Sawyl

08:13 pm: Hurley on the ACA
Kameron Hurley has written an excellent piece on the current ACA mess, probably best considered as a companion to her essay on suviving without healthcare, which contains the following sobering conversation:

If we save the ACA I keep my "in case I'm laid off/fired" healthcare safety net. If we save ACA I could be a full-time writer someday. If we don’t save ACA and I lose my job for any reason, I’ll probably die. Meds are $1500 a month to keep me alive (not counting premiums).

When I went to pick up my latest round of meds and the pharmacy tech asked if I knew the bill ($500) I said "Oh yes. But I’ll die without them. So they kind of have me over a barrel."

And she said, "I guess I would die, then. That’s more than I make in a week."

Makes you realise why socialised medical schemes like the NHS are worth fighting for; why they're as popular as they are once they're implemented; and just what we've got to lose if they disappear...

Tags: kameron hurley, politics

10:45 pm: Another quiz victory
Another victory for our team at in the Puerto Lounge quiz. Normally, I'm quite happy to let other people answer the questions and only chip in when no-one else has an idea (or when they're wrong!) This week there were a couple of obscure rounds, so I went ahead and crushed them — in some cases, I was able to write down the answer before the end of the question. Sadly, this rather did for my usual pretense of being a monkey of moderate intelligence — because if TV has taught us anything, it is that super-intelligent monkeys, with or without their electronium hats, inspire nothing but bad feeling! At one point, A said, "I don't know about the rest of you, but he's making me feel deeply inadequate..." And B, who I don't know terribly well said, "So, what do you do? Apart from being a professional quiz hustler..."

Tags: quizes

11:40 am: Seventy-seventh parkrun
A change to the course this week, following last week's kerfuffle, to take us down through the flood channel and back up before joining the main path, avoiding the worst of the narrowed section in the process. Having started a long way back, I put in a very slow first kilometre, a modest second one, and three very fast ones to finish, pulling back enough time to finish in 20:46. Not bad given that I stood around for a good 15 seconds after the whistle went, waiting for people to start moving. Rather than waiting around at the finish, I ran to the climbing centre, got myself scanned, ran back to the finish and then headed off along the footpath on the eastern side of the canal, and round to bridge over the river. On the other side, I met up with D, who was marshalling, around the same time as the tail runner was coming through. I helped to pick up the signs and we walked back to the start — the other volunteers thought it was pretty funny that I'd finished the 5K and then run the course again — where I got the inside story on the course alteration.

Tags: park run, running

08:56 pm: Chamonix Lead World Cup
I've been watching the lead climbing from Chamonix over the last couple of days — like everyone, I was a bit thrown by the mid-week schedule — and the results have been interesting. The general feeling seems to be that the qualifier routes were a bit odd, with lots of people falling at the same point. Some very strong climbers failed to make it through in the men's competition — I really feel for Sebastian Hallenke, who was distraught after slipping off a very chalky sloper fairly low down — and in the women's comp, only Janja Gambret topped the route. The men's final started slightly oddly, with the first climber out topping the route, followed by three more tops, with the competitors differentiated on time — I think they were drawn on count back to previous rounds. Likewise the women's route saw three tops, with Anak Verhoeven saying that she felt the route wasn't really hard enough to challenge the athletes — which, given her amazing performance in the European Championships, isn't much of a surprise...

Tags: ifsc lead climbing

09:09 pm: The Geek Feminist Revolution
Today's featured book is Kameron Hurley's engaging essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution. Originally a series of articles and blog posts, a number of which have taken on a life of their own, the collection draws them together and puts them alongside other pieces which address similar issues. The tone is impassioned and polemical, rather than dry, closely argued philosophy, Hurley focuses on the person and political, challenging the reader to examine their own preconceptions and privileges.

The book starts with an excellent overview of the nature of writing and eviscerates some of the most common myths — such as the notion that talent is a sufficient condition for success; hell, in some cases, it doesn't even seem to be a necessary one! The second part delves into culture — mostly geek culture — and skilfully takes it apart, often from a feminist perspective, to show its inbuilt assumptions and biases. Hurley's essay on the first series of True Detective, focusing not on the supernatural but on what makes the lead characters monsters, is particularly good — and particularly disturbing, given that much of the perspective comes from first hand experience.

The last two sections of the book deal with the wider world — the justifiably famous and deeply horrifying The Horror Novel You’ll Never Have to Live: Surviving Without Health Insurance should be required reading for politicians of every stripe. The final section, which focuses on revolution and change picks apart moments in history and, although the ideas may not be original — the notion that default views are not apolitical reminds me of, I think, Felix Holt where being a Tory is considered to be apolitical! — they're expressed with clarity and an enjoyable sense of brio.

If the collection has a weakness, it is that all the pieces were originally written as standalone articles. Thus they include slightly more throat-clearing than usual, with Hurley setting out various facts that we've just read about in the previous essay. But that's a minor quibble with a easy solution: simple spread out the essays rather than reading them in one sitting, or dip into them out of order.

(As an aside, I particularly like the llama on the cover which, amusingly, appears to be a slightly modified version of the one the cover Schwartz and Christiansen's Learning Perl. My copy, now 20+ years old, notes that this particular llama comes from a 19th century engraving in the Dover Pictorial Archive, perhaps explaining how it came feature on both covers)

Tags: book reviews, kameron hurley

10:30 pm: Wiktory at the Puerto Lounge
For the second week in a row, we have managed to win the Sunday night quiz at the Puerto Lounge. We performed well through out, greatly helped by the presence of two team members who knew a lot about tennis.

But what really clinched it was the final round, which featured two sets of four questions which link together to give answers to the fifth and tenth questions which count for six points each. Yesterday, we managed to get both sets of links, dropping only question in the second set. In general, I enjoy these sorts of connected rounds — last week there was a one where each question formed a chain, with the tail of the answer to the previous question starting the next — because they're very like crosswords, where you can work out the answers even if you're not sure what they mean.

I'm not sure we're going to compete next week — some of the other team members are doing a triathlon — but I'm sure we'll be back in the not too distant future...

Tags: quizes

11:00 am: Seventy-sixth parkrun
Pleasantly gentle run this morning coming in 25th and in 20:18 — not bad, considering the heat. But with the warm weather and with the path still narrowed due to the on-going flood defence work, there have been more problems than usual with contention on the shared pathway.

The section around the start is particularly problematic. Not do a large group of people start at the same time, but they funnel through a narrow section between two temporary chainlink barriers which connects the canal path to the start of the divided bike-and-pedestrian path that runs along the edge of the flood channel. The path is supposedly temporary, although it's been there for almost a year, and consequently it's made of packed but uneven unmetalled aggregate, giving it a worryingly undercertain feel under foot and tire.

Even at the best of times, the rights of way across the path are unclear — although D says it explicitly isn't part of the cycle path. It's always hard to navigate, with pedestrians walking on either side as if it were completely pedestrianised, some cyclists sticking to the left as though they were on the road, and others sticking to the side that matches the cycle part of the divided path that runs along the channel.

Usually people — both runners and cyclists — slow down and make their intentions clear when they approach, making collision avoidance easier. But every so often, as just after the start of this morning's parkrun, you get a someone — in this case a cyclist riding in north-west against the general flow — who just bowls on through.

You'd think common sense, along with the notions of self-preservation and of decency towards one's fellow path users, would suggest giving way but obviously not in some cases. And as for the person who, a few weeks ago, was trying to ride a motor scooter along a later section of what is clearly marked as a pedestrian path, the less said the better!

Granted it's annoying to have to give way to other people, but it's one of the most fundamental aspects of living a civilised existence that you cannot always do exactly what you want, when you want, and damn the consequences. As Robert Nozick says somewhere: your right to swing your fist ends where it intersects with my face.

Tags: parkrun, running

08:00 pm: Janáček's Glagolitic Mass
A little while ago, I heard the Slava from Leoš Janáček's Glagolitic Mass on R3 Breakfast and was utterly smitten. I think it was a combination of the dazzling solo singing and dazzling last bars of the section where the shouts of amen! from the chorus alternate with great outbursts sounds from the orchestral brass and the organ that really got me.

It turned out that the recording I liked so much was from Norway: Ed Gardner and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. The quartet of soloists were every bit as top notch — Sara Jacubiak, Susan Bickley, Stuart Skelton, and Gábor Bretz — with Thomas Trotter adding sparkle via the obligato organ part. (The sound blend is superb despite, or maybe even because, the orchestra and choir were recorded in Grieghallen while Trotter was recorded separately in Bergen Cathedral)

The couplings on the recording are also well worth having: Adagio for orchestra; and the choral pieces Zdrávas Maria and Otče náš. All in all, a delightful discovery; although not, I'm sure, for my neighbours...

Tags: leos janacek, music

09:49 pm: A Talent for Murder
Seamlessly blending fact and fiction, Andrew Wilson's A Talent for Murder takes Agatha Christie's notorious disappearance in December 1926 and turns it into something rather more sinister.

Struggling with The Mystery of Blue Train and with her marriage to Archie in trouble, Agatha Christie finds herself targeted by a particularly unpleasant and intelligent blackmailer. The man, a keen fan of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, uses the threat of publicity to force Agatha to engineer her own disappearance. He has her drive to Newlands Corner, where he forces her to abandon her car, before arranging for her to travel to Harrogate. Here he plans to have Agatha use her cunning writer's mind to come up with a foolproof way to murder his estranged wife.

Meanwhile, back in Surrey, the disappearance of Agatha Christie has caught the attention of the local police, with Superintendent William Kenward, the Deputy Chief Constable, taking charge of the search. From the first, Kenward comes across as an old school copper sadly out of his depth. He devotes increasing amounts of time and effort to having the surroundings of Newlands Corner and the Silent Pool search, taking the edge off his doubts with nips from the bottle of scotch he keeps in his bottom draw.

Rather more successful is Una Crowe, daughter of the diplomate Sir Eyre Crowe, who takes it into her head to use the Christie Mystery to build a journalistic reputation for herself. Aided somewhat by her great friend John Davison, who is something spooking in the Foreign Office, Crowe throws herself into events, taking to Archie Christie, Nancy Neele, Superintendent Kenward, anyone who has the slightest inking of the case. Unfortunately, her persistance starts to pay off, putting her in terrible danger when she starts to close in on the puppetmaster.

A Talent for Murder pulls off the neat trick of taking a set of lightly sketched historical events and building a full-on psychological mystery out of them.

Wilson's fictional Agatha is an engaging lead, whose detailed knowledge of poisons and ability to plot are highly prized by her blackmailer; as notes on a couple of occasions: there's something slightly odd about someone who seems so outwardly normal but whose mind can imagine one involved murder after another. Una Crowe also comes across well; an ingenious young woman, finally coming out of the depression that has captured her following the death of her father, with a tendency to sail to close to the wind. Her friendship with Davison — Una drops plenty of hints that Davison is gay in an era when it was illegal — is nicely done, with Wilson resisting the temptation to make Davison the Spy a deus ex machina.

Enjoyable stuff and best still, the book ends with an extract from the next novel in the series which presumably follows Agatha Christie as she travels to Las Palmas in January 1927...

Tags: andrew wilson, book reviews

06:50 pm: River of Teeth
A fun one, in the form of Sarah Gailey's River of Teeth. Gailey takes a quirk of history — a tight vote on whether to introduce hippopotami to the Mississippi River — and turns it the other way, imagining an alternate version of Louisiana — complete with a large man-made lake called the Harriet — were breeding hippos for meat is quite the thing. But even the best plans have flaws and now the Harriet is bung full of dangerous feral megafauna, making it well past time the government hired a group of outlaws and assassins and hoppers to deal with the problem once and for all. And if the solution comes with a solid side-order of revenge, so much the better.

Winslow Remmington Houndstooth can't believe his luck when the government hires him to carry out an operation to clear the Harriet. Along with the money, comes a list of people to hire for the caper: Regina Archambault, con-artiste extraordinaire, and her albino hippo Rosa; Hero Shackleby, a retired explosives expert willing to take on one last job, and Abigail, their Standard Grey; the deadly Adelia Reyes, the best headhunter in the country, and Zahra and Stacia, her pair of hops; and last and least, Cal Hotchkiss, fast with his pistols but prone to cheating at cards, and his Betsy, his Tuscan Brown.

Houndstooth's plan is simple. The crew are to travel up river and through the Gate into the Harriet, using their federal papers to get them past the guards. Once in the lake, they'll use a carefully tailored chain of explosives laid out by Hero to herd the feral hops towards the Gate, which they'll have opened, allowing the ferals through into the gulf and thus fulfilling their contract in on simple operation. Trouble is, practically everything about the caper goes wrong from the get-go, and Houndstooth and his people find themselves far too close to the villain of the piece.

If River of Teeth sounds a bit like a Western with hippos instead of horses, that ain't too far from the truth. The cast is to die for, with both the humans and the hippos feeling like well-rounded and complicated characters, while the setting is well-imagined and vivid, with a wonderful sense of detail — if you overlook the craziness of people riding through swamps on hippos!

Tags: book reviews, sarah gailey