GoodReads meta-data is 362 pages, rated 4.1 by 2252 litizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Craic!
Slacker Paul ekes out a living in contemporary Dublin by doing six-hours of charity work a week. As long as he does this work a stipend from his late, fabulously wealthy aunt, who despised him, gives him a bare living. He was her only living relative. Her idea was that this stipend would get him started, at long last, on earning a living. She over-estimated her man, because his idea is to scrape along on that stipend. As a consumer he has learned how to make that stipend stretch to cover his very few needs. No bargain bin in Dublin escapes his notice. Most Op Shops are too upmarket for him.
Most of the gratis charity work is visiting inmates and patients at hospices and retirement (old folks) homes in and around Dublin. He has shopped around and found the best set-up, taking into account transport cost to and from, level of demands from clients, opportunities with female staff, and such. Paul is none too bright despite all his scheming. The staff at the institutions verify his work and he lets the elderly clients talk to him and he pretends to be whomever they say. He takes the chits to the lawyer managing the trust fund and gets the Euros. Simple. Too. To last.
Those patients that are assigned to him have no other visitors and are pretty confused about who any one is or where they are. He has one of those non-nondescript faces that they can project onto and he is a good listener.
Then one night, as he listens to a new client rattle on, the dying old man, Mr Brown, riddled with cancer beckons him closer to whisper weakly in his ear, or so he thinks. He moves the chair and leans forward and the old coot stabs Paul in the shoulder with a scissor blade he had secreted in the bed. What with all the tubes and wires on the old cuss the two of them get tangled and fall to the floor, killing the patient who was eighty if a day, and leaving Paul bleeding from the stab wound with additional bumps and bruises.
A routine police investigation soon discovers that the cancer-ridden client was not Mr Brown but rather Moriarty long since thought deceased in Montevideo. Whoa! Where has he been these last thirty years and what has he been doing? Who did he think Paul was that he wanted to stab him? None of this interests Paul, until….
It get worse when Paul barely escapes another much younger villain. His car is booby trapped. He is on the run! He blames the nurse who sent him to listen to Moriarty and she feels guilty enough to club together with him, because it seems someone is trying to kill her, too. Indeed anyone is a target who had anything to do with Moriarty at the hospice.
The pace is fast and furious. The throw-away lines are many. The Irish idioms are delightful. Much ground is covered in and around Dublin. Little is as it seems: The beautiful TV journalist is rancid. The upright police commissioner isn’t. The shifty cabinet minister is honest. The objectionable husband (never mind the details) is a wounded lion. The helpless shut-in is far from helpless. Even the dead are not what they seem.
Hurling figures in the story, as does Guiness so we know it is Irish.
The characters who pass in review include Bunny, the hurling coach who never bluffs, Dorothy who lied about the gun collection of her late husband, Detective Inspector Stewart who may be the last and only honest Gardià in All Ireland, pregnant lawyer Nora whose taser is illegal and all the more welcome for it, but nary a priest though the pews were near full.
Glad I read it on Kindle since I could look up the Irishisms as I went. It is the first of series of four or five titles by Caimh McDonnell.
I started the next one a few hours after finishing this one, and finished them all since I drafted this post. Craic!
‘House of Secrets’ (1936)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 10 minutes, rated 5.1 by 233 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Where is the old dark house?
While visiting London a brash American chipmunk inherits a House of Secrets. Whacko! Off he goes to claim the abandoned, empty, vacant, House of Secrets only to discover it is occupied and the occupiers have barking dogs and shotguns to prove it. They seem strangely indifferent to his legal claims, as do the local Bobbies.
Meanwhile back at the ranch lawyer’s office there are many phone calls to people with plummy accents. Now the lawyer tells him to sell and skedaddle. Meanwhile he has fallen in lust with a wispy blonde lurking about the House of Secrets. No way is he going to leave this damsel behind.
The next 55 minutes consists of Chipmunk asking a number of people — the lawyer, Bobbies, plummy accent 1, plummy accent 2, wispy blonde, shotgun totting butler — what is going on. They respond by saying they cannot tell him.
Why not? Because it is not in the script.
Meanwhile also in London are three American stereotypical hoodlums who want to break into the House of Secrets and find the treasure. Treasure? Well, any House of Secrets is bound to have treasure, right? Huh? How it got there is…. contrary to the laws of physics.
In the last five minutes, they break in, the secret is revealed, and a treasure is found.
Spoiler coming.
The house is being used to experiment on an anti-poison gas. Evidently no research facilities are available for such a purpose. Budget cutters had been at it again. The ace scientist was also given to acting like a Republican — screaming, grabbing, and going all sanctimonious all at once — and had to be sequestered and sedated far from prying eyes. Further, please, shouted the fraternity brothers. Usually these types get Senate seats.
The house is hardly used apart from a basement. Where are the sliding panels, secret doors, spy holes, remote switches, cobwebs, and the other conveniences of the Old Dark House? Nor is the damsel in distress until the gangsters appear, partly led there inadvertently by Chipmunk.
It was filmed at the Gower Street studios of RKO in Hollywood. The plummy accents all came from the British colony in Tinsel Town at the time.
Poison gas was the atomic bomb of the age, and any British audience would have shuttered at its mere mention. Ditto many in an American audience like Rondo Hatton, as is discussed in another post on this blog. But it is also mentioned in the last ten minutes and has nothing to do with Chipmunk, the gangsters, or much else.
29 November
1803 The Louisiana Purchase agreement was signed. It included all of six states: Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and parts of eight more: Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Louisiana. Nearly doubling the area of the country. The purchase was opposed by some Senators and Representatives whose names are now forgotten.
1935 Physicist Erwin published his famous thought experiment ‘Schrödinger’s cat’, a paradox that illustrated the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. To observe is to alter.
1948 The first mass-produced Australian car, the Holden FX, rolled off the assembly line in Melbourne. The automobile industry has been a child of the tariff wall and thereafter a political football.
1949 Chang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist regime left mainland China for Taiwan and stayed. Kate’s mother once sold a pup to Madame Chang. True fact.
1972 Atari released Pong, the first commercially successful video game. More came.
28 November
1520 Ferdinand Magellan passed through the Tierra del Fuego to become the first European to enter the Pacific from the Atlantic. He had left Spain on 20 September. In the image below the Pacific Ocean is on the left and the Atlantic on the right.
1660 The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge had its first meeting. Sir Christopher Wren, who was Gresham’s Professor of Astronomy gave the lecture. The audience was the scientific cream of Great Britain. The Royal warrant came two years later.
1814 ‘The Times of London’ was first printed by automatic, steam powered presses which reduced the price per number, making newspapers available to a mass audience.
1919 Lady Astor is elected the first woman in Parliament. She campaigned hard as a Conservative and was re-elected until 1945. She held the ethnic and racial prejudices of the time and place.
1956 Government of Canada paid the transportation costs to settle 37,565 Hungarian refugees in Canada, including the child pictured below. There followed English lessons and a clothing allowance.
27 November
1095 Pope Urban II called the First Crusade because “Deus vult!” (“God wills it!”) to liberate the Holy Land from the infidels. He was responding to false Fox News from Jerusalem about massacres of Christians. The aggression was Christian and battles have since continued.
1868 George Custer led a massacre of peaceful Cheyennes on the Washita River in Oklahoma. He had been suspended from duty for a year because of absence, carelessness, neglect, and incompetence. He made no effort to identify the Indians, respond to the white flag they showed, or the presence of numerous women and children. All were murdered at Custer’s command, though some troopers of the 7th Cavalry refused to participate, and Custer attempted to silence and punish them. Custer’s wife ensured it was reported as a great victory against the odds on the fact-free Fox News of the day. Pictured are some of Custer’s victims.
1895 Alfred Nobel made his last will and testament, pledging his enormous wealth toward the betterment of humanity through Nobel prizes.
1999 Labour Party leader Helen Clark became first women elected Prime Minister of New Zealand.
2006 Led by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Clark, the Canadian House of Commons passed a resolution recognising Quebecois as a nation with a united Canada by a vote of 265 to 16. It seems largely symbolic, e.g., public parks in Quebec were re-named as nationale parcs rather than provincial parks. Quebec also got its own trade commissioners in French-speaking countries like Belgium, Switzerland, France, and Cote d’ivoire. In context it took the air out of a proposal for yet another sovereignty referendum in Quebec. How that sold in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia among Acadians and elsewhere among Franco-Canadiens would be question.
26 November
43 BC In the wake of Julius Caesar’s murder Octavian, Lepidus, and Antony form a triumvirate to rule Rome and its Empire. Ah huh. It lasted even shorter time than the first triumvirate.
1896 Alonzo Stagg’s University of Chicago football team went into a huddle before offensive plays. Other teams followed the example within days. The word ‘huddle’ came from Low German to Middle English and refers to animals and people crowding together against the weather.
1917 On the orders of Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes army officers raided the Queensland Government Printing Office in Brisbane and seized all copies of Hansard containing a speech by the Premier of Queensland, T. J. Ryan, against military conscription for the Great War in Europe. This was done just before the second referendum on conscription. Earlier newspaper censorship in Brisbane had kept Ryan’s speech from a public airing. So much for states’ rights.
1917 Five professional hockey teams in Canada signed an agreement to create the National Hockey League. One ambition was to raise civilian morale with diversion from the long lists of the dead, wounded, and missing from the Western Front.
1941 FDR signed a bill making the fourth Thursday in November Thanksgiving day. Abraham Lincoln had proclaimed that in 1863, but there was no legislation. Rather each year the president proclaimed the last Thursday of November to be Thanksgiving Day. In 1939 that last Thursday was 30 November. The retail association claimed that such a late Thanksgiving eroded sales for Christmas and urged that it be pushed forward. The result was Franksgiving on the third Thursday in 1939 and in 1940. This change led to much confusion, contention, and distraction and became a political football. FDR reversed course and accepted the convention of the fourth Thursday with his usual wit and grace.
25 November
1789 Eora Aboriginal man Bennelong, a Koori, became an intermediary between the British and Aboriginal peoples. Michael Boddy’s play ‘Cradle of Hercules’ in the 1974 was my introduction to Bennelong. More recently we saw the Bangarra dance company interpret this relationship. 
1867 Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patented TNT.
1952 Agatha Christie’s ‘The Mouse Trap’ opened to an audience of 450. It has since had 20,000 performances in London’s West End and ten million people have seen it to date among them us.
1980 France continued nuclear weapons testing at Mururoa atoll. The tests were in the atmosphere until direct action by members of the New Zealand government led France to go into underground tests. Thank you, Kiwis. Continued testing led to diplomatic tension in 1994, and we encountered a whiff of it when Kate handed an Australian passport to a French official in Nice. He stared at it, at her, and slowly — very slowly — clicked away at the screen and then leafed through a very large ring binder (looking for a reason to gum things up, I thought).
1992 The Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia voted to partition the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, beginning January 1, 1993. We have been to the Czech Republic, and perhaps will make it to Slovakia in 2019.
Liliuokalani, Hawai’i’s Story by Hawai’i’s Queen (1898).
Good Reads meta-data is 424 pages, rated 3.84 by 632 litizens.
Liliuokalani (1838–1917) became the last royal sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands. In this autobiography she refers to them and the people as Hawaiian. Captain James Cook had called them the Sandwich Islands to honour the First Lord of the Admiralty who had commissioned the voyage.
Most of the book consists of reminiscences about the good old days, and repeated assertions that every native Hawaiian loved the monarchy, the monarchs, and the numerous members of the several royal families. There is a brief, early reference to the bloody wars among the peoples of these islands, long before the arrival of Captain Cook, to establish the monarchy, and political compromises that produces the plurality of royal families.
Absent from these recollections is the reality of the sui generis native conquest, genocide, and compromise. The name Hawaii was the name of one of the islands from which came the victorious tribe which then planted its name on the whole group, after conquering Molokai, Maui, and Oahu. The Nuʻuanu Pali lookout north of Honolulu was the scene of the final massacre. More blood was shed in the conquest of Hawaiians by Hawaiians than in the American annexation.
Only from Chapter 39 on does the story become interesting as annexation to the United States draws near and finally occurs. The focus is on Hawaii and Hawaiians as victims. Though earlier much is made of the relationship of the Hawaiian monarchy to Great Britain, there is no reference to a British role in permitting, encouraging, tolerating this American appropriation. Too bad, because I wondered about that. Nor do we hear anything about those natives who preferred Americans to an indolent, unresponsive, tribal, and taxing monarchy.
Annexation was indeed a sorry story, even if the telling here is one-eyed, which occurred during the administration of one of most inept and lazy American presidents, Grover Cleveland. His name is much mentioned in these pages. A biography of this man-mountain is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
Mark Twain, a frequent visitor to the islands, opposed annexation virulently. There is much name-dropping in the book but his is not among those dropped in my hearing. Try his ‘Letters from Hawaii,’ a collection of 25 letters that he wrote from Hawaii in 1866. He was there four months as a correspondent for the ‘Sacramento Bee.’ The letters were only published in 1947.
I listened to it in on Audible. The reading is superb, though the content is seldom interesting and rarely convincing. Autobiographies are like that.
In our many visits to Hawaii we have been some of the places mentioned in this book, and I listened to it in anticipation of another visit in 2019.
Her entry in Wikipedia is a battleground in Wiki wars, being edited, and re-edited almost daily. I checked as I was listening to the book. History is constantly rewritten on Wikipedia.
24 November
1639 Separately, Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree first recorded the observation of the transit of Venus. It was a major contribution to mapping the Solar system.
1642 Dutch sailor Abel Tasman landed on Van Dieman’s Land, now Tasmania. His name is also on the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand.
1859 Charles Darwin published the ‘On the Origin of Species.’ A masterwork.
1947 The drooling monster HUAC ruled the Hollywood Ten in contempt of Congress. Several went to jail and at least one died there. The floor vote was 346 for and 17 against the citations. The Supreme Court later upheld the authority of Congress to so act. The ten were writers, directors, producers, and editors. It was a shot across the bows of the studios and interpreted in that way.
1995 In a referendum Irish voters accepted divorce 50.3 to 49.7, ending a 70 year proscription. In a total of 1.6 million voters the difference was 8,000 votes.
23 November
1227 The Spanish Christians drove the Muslim Moors out of Sevilla after a two-year siege. Been there. Those oranges perfume the air.
1644 John Milton published ‘Areopagitica,’ a polemical pamphlet advocating the freedom of the press at a time when there was none. Read some Milton but not this. Maybe I should.
1903 Enrico Caruso made his American debut in Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto.’ Heard some recordings of ‘God’s voice,’ as Puccini said. Caruso in costume is pictured below.
1923 2SB Radio in Sydney went on the air for the Australian wireless broadcast from Philip Street. SB = Sydney Broadcasters. It broadcast Saint-Saens ‘Le Cygne.’ Still going but has become ABC 702. N.B. that wireless includes plenty of wires then as now.
1955 Great Britain transferred responsibility for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands to Australia which with Christmas Island today constitute Australian Indian Ocean Territories closer to Sri Lanka and Indonesia than Canberra.
