Books of 2013, #47: The Incrementalists, by Steven Brust & Skyler White

First, let me say it’s goddamn amazing I didn’t see more jokes about Brust’s co-author’s name here, especially considering that The Incrementalists dropped right about the time Breaking Bad was wrapping up. Maybe it was just too obvious.

Anyway, this one’s short: I think, despite enjoying his own output as well as his public persona at talks, readings, and whatnot, that John Scalzi and I must have different tastes in SF. Scalzi loved this book, and even blurbed it, and so I figured it might be fun despite having read and been underwhelmed by the similarly-blurbed Ancillary Justice last month. The Incrementalists at least sounds interesting, given the premise: a secret cabal of sorta-immortals are dedicated to improving human society via tiny nudges here and there.

Unfortunately, instead of telling a story about how this happens, and what they’ve accomplished, what we get here is a weird sort of backstage, inside-baseball we’re-in-love-with-our-idea mess that I found to be a complete slog. There’s no accounting for taste, but I really thought the “big idea” (to steal a phrase) deserved a better story than we get in this book. Is there an existential threat to the group? Maybe, but since we don’t really know what they’ve done, or how, why should we care?

Anyway. This would not be the only book to disappoint me this fall, sadly.

What if you never punted?

Coach Kevin Kelley of Little Rock’s Pulaski Academy can tell you. His team also almost always uses an onside kick, too.

Turns out, there’s a good reason to reconsider the automatic 4th down punt. And maybe the mechanics of kicksoffs, too. Kelley’s done very, very well with his unorthodox approach, and has some data backing him up.

(This reminds me of the New Yorker story about the girls’ basketball team that always did a full court press, which was (of course) written by Malcolm Gladwell. The girls’ success was ended not by spectacular tactics, but by a ref who decided he didn’t like the clearly legal approach, and started penalizing them; obviously, this isn’t happening to Kelley.)

Who?

There’s a seven minute prequel available now, ahead of the special next week.

The Doctor featured in it isn’t Matt Smith. Or Peter Capaldi. Or John Hurt.

I’ll say no more. Go. Watch.

This is quite incredible. The DOJ is BEYOND overreaching here.

Some major tech companies (Google, MSFT, etc) are suing the US government, claiming a First Amendment right to disclose the number of currently-secret information requests they get from the NSA under the FISA law.

The DOJ has filed a response, but is refusing to allow opposing counsel to read parts of it.

No, really. TechDirt:

[T]he DOJ is simply refusing to let the tech companies see its own argument. In response, the companies have filed a pretty direct and somewhat angry motion, asking the FISA court to either let them see the arguments, or to strike the redacted portions from the DOJ’s motion. Basically, the DOJ is saying that it can make legal arguments that only the court can see, but which the tech companies suing it cannot see. That goes against every basic concept of due process.

We cannot allow secret laws, secret courts, or secret arguments. All are anathema to liberty and democracy.

Goddammit, Neil

That didn’t take long.

Fans of the original run of Sandman will remember how frequently issues were delayed, especially in the last third of the run. Comics are nominally monthly publications, but Sandman absolutely did not hew to this plan after a certain point; its 75 issues were spread over 84 months, with most of the disruption coming in 1994 and 1995.

Gaiman’s much-anticipated prequel, Sandman Overtures premiered last month. Issue 2 has already been pushed back until February for reasons undisclosed.

I’m not really one for celeb pieces, but…

…this Clooney piece in Esquire is a goddamn delight. A bit:

Being Clooney, he does not only write to Brad Pitt, however. He also writes as Brad Pitt. A few years ago, he even had some stationery made up with Brad Pitt’s letterhead. Then he found a book about acting and accents and sent it to Meryl Streep, with an accompanying note. It said, “Dear Meryl, this book really helped me with my accent for Troy. I hope it helps you too.” He signed it “Brad Pitt.” Then he sent another letter to Don Cheadle on “Pitt’s” stationery. As long as Cheadle has been acting, he has dreamt of playing Miles Davis. So the letter informed Cheadle that Pitt’s production company had acquired the rights to Davis’s life story. The letter said that Pitt wanted him to star in it.

As Charlie Parker.

Delightful Football Schadenfreude

Roll Bama Roll has their Tuesday meltdown post up, which includes delicious, delicious LSU tears, though this time around there’s a shocking amount of realism vs. magical thinking, e.g.

BAMA owns us….it is what it is….
as long as Saban is there they will continue to own us…

and

LSU makes mistakes in big games.
Bama doesn’t.They are better. Better players. Better coach. Better recruiters. Better program. it was fun while it lasted.

and

Well…being elite was nice while it lasted. Back to mediocrity.

and the delightful

We could not win a street fight against a mini-van full of nuns.

but my favorite also says volumes

[Alabama QB AJ] McCarron speaks so coherently. Wish we had that somewhere.

RTR.

In Which Laurie Anderson Breaks Your Heart

Her remembrance of Lou Reed in the current Rolling Stone is tender, beautiful, and heartbreaking.

As it turned out, Lou and I didn’t live far from each other in New York, and after the festival Lou suggested getting together. I think he liked it when I said, “Yes! Absolutely! I’m on tour, but when I get back – let’s see, about four months from now – let’s definitely get together.” This went on for a while, and finally he asked if I wanted to go to the Audio Engineering Society Convention. I said I was going anyway and would meet him in Microphones. The AES Convention is the greatest and biggest place to geek out on new equipment, and we spent a happy afternoon looking at amps and cables and shop-talking electronics. I had no idea this was meant to be a date, but when we went for coffee after that, he said, “Would you like to see a movie?” Sure. “And then after that, dinner?” OK. “And then we can take a walk?” “Um . . .” From then on we were never really apart.

Lou and I played music together, became best friends and then soul mates, traveled, listened to and criticized each other’s work, studied things together (butterfly hunting, meditation, kayaking). We made up ridiculous jokes; stopped smoking 20 times; fought; learned to hold our breath underwater; went to Africa; sang opera in elevators; made friends with unlikely people; followed each other on tour when we could; got a sweet piano-playing dog; shared a house that was separate from our own places; protected and loved each other.

[…]

Like many couples, we each constructed ways to be – strategies, and sometimes compromises, that would enable us to be part of a pair. Sometimes we lost a bit more than we were able to give, or gave up way too much, or felt abandoned. Sometimes we got really angry. But even when I was mad, I was never bored. We learned to forgive each other. And somehow, for 21 years, we tangled our minds and hearts together.

What Snowden Has To Say

I’ve actually had this in tab for a few weeks; it’s worth your time to click through and watch the dialog available. Snowden makes some very, very good points. If you don’t have time, here’s the bullet points:

It’s led us to a point in our relationship with the government, where we have an executive — a Department of Justice — that’s unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera, but they’ll stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth. And that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.

Hard to argue with that. But he keeps going:

This is not about any particular program. This is about a trend in the relationship between the governing and the governed in America, that is coming increasingly into conflict with what we expect as a free and democratic society. If we can’t understand the policies and programs of our government, we cannot grant our consent in regulating them….

He’s not wrong. Not even a little bit. And the vigor with which he’s been pilloried by those in power shows precisely why he fled rather than work through channels to correct the wrongs he saw happening.

Fun with NSA Apologist Bullshit

This TechDirt post in response to Rep. Mike Rogers’s hilarious pronouncements (basically, “Since nobody complained when nobody knew about this!”) is pretty fantastic.

Colbert’s bits are stellar here; really TOP NOTCH:

Let’s say, instead of falling in the forest, the tree is standing outside your house and I’m hiding in it watching you shower. So far, I’m not violating your privacy. But the second you see me through the window, suddenly I’m the criminal? What about my privacy? I’m trying to masturbate here. Come to think of it, there are all sorts of victimless crimes like this. We know people getting assaulted because they call the police. But I’ve never heard of anyone calling the cops because they were murdered. Therefore, clearly, no one was killed. **By the same logic, folks, I have not insulted Mike Rogers as long as he never hears me say: The reason Mike Rogers uses circular logic is because his head is jammed up his own ass. **

I admire what historians will now call “The Rogers Doctrine”: when it comes to privacy vs. security, we can have one of them, as long as we don’t know which one it is. That way, we can maintain our constitutional rights. Or, if they do take away our rights, just don’t let us find out. That way, we’ll still have them.

How Good Tech Firms Tell the NSA, et. al., to fuck off

The first example is Apple’s new “Warrant Canary” clause. It works like this: there’s a section in their periodically-released transparency report that states very clearly that

Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.

This report is re-issued periodically. Apple may receive a gag-protected demand for user data at some point, and not be able to say anything about it, but if this happens we can expect this clause to vanish from future transparency disclosures. If it’s gone, Big Brother came calling.

The even better example is how furious and enraged Google’s security team is about the disclosure that the NSA was listening on their internal traffic. As a result, they’ve encrypted every bit of that traffic, which renders the NSA’s taps worthless:

We designed this system to keep criminals out. There’s no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we’ve got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason.

Unfortunately we live in a world where all too often, laws are for the little people. Nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process. In the absence of working law enforcement, we therefore do what internet engineers have always done – build more secure software. The traffic shown in the slides below is now all encrypted and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it, ruined.

Thank GOD for Snowden’s disclosures.

Cops now literally all up in your ass in New Mexico

A New Mexico traffic stop somehow concluded with a forced colonoscopy in a search for phantom drugs that were not there.

  1. Eckert’s abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.

  2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

  3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert’s anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.

  4. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

  5. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

  6. Doctors penetrated Eckert’s anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.

  7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.

  8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert’s anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.

The doctors should lose their licenses; the police involved should be fired, forever barred from law enforcement or security work, and be held personally and criminally liable.

Instead, while I’m sure Eckert will end up with a giant settlement from the county and state, I’m equally sure we’ll see the policemen involved given commendations or promotions, or quietly allowed to take employment elsewhere with no personal or professional repercussions at all.

H/T: Ol’ Rob.

And now, painful satire for nerdy heathen

Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming.

Sample:

Inheritance
Inheritance is a way to retain features of old code in newer code. The programmer derives from an existing function or block of code by making a copy of the code, then making changes to the copy. The derived code is often specialized by adding features not implemented in the original. In this way the old code is retained but the new code inherits from it.

Programs that use inheritance are characterized by similar blocks of code with small differences appearing throughout the source. Another sign of inheritance is static members: variables and code that are not directly referenced or used, but serve to maintain a link to the original base or parent code.

Seven Minutes of Christian Paranoia

Phil Phillips and Gary Greenwald were key parts of the “toys are satanic devices for corrupting your children” hysteria in the 1980s. IO9 has a 7 minute supercut of them becoming more and more unhinged about Yoda, GI Joe, the Smurfs, He-Man, and (obviously) Dungeons & Dragons.

It’s bananapants and delightful.

“Some art is real.”

Ordinarily, I find Chuck Closterman tedious and irritating. His remembrance of Lou Reed in Grantland, however, is completely fucking spot on.

I love this bit in particular, about Metal Machine Music:

In 1975, Reed released Metal Machine Music, a four-sided 64-minute collection of itchy guitar feedback with no words or melody. In the original liner notes, Reed claimed no one he knew had ever listened to the entire thing, including himself. If you purchased it on vinyl, you eventually realized the fourth side concluded with a “locked groove.” This meant that — if you didn’t manually lift the needle off the record — it would never stop playing (thereby subjecting its listener to an endless, joyless squeal). Basically, he made an album that sounded terrible on purpose and then figured out a way to make it go on forever. It assaulted the people who supported him and exasperated the label that paid him to create it. Now that he’s dead, it’s tempting to argue that the mere existence of Metal Machine Music is cool and subversive, almost as if the only thing that matters was the idea. But it’s not just the idea. It’s not just that Reed thought it would be funny to do this.* It’s not a parody or an urban legend. Metal Machine Music is a real thing. You can hold it. You can drop it on the floor. It’s a tangible document that illustrates the militant fringe of what can be produced with the rudimentary tools of rock and roll, designed by someone who never adequately explained what his original motive was. It’s not merely cool that it exists. It’s amazing that it exists. It’s wonderful, regardless of the notes. And while thousands of lesser mainstream artists could have easily produced an album with similarly unlistenable sounds, only Reed actually did so. Only Reed made this album, sold it to 100,000 people, and moved on to something else entirely.

* Although this was probably part of it.

Lou Reed: Original Heathen

I came to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground late by some standards, but in the pre-Internet era of the 1980s in South Mississippi, it’s sort of amazing I ever found him at all. My first exposure was via the Jane’s Addiction cover of “Rock and Roll“, which I heard at a party I probably shouldn’t have been at in a “student ghetto” house behind a USM dorm that’s not there anymore (Elam, for any EagleHeathen).

Anyway, the song started, and someone said “you know, there aren’t that many Velvet Underground covers, and there are even fewer good ones.” I didn’t get the reference until a year or so later, when I met my friend John Smith.

That’s not a pseudonym. John was born with a name that would, 20 years later, make him completely un-Google-able but for his brief moment of fame. He came to UA with much better music taste than I’d been able to assemble in Hattiesburg, so it was through John that I first really explored some of the artists who would become ubiquitous for the rest of my life: Dylan, Alex Chilton and Big Star, and most of all Lou and the Velvet Underground.

John and I hit it off pretty quickly, and the music was always a fixture in his smokey dorm room. Loaded hit the turntable, and there, suddenly, was the punch line to the joke set up so many months before behind Elam Arms. The Janes’ version was a reasonable cover, but here was the ur-text, a fully formed protopunk song recorded before I was even born. The penny drops for some of us when we first hear the Velvet Underground; if you’re at all aware of the trends of popular and alternative music since the 1970s, you have no doubt at all that what Brian Eno said is true: not that many people bought Velvet Underground records, but damn near every single one of them started a band. It’s no exaggeration to say that, without Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, modern music would be unrecognizably different.

I was sitting on the ground, outside the “security bubble” of the Marine Corps Marathon finish area on Sunday when I got the news. Lou Reed had died on Sunday, in Long Island. He was 71 years old, which is a hell of a lot longer than I suspect he thought he’d live. I am not one given to grief over celebrities, but I am not too proud to say this hit me hard, harder even than MCA last year. I blinked through tears to read the quickie Rolling Stone obit, and was amazed to see his hometown paper was caught flat-footed; it took the Times almost a full day to deploy the sort of exhaustive obituary for which they’re rightly famous. Someone said “gosh, we’re really gonna lose it when Dylan dies,” and I realized that Reed meant and means more to me than Dylan ever has. I’m having a hard time coming up with many other musicians whose artistic footprint figures as much into my own life as Reed, and it’s a short list indeed — filled mostly, no doubt, with folks who stood on Reed’s shoulders. (Tom Waits will live forever AND I WILL BROOK NO DISSENT.)

The tributes and memories flooded my Twitter feed for much of the next day. Why, of course Neil Gaiman was a fan, and of course he interviewed him years ago, as a working journalist. As it turns out, Sasha Frere-Jones used Reed’s music to propose marriage. Josh Marshall was a fan, too. By Monday, VU bandmate John Cale had weighed in:

“The news I feared the most, pales in comparison to the lump in my throat and the hollow in my stomach,” Cale wrote in a statement. “Two kids have a chance meeting and 47 years later we fight and love the same way – losing either one is incomprehensible. No replacement value, no digital or virtual fill . . . broken now, for all time. Unlike so many with similar stories – we have the best of our fury laid out on vinyl, for the world to catch a glimpse. The laughs we shared just a few weeks ago, will forever remind me of all that was good between us.”

There are only four Velvet Underground albums: 1967’s Velvet Underground & Nico, the blistering followup White Light/White Heat a year later, the self-titled Velvet Underground from 1969, and finally Loaded in 1970. None are long, and all cast long shadows (all 4 rate Rolling Stone’s list of Top 500 Rock Albums). In those four brief records there’s enough gold for a hundred lesser careers — and Lou wasn’t done when he left the Velvet Underground.

In his solo work, he never stopped experimenting — indeed, it’s not unfair to say his solo career embodies the idea that, if you never fail, you’re not trying hard enough. Most of it, aside from the radio hit that included Neil Gaiman’s daughter’s namesake, is less accessible than the VU work, but that doesn’t mean bad. Transformer is an amazing rock and roll record (and includes the aforementioned “Wild Side”). His 1973 effort Berlin is the standard by which soul-crushingly sad albums are judged. Street Hassle‘s title track is a 3-movement poem about down-and-out life in New York, and believe it or not has aged reasonably well. 1989’s New York put him back on the radio, and a year later he reunited with VU partner John Cale to memorialize Andy Warhol with Songs for Drella, which met with broad praise.

There’s little else I can say on the subject not said better elsewhere, so I’ll close this down and apologize for a disjointed entry. Follow a link or two if you’re unfamiliar. Dive deeper if you are. In closing, here’s John Cale performing an on-topic poem with music by Brian Eno:

It’s rare to see a Republican be so completely honest

On the Daily Show, correspondent Aasif Mandvi traveled to North Carolina to discuss their new voter ID law with a local GOP activist and precinct chair, Don Yelton.

What followed was bizarre in its candor. The freakshow starts when he says “well, I’ve been called a bigot before…”

His commentary is so amazing that the Bunscombe County GOP has asked him to resign his position as precinct chair, lest we correctly surmise that he is completely representative of the party.

Wait a minute here. Are you telling me the Mississippi Tea Party might be RACIST?

The GOP’s idiot Taliban is funding a loonybird neo-Confederate to run against Sen. Thad Cochran.

I haven’t kept up with him recently, but he’s been historically considered the less-embarrassing senator from the Magnolia State since Lott was elected to fill Stennis’ seat 1989. (I know nothing of his successor, Roger Wicker, who took the seat in 2007.)

My guess is that Mississippi elects the know-nothing, though.

How Good is AJ?

At no point, really, in Heathen Central’s life as an Alabama fan have we had the sort of lightning-in-a-bottle quarterback that people immediately call a star. There’s been no Johnny Football in crimson. Other SEC schools grabbed showy players like Tim Tebow and Cam Newton, but not us. We probably even envied Tennessee (sssssh!) for Peyton back in the day. But only a little; success at Alabama, when it comes, has always been much more of a team effort than is usually on offer at programs that build their teams around a star QB. No Alabama quarterback has really made a splash in the NFL since, arguably, Kenny Stabler, and even the Snake didn’t get drafted until the second round. (The lion’s share of them aren’t even notable enough for a Wikipedia article.)

It’s not really different now, except it sort of is: AJ McCarron, now in his final year, may well play for his third national title as Alabama’s quarterback this January (he was red shirted for the 2009 season, so he was “on” another title game, too). Nobody else has done that. Few are ever as reliable and error-free as AJ. A stat I’m sure opponents find alarming is that, when you review his career as a starter at Alabama, he’s got just as many championship rings as he has losses. Alabama is 30-2 since AJ took over at the beginning of the 2011 season, and they could very well run the table again this year.

But for some reason, folks keep dismissing his NFL prospects. Grantland takes a look, and finds the arguments wanting.

Adventures In Fuckwittery!

So, imagine you’re engaged. Imagine it’s your responsibility to book the ceremony. Imagine it’s the day of the ceremony. Imagine you forgot to schedule it at the courthouse.

Oops!

Do you:

a) Flee! or

b) Confess your lackluster performance to your no-doubt long-suffering fiance, and take your lumps? or

c) Call in a (fake) bomb threat to the registration office, assuming your forgetfulness will get erased by the ensuing chaos?

Our hero, sadly, took (c), only to discover that the hoax was easily divined to be exactly that, and that his wedding was in no way imperiled — except for the fact that he’d neglected to schedule it. He’ll get a year in the clink for his trouble.

Shockingly, though, apparently he’s NOT lost the affections of the fiance in question, which suggests she has some of the same problems with judgement that plague our ersatz bomb-thrower.

It’s that time again.

LET THE HATE BUILD:

(Incidentally, last year they found this guy. His name is Irvin Carney, and he moved to Cincinnati after graduation. Mr Carney, we should note, continues to hate Tennessee.)

Amazingly, some folks will still insist this isn’t about voter supression

As of this November, Texans must have a photo ID to vote — with their up to date, correct legal name.

Sound innocuous? Sure. Then realize that (a) many women don’t update their driver’s licenses immediately after getting married, because it’s a hassle and (b) women might be a big deal in the next governor’s race down here, on account of Wendy.

It’s not enough to work to disenfranchise the poor, blacks, and others who may not have a state-issued ID; now they’re going after women, too. The is in increasingly dire demographic trouble, so their response is to limit the ability of citizens who dislike their policies to vote. That’s amazing and brazen.

More at MeFi.

Books of 2013, #46: Mo Meta Blues, by Questlove

HOLY HELL DO YOU GOTTA READ THIS BOOK.

?uestlove‘s book Mo Meta Blues was already on my radar before Mike wrote about it a few weeks ago, but I’ll admit that having dinner with him (Mike, not Questlove) last week is what made me pick it up on the way out of Raleigh last Friday.

The Roots are a really intriguing act, but this book is fun even if you don’t dig hip-hop, or don’t dig the sort of hip-hop that the Roots do. Ahmir (Questlove’s given name) has had an interesting life so far — he’s the son of successful but not famous musicians — and has a quick wit and a great way with a story that’s often missing in celebrity or musician memoirs. Sure, it starts with the bog-standard growing-up stories, but there’s a depth here that gives it resonance, and not just because much of the music of his youth is also the music of mine. This book’s very self-aware, as is Questlove, and that helps keep the book from getting too full of itself.

There’s really not much I can say more about this, except to note that Quest’s level of fame is sufficient that he has access to his idols, but not so enormous as to really diminish his enthusiasm for these people and their work. That enthusiasm comes through, for example, when he gets to go rollerskating with Prince, among other things.

Yeah, that’s right. Rollerskating with Prince. Now that you this story’s in the book, how can you NOT want to read it?

Books of 2013, #45: Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

I had better luck here.

Ancillary Justice is Leckie’s first novel, which is sometimes trouble, but didn’t get in the way here at all. AJ is a wide-ranging space opera sort of thing, but with some genuinely inventive worldbuilding that I can’t say much about without being spoilery. It’s a bit of a mystery, and a bit of a quest, and a bit of an exploration of some admittedly well-explored SF ideas (“what is human?”), but the mix is right; Leckie in particular doesn’t let her enthusiasm for her world completely drown the story, which is nice.

This is not to say there aren’t issues here. AJ is getting lots of attention for the way it deals with gender in language. Our narrator spends lots of time conversing in a language not his own, and a key difference between his tongue and the one he frequently speaks is that his own is vastly less gendered. Couple this with the facts that gender in the world(s) of the book is (a) not obvious in most cultures and (b) varies in presentation when it is and (c) not an indicator of position, and Leckie has set the stage for a novel that also tweaks expectations about gender in the reader, or at least that’s what it feels like she’s trying to do.

In my experience, though, shifting between “he” and “she” when referring to the same character is just jarring, and makes it pointlessly more difficult to track the actual story. I said Leckie didn’t let her ideas get in the way, and this is mostly true, but the gender thing here is (while well intentioned) enough of an “aren’t I cute” move that I’d dock her a letter grade even though I’m generally sympathetic to the notion that gender expectations are troublesome, and that gendered language can contribute to that, and all that comes with those ideas.

The politics of Radch space (the dominant human empire, which is quasi-feudal and very corrupt) are also a little twee and precious, but they don’t get in the way of the story here nearly as much as the pronoun trope does.

All that said, I enjoyed it mostly, and was sad to see it end, but not, I think, sad enough to pursue other works in the same universe (online references make it sound like Leckie plans more Radch works).

(Avoid online discussion of this book, even in places like IO9 or Goodreads, if you want to avoid any spoilers at all.)

Books of 2013, #44: Carter Beats the Devil, by Glen David Gold

I’ll just come right out and say it: holy CRAP was I disappointed in this one. In the decade since it hit the streets, Carter has gotten nearly universally good reviews. Everyone loves it. It’s been on my “I should read that” list for a long, long time, so when geek-celeb Wil Wheaton wrote about loving it on his blog a month ago, I finally got around to ordering it from Amazon.

Carter Beats the Devil is one of those “fictional story told with real-life character” books, which sometimes works but usually ends up too clever by half. This one starts well enough, but Gold really kinda runs out of steam about halfway through. It went from a page-turner to a slog, and then stayed there; I found it a chore to finish. Even the “big reveals” towards the end didn’t really pay off for me, anyway.

Anyway, onward.

Books of 2013 #43: 61 Hours, by Lee Child

(SO behind, still.)

Yeah, I know, but I was traveling again. Reacher books just go down easy, which is troublesome as now I’ve only got 4 left. Write like the wind, Lee!

61 Hours is an odd one in that it’s framed, constantly by the titular countdown that we only slowly grow to understand. Reacher, of course, is drawn into a web of intrigue in an isolated small town — which is by no means new for him — but by this point in the series Child’s gotten good enough with characters that they’re a bit better than stock, which is nice for pulp.

Mark this one, as always, for fans only, but I enjoyed it, if for no other reason than the consistently hilarious visual provided by the generally-offscreen antagonist.

The TSA Admits That It Is Useless

I’m sure they meant to redact the document in question, but BoingBoing reports that our boondoggle agency of self-important timewasters has admitted that there is no evidence of terror groups threatening American air travel.

The TSA has a lot of explaining to do, both to members of Congress and to the general public, all of whom were misled as to the threat we face and the justification for the most intrusive searches ever performed on the public at large in the United States in the history of this great nation. The terrorists that the TSA has made the country fear, it admits, do not actually exist.