Sand gropers unite!

K. A. Bedford, Black Light (2015).

Good Reads meta-data is 328 pages, rated 3.22 by 45 litizens. 

Genre: Thriller: Species: Paranormal.  

DNA:  Black Swan. 

Verdict: A change of pace. 

Tagline:  Elves and demons rove Western Australia!  ‘Get your amulets right here! Three potions for the price of two!’  

A few years after The Great War, a widowed English novelist moves as far away as possible from bad memories to Western Australia, hours south of Perth.  She lives alone, hires servants, writes novels, wears old clothes (at times those of her dead husband), has plenty of money, never attends church, drives cars, does not coif her hair, is reclusive, each and all of these facts shocks the locals. They, however, are divided among themselves over which of her unnatural behaviours is the worst. So far she hasn’t started smoking or playing loud music, but can it be long before she starts this devil worship?  So they may well ask. The vicar reviles her wanton ways! He is small-minded hypocrite.  A touch of realism there.  

(A similar reaction to women of that time on the other side of the world is On the Rocks, discussed elsewhere on this blog.)

Then, unbidden, a favourite aunt from Old Blighty makes the two-week odyssey by air (circa 1926) to warn Novelist of impending doom!  Doom?  Doom.  However, once arrived, Aunt is so exhausted from the sojourn, confused by her fatigue, ill from motion sickness, disoriented in the unfamiliar surroundings that she cannot quite say what impelled (or paid for) her impromptu trek, apart from some strange dreams involving Novelist. These dreams, as she recounts them, are very detailed and accurate about places and objects auntie has never seen.  We have entered Spooktown in the Twilight Zone.     

Late 1930s

Side Bar: spiritualism reached a high in the years after World War I.  The wholesale slaughter of a masculine generation gave impetus to efforts to penetrate the beyond.  While many charlatans and crooks took advantage of that demand, there were also well-meaning people who explored the occult.  One of them is Novelist’s neighbour, who spends most of spare time, when not reading up on magic, building a time machine with correspondence from H. G. Wells. Get the idea?

The plot pot thickens when she receives first a menacing letter, then a threatening one, and finally a blackmail demand.  Since she has only been there a few months, none this makes sense…in this world.

Daunted, she nonetheless fights back with scant assistance and resources, not including the local plod whose only apparent interest is football.  Another touch of realism that. Being other worldly the story does not stick to Ronald Knox’s decalogue for krimis. Ergo, in the last 50+ pages all kinds of new information and characters enter.  It’s just not natural!  

***

A change of pace from my usual reading.  It is well written and thoroughly contextualised with differentiated characters. The detail is rich but not suffocating.  It ends on an open door that suggests a follow-up novel.  

Yes, it still hurts.

John Rossi, The 1964 Phillies: The Story of Baseball’s Most Memorable Collapse (2005). Rev. ed. (2024).

Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 3.0 by 1 litizen. 

Genre: History: Species: Baseball.    

DNA: Philly.

Verdict: [Here I go again.]

Tagline: They were all out!  

In 1964 an unprepossessing Philadelphia Phillies baseball team led the National League for 74 consecutive days in the home stretch, World Series tickets were printed, and…the Cinderella Cardinals from St Louis won it all.  Huh?  That result set two records.  For the Phillies: it was longest lead that late in the season to dissipate, and for the Cardinals: the largest deficit overcome in the shortest time.  

The Phillies lost ten straight games in the last fortnight of the season and sank from view. It all started with Chico Ruiz, who stole home, when he shouldn’t have. Tsk, tsk, tsk.  (I have decried this event in other posts and will not add further salt to that old wound.)

Much ‘If only’ second guessing, inevitably, fills the pages about rosters, pitch calls by the catcher, pinch hitters, pitching rotation, use of the windup rather than the stretch, line up cards, batting order, even leads from first base, each and all in an effort to solve the mystery of the debacle. 

But, at the end, as the author admits, there was no mystery.  Or rather the mystery is how an average team like the Phillies, played well enough to lead the balanced Dodgers, the big bats of the Giants, and the laser pitchers of St Louis for so long.

In 1964 only two Phillies made the National League All Star team for the only time in their careers.  The one Hall of Fame player on the roster, pitcher Jim Bunning, had started slowly, and was not an All Star that year, but later he carried the team much of the way. (Stock broker by winter, in the season Bunning always wanted the ball. Two days between starts was fine with him.) Further evidence for the mediocrity of the team is that in the following years it sank still further and still faster, as did most of the members of the 1964 roster who disappeared from view.  

The success in 1964 was a compound of good luck, good management, and some grit.  Though of course in unfailing hindsight the manager — Gene Mauch — was blamed for the defeat, rather than congratulated for the successes of his tactics of ‘little ball.’

‘Little ball?’ asked the fraternity brothers, who have forgotten everything and learned nothing. It means advancing the runner and playing for one run at a time, and relying on defence and pitching to keep the game close. Ergo it involves hit-and-run, hitting behind the runner, bunting for hits, squeeze bunts, tag ups for sacrifice flies, advancing on fielder’s choices, double steals, going deep into pitch counts, and delayed double steals, playing the infield in, pitch outs, double cutoffs, and so on. It also places a premium on defence in the middle of the diamond with a sound double-play combination, a strong-armed centre fielder, and a smart catcher who can block the plate. The final piece of the puzzle is a bullpen of strike-throwing relief pitchers.  

Manager Mauch also played ‘money ball’ avant le mot by  platooning in several positions, notably left field and first base, to give hitters an advantage.  

As the day-by-day, game-by-game report in this book shows the Phillies ran out starting pitchers in August.  Instead of five, as the coach’s manual says, they had two.  The others had one problem or another. Things were so desperate that the starting pitcher in one crucial game during the slide was an 18-year old called from the minors getting in his first major league game.  A promising left-hander had a shoulder injury in June that made every pitch painful. The two other right-handers in the pre-season planning each became unreliable. One had lost confidence in himself (later compounded by the Ruiz incident): he overthought everything and simply did not want the ball in baseball speak. The other, much less experienced pitcher, seemed resigned to losses before he threw the first pitch and the manager lost confidence in him. 

John Rossi

While Rossi refers to the crowds attending games, and quotes often from the press, there is little about the social impact more generally on the city. It was a year of turbulence and, I have seen it asserted elsewhere, that the Phillies’ successes had a positive influence on the communities of the city by giving disconnected people something in common that transcended their own grievances and adversities.  

One liked it

Murder Most Royal (2020) by S. J. Bennett

Good Reads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.88 by 6784 litizens.

DNA: Brit; Species: Royalty.  

Verdict: One liked it. 

Tagline:  Look what Santa Claus brought.

Members of the British royal family travel to Sandringham House on the Norfolk Coast for Christmas, where they have been many times before.  The peace and quiet they seek is unsettled by a macabre discovery on the beach, teenage drug dealing, a hit and run accident or was it, and a death in odd circumstances.  Sandringham sounds worse than Newtown on Saturday night.

While plod takes these events one at a time, with years of experience at the jigsaw puzzle of humanity, Her Majesty sees a whole, and sends forth her paladin, one time artillery officer Rozie to connect the dots.  

Bennett makes the members of the royal family human, and in the main likeable. Similarly the local residents are several and varied. Nor are the police reduced to cardboard. 

Still I niggle, Her Majesty seems to be in a hurry and has three direct confrontations that cut against her softy-softly approach. The sulky teenager who appears early on then disappears, and likewise the drug haul that misled the police also goes poof!  There is also a reference to Greenland that had me consulting Google Earth to see if it made sense. Barely. Contrived.

Finally, I found it hard to keep the characters straight. Those with titles have three names: their aristocratic one, a birth name, and a nickname.  It was like reading a Russian novel with patronymics, eponymics, retronymics, and nymics.  

For pedants only: Sandringham House is the personal and private property of Elizabeth Mountbatten née Windsor. It was purchased by her father and willed to her.  Wikipedia says it has, get this, between 100 and 200 rooms! ‘Between.’  That made me wonder about all the staff. The maids, janitors, tradesmen to keep the place running.  Then there are the grounds of the estate, which are extensive.  Who pays them?  

Third in the sequence and one hopes for a fourth in due course. 

Her Royal Investigator

Murder Most Royal (2020) by S. J. Bennett

Good Reads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.88 by 6784 litizens.

DNA: Brit; Species: Royalty.  

Verdict: One liked it. 

Tagline:  Look what Santa Claus brought.

Members of the British royal family travel to Sandringham House on the Norfolk Coast for Christmas, where they have been many times before.  The peace and quiet they seek is unsettled by a macabre discovery on the beach, teenage drug dealing, a hit and run accident or was it, and a death in odd circumstances.  Sandringham sounds worse than Newtown on Saturday night.

While plod takes these events one at a time, with years of experience at the jigsaw puzzle of humanity, Her Majesty sees a whole, and sends forth her paladin, one time artillery officer Rozie to connect the dots.  

Bennett makes the members of the royal family human, and in the main likeable. Similarly the local residents are several and varied. Nor are the police reduced to cardboard. 

Still I niggle, Her Majesty seems to be in a hurry and has three direct confrontations that cut against her softy-softly approach. The sulky teenager who appears early on then disappears, and likewise the drug haul that misled the police also goes poof!  There is also a reference to Greenland that had me consulting Google Earth to see if it made sense. Barely. Contrived.

Finally, I found it hard to keep the characters straight. Those with titles have three names: their aristocratic one, a birth name, and a nickname.  It was like reading a Russian novel with patronymics, eponyms, retronymics, and nymbics.  

For pedants only: Sandringham House is the personal and private property of Elizabeth Mountbatten née Windsor. It was purchased by her father and willed to her.  Wikipedia says it has, get this, between 100 and 200 rooms! ‘Between.’  That made me wonder about all the staff. The maids, janitors, tradesmen to keep the place running.  Then there are the grounds of the estate, which are extensive.  Who pays them?  

Third in the sequence and one hopes for a fourth in due course. 

The real coin.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959).

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2h and 9m, rated 7.0 by 20,000 cinemtaizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Verne.

Verdict: Fun.

Tagline:  What waits below?  

Pretty sure I saw this on the wide screen as a boy, and marvelled at it.  The character studies stand the test of time even if the special effects don’t. James Mason is, well, James Mason. He can’t act but he doesn’t have to.  Arlene Dahl can and does. Then there is Pat Boone in his underwear.  Something for everyone. Though I thought the villain wouldn’t scare fourth graders.  

Declaration: I have tried to read Jules Verne and found his prose impenetrable. So mannered, so stiff, so roundabout, so ponderous, so unyielding that I did not make it past page 10 in either 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or Five Weeks in a Balloon.  

There is a genre of JCE films. I count more than dozen on the IMDb using that exact title, and many others with variants.   

Oh dear.

Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime 1h and 30m, rated 4.1 by 2,000 extended family members.  


Genre: JCE


DNA: Verne. 


Verdict: Uncle! I gave up.


Tagline: Bore. 


A consistently tedious rendering of the Jules Verne story.  Made for television to eclipse a big budget version due out later that same year. In this mishmash, a corpulent child (actor) plays the romantic lead, disbelief was disbelieved right there. Later he is superseded by another as if the producers also disbelieved the early scenes.  


Declaration: I didn’t make it to the end.  


There is a cottage industry of JCE films.  One day I might try to watch a few of them for a comparative perspective.  Or I might hit my foot with a hammer instead.  Hard to decide which would be less painful.


Clean for Gene.

Eugene McCarthy: The Rise And Fall of Post-war American Liberalism (2005) by Dominic Sandbrook

Good Reads meta-data is 402 pages, rated 3.74 by 85 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

Verdict: Speaks Minnesotan.  

Tagline: Hindsight aplenty.  

I was looking for a biography of the man and found this to be the best bet, though the author specifically sets aside the label biography, still there is much biography in it.

Starting points: 

1 born to farmers and farmed himself as a young married man

2 considered monastic life seriously enough to start on it for a year Benedictine

3 college school teacher

4 disciplined, serious, spare (no rhetorical flourishes), used to being in front of room of young people. – be on time, target, and budget (both as farmer and teacher) 

5 ready to do the work without the limelight monastic modesty

6 compromise is a good not an ill, and necessary because everything is not malleable (farm)

7 In the US Navy he was a code breaker

Personally got on well with Southern conservative democrats as well as liberal Republicans like Harold Stassen.  (And like Stassen he became addicted to running for president in later life.)

Got bored in four terms in House of Representatives so tried for the Senate with the support of organised labor and he unseated an incumbent Republican. Became easily bored and more ambitious, these traits stayed with him. The more he interacted with more senior leaders the more he saw himself taking a place among them: Ego now enters the equation.

The feet of clay that are relentlessly examined in this book show him to be a man who, finding things coming to him easily, developed hubris.  All that is said, repeatedly, yet the fact remains he did what no one else would do in challenging a sitting president from his own party almost single handed at the beginning.  He did indeed stand up alone. 

Remind me who has done that since. As the Senator said himself as the dust of 1968 settled: ‘I may not have been the best man to make it [the challenge], but I was the only one who was willing to try.’  

Of course, there was no chance he would secure the nomination from the Democratic Party as he often said himself.  His purpose was to present an articulate, identify, and mobilise an alternative.  That he certainly did.  The dynamics of the following campaign in 1968 are many.  First the incumbent president withdrew, and then another candidate was murdered.  While that makes the whole thing seem chaotic, as the author shows and as McCarthy said many times first Johnson and then Humphrey would secure the nomination.  What McCarthy’s campaign could do however was to influence changes in policy, program, and personnel. 

At the outset his campaign had been single-issue of the Vietnam War, then with Johnson’s withdrawal it shifted to a campaign about the office of president itself to be less an executive and more a chairman of a board.  McCarthy did not handle either the entry and then demise of Robert Kennedy with any intelligence or decorum, but then who did.  

His campaign was disorganised and disjointed in itself with managers, writers, canvassers, and pollers coming and going.  While funding was reasonable, talent was in shorter supply.  But in any event McCarthy seldom took advice from members of his campaign. That led to frustration on both sides.   

Somewhat inadvertently the author shows that the qualities that gave McCarthy credibility also meant he could not win.  He was distant, aloof, intellectual, poetry-quoting and he just did not do the handshaking a candidate is supposed to do, but he did autograph the book I had.  On many occasions late in the going when given a chance to state his case he simply replied ‘People know my position.’  

In his personal manner he was detached and reserved rather like John Kennedy, whereas Robert Kennedy became a firebrand, often without focus.  McCarthy’s appeal was cerebral; Robert Kennedy’s was visceral.  

There is some speculation prior to Kennedy’s death that Humphrey and Kennedy would arrive at a stand-off in the convention, and McCarthy might then be a compromise both sides would accept: A straw in the wind of fate.  This line is pursued on several alternative history web sites for those who wish to consider it.

Realising the cause was all but lost after June, he did less and less.  Instead of handshaking at factories, school, or sidewalks, instead of prepping for interviews, instead of going here and there to meet labor leaders or black communities, he would read poetry, and worse, per our author, write poetry.  

In paraphrase I’ll give his fellow Minnesotan Garrison Keillor the last words here on McCarthy:

He was the last man in American public life to quote from Yeats or Frost, and to do so because he had read their poetry not because a speechwriter had inserted it.

While this book more than once dismisses McCarthy’s poetry in 1968 both Time Magazine and the New York Times labeled him as that. In that whimsical manner that so irritates the author on his nomination papers in the primaries he often listed his occupation as ‘Poet, unpublished.’ 

Holy Batmobile!

Return to the Batcave; The Misadventures of Adam and Burt (2003).

IMDb meta data is 1h and 30m, rated 6.5 by 2,300 batfanatics. 

Genre: Docucomedy. 

DNA: Nostalgia.

Verdict: Batusi!  

Tagline: Kapow! 

Senior citizens Adam and Burt attend a charity fundraiser at a car museum, where the Batmobile is stolen right out from under their….selves. ‘Holy grand theft auto, Batfans!’ The elderly duo set off in pursuit of the krim(s) by foot, by car, by bus with the help of citizens they….reminisce about the good old days between popping ibuprofen. 

Check that utility belt! It is a good natured reprise which it is hard not to like though the New York Times reviewer at the time managed to not like it.  What a fuddy-duddy!

It is certainly more diverting than the ever so self-important retakes of the Caped One, Citizens.

By Jove!

Jupiter Ascending (2015). 

IMDb meta-data is 2h and 7m, rated 5.3 by 198,000 cinematizns. 

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Hollywood.

Verdict: Oh hum.

Tagline:  It cost so much to make, it must be good!  

An insipid blend of Dune and Star Wars. I tried to like it, really I did, but I failed.  I tried because a trusted source recommended it, then I realised this same source had recommended the shrill Valerian (2017) and the somnambulant The Tangle (2019). This makes three strikes; the trust badge for this source has been revoked.   

A similar but much cheaper, less pretentious, more amusing telling of a like story is Vagrant Queen (2020) rated 5.4, which probably cost less than the catering budget for Jupiter Ascending.

A Close encounter

Christopher Buckley, Little Green Men (1999).

Good Reads meta-data is 317 pages rated 3.66 by 3,658 litizens.

Genre: Satire.

DNA: D.C.

Verdict: Reality.  

Tagline: They beamed him up, but not for long.

TV Host is the Prince of D.C., then….  His smug ever so polite attack journalism irritates a minion in an deep state agency so secret it may not exist.  In a fit of pique Minion hits the keyboard and things are never the same for Host again, nor for Minion. Host’s wealth, his status, his influence, his marriage, his friends, his sponsors, his home, all are soon lost.  But like Phoenix he rises to become leader of the Abductees Alliance. Yes, you read that right. The little Green Men got him and he is going to make them pay.

Meanwhile, rejected by the deep state for his ill discipline, Minion joins forces with Host to reveal….  But wait, it is not that simple….   

Christopher Buckley

It is a satire on the D.C. establishment, but how can one parody what is already absurd. Buckley tries very hard to do so and does succeed in landing some stingers, but by and large, read today, it seems understated.  

Oh, and when it is finally resolved the plot holes are big enough to accommodate the starship Enterprise.  

Yes, of that Buckley, born with a silver keyboard in hand.