Like most people, I get tired of listening to the same songs and need some variety. Unfortunately, I just don’t like the popular stuff coming out these days. So I’ve been plumbing the depths of music archives, in particular Freegal.com. Freegal (Free + Legal) is a service for libraries and their patrons. Our county library has a subscription which allows its users, e.g. me, to sign in with their library cards and stream or download songs. The archive is mostly from Sony Music and is paid for through your library, i.e. taxes. It doesn’t carry the new stuff, but that’s fine with me. So below is a list of stuff I have retired (but may bring back some day) from my mp3 playlist and stuff I have added. I last did this a year ago, so you can compare if you like;

Retired songs

Added

On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps the most famous doctor in America, the author sets forth his experiences as the nation’s leading infectious disease specialist. After a short, rather egotistical personal history, he describes what it was like treating patients and wrestling the bureaucracy over the many epidemics that our nation faced over half a century. He describes numerous flus, MERS, SARS, HIV, AIDS, Zika, Ebola, Malaria and, of course, Covid outbreaks. His writing is clear and very readable. The book would be better without so much ego in it, but it is very informative. Although Fauci never describes other persons in derogatory terms, it becomes clear through the actions of the many politicians he dealt with which were morons (e.g. Peter Navarro) and which were caring people who just wanted the best medical advice for dealing with a health crisis (e.g. both Bushes, Obama, Biden). Although it’s not riveting reading, I enjoyed it and felt better informed for having read it.

View all my reviews

By now the world knows what appears to be a second assassination attempt on ex-President Trump occurred at his Trump International Golf Course in Florida. The suspect did not fire a shot or even come within line of sight of Trump so I doubt he can be convicted of attempted assassination, but he is facing many charges. I do not know the exact coordinates of where he set up with a rifle, but if newspaper maps are correct as to where the FBI cordoned off the area, I searched the right area with my What3Words program. These W3W combinations from the area are somewhat ironically applicable:

fairway.puffed.twisty

money.self.immunity

duvet.tombstone.lawfully

Write your own story about these. I don’t want to be accused of treating the matter lightly.

I’ve been having fun playing the Times’ Connections game and decided to write a tool that would help me when it gets to the final hard part. What the tool does is find the words that most often follow or precede a set of puzzle words. You can find the most likely candidates to solve puzzles (usually the purple one) in the form ___word or word ___. I’ve made a video of the tool in action. The default is to find the highest scoring words that follow the puzzle words, trying to find the connection. If I check the box, it will do the same for words that precede them. In the video I show how after solving the yellow and green groups I am hypothetically stumped at the last two categories. I’d actually solved this already without the help of my tool. I selected four of the eight remaining words that included three connected words as though I was unsure. I could have entered as many as eight, but that would take too long for the video. I ran my tool and it found one of the connections, the word KING. The tool uses the Google Twograms data to determine the frequency of word pairs that include each puzzle word, then selects and orders the ones that have the highest overall frequency combined with multiple (but not necessarily all) puzzle words. Here’s the video.

Rich Blood by Robert Bailey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jason Rich, fresh out of rehab and bar discipline, is an ambulance-chasing personal injury attorney who has never taken a case all the way to a jury trial. His sister Jana is a former beauty queen who cheated on her husband, a rich doctor, takes drugs, and is accused of murdering her husband. There’s bad blood between them, but she calls on Jason to defend her and he agrees to do it mainly for his nieces’ sake. I’ll skip the details of the investigation and the trial to avoid spoilers but the case does go all the way to trial.

The blurb on the cover quotes another author as saying it’s a “deliciously clever legal thriller.” That’s not accurate on either count. It’s not particularly clever nor much of a legal thriller, but I will say it’s worth reading if you’re the patient sort. There is a psychological heuristic known as the peak-end rule that says an experience is remembered as a whole based on only two points in time: the peak experience and the end. In this book, both come in the last 50 pages, which is why I say you need to be patient. It’s rather boring for the rest of it. The first 200 pages or so are mostly filled with descriptions of how Jason has messed up his life and is about to fall off the wagon again and similar unflattering facts about Jana. The investigation by Jason and his team consists mostly of interviewing all the obvious witnesses and doing a little bit of physical surveillance. They all say pretty much the same thing which points to Jana’s guilt. There’s no cleverness in that. The courtroom part starts around page 280 and isn’t full of any surprises, either. I certainly never felt “thrilled.” But the author does manage to end with a couple of surprises, provided more by an unlikely last-minute stroke of luck (a sudden memory) than by any cleverness on Jason’s part and by some post-trial revelations. Still, it leaves the reader with a feel-good “end” that proves the truth of the Peak-end rule. At the end you feel like you’ve enjoyed it, even if you were bored for 80% of it. If you like true legal thrillers I would recommend Scott Turow or Michael Connelly over this author.

View all my reviews

The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My wife gave this to me to read when she discovered it was a mystery. I like mysteries, but this isn’t really one. The mystery part is actually fairly well done but confined almost entirely to the opening scene and the last 10% of the book. The rest consists of hundreds of pages of descriptions of classical violin pieces and is a showcase for the author’s personal knowledge of the fine points of playing them. When it’s not doing that, it’s the story of a handsome, decent, young black man who is constantly subjected to racist treatment at the hands of whites. I’m quite tired of reading or hearing from professional victims. Yep, racism is real but I don’t need to be told that for the ten thousandth time. I’m part black although I don’t look it; I’ve been discriminated against for being too white. I just want a good mystery. Concert violin soloists might enjoy this more than I did, but I actually thought the music part was rather clumsy and mostly an ego trip for the author. Other than some bluegrass fiddling and romantic string quartets I don’t care much for violins. Still, the book is readable enough to pass the time.

View all my reviews