In Uncategorized on February 18, 2002
the aa have published a survey of the most (and least) dangerous roads in britain. the most dangerous english road (it gets beaten by a bit of the a9 in scotland) is the A537 from macclesfield to buxton. i drove this road for the first time a couple of weeks ago when I’d just bought my new shiny car and was whizzing around twisty peak district roads to try it out. the survey ratings are based on the accidents/vehicle miles ratio for a stretch of road.
i’m not entirely convinced by the “what makes a dangerous road” page linked from the bbc page. it moves the responsibility for road safety onto the people who erect crash barriers, design junctions and choose where to put the traffic lights. nothing makes a road dangerous, it’s the drivers on the roads that endanger themselves and those who share the roads with them.
In books read on February 18, 2002
I read this under the alternative title Charisma and it's a struggle to decide which reads more like a bad romance novel. The book however does not read like any kind of bad novel. This is the second in the Castlemere series and the fifth in my out of order reading order.
I think this is probably the weakest of the series that I've read so far. It didn't get under my skin the way some of the other books have. The characters continue to be wonderful and realistic but the inability of Bannister to let them get through the book without putting at least one of them in mortal danger is getting a bit wearing.
In this book a welsh evangalist preacher comes to town and does very well there in the wake of the obligatory murder. One of the parts of the book I had trouble with was when the preacher unwittingly fired up a lynch mob. I could believe in the preacher and in people's reactions to him but something in the herd mentality seemed off key. I was also concerned that the lynch mob seemed to be forgotten very fast with neither the victim or the participants afforded much time in the rest of the book.
I had some misgivings when the IRA entered the story for a time, they are so easily villanified that it seems an author is cheating when they appear in fiction. This part of the story played out well without concurring with stereotypes though.
In summary the characters are enough to keep this series going and though the plots are rather outsize for the town concerned I'm still enjoying them.
Purchased on 15th February 2002.
In books read on February 14, 2002
Short version: just as good as I'd hoped it would be.
Long version:
I was disappointed in McDermid's last standalone book and so I was really worried that this one was going to miss the mark for me as well. This is the third story to feature Carol Jordan and Tony Hill (the previous two books were The Mermaid's Singing and The Wire in the Blood). I read both of the earlier books a while ago now and loved them both. There were plenty of elements in this book that could have made it a dreadful experience but I got involved with the characters and really liked the book.
This book revolves primarily around Jordan as she is given an undercover operation that involves living in Berlin and working with a big time trafficker of both drugs and people. The new setting brings in a lot of new European characters including a pair of lesbian detectives from Berlin and the Netherlands who know each other primarily through instant messaging. I thought these two characters were very realistically drawn and can only hope that police forces throughout Europe are populated by their sisters. The world would be a better place if that were so.
Jordan also becomes involved in helping out with a serial killing investigation and this is where psychological profiler Tony Hill is drawn into the story.
McDermid puts her characters through a lot and I don't know how many books this series can go on for because they barely get out of this book alive and this isn't the first time this has happened. This is one of the things that could have wrecked the book for me but I went with the flow and got drawn into the suspense.
I hear that a TV series is being made based on these books and I'm in two minds about it. I'm worried that they'll wreck the books by casting people who are nothing like the characters in my head and by abridging stories and cutting out the goriest bits. But I also think greater readership for McDermid is a good thing and though she's one of the stars of the crime writing scene I don't think she's well enough known to the general public yet.
A couple of other comments: At the beginning of this book there's a lot of stuff that refers back to the case in the previous book that I think would wreck the suspense of that book if you read the series out of order so don't read this book first! And if you have read the previous books I think this one is lacking the extra gory bits that featured in those - I could read all of this one with my eyes open ;-)
In summary, this was a very enjoyable episode in this series with some excellent settings along the rivers of Europe and some great characters and I thought the plot worked pretty well (though there were moments when I thought some rather predictable things were being foreshadowed, but these didn't come to pass). I hope McDermid gives us another Lindsay Gordon or Kate Brannigan book next though!
Purchased on 8th February 2002.
In Uncategorized on February 13, 2002
from the pointless statistics department i find out that:
last year, the british spent £41 each on hot drinks “to go” … the average uk resident consumes £137 worth of sandwiches, pasties, pizza slices and the like annually – twice what germans spend.
the amounts seem awfully low to me. have the germans got a better pricing policy on triangular sandwiches?
In Uncategorized on February 13, 2002
my sister’s 7th birthday is being relived on the web. an evening with ceefax contains a complete page capture of bbc1 ceefax from 1983. hi-de-hi was on in prime time, tv stopped at about midnight and president reagan was cancelling trips to the phillipines. (it’s a pity the birthday pages were broadcast on another channel!)
what stands out to me is that although we’re still using practically the exact same teletext system two decades later (we’ve added some coloured buttons for easier page jumping but i don’t think that much else is new in analogue tv?) the design has improved a lot. there are some people out there who have got very very good at packing information into an 40×24 character screen and who have great skill at monotype justification. it’s dated technology but i hope it’s not outdated yet.
[found via linkmachinego]
In Uncategorized on February 13, 2002
here’s how to find out if you are part of the dido demographic. If you have 12 of the following albums [from a selection of 25] among your cds, you’re a dido. if you have any more than that, seek help. we’re not sure from whom, but seek it anyway.
i can do ten but some are lps rather than cds though i have at least one on both formats. i’m not quite in need of help yet, and i don’t agree with everything the article says, but then i wouldn’t, would i?
In Uncategorized on February 13, 2002
i was looking for some interesting ways to use up the other half of the packet of filo pastry in my fridge. the filo-pastry-fax isn’t quite what i had in mind.
thin sheets of filo pastry could be (half) baked so they are still flexible yet do not stick together. they could then be strapped together somehow to form a book, in which the owner could write addresses and schedules and stuff. when full, the “filo-pastry-fax” could then be re-cooked and eaten as either a savoury or sweet.
there’s plenty more half baked ideas at the half bakery.
In books read on February 12, 2002
This is the first book in this series to completely fail to interest me. Though I've found Laurie King's favourite theological themes to get a little wearing in the past I'd rather read about them than the interminable trips across Dartmoor that make up this book. Something here just didn't work for me.
At the end of the book there are about a hundred pages when things come together and the plot becomes interesting but the rest of the book has little mystery to entrance the reader and I found a lot of it pretty boring. Mary doesn't like Dartmoor much, I can't say I blame her and i'll be glad to see her back somewhere more suited to her.
And then there's the sex. I've no problem with sex in books whether the author chooses to be explicit or implicit. It just got too twee when Holmes "deduced what was needed tonight with a minimum of clues...." time after time.
King can do a lot better than this and I'm disappointed that this book failed to connect with me.
Purchased on 22nd November 2001.
In Uncategorized on February 11, 2002
bt continues on it’s ridiculous idea of extracting a license fee from every hyperlink. the article contains this statement from the patent office:
it seems ludicrous that a patent for one technology can cover another but patents are anything but precise and are meant to cover things that aren’t yet invented
so basically the patent office are saying that their job is ludicrous? i agree with that much at least.
in another ludicrous move the charity actionaid is trying to patent the ready salted chip. in this case however the patent application is designed to show up how silly the whole thing is. it’s part of a campaign against multi-nationals who do this kind of thing with agricultural patents in what actionaid calls bio-piracy.
In Uncategorized on February 11, 2002
net windows looks pretty good, it’s a dhtml library to help with building web applications:
letting them act more like applications and less like webpages
what i’m specifically impressed with is that in a world where “IE5+ only” is too frequently heard i can run their test apps on netscape 6 on linux and other browsers that understand what standards are. they get bonus points for that.
nocto