review
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Original post from Jan 2024.
I’ve looked at a couple of smart helmets in the past. Not much impressed.
But this one looks worth spending the bucks.
As I post, you can get an early bird price on the full kit for U.S. $300. They expect it to retail for $500.
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Details on Indiegogo.
Another good Aussie TV series.
This is a sequel to Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, which I have not yet seen.
Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries (2019) is set in Melbourne, mid-1960s.
The show revolves around the personal and professional life of Peregrine Fisher, … who inherits a fortune when the famous aunt she never knew goes missing over the highlands of New Guinea.
Peregrine sets out to become a world-class private detective in her own right, guided by a group of exceptional women in The Adventuresses’ Club, of which her aunt was also a member.
Each episode is about 80 minutes.
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This is the first full novel (2006) in Steve Berry’s Cotton Malone series.
Comparisons to The Da Vinci Code (2003) are inevitable. This is a mystery involving the supposedly extinct order of the knight Templar, and their most treasured secret, the Great Device.
There seems to be a religious thriller genre.
Personally, I can’t recommend this book. The story and characters were not compelling for me. And the puzzles used to find the prize too confusing. When the secret is finally revealed, … a let down.
The author was a trial lawyer for 30 years. It took him 12 years and 85 rejections before selling a manuscript.
The ancient order of the Knights Templar possessed untold wealth and absolute power over kings and popes—until the Inquisition, when they were wiped from the face of the earth, their hidden riches lost.
But now two forces vying for the treasure …
Cotton Malone, one-time top operative for the U.S. Justice Department, is enjoying his quiet new life as an antiquarian book dealer in Copenhagen when an unexpected call to action reawakens his hair-trigger instincts–and plunges him back into the cloak-and-dagger world he thought he’d left behind.
It begins with a violent robbery attempt on Cotton’s former supervisor, Stephanie Nelle, who’s far from home on a mission that has nothing to do with national security. …
SteveBerry.org
“The novel’s overcomplicated conspiracies and esoteric brainteasers can get tedious, and the various religious motivations make little sense. - Publishers Weekly.
“A long, tortuous journey to an unsurprising, though thoughtful, end.” – Kirkus Reviews.
BookBrowse
Weakest season, so far.
The plot incredibly unbelievable.
Who approved this script?
Still, Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the head of Slough House, makes it worth watching.
For me it’s mostly a black comedy, an absurd workplace shambles.
But at times, it’s almost le Carré level espionage drama.
People still LOVE this show after 3 seasons.
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Weird, gripping non-fiction. ??
Or is it horror story, historic hallucination?
Fact or fantasy?
I don’t understand what this book is talking about.
An extraordinary ‘nonfiction novel’ weaves a web of associations between the founders of quantum mechanics and the evils of two world wars
The first section of Labatut’s book moves at a dizzying pace. He begins with a guided tour of a chamber of horrors in which we encounter some of the more diabolical inventions prompted by two world wars, and are introduced to a blur of real-life characters including the drug-raddled Hermann Göring, who crushed a cyanide capsule in his mouth to avoid the hangman’s rope …
The real villain here, however, is the chemist Fritz Haber (who died in 1934), who directed the programme of poison gas attacks that killed tens of thousands of soldiers in the first world war, an accomplishment that drove his disapproving wife to suicide. …
After this hair-raising opening we are launched into somewhat more tranquil regions of spacetime, where float more familiar characters such as Einstein and other 20th-century physicists and mathematicians …
The second half of Labatut’s book is largely taken up with the struggle for supremacy in modern physics between Erwin Schrödinger and Heisenberg. …
Labatut has written a dystopian nonfiction novel set not in the future but in the present.
Guardian review
Heisenberg and Schrödinger debate atomic particles. Einstein looks on in disgust, clinging to his worldview of Newtonian physics.
I often think of the Freakonomics podcast from 2011 …
… “Sunk cost” is about the past — it’s the time, or money, or sweat equity that you’ve put into something, which makes it hard to abandon.
“Opportunity cost” is about the future. It means that for every hour or dollar you spend on one thing, you’re giving up the opportunity to spend that hour or dollar on something else — something that might make your life better. If only you weren’t so worried about the sunk cost.
If only you could quit. …
Jim VandeHei, founder of Politico and then Axios:
In 2009, I was recruited for one of the most prestigious and cool appointments in American journalism: to serve a nine-year term on the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Three years later, I quit. …
So, how do we know when to quit? Looking back over my decades of best quits, here’s how you know. If the position is…
Housing is an increasingly urgent issue.
Canada’s population grew by 1.2 million in 2023, the highest ever annual increase. And there are not enough homes for those kind of numbers — even if they could afford them.
Multiple approaches are needed to increase housing supply, including turning unused office spaces into apartments and condos.
Short term ➙ easiest is to provide free, safe temporary accommodation for anyone.
Nobody wants people living illegally or legally in tents nearby. THEREFORE the goal should be to be to offer a better alternative, indoor or outdoor. I’d call it a municipal FREE CAMPGROUND.
Volunteer organizations could provide meals and medical advice. Help folks try to get out.
Long term ➙ we need more “Housing First” initiatives.
Rather than moving homeless individuals through different “levels” of housing, whereby each level moves them closer to “independent housing” (for example: from the streets to a public shelter, and from a public shelter to a transitional housing program, and from there to their own apartment or house in the community), Housing First moves the homeless individual or household immediately from the streets or homeless shelters into their own accommodation. …
… housing is a basic human right, and so should not be denied to anyone, even if they are abusing alcohol or other substances. The Housing First model, thus, is philosophically in contrast to models that require the homeless to abjure substance-abuse and seek treatment in exchange for housing.
Finland and Denmark are the only European Union countries where homelessness is currently falling. …
Since its launch in 2008, the number of homeless people in Finland has decreased by roughly 30%, and the number of long-term homeless people has fallen by more than 35%.
“Sleeping rough”, the practice of sleeping outside, has been largely eradicated in Helsinki, where only one 50-bed night shelter remains. …
Wikipedia
Providing housing first to people living on the street has worked surprisingly well where it’s been tried around the world.
Season 1 was great.
But season 2 was even better, IMHO.
YES it’s ultra violent. TRUE – dozens of bad guys die because they never seem to shoot straight. 😀
Too much Mission Impossible silliness, of course.
But Reacher is iconic. A true original.
In season 2, Reacher reunites with his U.S. Army Military Police unit, the Special Investigators, when one of their own is murdered under mysterious circumstances.
Some fans of his books like me wonder WHERE they can go in season 3?
A letdown is likely. Most of the Reacher books are like season 1 ➙ He wanders into a random town. Somehow gets involved in a big fight with a bad guy. Wins without car chases or gun fights.
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Different Seasons (1982) is a collection of four Stephen King novellas with a more dramatic bent, rather than the horror fiction for which King is famous.
Of course the first story was adapted into one of the greatest films of all time, Shawshank Redemption.
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The Body was adapted for Stand by Me (1986). Another of the greatest films of all time.
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I couldn’t really get into the novella, The Body, however.
Instead it was Apt Pupil that really got me.
It’s the story of the evolution of a mass shooter from age-13 to 17.
… student Todd Bowden discovers that his elderly neighbor, Arthur Denker, is Kurt Dussander—a former Nazi concentration camp commandant who is now a fugitive war criminal.
Todd, fascinated with Nazi atrocities perpetrated during World War II, blackmails Dussander, forcing him to share disturbing stories of what it was like working at Nazi extermination camps and how it felt to participate in genocide. …
I’ve not seen the film. 54% on Rotten Tomatoes. Ian McKellen stars as Dussander.
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Funny. Dumb. 😀
This 90min pilot went on to 4 seasons through 2022.
Agatha Raisin is a British comedy-drama television program, based on M. C. Beaton’s book series of the same name about a former PR agent who solves crime mysteries in the Cotswolds village of Carsely.
… broadcast as a pilot titled Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death 2014 …
… soon finds herself a suspect in a murder case when she enters the village’s annual quiche-making competition in an attempt to ingratiate herself with the community. She sets out to clear her name and solve the mystery of the quiche of death.
This is a case where the TV show is better than the source book – Quiche of Death (1992).
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Rick McCharles 