The Peacock and the Sparrow by I.S. Berry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Shane Collins is a heavy-drinking veteran CIA agent relegated to Bahrain to finish out his lackluster career. He inherits a low-level informant who manages to scrape together enough intel to satisfy his new station chief, a pudgy bureaucratic “rising star” with a flame up his ass. Shane meets and falls for a beautiful local artist. There are some fellow CIA personnel, a Navy admiral and his aide in the mix, various expats and skeezy locals and the stage is set for dead drops, surreptitious meetings, betrayals, and talk of revolution against the king. The Arab Spring is approaching. The plot is exciting, if more than a bit implausible toward the end, but page-turning fun nonetheless.

But the best part of the book is the gritty reality painted in beautiful prose conveying the sad on-the-ground hellhole that is Bahrain. At least I think it is what the real Bahrain is like; the author has me convinced, anyway. Clearly the author, a former CIA agent herself, knows her stuff and makes it feel so real I was tempted to shake the sand from my shoes after a reading session. I’ll stretch my 4.5 to 5 stars for this one. It’s the best spy novel I’ve read in years.

View all my reviews

If you follow the news, you know that Donald Trump named Kash Patel, a right-wing FBI hater, to become the next head of the FBI. I doubt he will be confirmed, but if he is, he has promised on day 1 to close the FBI Headquarters Building (currently named the J. Edgar Hoover Building) and to reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.

So I checked my favorite authoritative place-naming site, What3Words.com,, and discovered the U.S. already has a Deep.State.Museum. It’s located in San Antonio, Texas, in an intersection between Autozone, Schlotzky’s Sandwiches, and Sherwin Williams paint stores. Maybe Patel is confused. On the border of Washington D.C. there is a deed.state.museum in Mt. Rainier, Maryland, only 3 miles from the FBI building. That’s probably what he was thinking of, or possibly the feed.state.museum in Laurel, Maryland, only 5 miles from NSA Headquarters. It’s in a gas station … at least that’s what the deep state has disguised it as.

Then maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong place. Museum.deep.state is also in the U.S., in a forest in Wellsville, Ohio. Closer to D.C. there are a couple of other logical museum sites:

• museum.deep.stage: Potomac, Maryland
  museum.jeeps.state: Damascus, Maryland.

If Patel isn’t confirmed, he should be able to set up his museum in one of these likely spots.

Look Closer by David Ellis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Simon is a law professor, the only child of two lawyers, both of whom are long dead as the story opens, his mother by suicide, his father murdered. Simon was once suspected of the murder, but that was in the distant past. Vicky, the woman in his life now, is the sister of Monica, also dead of suicide after being dragged into addiction by some scumball. Simon and Vicky met in a suicide survivors support group.

But soon we see Simon’s journal entries. It seems he has run into Lauren, a beautiful woman who once worked in his father’s law firm. She was Simon’s first crush and those amorous feelings seem to be coming back to him, but she is married to a rich older man. Vicky, meanwhile, professes not to love Simon now. She meets Christian, a conniving money manager who promises to make her fabulously rich once she gets her hands on Simon’s trust money, which is currently tied up and untouchable. Everybody seems to be scheming to cheat everyone else out of that trust money, and at least one of these characters ends up dead at some point.

That’s a great setup and it hooked me in from the beginning. I had to ration my reading so the book would last longer and I could enjoy the suspense for days. As you might expect, I used the word “seem” for a reason: because things, some of them anyway, are not as they seem. The book is full of twists and turns right to the end. You won’t know whom to root for, if anyone, as all the characters seem rather unsavory. There’s that word seem again. Withhold judgment; that’s all I can say.

View all my reviews

Extinction by Douglas Preston
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In a twist from Jurassic Park, the author has conjured a super-rich vacation enclave where de-extincted megafauna roam free in the Rocky Mountains. Visitors can see mammoths and other non-aggressive vegetarian species from eons past. A young couple vacationing there is murdered under mysterious circumstances. From there the tale becomes fanciful, fast-paced, and “shocking” (although you’d have to be pretty slow not to see that some sort of scientific skulduggery was going to be revealed). Overall it was interesting enough to keep me going and is worth a few stars, but the characters were all incredibly dislikable except for the heroes, a spunky female state agent and a crusty male local sheriff, who, of course, start out at odds and slowly become attracted to each other amid gunfights and explosions. The plot is eye-rolling all around, but if you like schlock sci-fi thrillers, you’ll enjoy this one. By the end I was just glad it was over.

View all my reviews

If you’ve read my blog regularly, you’ll be familiar with how this works. If not, the short version is that the location company What3Words.com has assigned three-word combos to every one meter square spot on earth and I have fun finding W3W combination that are prophetic, ironic, or simply entertaining. You can see more here and here, or just search W3W in the search box above.

I could have told you Matt Gaetz’s nomination would be sunk because attorney.general.gates lands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So does Gates.withdraws.nomination.

Personal names are not used by W3W unless they happen to be valid words in one of the languages they support. Trump and Musk happen to be such valid words, so you can have a lot of fun with them. For example trumps.cabinet.selection is deep in Russia. An illegal spy?

The pressure is now on the U.S. Senate to serve as a guard rail to keep Trump from appointing unqualified people to key positions (Rudy Giuliani as FBI Director? One of the cop-killers from Jan. 6?) So I searched Senate chamber for any clue as to how well they would do. Sadly, the best I could find was that it is one of those prime.actors.areas.

Setting politics aside, I see that California is expecting an atmospheric.river.storm, so I decided to look up where it will hit. According to W3W that will center on West San Jose about 8 miles from my house. Yikes!

Lastly, on a whimsical note, I just read that some crypto billionaire bought that stupid “art” consisting of a banana duct taped to a wall for $6.2 million. Since duct is not a valid W3W word (confuses with ducked) I had to settle for duck.taped.banana, which is located in a federal intelligence facility in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. That’s not creepy!

I think high inflation is harmful for an economy and should be stopped or reduced if possible, But the reality that is often overlooked is that it actually helps many people. In particular, retirees. Many retirees have some form of pension or rely on Social Security. In my experience these all have cost of living adjustments (COLAs) every year. But the COLAs typically use the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to compute the increase. The CPI, in turn, includes housing as a major component, about 1/3. But most seniors do not have increased housing costs. Homeowners usually have paid off, or soon pay off, their mortgages by retirement so their costs go down. If not, the monthly payment is usually fixed, not increasing. Renters and homeowners both usually move to cheaper areas for retirement and often downsize from a full-size house to something smaller, e.g. a cottage, cabin, or trailer. Obviously, individual circumstances vary, but the bottom line is that disposable income for these folks goes up faster than their living costs during inflation.

How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain by Peter S. Goodman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Goodman has written a well-researched book explaining not only how the U.S. came to have the massive shortages around the time of the pandemic, but also why inflation is baked into our economy. The basic principles are set forth clearly: way too much dependence on China to manufacture our goods, adoption of just in time (JIT) manufacturing here in order to minimize inventory costs (and thus inventory) and pay higher dividends, consolidation of many vital sectors to monopoly or near-monopoly status (ocean shipping, longshoremen, meatpacking, computer chips), weak antitrust enforcement, etc. The details are fascinating, although it does get somewhat repetitive as the same factors play out again and again. The author makes a wise choice of explaining step-by-step how one small toy manufacturer in Mississippi, Glo, had to get its product manufactured in China and shipped to the U.S. in time to fulfill orders for the Christmas season during the worst of the Covid pandemic. It was harrowing and the reader is cheering for Glo in the face of a dearth of shipping containers, overcrowded ships, broken contracts, a failing U.S. rail system, and so on. I was tempted to rate the book a 4, but it’s a bit dry for the average reader. Still, I recommend it.

View all my reviews

Deer Season by Erin Flanagan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book a great deal, but find it hard to categorize. I think I found it on a list of “thrillers,” but it’s not the typical action-filled thriller. It’s not really a psychological thriller, either. The tension comes from the building suspense over Peggy, a flirty teenage girl who goes missing. The small farm town focuses their suspicions and hatred on a young retarded farmhand, Hal, who is both handsome and simple-minded. He has a crush on Peggy, despite the age difference. Is she dead? Did she run away? Hal went missing from his deer hunting party the same night Peggy went missing, and he came home with blood on his truck, deer blood he claims. Later, a private detective is hired to unravel it all, but it is not really a detective novel either, as he is a rather minor character.

The book shines as a beautifully-written depiction of small town farm life in Nebraska in the 1980s. Alma and Clyle, Hal’s employers, are the central characters. Alma loves Hal like a son, perhaps as a substitute for the children she could never have. She is fiercely protective of him as the town turns against him. Their marriage appears to be in trouble. Peggy’s 12-year-old brother Milo, another central character, goes through a coming of age process. The author absolutely nails it with respect to Milo and his obnoxious cousin George – the obsession with girls, the pimple popping, and the rest of it. The farm life is described in detail, but almost invisibly as the inevitable and endless chores interrupt scenes as mundanely as sunrise and sunset. I found myself imagining that existence, growing up there. The mystery deepens chapter by chapter as Peggy remains missing, but it is resolved in the end with a clever twist. The author, a professor of writing, is very talented. She has penned a beautiful description of a dreary but very believable setting and relatable characters. While it’s not a page-turner, it’s so realistic that it makes you feel like you live in a time warp in Gunthrum, Nebraska while you read.

View all my reviews

Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother’s Quest for Vengeance by Azam Ahmed
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This true life story of a woman who fought the Zeta gang in San Fernando, Mexico is both inspiring and disheartening at times. It’s heartbreaking to see how criminals prey successfully on ordinary citizens with rarely any consequences. It must be a terrible place to live. The heroine of the story, Miriam Rodriguez, lost a daughter to the gang violence. The daughter was kidnapped, then ransomed, then beaten and killed despite the fact the ransom was paid. Miriam went on a vengeance rampage and was successful in getting many of the gang incarcerated and some killed by the Mexican army. I read this only because it was chosen by my book club, and I can’t recommend it. The writing is terribly repetitive and disorganized. The many Zetas and police and how or what they did were identified and explained over and over again. The storyline jumped back and forth as new details about past events emerged. It was almost impossible to keep track of who was dead or incarcerated at any point in the narrative. The beginning was mostly history of the area and backstory on some of the people involved, but was rather boring. Part two is where the action begins, and it becomes action-filled quickly. To avoid spoilers, I won’t say more.

View all my reviews

Exit Strategy by Martha Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In a future space opera world, Murderbot is a robotic part human security unit (SecUnit) who is an efficient, emotionless hired guard/killer. He’s also, despite disavowing any emotion, loyal to Dr. Mensah and other human “clients,” who are equally loyal and affectionate to him(it?). In short he is more like a loving pet, say a pit bull/doberman mix who can hack computer systems and pass for a human. This is the fourth installment in the Murderbot Diaries. Like with the first one, which I reviewed here: All Systems Red I enjoyed the plausible technobabble and the cute denial Murderbot displays about his love for Dr. Mensah and her crew of humans. There’s not much substance, but it’s a short, fun read with plenty of action. I listened to the audiobook, which has a good reader.

View all my reviews

The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning by Ben Raines
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This outstanding narrative begins describing how just before the Civil War a wealthy southern landowner bet he could bring a load of African slaves into Alabama through the blockade the federal government had set up to enforce the ban on such slave importation. He had a boat, the Clotilda, outfitted specifically for this task and set out to Ouida, Dahomey, then the slave trading capital of Africa. He partially succeeded in his task, although there were setbacks. The first chapters introduce the three main locales: Mobile, Ouida, and Africatown, the community later established by the slaves who were on the ship, the very last one to import slaves to the United States.

The book then goes on to describe how the ship returned with its load, was hidden and burned to conceal the crime, one punishable by death. The author, an investigative journalist and Alabama tour boat guide, is the one who eventually found the ship 160 years later. He tells how information he gleaned from descendants of those slaves and his own knowledge of the rivers and the local history led to this find despite earlier failed attempts by others. The discovery confirmed many of the accounts of the slave descendants and debunked others from many sources. The subsequent history of many descendants, those of slave traders, slaves, and the Africans who sold their fellow Africans to the whites, are all explored. It brings exposure to the reprehensible treatment Africatown received at the hands of the whites in power over the years. It’s fascinating as both a detective story and a social and political exposé.

View all my reviews

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel, one I read only because it was a choice of my book club, is a historical fiction depicting the interplay between Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla over the “war” between direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). The central character is Paul Cravath, the original founder of what became the famous law firm Cravath, Swaine, and Moore. The female lead is Agnes Huntington, a renowned singer of the day and later the real Paul Cravath’s wife. There are many more characters and keeping them all straight is rather difficult. That may be one reason I didn’t much enjoy the book. I found the historical part interesting, although much of it highly implausible. The author’s notes declare it to be mostly true or at least plausible, but I find that hard to believe. The way the author describes it, everyone, including governments, police, and common citizens lived in fear of Edison, J.P. Morgan, or Westinghouse sending Pinkerton agents to kill them or ruin their lives. Many supposed events that were critical to the plot, like Tesla’s mental breakdown and amnesia, are not even mentioned in the lengthy Wikipedia entry on Tesla. The Tesla in the book is a near lunatic with no sense of business and no social graces, yet other public sources indicate that he founded and ran profitable companies and socialized with many famous people. I realize that the book is a novel, but I find it disturbing when historic events and people are presented in what seems to me to be an inaccurate way. Use fictional characters if you want to tell a fictional story. The writing style is florid and the love story is perhaps the most implausible part of the plot. Still, the story of the science and technology breakthroughs and rivalries kept the book interesting enough.

View all my reviews

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, so 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

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the best book I’ve read all year by far. It’s a must-read. It’s a total page-turner almost from the beginning although it takes a few chapters to introduce the key figures and their backstory. This is the true story of a harrowing misadventure of a task force of English ships sent around Cape Horn in 1740 to prey on a Spanish Galleon thought to be laden with treasure. The group becomes separated in the notorious storms in that region. One ship in particular, The Wager, is shipwrecked on the Patagonian shore. Thereafter is a tale – many tales – of death and disease and heroism and bravery and cowardice and resourcefulness and deviousness. It’s a cross between Lord of the Flies and Horatio Hornblower 1 – 11. and Robinson Crusoe. Some survive. Some don’t. I don’t want to spoil it beyond that but the subtitle tells you there’s a lot more: “A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder.”

The book is thoroughly researched with many direct quotes from log books and other original sources, but the book reads like a well-paced novel, not a white paper. There are many truths here and they are not consistent. You can judge the officers and seamen and the entire British navy for yourself after finishing it — or maybe you’ll decide you shouldn’t judge anybody.

View all my reviews

I thought it would be interesting to see who’s trending where of the two leading vice presidential candidates. In case you don’t know who they are, J.D. Vance is the Republican, Donald Trump’s running mate, and Tim Walz is the Democrat running mate of Kamala Harris. This map is from Google Trends and covers the last 30 days. The map colors are misleading because Vance is blue and Walz red, the opposite of the colors normally associated with the two parties.

Since Vance grew up in West Virginia and Ohio, geography explains some of his popularity in those blue-colored “red states.” Walz was less well-known than Vance until recently, which may explain why people all over are now curious about him. As for Arizona, Vance recently visited there, reportedly “to introduce himself to those voters.”