varied books on music

Nov. 26th, 2025 11:37 am
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Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs (Celadon Books, 2025)

John Lennon and Paul McCartney, of course. The subtitle was almost enough to put me off this book entirely, but I'm glad I read it. It's actually really insightful, and does not gloss over their conflicts, as the subtitle might imply or some reviews have suggested. The emphasis is not on the love but the musical collaboration. (George, Ringo, and George Martin get an occasional look-in.) There's relatively little on the details of the early period when Lennon & McCartney were writing songs together "eyeball to eyeball," perhaps because little is known of exactly how they did it. But after the Beatles stopped touring constantly, so John & Paul were no longer constantly in each other's company, their partnership mutated into each writing his own songs in dialogue with the other's, and this continued even into the nastiness of their early solo years. (Paul zings "Too Many People" at John, John ripostes with the brutal "How Do You Sleep?", Paul writes "Dear Friend" to make peace.) In these sections, Leslie is at his best. I was particularly taken with his analysis of "Tomorrow Never Knows." Lennon wrote this in response to McCartney's "Yesterday" (yesterday ... tomorrow ... that's only part of it) and "Eleanor Rigby," but the most striking point for me was the mutation of an influence from somebody else. The first line of the song, "Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream," is a direct quote from Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience, which John had been reading, except that he added the word "and." A trivial change? Not at all. As a cited musicologist points out, that turns the line into iambic pentameter, the standard English verse meter. John may not have realized that that's what he was doing, but he'd been reading a lot of poetry, and, Leslie says, "it was part of his verbal muscle memory." There's lots more like this.

Leslie is adamant about two things: first, that whatever the conflicts in the later years of the Beatles, John and Paul were always happy to make music together (and that they continued to collaborate in the creation of even their most distinctive individual songs for the Beatles), and that the stereotypes of John the caustic rebel and Paul the smooth charmer are quite inadequate. Paul had his harsh side. In an interview, John said, "Paul can be very cynical and much more biting than me when he's driven to it ... He can carve people up in no time at all, when he's pushed." As for John, the later part of the book has a lot of psychological analysis, including the repeated statement that what John really wanted in those years was to be loved, and he felt Paul was turning cold and distant; meanwhile Paul had no idea what John was going through emotionally.

The book dribbles to a close with McCartney's comments on Lennon since Lennon's death, and the suggestion that he's been whitewashing some of the conflict between them. It's a very long journey through this book, nearly 400 pages of text, and the opening chapters go into tremendous detail on the events of the Beatles' early, struggling years. You have to be a real fan to want this book, but you'll get a lot out of it if you are.

Nancy Shear, I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms: A Memoir (Regalo Press, 2025)

What a strange book. At age 14 in 1960, Shear attended a Philadelphia Orchestra concert and fell in love not just with the music, but with the guest conductor, Leopold Stokowski (then 78). Despite her age, she quickly turned her passion into a job as a librarian with the orchestra: duties, mostly copying conductors' notations from the score into the individual musicians' parts. Then she parlayed that into a position doing the same thing for Stokowski personally as he undertook various gigs. How did she manage this? Sheer gumption and dedication, I suppose. This book is mostly a hero-worshipper's gushing love letter to Stokowski's talent: Shear considers him a conductor of unmatched skill and insight, an opinion that will not earn universal agreement. There is a lot about technical musical points, however. How Stokowski would modify scores to fit modern instruments' capacities (a controversial practice); does the orchestra tune up as a whole or by sections? That sort of thing.

But what about ...? Though Stokowski had a reputation for numerous affairs, Shear insists he always acted as a gentleman towards her, though she admits one might not believe this, and she does print some pretty personal letters and she says he frequently touched her in what she insists was a non-sexual way.

The book is almost entirely just about Stokowski. Though Shear says she worked with many great musicians, only two others get more than a momentary glance. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, much more physically handsy than Stokowski, and Shear mentions only casually and incidentally that she did have a sexual affair with him. And Eugene Ormandy, Philadelphia's music director, whom she did not like either as a musician or a man. He did try once forcibly to kiss her, which in telling it she brushes off in a manner that was typical of older accounts but seems beyond quaint when so told in a post-#MeToo world.

And the man who knew Brahms? He makes just a cameo appearance on page 62. Shear gives his name - Raoul Hellmer - but nothing else about him. He's not a famous musician, just some guy who visited backstage for some reason and who, as a boy in Vienna, once delivered a pharmacy order to Brahms. He shakes hands with Shear and that's it. "I (briefly) met a man who (briefly) met Brahms" is more like it.
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What I read

After Hours at Dooryard Books was really good - set in 1968 in a used bookstore in Greenwich Village - this was so not a Summer of Love - but lots of Unhistoric Acts - also I really liked that what I feared was going to be one of those three-quarter way through Exposure of Dark Thing/Arising of Unexpected Crisis in Relationship actually didn't go angst angst angst wo wo wo.

Slightly Foxed #88: 'Pure Magic': pretty good selection, though rather irked by the guy fanboying over Room at the Top and all he can say about the sexism side of things is that the protag's behaviour to women 'may be less than admirable but he is not a cad'. O RLY. What do you call putting the local rich guy's daughter in the club and then chucking your older woman mistress, who dies horribly in a car accident?

Robert Rodi, Fag Hag (1992) - of its period perhaps. I think there may be works of his I remember more fondly than this one? Don't really recommend.

Dick Francis, Hot Money (1987): this is one in which I was waiting for the narrator to get, as per usual for a DF protag, nastily done over, probably by one of his siblings or in-laws in this convoluted tale of seething envies within the family of a much-married tycoon. He did get blown up but that was not personal and so did his father. No actually woodsheds but there was a glasshouse and various other nooks and crannies to see something nasty in.

On the go

Back to Lanny Budd - O Shepherd, Speak! (#10) (1949) - Lanny as ever finds himself where it's happening in the final stages of WW2 - have got to the aftermath of the war, and thinking about peace. Quite a way to go.

Up next

No idea.

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The core rules plus essentials for the 2013 Fifth Edition of Shadowrun, the cyberpunk-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Catalyst Game Labs.

Bundle of Holding: SR5 Essentials (from 2019)



Eighteen setting sourcebooks for Shadowrun 5th Edition.

Bundle of Holding: SR5 Universe Mega
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[personal profile] neonvincent
I found a video I like better for Local news covers the marching bands in the 2025 Macy's Parade.

WLBT 3 On Your Side reporting Alcorn’s band heads to NYC to perform in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Alcorn’s band heads to NYC to perform in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

The Mighty Nein 1x04

Nov. 26th, 2025 02:00 pm
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[personal profile] settiai
Continuing on my previously posted thoughts about episode 1x03, I just finished watching episode 1x04.

Spoilers under the cut. )
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AI Slop Recipes are Taking Over the Internet and Thanksgiving Dinner is what my feed greeted me with this morning, and geez, it's making me feel even more fiercely determined re the mini cookie cookbook of recipes I've made and loved that I'm trying to put together to send out with holiday cards this year. Though I need to get off my butt with those, too, still haven't ordered them.

In the meantime, the current status of this year's Thanksgiving meal:

- Main: Kristina Cho's Chop Shop Pork Belly, from her Chinese Enough cookbook. Pork belly is currently air-drying in the fridge; all we have to do Thursday is roast it. Will be serving with rice (or possibly a rice stuffing, see below), and ...

- Cranberries: Kay Chun's Cranberry-Asian Pear Chutney, as always since 2001. This is done and chilling in the fridge. But I was chatting with Marissa Ferola (who runs Nine Winters in Huron Village, Cambervillains), and she shared her daughter's cranberry sauce recipe with me, with fivespice and black pepper and mandarin and chinkiang vinegar! So that sounds intriguing. And I think both will go great with the spices of the pork belly.

- Stuffing: I found Rize Up's KPop Gochujang Loaf in stock last week, which means THIS IS THE YEAR I am *finally* making Mandy Lee's red hot oyster kimchi dressing. Seriously, this has been on my Thanksgiving bucket list for years. Between the New England tradness of oyster stuffing, [personal profile] hyounpark's well-documented love of oyster kimchi, and me finally putting all the pieces together, I am so stoked to make this. There's still a possibility we may get fancy and put together a rice-based stuffing on the side, as that's what my mom and [personal profile] hyounpark prefer, but we'll see. But I do need to get started on it.

- Cornbread: I was trying to de-dairify our favorite custard-filled cornbread, but the experimental batch yesterday proved that coconut cream does not behave the same way dairy cream does; it was pretty obvious when there was a giant crater lake of liquid coconut cream after an hour of baking when it should have settled into a layer in the cornbread, and upon slicing into the cornbread, said pool of coconut cream completely spilled over like a spring river. So the backup plan is to try it with our local dairy's A2 cream, since our issues are lactose intolerance rather than dairy allergies or veganism. I'd also been picturing flavoring it a la Betty Liu's lemongrass corn soup, so I may steep the coconut *milk* with the lemongrass, but leave the cream alone. (I'd steeped the coconut cream with lemongrass before, but I'm wondering if that also might have created custardization issues. Won't have time to fully experiment before the big meal tomorrow, but I have paths to follow before next year.) But this will bake Thursday along with the pork belly, so I do need to scrape the remains out of the cast iron skillet in prep for tomorrow.

- Orange veg: We're going with kaddo bourani in lieu of our default Orange Vegetable Soup trend of the last few years. Given all the other experimentation I tend to put on this menu, it's always good to have some reliable old faves on the docket as well. I'm making the meat sauce right now, but will probably not start the pumpkin part until this afternoon, as I need to do both the stuffing and pie crust before the pumpkin hogs the oven all afternoon/evening.

- Green veg, cooked: Which is why Andrea Nguyen's sesame salt greens (from her cookbook Ever Green Vietnamese) are back as well. Based on the greens we have in the fridge right now, it's gonna be collards to make the Southern boy happy :) It's stovetop, it can be done pretty close to last minute, but I might try to slip this in tonight and just rewarm tomorrow. If not, I'll make them while the pork is roasting Thursday.

- Green veg, raw: I was irked that some random reel came across my Instagram feed this week that said, of Thanksgiving dishes Sagittarius is salad. But the reasoning was basically atting me, hahaha. "It's like, chaotic, nobody quite knows what could be in it, it could be from anywhere in the world, any type of salad." Which is tempting me, don't get me wrong, to pull in a Midwestern dessert salad, hahahahaha 😁 (I'd probably go strawberry pretzel, LBR.) [Also, I could have sworn I wrote a thing about Midwestern dessert salads here, but I can't find it to link to, so maybe it's just in my notepad of things I've been meaning to post about? Must rectify that.] But Eric Kim's Roasted Seaweed Salad (from his Korean American cookbook) will also be on the table again. This one's easy - will be made during the half hour the pork is resting waiting to come to the table.

- Potatoes: uh I guess we should figure this out, right? But we're looking for something different from our usual scallion cheddar or maple miso mashed potatoes. And I don't want to do anything that involves mandolining or tiling a bunch of potatoes either. We will probably default back to some kind of basic mash, though Kristina Cho mentioned Sriracha Twice-Baked Potatoes on her Substack, and while the potatoes we have on hand are too small to do that properly, we could certainly run with the general flavoring principles. I may try to outsource this to Leonard and Sara though!

- Miscellaneous: If I get ambitious, I also really want deviled eggs and I have like two dozen options for recipes with Asian flavorings.

- Dessert: I did manage to get ahold of passionfruit, so Alana Kysar's Liliko'i Chiffon Pie (from her cookbook Aloha Kitchen) will be gracing our table again. And that's first up for today: I need to get started on the crust so that's out of the way before I work on the filling.

And with that, I'd better get moving! Especially because I may need to make one last dash out to the supermarket for forgotten ingredients (mostly for the pie: gelatin, eggs). Wish me luck.

Nonfiction

Nov. 26th, 2025 01:21 pm
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[personal profile] rivkat
Michael Grunwald, We Are Eating the Earth: The thing about land is that they aren’t making any more of it, and although you can make more farmland (for now) from forests, it’s not a good idea. This means that agriculture is hugely important to climate change, but most of the time proposals for, e.g., biofuels or organic farming don’t take into account the costs in farmland. The book explores various things that backfired because of that failed accounting and what might work in the future. Bonus: the audiobook is narrated by Kevin R. Free, the voice of Murderbot, who turns out to be substantially more expressive when condemning habitat destruction.

Tony Magistrale & Michael J. Blouin, King Noir: The Crime Fiction of Stephen King (feat. Stephen King and Charles Ardai): Treads the scholarly/popular line, as the inclusion of a chapter by King and a “dialogue” with Ardai suggest. The book explores King’s noir-ish work like Joyland, but also considers his horror protagonists as hardboiled detectives, trying to find out why bad things happen (and, in King’s own words, often finding the noirish answer “Because they can.”). I especially liked the reading of Wendy Torrance as a more successful detective than her husband Jack. Richard Bachman shows up as the dark side of King’s optimism (I would have given more attention to the short stories—they’re also mostly from the Bachman era and those often are quite bleak). And the conclusion interestingly explores the near-absence of the (living) big city and the femme fatale—two noir staples—from King’s work, part of a general refusal of fluidity.

Gerardo Con Diaz, Everyone Breaks These Laws: How Copyrights Made the Online World: This book is literally not for me because I live and breathe copyright law and it is a tour through the law of copyright & the internet that is aimed at an intelligent nonlawyer. Although I didn’t learn much, I appreciated lines like “Back then, all my porn was illegally obtained, and it definitely constituted copyright infringement.” The focus is on court cases and the arguments behind them, so the contributions of “user generated content” and, notably, fanworks to the ecosystem don’t get a mention.

Stephanie Burt, Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift: longer )

Kyla Sommers, When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital: Extensive account of the lead-up to, experience of, and consequences of the 1968 riots after MLK Jr.’s assassination. There was some interesting stuff about Stokely Carmichael, who (reportedly) told people to go home during the riots because they didn’t have enough guns to win. (Later: “According to the FBI, Carmichael held up a gun and declared ‘tonight bring your gun, don’t loot, shoot.’ The Washington Post, however, reported Carmichael held up a gun and said, ‘Stay off the streets if you don’t have a gun because there’s going to be shooting.’”) Congress did not allow DC to control its own political fate, and that shaped how things happened, including the limited success of citizens’ attempts to direct development and get more control over the police, but ultimately DC was caught up in the larger right-wing backlash that was willing to invest in prisons but not in sustained economic opportunity. Reading it now, I was struct by the fact that—even without riots, fires, or other large-scale destruction—white people who don’t live in the area are still calling for military occupation because they don’t feel safe. So maybe the riots weren’t as causal as they are considered.

(no subject)

Nov. 26th, 2025 01:21 pm
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[personal profile] maju
On the weekend (I forget which day) my daughter asked me to go to Target in the mall just down the road to buy a few groceries she needed for a dinner Violet was going to, which I was happy to do. However, I'm not very familiar with this mall as I've only been there a handful of times before, and I got completely disoriented when I came out of Target with my purchases and ended up exiting on the opposite side of the mall from where I'd gone in. The map on my phone couldn't find where I was, and I ended up going back inside and retracing my steps until I eventually found my way out. I was feeling a bit stressed because I knew my daughter was pushed for time to prepare the food, which didn't help.

Anyway, I had decided that sometime I was going to walk to the mall and try to get oriented to its layout, and this morning I did just that. It was very misty this morning after a lot of rain overnight, but not raining and not cold. (I even wore shorts.) It's about 3 ½ km/2 + miles from here, an easy enough walk. Once I got inside and studied a map I was able to get my bearings quite easily, helped by the fact that there were relatively few people there at about 10:30 am, plus I was not feeling at all stressed about getting home quickly. I'm now confident that I'll be able to find my way around fairly easily in the future so it was a profitable morning.

Wednesday Reading Meme

Nov. 26th, 2025 12:54 pm
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[personal profile] sineala
What I Just Finished Reading

Nothing. As you can tell, the past few weeks have really been Surprise Medical Problem Time, and while I have my brain back most of the time, I am not really having a lot of energy for sustained focus.

What I'm Reading Now

Comics Wednesday!

X-Vengers #2 )

What I'm Reading Next

I just started reading a f/f tennis rivals-to-lovers name-on-wrist soulmate romance novel because I guess this is just what Real Books are like now.

Snowy Day

Nov. 26th, 2025 10:37 am
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[personal profile] lydamorehouse
 Buttercup atop the radiator
Image: Buttercup atop a radiator, perched on a quilt just made just for him (and all the other cats).

Today is lefse day!  We always make a fresh batch for the holidays (we'll do it again for Christmas/Solstice.) We make our lefse from a box, because I actually like the taste when lefse is made from instant potatoes. Also, it makes that part of the process dead easy.

I hope all of my friends who got snow today also got the opportunity NOT to have to go out in it!  Have a great Thanksgiving, y'all.
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[personal profile] wychwood
I saw another article today that mentioned something in passing about libertarians wanting to go back on the gold standard, preppers hoarding gold, etc, and the thing that I don't understand is - why do people think that gold will be valuable in an apocalyptic / post-apocalyptic scenario?

The idea seems to be that paper money is a fiat currency and therefore won't be worth anything when society collapses (not to mention that hardly anyone carries any paper money these days!), which is probably true, or close enough. Therefore you should put your money into gold, which will still be valuable.

But it seems to me that gold in this context is effectively just another form of currency, a medium of exchange - gold itself doesn't have any real use that I know of beyond a) looking pretty and b) being exchangeable for things of value. Maybe c) there's some electrical stuff that uses tiny amounts of gold I think? So it's only valuable because other people agree that it's valuable, because other people will take it in exchange for other goods or services, because we have culturally agreed that gold is valuable.

I just feel like, you know, after the apocalypse when the survivors are starving and everyone's trying to grow crops or whatever, to quote what is probably Revelations 6:6 (via Larry Norman) "a piece of bread will buy a bag of gold". Or as Peter Blegvad (via Fairport Convention) says, "gold is the lowliest of metals - too soft for serious use; pretty, of course, warm to the touch..."

On the other hand, a lot of different cultures from many parts of the world appear to have agreed that gold is valuable. So what am I missing? Why are you better to put your savings into gold than, I don't know, aluminium or seed stocks or liquid nitrogen or something - anything - that would have actual use-value?

Laundry Day

Nov. 26th, 2025 07:51 am
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[personal profile] susandennis
Thanksgiving Eve - the best way. No getting ready to go on a trip. No food prep at all. No guests prep. In fact, it's just a regular Wednesday. Laundry day. With no other chores or todos required.

Most everyone here on this hall is leaving the premises for Thanksgiving. So it should be nice and quiet.

Every year, Timber Ridge raises the monthly fee. Last year they raised it 5.75% but this year, we're getting a deal for 2-26 - only a 5% raise. Social Security is going up 2.8%. I am always but, for sure, annually, grateful that my plan for now until the end will cover this math problem without impacting my pledge to keep Amazon in business.

It's a lovely foggy morning, perfect for swimming. And it does not look like it will clear any time soon so there's not even any hurry.

I have lots of good TV and lots of good yarn. I'm a happy camper.


20251125_195722-COLLAGE

Well, crap

Nov. 26th, 2025 11:11 am
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
It was just pointed out to me that SF artist Stephen Fabian died age 95 back in May.
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Still reading steadily through the series. These books are just perfect for decompression reading, they're mostly lightweight though with the odd flash of seriousness, they're full of fun hijinks and adventures, all the characters are very nicely drawn and overall they're just plain fun to read. Plus a nice sprinkling of historical interest for the period.

Among Those Absent
Prisoners are escaping and disappearing with tremendous success. Tommy Hambledon has to find out why. While Biggles would have tackled this by looking for rogue airplanes, Hambledon tackles this by getting himself a cover as a fraudster and being sent to prison, whereupon he muscles in on someone else's escape and gets rescued from prison. By hot air balloon and parachute. And after Hambledon and a fellow escapee have a wonderful hot air balloon and parachute ride, they then have to deal with the fact that the escape gang want paying for their rescue out of the totally fictional ill-gotten gains Hambledon is supposed to have stashed somewhere. In the process of dealing with this, Hambledon encounters a different slightly shady group of guys who--well, their leader lives in a truly flamboyantly ridiculous suburban mansion which is named, and I really could not believe my eyes when I read this, Kuminboys. It is almost redundant to add that he has all sorts of miscellaneous young men calling on him at all hours who are willing to do all sorts of shady odd jobs for him. He deals with blackmailers unofficially. Manning and Coles never say anyone is gay or refer to sexuality in any way, but then they do things like this and I love it. And, well, there is a plot involving Hambledon sorting out the prison break gang, but I'm afraid my brain seized up at Kuminboys and I can't actually remember what happened otherwise. The anti-blackmail gang was fine at the end and so was Tommy, and that's the main thing.

Not Negotiable
This one opens with a prologue explaining that the Nazis had an industrial-scale programme forging currency from the various Allied countries in an effort to destabilise their economies. Now, after the war, large numbers of dubious notes are turning up across France and Belgium and Tommy Hambledon is trying to find the source. A fun Belgian detective teams up with him for this, and lots of Manning & Coles's usual vivid secondary characters including a reformed crook and a young man who tries crime and doesn't like it, plus two young women who attack a gangster with a frying pan with considerable success. Not one of the most outstanding, but plenty of fun to read.

Diamonds To Amsterdam
This was an absolute classic, featuring a mad scientist, so many people in disguise, gold and jewels and a seaplane and a Very Significant Umbrella and kidnappings and escapes and really everything you could possibly want. The story opens with our mad scientist being found murdered. The mad scientist in question had just solved, allegedly, the problem of how to turn silver into gold, and then someone bludgeoned him over the head and his notes all disappeared. Then his assistant disappeared, then his machinery was stolen, and Tommy Hambledon is traipsing around a Home Counties village trying to find clues to all of this and figure out what was going on, with occasional trips to Amsterdam thrown in for good measure. A great ride, plus some excellent whump as various characters are drugged or kidnapped and imprisoned, lots of fun all around.

Dangerous By Nature
Tommy Hambledon visits Central America. While this had some moments of period-typical racism, it was not as bad as I expected. The story was a familiar one from multiple Biggles and a Gimlet on this theme: in a fictional Central American state, a slightly lost British sailor saw a ship secretly unloading goods in a remote part of the country while hiding its identification. Hambledon is sent to investigate. He is told that he can liaise with the excellent American spy Mr Hobkirk who is already there; however no such person ever comes up. Instead he has a peculiarly devoted and helpful local man named Matteo who follows him around everywhere, produces useful information and kills assassins and generally devotes himself to Hambledon's wellbeing and work, far more than you would expect from the guy who you paid to carry your luggage to the hotel. Hambledon, unusually for him, has no suspicions about the identity of the capable and knowledgeable Matteo. Anyway, the country is run by your standard thriller dictator who has annoyed the local aristocracy and is fleecing the local peasantry and has plans to flee the country with all the wealth he can carry away, soon. Hambledon discovers that the mysterious cargo was of course weapons, supplied by the Russians; however the Russians are somewhat inexplicably arming both the President and also the old aristos who oppose him, and having bought everyone off with guns, they are busy building something involving lots of concrete in the middle of the jungle. Hambledon investigates, nearly gets killed many times over in the classic way, discovers he does not like jungles at all, and eventually figures out what it's all about. (spoilers for the plot)
It's atom bombs. The Russians are building a missile site so they can launch atom bombs at the Panama Canal. This book was written in 1950 and it's clear that Manning and Coles don't know that much about atom bombs at this point, because apparently there are twelve atomic warheads on site. This site gets shelled by the aristocrats, and the atom bombs are all set off by accident. Hambledon, hiding down the valley with his friends a few miles away, is fine. Radiation and fallout are not a concern for anyone. It's fascinating seeing that while everyone is scared of atom bombs, they are not nearly scared enough, they're treated as being functionally the same as super-sized regular bombs and there is no mention of any further ill effects. Hambledon arranges that the story is put out that a previously unknown volcano erupted and that was what the big mushroom cloud was all about (the mushroom cloud, evidently, they have heard of). And once all the atom bombs have detonated, the whole story is over.


Now Or Never
Hambledon has heard rumours of a secret resurgent Nazi society in occupied Cologne and heads out to investigate. Forgan and Campbell, our gay model train shop and lawbreaking-for-fun guys, come along to help out, impersonating the Spanish financiers who are supposed to be meeting the Nazis in Cologne - a job that does not become easier when the actual Spaniards show up. Meanwhile, Hambledon makes friends with an earnest and enthusiastic German private detective, and tries to figure out what's going on. Excellent atmospheric descriptions of bombed-out Cologne and life there as things start to recover postwar. These are all very much immediate postwar books, and it's fascinating to see what the attitudes are and the snippets of different settings, in France and the Netherlands and Germany and England, every character has a war backstory of some sort and most of the plots are about leftovers of war one way and another.

Alias Uncle Hugo
A Ruritanian adventure of a familiar mould for Biggles readers. Tommy Hambledon is undercover in Soviet-occupied Ruritania to retrieve the teenage king of Ruritania, who is living incognito with his elderly tutor to care for him, and take him to England. Presumably to head up a government-in-exile or possibly to go to school, Manning and Coles wisely leave the politics to look after themselves and concentrate on the fun bits, ie Hambledon undercover as a Soviet inspector of factories trying to find an opportunity to extract young Kaspar from his Very Communist School For Little Communists. Unlike Biggles, Hambledon has no compunction at all about leaving a trail of bodies behind him and does cheerfully shoot people in the head the minute they suspect him. He also has a great line in making friend with people and then dropping them in the shit, in this case several senior communist police officers who think he's the bee's knees right up until they get killed or arrested for their connection with him. There's some excellent Aeroplane Content in this one too, Hambledon doesn't team up with Biggles but his life might have been a bit easier if he had, and being sent to make a stealth landing in Ukraine to retrieve the Ruritanian Prince and the British spy who's rescued him is exactly the sort of job Biggles does all the time. But Hambledon has to figure out his own aeroplane evacuation, and there's plenty of aeroplane fun as he does so.

A book related question

Nov. 26th, 2025 10:19 am
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[personal profile] aurumcalendula posting in [community profile] raikantopeni
Any idea why volumes 1 and 2 of Petrichor by Sixteenseven (both the English translations and the Thai originals) don't seem to be available on MEB anymore?

I think volume 1's English translation is still available on Google Play.
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Posted by Daniel Engber

There’s a fairy tale about Thanksgiving that gets refuted every fall. Does eating turkey really make you fall asleep? When science writers check in with the experts, they always get the same response: No, no, no, and no. Also no and no.

These holiday debunkers tell you what the science says: Turkey meat is not a sedative. They tell you what the studies show: Drumsticks don’t produce fatigue. And then they take another step, however ill-advised: They lay out different reasons Thanksgiving dinner might be sleep inducing. Even as these stories bust the turkey-coma myth, they end up replacing it with other fables.

The trouble began nearly half a century ago. It started with warm milk—a sleep aid that was the subject of its own lightly flavored brand of science journalism. Was it true that a mug of milk could help you go to sleep? Yes, the experts said, because milk has tryptophan! This one amino acid worked something like a natural “sleeping pill,” a psychiatry professor told The New York Times in 1983. “Once again,” the Times said, “an old wives’ tale, the one about warm milk before bedtime, has received scientific support.”

Indeed, a tryptophanic fever was about to spread across America. By the end of the decade, tryptophan was being widely sold in supplements as a treatment for insomnia; an aid for beating jet leg; and also a fix for depression, PMS, and drug dependence. (Tryptophan was even talked about as a suicide preventive.) To explain its wondrous potency, scientists noted that when tryptophan made its way into the brain, it could be converted into the neurotransmitter serotonin. According to the thinking of the time, serotonin was the molecule of relaxation and well-being. Early studies seemed to show that it led to sleep.

Turkey, too, contains some tryptophan. Thus the sleepy-turkey myth was born. But even from the start, experts knew the theory had some complications. In the first place—as every Thanksgiving-myth-debunking article notes—turkey doesn’t have a lot of tryptophan. In fact, almost every other kind of meat has more. One serving of turkey breast contains 244 milligrams of tryptophan; one serving of clams contains 243. You’ll get less tryptophan from turkey, ounce for ounce, than you will from octopus or cheddar cheese. And in the second place, even taking high-dose tryptophan supplements doesn’t seem to do so much for sleep. (In 2017, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommended against the use of tryptophan as a treatment for insomnia on account of its “absence of demonstrated efficacy.”)

If only that could be the end of it. The early experts on the topic had laid out some other dietary theories of ensleepification. Tryptophan was soporific, the MIT neuroendocrinologist Richard Wurtman and his colleagues said, but its effects were limited by the degree to which it crossed the blood-brain barrier. Other nutrients from foods could get in its way. But Wurtman, who died in 2022, found that when you ingest a bunch of carbohydrates, the resulting spike of insulin can shunt away the amino acids that normally compete with tryptophan. As he saw it, carbs have a “sedating effect” in the human diet, by helping tryptophan to make its way from the gut into the brain. If it seemed as though a mug of warm, protein-rich milk was helping people get to sleep, that’s because they must also have been eating cake.

Wurtman was already floating this idea—let’s call it the sleepy-carbs hypothesis—in the early 1980s, and it has been repeated in the press ever since. Almost all articles about the turkey-coma myth now point at carbohydrate-heavy side dishes, the sweet potatoes and the pie, and claim that these Thanksgiving foods, not the turkey, really knock you out.

This merely swaps one highly suspect notion for another. Studies find that meals with lots of carbohydrates don’t really make you sleepy. (They may have some small effects on how you sleep, such as an increase in the time you spend in REM, the dreaming phase.) More to the point, the old idea that serotonin is a simple, sleep-promoting signal in the brain is fully out of fashion; later research found that serotonin may also be a potent source of wakefulness, and that its function in the sleep-wake cycle is both complicated and diverse.

Nutritionists may now be more inclined to look at melatonin, a hormone that is synthesized (like serotonin) from dietary tryptophan. One line of research looks at whether sour cherries or beefsteak tomatoes might be useful as a sleep aid, because these foods are known to be rich in naturally occurring melatonin. When taken as a supplement, melatonin seems to have a small effect on sleep onset and sleep quality; when taken as a tomato, it may also have some benefits. That said, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends against the use of melatonin as a treatment for insomnia for a similar reason that it recommends against tryptophan: insufficient evidence of clinically meaningful results.

In short, all the science here is pretty weak. Yet the turkey-myth debunkers pile on the speculations. The sleepy-carbs hypothesis is just the start. What accounts for post-Thanksgiving lethargy? Many experts blame the fact that we’re consuming so much food, and overeating makes you tired on its own. (Some even cite the old-fashioned and unlikely notion that heavy digestion deprives your brain of oxygen.) But the evidence that people are more inclined to fall asleep, for any reason, after pigging out—that they experience what’s known among the cognoscenti as “postprandial somnolence”—is equivocal, at best.

This is science—and this is science journalism—of the sort that only makes you dumber the more of it you read. Here are some other reasons you might feel tired after eating dinner on Thanksgiving: You have consumed some alcoholic beverages; you have traveled a long distance; you have gotten trapped in some exhausting conversation with your cousin’s wife. Also maybe this: Dinner time is over, and the sky is dark, and a lot of time has passed since the last time you were sleeping.

And allow me to lay out one final possibility: What if Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t even make you sleepy in the first place? Could the very basis for the turkey-coma myth, and for all of its debunkings, be a sham? I could find no data to suggest that the Thanksgiving-meal effect is real. “Nobody’s tested this,” Faris Zuraikat, a nutrition and sleep scientist at Columbia University, told me when I called him for this story. So here we are today, dressing up a folk belief about the holiday with pseudoscientific rationales. It’s a pointless and exhausting project. We should be thankful if it ends.

Constraints [finances]

Nov. 26th, 2025 09:35 am
rebeccmeister: (Default)
[personal profile] rebeccmeister
There are a lot of good outcomes from that financial planning webinar. One was that the people who led it presented a useful heuristic for budgeting. This, again, is an arena where I've heard various bits and pieces of things from various places over time, but for a long time my financial circumstances were so volatile and variable that it was tricky to implement what I was hearing. Anyway, the heuristic is, 50/15/5: plan to allocate 50% of your income towards basic necessities (housing, food, utilities). Plan to put 15% of your income towards retirement. If your employer offers any form of matching retirement contribution, that can count towards the 15% total. And put 5% of your monthly income in savings for emergencies (unemployment, repairs, unexpected healthcare expenses).

When I got hired into my current job, I had my employer set aside 15% of my income, but without having much context for that number. It just seemed like a sweet spot, mathemetically. My employer does match set-asides up to 10%, but I also have to figure that I have gotten a late start when it comes to retirement savings, so I'll leave that allocation how it is. It's just comforting to know that it's on the aggressive side of the equation.

I *do* have one lingering task on that front: for the 4.5 years I was in Texas, funds went into the Texas Teacher Retirement Services, but if a person then leaves Texas, the account goes dormant and they stop paying interest. So I need to figure out my options for transferring those funds somewhere else that will earn interest. I also need to figure out whether I need to do anything with retirement savings from my 2 years in Berkeley. All those funds are kind of a pittance, but still, they're MY pittance!

With knowledge of the 5% heuristic, I was able to configure my checking and savings accounts to start a monthly automatic transfer. Yay! I'd had a different savings system in place in the past, but it was too motivation-based. A systematic arrangement is ideal.

With the 50/15/5 taken care of, one can view the remainder of one's income as discretionary spending. However, before I can really do that, I need to go back through my finances to figure out where I actually am with regards to the 50% towards the basics. I can already tell you that The Rent is Too Damn High, and I suspect I'm above the 50% mark already. But I'm ready to get back to more detailed financial tracking, because I am actually much happier to work within financial constraints as compared to not having a good idea of what constitutes realistic spending expectations. And if I can point to The Rent is Too Damn High, that's helpful for thinking about house-hunting or moving or doing any of a number of other things.

So then, the next part of the webinar that was great was that they provided a bunch of curated budgeting resources, including both some free expense tracking tools, and recommendations for which of the paid expense tracking tools are the most worthwhile based on their experiences (yes, with a shout-out to YNAB, for instance!).

There, again, I've tried to create and maintain my own spreadsheets for expense tracking in the past, but without much context for a lot of my decision-making. If I use something made by other people who have already done a lot of the thinking and calculating for me, well, that sounds great.

Anyway, I really appreciated [personal profile] twoeleven's comment about how refreshing it was to hear about something like this seminar, in the context of working with a lot of autodidacts who often wind up with a weird combination of tunnel vision and blind spots from the assumption that many/most things can be self-taught. I mean, sure, *some* things can definitely be self-taught! But again, I think this post illustrates how the right sort of seminar can be tremendously useful.

And with any luck, some of the other courses you'd like to take will get put together and offered, somehow. I feel like I need to keep a list of those things. My local library does try and offer some of these sorts of courses, at least.

Things upcoming

Nov. 26th, 2025 02:44 pm
[syndicated profile] charlie_stross_diary_feed

So: I've had surgery on one eye, and have new glasses to tide me over while the cataract in my other eye worsens enough to require surgery (I'm on the low priority waiting list in the meantime). And I'm about to head off for a fortnight of vacation time, mostly in Germany (which has the best Christmas markets) before coming home in mid-December and getting down to work on the final draft of Starter Pack.

Starter Pack is a book I wrote on spec--without a contracted publisher--this summer when Ghost Engine just got a bit too much. It's a spin-off of Ghost Engine, which started out as a joke mashup of two genres: "what if ... The Stainless Steel Rat got Isekai'd?" Nobody's writing the Rat these days, which I feel is a Mistake, so I decided to remedy it. This is my own take on the ideas, not a copy of Harry Harrison's late 1950s original, so it's a bit different, but it's mostly there now and it works as its own thing. Meanwhile, my agent read it and made some really good suggestions for how to make it more commercial, and "more commercial" is what pays the bills so I'm all on board with that. Especially as it's not sold yet.

Ghost Engine is still in progress: I hit a wall and needed to rethink the ending, again. But at least I am writing: having working binocular vision is a sadly underrated luxury--at least, it's underrated until you have to do without it for a few months. Along the way, Ghost Engine required me to come up with a new story setting in which there is no general AI, no superintelligent AI, no mind uploading to non-biological substrates, and above all no singularity--but our descendants have gone interstellar in a big way thanks to that One Neat Magictech Trick I trialed in my novella Palimpsest back in 2009. (Yes, Ghost Engine and Starter Pack are both set very loosely in the same continuum as Palimpsest. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that Palimpsest is to these new novels what A Colder War was to the Laundry Files.) So I finally got back to writing far future wide screen space opera, even if you aren't going to be able to read any of it for at least a year.

Why do this, though?

Bluntly: I needed to change course. After the US election outcome of November 2024 it was pretty clear that we were in for a very bumpy ride over the next few years. The lunatics have taken over the asylum and the economy is teetering on the edge of a very steep precipice. It's not just the over-hyped AI bubble that's propping up the US tech sector and global stock markets--that would be bad enough, but macro policy is being set by feces-hurling baboons and it really looks as if Trump is willing to invade Central America as a distraction gambit. All the world's a Reality TV show right now, and Reality TV is all about indulging our worst collective instincts.

It's too depressing to contemplate writing more Laundry Files stories; I get email from people who read the New Management as a happy, escapist fantasy these days because we've got a bunch of competent people battling to hold the centre together, under the aegis of a horrific ancient evil who is nevertheless a competent ancient evil. Unfortunately the ancient evil wins, and that's just not something I want to explore further right now.

I'm a popular entertainer and it seems to me that in bad times people want entertainments that take them out of their current quagmire and offers them escape, or at least gratuitous adventures with a side-order of humour. I'm not much of an optimist about our short-term future (I don't expect to survive long enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel) so I can't really write solarpunk or hopepunk utopias, but I can write space operas in which absolutely horrible people are viciously mocked and my new protagonists can at least hope for a happy ending.

Upcoming Events

In the new year, I've got three SF conventions planned already: Iridescence (Eastercon 2026), Birmingham UK, 3-6 April: Satellite 9, Glasgow, 22-24 May: and Metropol con Berlin (Eurocon 2026), Berlin, 2-5 July. I'm also going to try and set up a reading/signing/book launch for The Regicide Report in Edinburgh; more here if I manage it.

As during previous Republican presidencies in the USA it does not feel safe to visit that country, so I won't be attending the 2026 worldcon. However the 2027 world science fiction convention will almost certainly take place in Montreal, which is in North America but not part of Trumpistan, so (health and budget permitting) I'll try to make it there.

(Assuming we've still got a habitable planet and a working economy, which kind of presupposes the POTUS isn't biting the heads off live chickens or rogering a plush sofa in the Oval Office, of course, neither of which can be taken for granted this century.)