At Midnight Comes the Cry by Julia Spencer-Fleming
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this 10th Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne novel the married odd couple becomes involved with a white nationalist group and the domestic situation of the abused spouse of one of them. Clare is an Episcopal priest and former army helicopter pilot. Russ is a recently involuntarily retired police chief. It seemed to be an inauspicious pairing to me, but the author managed to create a suspenseful tale when the body of a forest ranger is found in the remote wilderness of an upstate New York park. I’d give this one another half star if Goodreads allowed it. It suffers a little from its reliance on the reader knowing the main characters already. I didn’t and I learned barely enough to follow the family dynamics there. The final scene was too complicated. The shape and connections of the physical space are important and it just isn’t easy to envision from text descriptions. But I enjoyed having characters who weren’t potty-mouthed all the time and I especially liked the fact the author paid attention to law enforcement jurisdiction as a plot device. That’s so important in real life (I was an FBI agent), but is often glossed over or misrepresented in crime fiction. I never did figure out what the title had to do with the story.

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SUNO is an AI platform for making music. I’ve posted about it before. But it’s also a way to find new music. It’s not well-designed for that purpose, so it takes some work, but it’s been worth it for me so far. Once you’re a member, including a free member, you can search for songs using genre, creator, instruments, title, style, etc. The search results will be the creations of members, i.e. creations that the SUNO AI software made using text prompts, audio uploads, or a combination of the two, so it’s hit and miss. You have to listen to a lot of not-so-good stuff, but it’s quick and easy to just go on to the next one. I’ve found great songs there that way.

Another way is to create your own songs using those same techniques. With experimentation and luck you can produce something new that you really like. I’ve done that, too, in many genres: ragtime, blues, rock, gospel. I’ve created over 20 songs that I really like. You can download songs you created yourself. You can put all of the ones you like in playlists. In fact, every song you give the thumbs up to automatically goes into your Liked playlist. You can listen to your own liked songs later just by going to that playlist.

Here are a couple of SUNO rock songs I really like, one by a French creator and one I made:

Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jet is a 27-year-old woman still living at home after a failed law school attempt. She’s attacked from behind on Halloween with a hammer, but somehow survives. Only she suffers a bone fracture at the base of her skull which will almost certainly result in a fatal aneurysm. She has a week to live and is determined to find her “killer” although, as the title says, she’s not quite dead yet. She and her best friend from childhood, Billy, set out to do so. Billy is devoted to some unnamed woman he has loved since forever. Of course Jet is the only person too dense to figure out who that is. It’s an original plot setup. The family dynamics are very complicated. Jet has an older brother who is a rather angry sort and dealing with a father who doesn’t value him as he should. Their sister Emily was the rock star of the family, but died as an 11-year-old when her hair got caught in the pool drain. Billy’s mother took off and abandoned her family some years earlier. Everyone is blaming everyone else for these things. All these play into the final plot resolution. I couldn’t get excited about it, but the book was interesting enough to keep me reading to the end. Perhaps it qualifies as a beach read.

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I’m continuing to enjoy using SUNO AI to remix songs. This is more than just playing around with it. I used to be able to play guitar and even upload a few videos of my playing to YouTube, but arthritis robbed me of that ability years ago. I’ve really missed the creative side of my music. SUNO has given that back to me in a new way. Enjoy the Bessie Smith classic reimagined.

I recently experimented with SUNO, a music AI site. I uploaded my guitar version of the classic ragtime song Ballin’ the Jack and asked for a swing version. This is the product.

If you want to compare to my original, here’s it is:

The Humans by Matt Haig
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This very boring novel features an alien who comes to Earth to destroy it because his species thinks humans are illogical and self destructive and thus a danger to the universe if they acquire superior technical knowledge. The alien, in human form, quickly begins to appreciate humans and their illogical emotions. That much is no spoiler as it is pretty much the published description of the book in Goodreads and libraries. It is also pretty much the entire plot, which is the main reason it is so boring. It is very well-trodden ground in literature, movies, and TV. The author has added nothing to the existing genre.

Here’s a list, in chronological order, of several very similarly themed works involving human-looking or humanoid aliens with that initial view of humans: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951 movie/1940 short story); Childhood’s End (1953), although the Overlords look like devils; Star Trek (1966) – Spock and the Borg are humanoid and both consider humans inferior, but only the Borg are hostile; Mork & Mindy (1978+ TV series); V (1983+ TV miniseries); Starman (1984); Star Trek: Voyager (1997+ several episodes); The Humans (this book – 2013); The Orville (2017+ TV series); Resident Alien (2021 TV series). This is just a sample; others exist. There are others where the aliens aren’t human/humanoid, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) but have a similar story line.

The plots of these vary somewhat, with differing degrees of initial hostility toward us; some aliens becoming appreciative of humans or affectionate and protective, and others leaving humans alone to fend for themselves, but generally change their initial view of us to a more positive one. The point is that there is absolutely nothing new in this book and it doesn’t even having the redeeming humor of several of the listed works. The only “humor” is the running gag present in every one of the above where aliens think we’re hideously ugly and can’t understand our illogical self-destructiveness like littering and fighting. That grows old real fast. The writing is a mundane narrative.

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The Confession by Sheldon Siegel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mike Daley is a lawyer, a graduate of Boalt Hall of Law, Berkeley’s premiere law school, and, coincidentally, my alma mater, so he has a leg up in my book. He’s representing Ramon, a priest, accused of murder. The victim, a girlfriend of his from his pre-priesthood days, was pregnant and Ramon may be the father. Okay, that’s an interesting twist. The Archdiocese wants to take over the case in order to protect its interests, but Ramon wants Mike and his ex-wife Rosie, to represent his best interests. But Ramon can’t directly defy the Archdiocese. So Mike is fighting the D.A. and his own co-counsel. I like the complications this introduces. The author handles all the legal stuff in a clever, entertaining way while still being quite accurate.

But the real appeal is the clever dialogue. There’s a lot of it, but the author employs a shtick where interleaved between the lines of dialogue are asides showing what Mike is really thinking. It works well. Everybody, including Mike, is lying to everyone else but Mike’s asides keep us on the right track. The book has its flaws. Daley uses his brother as a P.I. who can magically find anything, tail everyone, tap any phone, get private police and other records, etc., largely through illegal methods. As an FBI agent for 26 years I’m well aware of what a P.I. can reasonably be expected to achieve and this ain’t it. So suspend your disbelief. Of course every time Mike makes some progress, one more thing goes wrong, implicating his client. His fingerprints are on the murder weapon; they’re on the neck of the strangled victim; a star defense witness gets murdered, etc. Despite a few cliches, it was a fun read. Goodreads doesn’t allow half stars, but I’d give this 4-1/2.

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My wife and I are alone this Christmas Day, but our kids will be arriving from out of state for a late “Christmas” on Saturday. I’m greatly looking forward to that. This has led me to muse about our good fortune, which is also very bad luck in a way. My wife and I were both born and raised in San Jose. We married in 1980 and bought our first house together in 1981. It cost less than $200K, which was pricey then. Fortunately I owned a house I’d bought when I was single, and the increased equity from that house was sufficient for a down payment on a house in what was then unincorporated, but later became Los Altos. It’s a three-bedroom tract house that would be considered ordinary middle-class housing virtually anywhere in the U.S. But then Silicon Valley became Silicon Valley. Everything in my neighborhood now sells for at least three million, and most for over four million. That makes us rich on paper, but it’s still a three-bedroom tract house from the 1950s and we live much as we did when my wife had to cut coupons. So our good fortune is that we can afford to live in this wonderful area and have financial security. Our kids will inherit millions and they and their kids will have financial security. But the mixed blessing part is that we almost never see them. They can’t afford to live near us, or at least they have made the rational choice to live someplace where housing costs wouldn’t strangle their ability to enjoy a normal life. Of course, we could move to be near one of them, but they live thousands of miles apart from each other and we would have to leave our home and friends, doctors, etc. we’ve accumulated over decades. I’m not complaining, really, as I feel fortunate. But the point of my musing is simply that old saw: money doesn’t buy happiness. Relish and nourish your family life and don’t be in headlong pursuit of more money. Merry Christmas.

Proof by Jon Cowan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had hoped and expected this to be a legal thriller. It’s not. There’s no courtroom cross-examination, no clever legal loopholes exploited. The main character, Jake West, is a crappy father, an alcoholic, a lousy husband (now ex), and violates all sorts of ethical lines as an attorney. He’s falsely accused of murdering his law partner and former best friend. I guess we’re supposed to root for him as he fights to clear his name. He goes after his firm’s biggest client (which happens to be his father’s firm, too), a property developer, who, of course under the rules of cliched plots, is corrupt. He does his fighting primarily through extortion. I found Jake barely better than the scummy people he goes after. The plot is so implausible it’s ridiculous, the characters are all stock stereotypes, and the book very disappointing overall. Cowan is no Grisham or Turow.

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I don’t like heavy metal music. I pretty much hate it. If you’d ever asked me if I’d put a Metallica song on my playlist, I’d have told you no. But I’ve done just that. More precisely, I just added a cover of a Metallica song. The title is Nothing Else Matters. I still don’t think I’ll ever add an actual Metallica recording, but I listened to the original and it’s not very offensive to my ears although it’s not something I’d choose to listen to. The cover is by the band Apocalyptica, which, despite its heavy metal sounding name, is not a metal band. It’s four cellos that cover rock songs arranged in a heavy sort of classical-rock style. The song is a rather somber almost dirge-like number and quite beautiful on the cellos.

I had actually asked some AI bots for recommendations of modern bands that do classical pieces in a semi-rock style similar to A Fifth of Beethoven or Tétaz’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I got some recommendations meeting that criteria but one bot recommended Apocalyptica, warning me that it mostly did the reverse, i.e. took rock songs and did them in a semi-classical style, so it wasn’t a case of AI hallucinating.

Here are some other songs I just added to my playlists:

• Soul Shake by Delaney & Bonnie
• Only You Know and I Know by Delaney & Bonnie
• Slack Key Blues by Slack Key Ohana & Rand Anderson
• Statesboro Blues by the Acoustic Blues Travelers (I used to have two other versions in my list but I tired of those.)
• Nitty Gritty Mississippi by Ry Cooder (This was in before, but I removed it; now it’s back)
• In the Mood by the Mountain View High School Choir (I already have the Glenn Miller version in one playlist; this version goes in another)
• Love to Keep Me Warm by the Mountain View High School Choir

The Winds from Further West by Alexander McCall Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is lightweight stuff that passes the time pleasantly enough. Neil, a doctor doing research, is mistreated at work and cheated on by his girlfriend so he takes the offer of his gay friend to decamp on the island of Mull, a remote Scottish area. There he enjoys the small-town low pressure feel and meets a lovely woman vet. You can pretty much fill in the rest. I do wish the author would find another word besides “just.” “I just do”. “It just is.” “They just can’t.” Every character speaks this way. They just do.

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The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jensen Huang is a remarkable man. He is no doubt a very capable engineer, but his success has come more from his competitive drive and uncompromising work ethic. He both inspires and intimidates his followers. In that sense he is much like Steve Jobs, but Huang is smarter technically and shrewder in a business sense. He was always a big advocate of parallel computing. The current success of Nvidia, though, is partly luck. It began primarily as a graphics video card manufacturer relying mostly on PC gamers. It struggled along with that small consumer customer base until the killer app – AI – came along and found that the graphics cards were ideally suited for it. Huang was slow to see the match for what it was and much of the company’s success was due to the skill of some very smart people who were recruited by Huang for their brilliance and loyalty to parallel computing. They in turn were drawn to Nvidia because of Huang’s reputation as a parallel computing pioneer and because he had the hardware and openness to try new things. Nvidia is now the world’s most valuable company.

The book tells this story and tries to give the reader a sense of the technology, but is really a biography. There is a brief thumbnail description of a neural net and parallel computing, but barely mentions other aspects of artificial intelligence like Large Language Models (LLM), deep learning, or random forest computing. If you read this hoping to gain an understanding of how AI works, you will be disappointed. It seems many, maybe all, scientists and AI programmers don’t really understand how it works. The writing is professional, reportorial in style, but becomes rather repetitive largely because so many stories of the people who are drawn to Nvidia are so similar. If nothing else, I gained an appreciation for how complex and specialized the technology is and I learned that the huge energy draw AI causes is for the training, not as much its subsequent use. It’s not a page turner, but I enjoyed the book.

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The Doorman by Chris Pavone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Chicky Diaz is the senior doorman at the most famous co-op/apartment building in New York City. He’s a loyal employee and all-around well-meaning soul who has come upon hard times. In the building are some fabulously rich residents including Emily, a drop-dead gorgeous raven-haired beauty married to Griffin, a despicable CEO of an arms manufacturer. Also in the building is Julian, a gallerist who makes a living selling ugly but valuable art to rich people like Emily and Griffin. Their lives intertwine throughout this novel. Some gangsters join the mix. The pace is good, the writing better, and the suspense builds. The author shreds Griffin and his MAGA brethren mercilessly, so if that’s your politics you won’t like this one, but that’s really a sidelight. There’s enough real action at the end to qualify it as a thriller, I suppose, but barely. It’s more about wealth inequality and the plight of the downtrodden.

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The Last Ferry Out by Andrea Bartz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

This bait and switch is awful. It’s described as a twisty thriller and was on my library’s Mystery and Thriller list. There is no mystery and it’s not thrilling. It’s pretty much just a lesbian love story. Eszter (small pretty blonde) dies on a remote Mexican Island, and her fiancee Abby (tall muscular with a fade) goes there to find out what happened. Abby is paranoid and overreacts, misinterprets everything, and suspects everyone. Most of the book is spent talking about how beautiful Abby thinks Eszter was and their courtship and relationships with their parents and how much Eszter loved her muscles and height. I have no beef with lesbian love stories, I just don’t want to read one, especially when I’m expecting a mystery. It’s not even well-written and the title is misleading. I forced myself to finish it since I had nothing else handy – I’d read the last of my book club selections and all my holds at the library were taking forever to come in. One finally did. I’m going there now.

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Right turn only but No right turn.

I think the Right turn only sign is for cars exiting the driveway and No right turns one for people wanting to enter. They’re at slightly different angles. I was probably making an illegal right turn into the parking lot as I got this photo. What adds to the confusion is the fact the driveway has a solid white line in the middle, suggesting that it is OK to turn in there. There is no Exit Only marking. That white line you see is the limit line for cars exiting but doesn’t extend all the way across, also suggesting the other lane is for entering cars.

New songs added as of October 26, 2025:

• 9 to 5 – Dolly Parton
• Ain’t No Grave – Jackie DeShannon
• Baby You’re No Good – Linda Ronstadt
• Folsom Prison Blues – Brandi Carlile
• Frankie and Albert – Jackie DeShannon
• Rockin’ Boogie – Jesse Fuller
• That’ll Be the Day – Linda Ronstadt
• Trouble in Mind – Jackie DeShannon

Songs I’m retiring from 1 or more playlists for now (but may be keeping in others)

• Aunt Hagars Blues – Sammy Price
  Backwater blues – Albert Ammons
  Boogie Woogie Stomp – Carl Sonny Leyland
  Hollywood Pastime – Larry Clinton
  Just Strollin’ – Bob Crosby
  Longhair’s Blues – Ethan Leinwand
  Mirandy – Eubie Blake
  Music Hall Stomp – Carl Sonny Leyland
  Railroad Bill – Etta Baker
  The 31 Blues – Ethan Leinwand
• Fall in California – Jill Suttie
• Go where I send thee – Golden Gate Quartet
• Sentimental Gentleman from Georgia – Meredith Axelrod

The last three are vocals; the rest of the retiring ones are instrumentals, mostly piano solos in the blues/boogie woogie genre. Everything I’ve added is a vocal. You may notice I’ve added a couple of covers of old 1960’s songs. The originals were great, but I’ve been listening to them for about over 50 years so it’s time to mix in some great versions by others.

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This science fiction classic is full of wit, satire and a surprising prescience about AI. Written in 1966, you’d think it was about ChatGPT, Claude, or xAI. Set on the Moon in the future, Mannie, the only competent computer tech strikes up a friendship with “Mike” his name for the supercomputer that runs the entire lunar complex. The humans there (“loonies”) are virtual vassals controlled by Earth masters (The Authority), and a lunar warden. They mine ice and grow food in tunnels with unlimited solar energy available. But Mannie, Mike, a rabble rouser called the Professor, and Wyoming (Wyoh, the luscious babe in the group) conspire to revolt against the Authority. I admit I started skipping fairly early as it got to be a bit over the top, but I enjoyed what I read. At least the ending was satisfying.

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For you regular readers of my blog – both of you – you probably know that I am past president of the American Cryptogram Association (ACA) and have always been fascinated with codes and ciphers. As you may also know, there is a famous (among cipher fans, anyway) sculpture in the courtyard of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) called Kryptos.

As you can see, it has letters carved into it. There are four panels, each enciphered in some manner by the sculptor. Three of those were deciphered years ago, but the fourth remained unsolved. A few days ago two men discovered that last text, although they did not actually decipher it. They found the original passage by following clues the sculptor left (both intentional and unintentional) that led them to the Smithsonian Institution where the sculptor had done research for the project. So the sculpture text has been broken, but the final cipher method has not been solved.

I decided to check out the What3Words information about that location for fun as I do from time to time. Here are some relevant cites:

Central.Intelligence.Agency is located in a muddy field in West Helena, Arkansas, clearly a ploy by our country’s spymasters to divert foreign adversaries.

data.live.shower is the actual location of the Kryptos sculpture, but when you enter those words intro W3W, it says they are in the vicinity of Brookmont, MD, not only the wrong city, but the wrong state. Yet another CIA disinformation ploy? Well, Brookmont is right across the Potomac River from the CIA compound, closer than central Langley.

The only W3W location in the immediate vicinity of Kryptos that hints at its true nature is rare.zebra.code, which sounds like a code in itself.

Overboard by Sara Paretsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Although this is my first Warshawski novel, it’s the 21st in the series. The central character is a female private eye in Chicago (V.I. or Vic). The plot involves some bad guys who have stashed the elderly mother of one of them in a cruel “memory care unit” in order to force her to sign a deed turning over her house to her useless crooked son. The house is a decrepit mansion in a prime location for development. But the woman wants her granddaughter to have the house. That girl becomes imprisoned, but escapes and V.I. finds her and takes her under her wing. The teen nephew of a bad guy also ends up needing her help. Add in violent, corrupt cops, a legal problem going on with the local Jewish synagogue and you have the basic idea. Vic is a former public defender and is thus on the “woke” side of things. She wears a mask (this takes place in 2022, the height of the pandemic) while the bad guys don’t. They swear, steal, and the corrupt cop beats up people especially anyone who is woke. Vic takes ridiculously dangerous risks for the girl and the boy and the synagogue, all without pay. The plot depends heavily on the weak ploy of Vic being able to call on a series of friends and contacts (a reporter, a good cop, etc.) to get or do almost anything that needs doing or getting. It jumps the shark at the paper clip scene, but I’ll leave it at that.

I listened to the audiobook. There were some odd choices made. For starters, the title has nothing to do with the plot. There is no boat or anyone going overboard. Secondly, the voice actor is 65 years old and sounds like it, maybe even older, while Vic is much younger, maybe 50 at most. It sounds odd with an old woman talking in the first person describing her rock climbing, swimming underwater while being shot at, running regularly, winning physical fights with large men. The actress is good, just too old. Thirdly, there’s some kind of superdrone in the plot that can do almost anything including read your thoughts if it flies over you. I can’t recommend the book, but it passed the time.

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Malibu Burning by Lee Goldberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Every novel needs conflict, or so I’ve been told. Here we have opposing forces: Walker and Sharpe, two arson investigators, on one side, and Danny Cole, a convicted con man (though with a heroic streak) on the other. When Danny gets out of prison he plans a major heist against the backdrop of a fire of his own making. The plot is as implausible as it sounds, but it moves along nicely with engaging dialog between Walker and Sharpe who have just been thrown together and are getting to know each other. In the ethos of this book, every rich person is evil and deserves to have his/her house and fortune burn down. At least that’s Danny’s view. There’s some good detective work and plenty of exciting crime plotting and firefighting scenes. The author seems to have done a lot of research, at least enough to seem knowledgeable to me. Four stars is a stretch, but it’s a fun read if your hopes aren’t set too high.

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