Over my shoulder

Microsoft Word, and its step-sibling Outlook, has got a lot more irritating in the past couple of years. I don’t know whether it’s AI, or just someone deciding that what people really need is not just spellcheck, but grammar and punctuation suggestions. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn those “features off.

Believe me, if I could find it, I would. Since the seventh grade, when Miss Bauer rammed the tools of English into us, I have not needed any jumped-up bog standard “help” with language, thank you very much.

But, back to spellcheck: a couple of weeks ago, Outlook signaled that it didn’t like “gormless” as my choice of descriptor for someone who absolutely personifies the quality. So when I clicked on the word, these are the substitutes it suggested:

Now—why would you object to “gormless” the adjective, but be perfectly happy with “gormlessly”, the adverb? See why I want to turn the dag-blamed thing off?

(As I write this, it’s still giving me the wavy red line under the offending word.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Getting a grip

As presaged on Monday, yesterday the cast came off. And—considering the 90-degree-plus-about-105%-humidity—not a moment too soon. If there is anything slimier than the inside of a cast on sweaty skin, I do not want to know about it.

The PA cut through the carapace and pulled away the shell, then I had a proper old scrub of the skin.

There’s some tenderness, but no pain; most of it is apparently due to the four weeks’ constriction inside the cast. And I’m peeling skin off like I used to after a day at the beach.

My surgeon is quite pleased with my healing—he gave me a referral for OT, but he said I don’t have to use it unless I really feel I need it. (Glad about that, because I was not looking forward to the $40 a pop co-pay.) Ditto the thumb brace; better that I just get back to (careful) normal movement.

The first thing I did—before even the surgeon came into the room—was take out pens and start marking up some work documents.

I cannot tell you what a joy that was, even just with the crappy office pen. Ditto pouring a glass of bubbly and holding it in my right hand to drink. I came home (although operating the gear shift was a bit problematic; I expect that’ll improve) and took a shower without having to stick my arm in a plastic bag!

Small joys, my friends. Small joys.

Good advice

Seeing as to how this week has gone down a kind of careers pathway, I’ll close it out with this Pro Tip:

While I’m sure that no hiring manager is favorably impressed with a job aspirant screwing up his/her name, it’s pretty much the kiss of death for any career that revolves around communication through the written word. 

This Mr. Holton's ears must still be crimson at the memory 40 years on. One wonders if he left the field of journalism altogether and became, perhaps, an investment banker, where all anyone cares about is the number of digits to the left of the decimal.

 

Writing on the wall

Let’s have a bit of history by way of intro to today’s post—going back to the golden years of another Republican administration, when thousands of men moved from town to town across the country, searching for work. This being before the days of Geico, they mostly hitched illegal rides on freight trains, congregated in camps known as Hoovervilles and performed odd jobs in exchange for food.

Kind of like the men who hang out around Home Depots looking for work as day laborers.

Anyhow, this confraternity of traveling men developed a kind of hieroglyphic shorthand scrawled on various flat surfaces to communicate with those who followed, to guide them, warn them and share general insights. Viz.:

Not sure how much it will resonate with the general readership, but this updated chart of hobo-like signs for freelance writers is spot-on.

Written proof

All companies say they want to encourage their staff to improve their skills and keep learning, but in practice they don’t really want to invest in same. Especially if “invest” involves them shelling out any money.

At any rate, my employer has reinstated its tuition reimbursement benefit, announcing the revival of the program in the same email in which they unveiled the employee recognition scheme. The rules for the partial reimbursement pretty much guarantee that no one is going to be able to make any calls on the company purse, as “participation in the program must be approved by the employee’s manager, the organizational unit head and by Human Resources in advance of course registration.” And it’s been my observation and experience that the head of HR doesn’t feel like she’s done her job unless she’s interfered in other departments’ operations, particularly when there’s money involved.

And, as it turns out—these particular costs are charged to HR. So that’ll be the kiss of death.

(As an aside, reimbursement is limited to a maximum of $3000 per calendar year. I don’t know what decade the policy was written in, but graduate-level courses at schools in the D.C. area are in the neighborhood of $2000-$3000 a pop. It would take you a long time indeed to complete your degree if you were depending on the company to help you with the costs.)

However, I could stand a top-up of my skills so I had a look at some writing courses in nearby universities, and came across this listing at George Washington University:

Let me just say that I don’t really feel entirely confident in the writing instruction of an institution that misuses the verb “comprise”.

So I guess I’ll keep looking.

The bald truth

While perhaps not entirely true, this is indeed indicative, and somewhat related to yesterday’s post.

April soft and cold: Croak and wither

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month is from Sylvia Plath.

If you have any inclination whatsoever towards clinical depression, I don’t recommend Plath. (You probably also want to stay away from Doris Lessing. Just sayin’.)

Plath is pretty much the poster child for the creative woman who had the life sucked out of her and her creativity by getting hooked up with a creative man who exploited her gifts even as he disrespected them. In her case it was English poet Ted Hughes.

She reminds me a lot of Zelda Fitzgerald, actually. Neither Plath nor Fitzgerald had the emotional strength or the community support to tell her husband to get stuffed. Both died prematurely.

Fitzgerald spent most of her last years in a mental hospital. She was burnt to death in locked in a room while awaiting electroshock therapy when a fire broke out.

At age 30, Plath committed suicide by sealing the rooms between herself and her two small sleeping children, and turning on the gas in the oven.

Listen—poetry is not for the weak-willed.

Anyway, I could have given you “April 18”, which is pretty grim (you know that any poem that starts out “the slime of all my yesterdays/rots in the hollow of my skull” is not going anywhere close to Disneyland), or “Lady Lazarus” (“…my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade…”), or others. But let’s try something that—while plaintive—is more in the natural scheme of things.

I mean—poets’ two major subjects seem to be love and death, so fair enough.

“Frog Autumn”

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.

The insects are scant, skinny.

In these palustral homes we only

Croak and wither.

Mornings dissipate in somnolence.

The sun brightens tardily

Among the pithless reeds.

Flies fail us. the fen sickens.

Frost drops even the spider. Clearly

The genius of plenitude Houses

himself elsewhere. Our folk thin

Lamentably.

April soft and cold: Pleasant pastures

For Good Friday in National Poetry Month, here’s one of my favorite hymns, which started out as a poem by William Blake.

Blake, whose life spanned the time when the landscape of Britain was literally and metaphorically being changed by the Industrial Revolution, wasn’t a poet by trade. He was an printmaker, who painted and wrote poetry on the side. Basically home schooled, he learned to read well enough to rip through the Bible every which way, and he learned to appreciate art by engraving copies of classical drawings.

From these humble beginnings he grew into a powerful poet/artist who took on highly metaphysical subjects in both those forms. He was a Dissenter in both religion and artistic style, despising, for example, the works of Joshua Reynolds.

This particular poem (not originally titled anything, actually) appeared in Blake’s preface to an epic poem he wrote about John Milton. It pulls from a number of elements from the Bible and ties them to the hope (or at least the inquiry) that the appearance of Christ might alter the face of England for the better.

We are left to work out for ourselves whether he’s talking about the Second Coming or the adoption of true Christian principles by the people.

“Jerusalem”

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England's mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God

On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

The poem was set to music in 1916 by Sir Hubert Parry and it’s come to be associated with England itself. It’s often sung on Saint George’s Day (23 April), and it’s the unofficial anthem of Women’s Institute chapters everywhere, and at national sporting events.

I personally find it magnificent, especially when sung with the descant at the end. But the poem stands on its own.

The silence roars

As I mentioned yesterday, the Internet pretty much exploded with cartoons expressing the sorrow and outrage of the civilized world at the atrocity at Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

But there was also response from newspapers—actual publications mixing ink on paper, just as the satirical weekly did to such great effect—which went straight to the heart of the matter. Because the hooded and masked thugs who gunned down 12 people in the course of “avenging the Prophet” evidently thought that ending those particular lives would end the sort of commentary they’d been making.

And again and again, publishers and editors made it clear on their front pages that this was a fundamentally baseless expectation. I’ll give you two examples, first from The Independent (UK):

And  what has to be the extremists’ worst nightmare, from B.Z. (Germany):

Nous sommes tous Charlie

I was on my walk yesterday morning when I first heard the news of the murders at Charlie Hebdo, the satirical weekly based in Paris. At time of writing, twelve people had died in the act of terrorism, which targeted four of the main cartoonists, but killed eight other journalists and two police officers as well. One of the latter—wounded on the street—was finished off by gunman for no apparent reason. Except that he could.

The newspaper has ridiculed politicians, religion, business and anything and anyone else worthy of deflation. A lot of what they publish is offensive to a lot of people, which of course is the job of satire. This has been a particular burr under the saddle for Muslims, who have many precedents when it comes to expressing their offendedness through violence. The editors have had to defend themselves in court, and they’ve received death threats and survived a firebombing a few years ago.

(Basically: "Flush all religions")

So far I’ve not heard of Opus Dei or Haredi operatives being associated with such events, but the thugs with Kalashnikovs and masks over their faces who literally shot their way into Charlie Hebdo’s office yesterday were heard to shout, “We have avenged the Prophet.”

There’s been a global tsunami of response on social media, most of it outraged by but some in support of the attack. I’ll let you guess how that breaks out demographically. The graphics and cartoons hashtagged #JeSuisCharlie have been passionate and heart-rending.

"Grab your weapons, comrades!" (Francisco Olea)

(Loïc Sécheresse)

"There is no freedom without freedom of the press" (Tomi Ungerer, who as a boy lived through the German occupation of Alsace, and thus knows from repression and terror.)

(A 2012 New Yorker cartoon)

And one that truly captures the ethos of Charlie Hebdo:

"Oh, no..not them..." (Tommy Dessine)

There have also been spontaneous demonstrations of sorrow and solidarity in cities around the world. Including Paris:

Berlin:

Strasbourg:

London:

Dublin:

Tunis:

Pristina, Albania:

Rio:

Myself, I can’t seem to stop crying, because—aside from the ghastly human loss of each of those lives—the attack on freedom of speech and thought is downright anathema to any definition of civilization.

This is what happens when people have closed minds and open access to weapons. It’s the triumph of the barbarians—in this case the ones who want us all to return to those golden days of the 7^th Century.

As for the cry that we must respect religious sensibilities, if your God is so utterly lacking a sense of humor and so easily affronted that satire is somehow a capital offense, then s/he should not have given humans a brain capable of critical thinking and articulate expression.

Still, like air, I'll rise

News today that writer poet activist humanitarian Maya Angelou has died. She was 86 and in declining health in recent years.

So hard to think of her in terms of decline, because if anyone defined the term “force of nature”, it was Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, first of several autobiographical works, knocks you off your chair and out of your complacency.

But it’s her poetry I love. I had to share “Phenomenal Woman” during National Poetry Month last year. Such a powerful piece to hold up next to your dreams and aspirations, filling them with strength and fire.

And now seems a good time to take up “Still I Rise”.

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may tread me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops.

Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame

I rise

Up from a past that's rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

You can also listen to what the Washington Post calls “her regal presence and her honeyed voice.

More sense from a pissed parrot

Look, I was not exaggerating when I said in my Gratitude Monday post that Reginald Hill had a gift for language as great as his talent for storytelling, which the BBC TV series didn't quite get across. Here are just a few examples of same:

In Exit Lines, Detective Superintendant Dalziel infiltrates a country estate on a shooting weekend. (If you’re unfamiliar with the British concept of “shooting” I commend to you the 1985 film The Shooting Party, or the shooting sequence in 2001’s Gosford Park.) The notion alone sends regular readers into fits of giggles; but Fat Andy takes us even further when he informs his sidekick of his planned activities.

Pascoe blurts out, ““’You mean shooting…things?’

“’Aye,’ said Dalziel gravely. ‘They tell me things are in season.’

“’Birds? You’re going to go shooting birds!’ exclaimed Pascoe, incredulity struggling with indignation.

“’I asked about sheep,’ said Dalziel regretfully. ‘I wondered if they’d let me start with sheep, being only a trainee, so to speak. Something a bit bulky and sort of static. Sheep-shooting’s never caught on, they tell me. Stags, yes. But not sheep. You can do all kinds of things with sheep, especially if you’ve been stuck out on the moors a long time, but you can’t shoot them. It has to be birds. I asked about swans then…’”

Also from Exit Lines:

“The Deputy Chief Constable was not a man he liked. It was Dalziel’s not inaudibly expressed view that he couldn’t solve a kiddies’ crossword puzzle and had only been promoted out of Traffic because he couldn’t master the difference between left and right. More heinously, he rarely dispensed drink and when he did it tended to be dry sherry in glasses so narrow that it was like reading a thermometer looking for the bloody stuff, which in any case Dalziel regarded as Spanish goat-piss.”

But some of my favorite vignettes come from Pictures of Perfection. For example, when one of the villagers assures Pascoe that her son (who’s been seen riding about the place with a shotgun across his bicycle handlebars) would never have killed a kingfisher:

“She spoke with absolute conviction, but Pascoe was unimpressed. In his experience ninety-nine out of a hundred mothers confronted by a video of their offspring robbing a bank or ramraiding a warehouse or even just jumping a red light would say, ‘No, not my Tom or Dick or Clint. He’d never do a thing like that.’ He was looking forward to meeting the hundredth who’d say, ‘Yes, that’s the little toe-rag. Why don’t you bang him up forever?’”

Or this description of a garden shed:

“It was basically a store shed containing most gardening implements both ancient and modern, ranging from graip and dibber to chainsaw and strimmer. There was a musty, peaty, earthy smell distantly and not too pungently underpinned by something vaguely stercoraceous. A double row of shelves bowed under the weight of various tins and bottles containing stuff to kill and stuff to quicken.”

(And yes—I keep a dictionary to hand when reading Hill. A graip is a three-tined garden or manure fork; a dibber is a pointed stick for making holes in the ground for planting seeds; something stercoraceous resembles dung.)

Regarding one of the key characters, Girly Guillemard—well, I could go on at length, but all you really need to know is this:

“She was clearly on the edge of her nerves, yet Wield sensed it was more than a mere organizational crisis which had brought her here. He got the impression she could have supervised the building of a pyramid without breaking sweat.”

And I’ll leave you with this depiction of Wield’s dilemma at one point in the novel:

“He tried to soothe his dyspeptic conscience with the Fat Man’s frequent assertion that, the way the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] threw out perfectly good cases that had cost overworked detectives many sleepless hours, it made more sense morally, socially, and legally to leave justice in the hands of a rational, informed intelligence such as his own.

“Dalziel’s precise words were, ‘Them wankers couldn’t spot a bishop in a brothel. You get more sense from a pissed parrot.’”

I’ve been trying to find a way to work that sentence into a conversation, somehow. But probably not a job interview.

Gratitude Monday: Wielding the language

Last Monday I focused on being grateful for a film, because it was intrinsically good, and I happened to watch it at a point when I really needed something to lift my spirits.

Today I’m grateful for a particular writer, whose books unfailingly engage my mind, expand my vocabulary, introduce me to vivid characters and entertain me to the last word of the last page. Of every book.

As you probably know, I read a lot; on average in the range of 110-150 books per year. Most of that is non-fiction; when I do step over to the dark side, it’s almost invariably detective fiction, and just about all of that encompasses police procedurals. There are loads of crappy purveyors of that genre out there, a fair number of adequate writers, a very few good ones and one consummate master.

Reginald Hill. And specifically his series on Chief Superintendent Andy Dalziel and Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe, set somewhere in mid-Yorkshire (England).

I’ve been a fan of Dalziel and Pascoe since…well, I probably discovered them in the 80s. But I revisited them last year in the process of seeking inspiration on how to set up detective plots. Reginald Hill almost made me give it up.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, he writes the bloody hell out of a story. He wields language like a samurai does a katana. His characters are indelible—beginning with Dalziel: fat, vulgar, loud, and capable of holding more booze than anyone since Falstaff. Especially if someone else is paying for it. And yet—unlike Falstaff—nothing much slips past him. It’s gobsmacking to watch him in operation; he crosses over to cringeworthy on many occasions, but he is magnificent in his oblivion. Or (as it turns out) in his unapologetic dedication to doing whatever it takes to solve the case.

Pascoe, his series partner, starts out a Detective Sergeant in A Clubbable Woman, and progresses until he’s a DCI in the latest books. He’s a university graduate, in sociology, of all things; although thankfully he doesn’t seem to apply its precepts a whole lot. Perhaps because Dalziel generally makes preemptive strikes with his old-school-copper politically incorrect observations, which generally turn out to be spot-on.

Pascoe is a bit like Pauline (as in The Perils of)—he’s always getting shot, being buried alive in a mine collapse, finding unknown relatives, suffering through his daughter’s bout of meningitis or having her taken hostage by thugs. Well, a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.

Pascoe’s wife, Ellie, is a counterpoint to the cops—starting out as a university lecturer and then chucking it all to write a novel. She seems to take on more of the function of criticizing Dalziel’s political incorrectitude, leaving her husband a little freer to get his job as a policeman done. I expect Hill meant her to grate, because she does—a feminist who doesn’t seem to much like any woman with both a career and gumption, particularly DC Shirley Novello. Not even after Novello actually takes a bullet in defense of Ellie and others in Arms and the Women. (Hill may have got tired of her, too, as she barely makes an appearance in the most recent two books.)

Most interesting to me is Edgar Wield, who starts and ends the series as a Detective Sergeant. His dilemma as a corruscatingly ugly, gay cop (and you wonder at someone so physically and emotionally earthbound being associated with the word “gay” in its, uh, lighter sense) becomes one of the story arcs in Child’s Play, which—like Exit Lines—weaves threads of different colors and textures into a vivid and oddly harmonious tapestry of human frailties: fear, love, fury, foolishness, hope. You know—all the usual.

As a homosexual in one of the most virulently homophobic environments possible (especially in the 1970s, when Hill started writing the novels), Wield has to compartmentalize his life absolutely, and even after he comes out he makes the decision not to seek promotion beyond Detective Sergeant. He also takes pre-emptive measures to set expectations when he comes across new graduates who might have ideas that tutus and nipple rings loom large in his private life.

(As it happens, they don’t. His passions are H. Rider Haggard, Gilbert and Sullivan, and his classic Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle.)

Hill sets up characters and pulls them through subsequent novels, like DC Novello and DC “Hat” Bowler. (I won’t give away his actual Christian name, because it’s only mentioned once in all the novels, and you should find it out for yourself), DC Dennis Seymour and DC Hector.

Hector is a tad on the one-dimensional side, one of Hill’s weakest presentations. And I could have done without a recurring character like the sociopath Franny Roote, who’s so annoying that readers must have been lining up to slit his throat, starting with the voice box.

Yeah, I’d read Hill for the characters alone, but he weaves plot and subplot like a Bach fugue. Everything—everything—fits together. You skip over one bit of (seemingly) idle description, and it’ll come back to bite you in the butt at the end. If someone picks a daffodil or shoves a recording of medieval plainsong onto a shelf, sure as the earth revolves around the sun, that flower or music will be key to the ultimate resolution. As much as I want to rush headlong into finding out what-the-hell-happened, I’ve learned that I have to take my time and pay attention to everything along the way. It’s a good life-lesson, actually.

In addition, Hill’s not afraid to violate the canons of detective writing, and he doesn’t do anything according to a template. Some novels develop over a period of weeks; one plays out in just a single day. Not everything is solved; not every book involves a murder; not every puzzle is put together correctly. Shite, as Dalziel would say, happens; but in Hill’s cosmography, it happens so stunningly vividly that you just stand in awe.

Well, at least—I do. And I’m not that easily awed.

Hill’s first career was as a university lecturer, and all manner of literature informs his books. I enjoyed the conceit of Ellie’s reworking of the Aeneid in Arms and the Women—casting Odysseus as a fat, farting Yorkshireman and Aeneas as a slender, somewhat effete intellectual; possibly with a sociology degree.

Good Morning, Midnight turns on the poems of Emily Dickinson and features one of the most dysfunctional families I’ve ever seen; and I’ve seen a lot. Exit Lines is the interwoven stories of three old men who die unnatural deaths in a single night, alongside that of Pascoe’s father-in-law, who is withdrawing from life via dementia. In On Beulah Height, worked around Mahler’s “Songs of Dead Children”, a little girl lost dredges up the nightmare of 15 years earlier, when three more had gone missing-presumed-dead.

Child’s Play encompasses interlaced stories about sons and parents; about families; about love. It’s in this one that Wield comes out, although it turns out that Dalziel knew all along and didn’t care. With Dalziel, it’s who you are and how you do your job that matters, not whom you sleep with. He does, after all, put up with Ellie’s unending claptrap.

And Pictures of Perfection is a fabulous (as in “fable-like”) tale, set in a village that reminds me a bit of Santa Cruz: if you weren’t slightly loopy when you (or your ancestors) came to Enscombe, you either left or took on the characteristics of dottiness.

The Wield Contradiction comes to the fore in Pictures, one of the ones with minimal violence. The exchanges between Wield and the caustic-tongued bookseller Edwin Digweed are handled with a delicacy that would not be out of place in the pages of Jane Austen (whose letters form the framework of the novel). Absolutely beautiful—one of the most romantic encounters I’ve ever seen in any kind of literature.

And if you don’t believe me about how ugly Wieldy is meant to be (or how exquisitely Hill uses the English language), try this from Pictures:

“Wield barked the sound which friends recognized as his way of expressing amusement—though others often took it as a sign that the interrupted lycanthropic process suggested by his face was about to be resumed.”

Well, you see what I mean?

When I discovered last year that Hill had died two years ago yesterday, age 75, my first—entirely selfish, I admit—reaction was, “Oh, I hope to God he stockpiled a bunch of D&P manuscripts with his publisher. At least two or three. Well, even a couple of outlines that some other really spectacular writer could run with.”

But, you know—I can’t think of any writer out there who could match Hill for dexterity of wit and elegance in telling a story.

I was absolutely gutted to think there’d be no more—the last outing was Midnight Fugue, in 2009. If I’d known that when I started out last year to re-read them, I’d have paced myself instead of gorging on his banquets of characters, plots, full range of humor and bloody great use of language.

But in the meantime, I’m so grateful that Reginald Hill took up a life of crime, and that I was able to join him, Dalziel, Pascoe and Wield on those wonderful sorties into the human condition.

Red October down

Tom Clancy has died at age 66, which means that the shelves of “military thrillers” that he pretty well pioneered is going to be left to lesser writers, of the testosterone-infused cookie-cutter variety. Clancy had a style and a verisimilitude to his writing that I expect will not be easy to replace.

I read his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October, when it was in galley proofs and being shopped around Hollywood. Pretty heady stuff for a first effort, and for something coming out of the Naval Institute Press. It’s not really my cup of tequila, but Clancy completely grabbed me with the pace. Seriously—it was indeed a page turner.

I have to say that the film eventually made (not by my employer) was a disappointment; for one thing, it never really was a hunt at all, the way it was in the book. The suspense factor was considerably lower. Plus—well, I like Connery fine, but his Scottish accent as Captain Ramius was just distracting. (Well—maybe that was just their way of showing that he was a Lithuanian amongst Russians? No, probably not.)

Clancy kind of disappeared up his own stealth propulsion system as his career progressed, but—fair dues—he was a storyteller of style and verve.

Writing dangerously & mournfully

It’s been an odd week; not entirely sure why.

One thing, maybe, is that I’ve been stuck for the past three days in a civil funeral for my murder vict… I mean, for the murder victim in my novel.

Let me just say that being mired in a funeral service is a whole lot less fun than being hung up in a country pub unable to get dinner on the table. At least there I had booze.

It’s a “civil funeral” (a term which I did not make up, but which brings to mind the probability that there are uncivil funerals) because the deceased in this case was opposed on principle to churches. He also didn’t have a whole lot of friends, so that limits the possibility of having people get up & tell remember-the-time stories.

He was, however, a blues fan, so I’ve been immersing myself in CDs from my collection. I’m not going the mournful route—the geezer was as ornery as they come—so I’ve got a few of the classics by Muddy Waters, Lightning Hopkins & some others.

But I couldn’t let it go without Bonnie Raitt. I’m thinking her version of “Louise” just has never been topped, but I can’t find a decent YouTube video of that one to share with you. (There’s something about the line “Louise rode home on the mail train” that just does me in.) So here’s another of hers that kind of speaks to me right now.

Bring on the weekend.