John's Green Blog

Doing less and writing more.

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Author: John Freeman

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  • Huichol Yarn Painting

    Huichol Yarn Painting

    a Pomegranate puzzle: 1000 pieces, 25 x 80

    The artwork is yarn inlaid into beeswax on a wooden board.
    It’s title is:
    “Gods Teach Humans to Honor the Sacred Seeds“

    Just to be pedantic:
    If you’re pressing yarn into beeswax, is it called “painting”?

    Whatever you call it, yarn laid into beeswax looks effing hard to do, and looks great!

    The puzzle box has some cool text on it:

    • When the Universe was created the Supreme Beings were shape-shifters.
      They could transform themselves into humans, plants, animals, and insects      .
    • Dove Woman could shift into a dove, a human, or the Corn Mother.
      She and her daughters provided abundance      :
      • Blue Corn Girl
      • Amaranth Girl
      • Squash Girl
      • Bean Girl
      • Gourd Girl
    • When the Creators thought it was time for the shape-shifters to take a form, they invented human, Watakame.
      • Watakame taught humans how to plant corn and honor the precious seeds.
      • The rituals he taught to these gods bring sustenance to the Peopleto this day:
        • Father Sun
        • Rain Mothers
        • Brother Deer
        • Corn Mother

    I got a little emotional just writing that, because those are such beautiful images, and with a little imagination you can see ’em all in the painting!

    Doing the easy parts

    Ongoing from the start was making a separate pile of the pieces at the top and bottom:

    • the solid purple pieces – happily there’s only one row of these at top and bottom, so they all have an edge.
    • the turquoise pieces with stripes.
      This band is three pieces wide, top and bottom:
      • outer row has purple on it’s outer half and turquoise with a bit of yellow strip on the other half
      • middle row is turquoise, with the other part of the yellow strip on one side and a bit of a red stripe on the other
      • inner row has the rest of the red stripe and some of the actual image!

    The puzzle is broadly symmetrical, with some extremely use differences in the details which I will describe below.

    individual pieces are gorgeous!
    upper left deer (with raindrops 🙂 and upper middle Corn Goddess
    upper right deer and some of the ‘corn circle” filled in
    beautiful water scene at the bottom, and the central mandala

    Here are the parts that “jumped out at me”, more of less in the order that I got to them:

    • top right – big smiling sun and a big deer with **brown spots
    • top left – big cloud and a big deer with **white spots
      • **raindrops from the big cloud made the red background go quicker on the left side
    • The lovely blue color of the water area at the bottom middle
    • The deep blue surround and the circle of fire jumped out
      • the interior of the mandala was really fun:
        • the eight-way symmetry
        • the beautiful blue color: different from the water blue at the bottom so is was easy to distinguish the pieces
        • the eight gorgeous little white tadpole creatures
        • the green and yellow men

    That was it for the easy stuff. Next up:

    • Those beings at the bottom, whatever they are, because that area is closest to my chair!
      • I’m guessing they are the “First Beings” still in shape-shifter mode, in other words proto-humans.
    • Next was the Corn Goddess at the top middle. This pieces are pretty distinct, and it;s another beautiful image.
    • that brown area in the lower middle left is cool, where these proto-humans are gestated

    Now it’s time to tackle that big green circle that encloses everything.

    • I think the green is cornstalks
    • **Note that the left side has a blue stripe through it, and the right side has a red stripe through it. Makes it easier to match ’em up.
    • On the red (right) side:
      • **the bottom half has little flowers between the leaves, and the flowers change color as you got around the circle.
      • **when the flowers stop, the rest of the leaves have stylized corn silk in changing colors
    • On the blue (left) side:
      • **the leaves have stylized corn silk in changing colors for the whole side, on the outside AND inside!
    • Did the red side first, then the green side. It was pretty fun.
    • In the course of doing this I’ve done most of the red background.
      • There’s still 20-odd pieces left which are pretty easy to place.
    • Recall above I mentioned the solid purple and the turquoise rows that span the width of the puzzle.
      • Since I’ve finished the red background, it seems logical to do the last of those rows, the most inside one, because it’s half red background!
      • Turned out to be fun and pretty easy.
    • I decided to roll on with the special pieces and for the bottom (closest to my chair 🙂 to do the next row – turquoise with yellow and pink stripes.
    • That used up exactly half of those pieces, so I rotated the puzzle 90 degrees to to the top!
    • The top rows went pretty quickly, now we’re down to finishing the middle!

    This is what the puzzle looks like with everything except all the complicated folks in the middle done!

    Even doing the puzzle is oddly spiritual. The poses of the people, the little creatures along the bottom, stylized feather arrangements that some of the important figures are wearing … it’s all kind of moving.

    This last part also takes a helluva long time!

    Each of those pieces has a story to tell:

    • a fragment of one of those lovely skirts, and a piece of a dude’s foot
    • there’s the dudes bending over, and
    • the dudes standing up, abd the ladies carrying …offerings?
      • all with a distinctive way of holding their hands in from of them.

    Anyway each piece requires studying it and finding it on the picture, and seeing if there is a neighboring piece to attach it to. It dowsn’t go quickly.

  • Nightshade (2025) – Michael Connelly

    Nightshade (2025) – Michael Connelly

    The last Connelly book I read, The Proving Ground, was also copyright 2025, so I guess he’s still cranking ’em out in volume.

    The hero of that book was good ole Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer
    (who now keeps the Lincoln in the garage and drives an EV :).

    This book introduces a new protagonist. He’s abrasive and kind of a hard-ass (think Bosch), but resourceful and interesting.

    His name is Stillwell.

    That’s all we get for a name! I looked for a first name, and could not find it. So I guess that’s going to be a thing here, like Shane, the lone seeker of justice!
    Or Reacher … “just Reacher”.

    I’m sure Connelly has some point in doing the one name thing, but I’m not into it. I think it’s a useless affectation. I’m sure the dude does actually have a first name. His girlfriend probably uses it when she asks him to pass the ketchup, so why do we pretend it doesn’t exist?

    Anyway, Mr One-name is a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detective (Bosch was a Los Angeles City detective). He has been banished to Catalina Island for being the loser in some kind of intramural pissing contest back on the mainland. This gets explained in some detail around p 164.

    We learn that many people on the island are there because they messed up on the mainland somehow. They are hiding from someone or something. Pretty much all the government employees are there because they pissed somebody off on the mainland.

    Getting sent to Catalina seems to be the LA County version of getting sent to Siberia.

    It’s supposed to be a big demotion, but waking up on Catalina Island every day looks pretty sweet to me!

    You’re quickly introduced to what a quirky place it is.

    • Everyone drives golf carts!
    • There’s a herd of buffalo (American Bison) on the island, brought there on the 1920’s for a movie that never left!

    The Story begins

    It’s a foggy evening, and our hero Stilwell has driven out to the Harbor to pick up the presiding judge who is cruising over to the island on his sailboat!

    They do this every week. He meets the judge and drives him (in a golf cart) to the “justice complex”.
    This time he gets him to sign a search warrant along the way.

    p 14 The next morning Stillwell executes that search warrant at a garage to search for evidence of a bison killing! He finds the evidence he was looking for in the form of traces of animal blood on a skill saw. He gets hassled by the owner, a charming fellow everyone calls Baby Head. You can tell already that Stillwell is Bosch-like in his knack for pissing off the rich and powerful without even trying!

    The Body

    Then the real action starts, a hull scraper (person who scrapes the hulls of rich folks boat while they are docked at the harbor) spotted a dead body in the water while he was 30 feet down scraping hulls.

    p 20 We learn later that Stillwell was on the County dive team before his sparkling personality got him moved somewhere else, so he does have diving skills. He dives with the scraper dude to check it out personally. He can’t see much, but he thinks he sees a streak of purple in the corpse’s hair.

    Mainland sends out a homicide team that unfortunately includes the bozo that Stillwell got in trouble with to get exiled to Catalina.

    32 For a little dark comedy, the homicide bozo, Ahearn, falls in the bay! He wore his city shoes, slick-soled leather soles and wasn’t careful on the wet gangway, and took a dive. This of course makes him hate Stillwell even worse 🙂

    43 Stillwell introduces us the harbormaster, a woman named Tash. They just do work stuff this time, but the next time we see her we learn that she and Stillwell are an item! It started casusally when he was assigned to Catalina, but they’re gettin pretty serious!

    46 The once a week local newspaper comes out on Saturday, to be fresh for the weekend crowds. There were three stories on the front page:

    1. Harbor Homicide: Bound body recovered.
    2. Tourist interests want to build a giant ferris sheel you could see from the mainland.
    3. Mystery of the mutilated buffalo. It was decapitated and someone kept the head! Connelley throws in a bit about the island’s long history of UFO sightings.

    All three turn up again in this story later, so pay attention! 🙂

    Tuesday at the Black Marlin Club

    50 The big weeknd is over. There were 26 arrests! Most were inconsequential, but there was one: a fellow who broke a bottle over a deputy’s head in a bar. Stillwell notes some unusual behavior in the bar video.

    54 Of the 16 crime reports over the weekend, only one was interesting: a felony theft at the Black Marlin Club (BMC). Even the name is ominous! :))

    The BMC is a more than century-old private club. Invitation-only membership of rich mainland families with big yachts. Get used to that abbreviation, we’ll be using it a lot!

    We’ve learned a few things so far:

    • Stillwell is an abrasive fellow that gets under people’s skin as part of doing his job … sometimes by design, sometimes because he’s just an annoying guy.
    • Previous undersherffs have put in their time on the island, and scurried back to the mainland as soon as their time was done.
    • Stillwell feels like “he’s come home” out here.
      • He’s met a great woman (Tash), and loves the place and the job.
      • He thinks he might stay here forever.
    • He’s gonna start nosing around at the BMC.
      It seems predictable that he’s going to piss off some rich people.

    The theft was of a small black jade sculpture of a black marlin. Stillwell learns that an employee Leigh-Ann Moss was fired from the BMC around the time it disappeared.

    We are all pretty sure she’s the body in the bay.

    • 67 Stillwell visits the BMC.
    • Leigh-Ann was fired for “overly flirtations behavior”. Meaning it was clear that her whole reason to work there was to get her hooks into a rich guy.
      • Apparently she was very attractive.
    • 90 Tash lets him look at the harbor videos from when the body appeared.
      • 92 There are suspicious things going on on the Emerald Sea.
      • It’s a ketch (a two-masted sailboat) owned by a corporate lawyer named Colbrick.
    • 97 There’s some slightly sketchy stuff going in there but he can’t pursue it.
    • 101 He is going to go to the mainland to nose around a bit.
      • Everyone knows this is a terrible idea since he’s been ordered to stay away from the case.
      • He’ll be in Big Trouble of he gets caught … but he of course does it anyway!
    • 104 He goes to the apartment of a nice guy, slovenly actor who Leigh-Ann crashed with then she needed a place on the mainland.
      • It was the address she gave on her BMC application even though she didn’t really live there.

    Diving Backstory

    112 Way back, before he was a homicide detective, Stillwell was assigned to the Sheriff’s dive team. As long as he’s on the mainland, he meets his old dive team boss Saunders at a bar and pumps him for info on the case he’s not supposed to be working on.

    He learns the body was in a sail bag, a nice canvas bag for storing a jib-sized sail. That seems like a clue!

    Mixing with the rich guys

    • 119 Still on the mainland, Stilwell chats up Colbrick, the owner of the Emerald Sea.
      • Great example of how our guy is quietly annoying. He purposefully doesn’t ring the Colbrick’s doorbell til 9:15 in the evening, because he likes to catch folks when they least expect it.
    • 125 Anyway, he intimidates Colbrick into giving him permission to search the boat. Colbrick insists on going with him.
    • 126 Stillwell gets to see the inside of the California Yacht Clob (CYC) in Marina Del Rey, where Colbrick keeps the boat.
      • We discover that the bag for his jib is new!
    • 133 Back on the island, interviews Colbrick’s “crew”, which is one guy, Duncan.
      • Seems to me like he could’ve just driven out and talked to the guy, but instead he has him arrested and brought in handcuffed for jum[ping probation on a marijuana bust ten years ago.
      • Serious asshole behavior if you ask me.
    • 147 He makes a simple process complicated, but eventually they settle down, and Stilwell decides Duncan is not a suspect, he is a witness, but still …
      • 152 … because of the arrest thing the poor dude still has to spend a night in their lockup.

    Homicide Backstory

    • 156 Just when he gets Duncan sorted, Ahearn pops up wanting his badge!
      • Ahearn has visited the slovenly former boyfriend, who was surprised, because he had already been visited by the police, i.e. Stillwell.
      • Just reading, I saw this coming a mile off, but somehow Stillwell didn’t!
    • Captain Corum is the head of Sheriff’s Homicide. They all have a conference call.
      • It’s against Stillwell’s nature to be open with people, but he has to give a little here if he wants keep his job, much less stay on this case.
      • So he gives the Captain (and us) his theory:
        • 160 “I think Moss was killed inside the BMC with the jade statue.
        • The body was put on the bag and taken out to sea the next day and dumped. Currents brought it back.“
      • It works! Stillwell is now officially on the case.
    • He’s ordered to come to the mainland because Corum wants the team to have a face to face meeting.
      • He’s picked up at the ferry by Sampedro, the other homicide detective, who so far is just a normal guy, not a corrupt moron like Ahearn.
    • The bad blood with Ahearn was before Sampedro’s time, so in the car to police headquarters, Stillwell tells (his side of) the story of why he was kicked off Homicide and banished to Catalina:
      • 164 It’s a depressing story of departmental ass-covering and corruption:
        • a cop named Dobbins got kicked off the force for corruption
        • Because the department let him retire with a clean record he was able to get a clean PI license.
        • He kills a guy in a divorce case he was hired for.
        • Ahearn was the lead investigator on that shooting.
          • Stillwell was on the team.
        • Dead guy’s wife said it was a setup.
        • Stillwell wanted to investigate, but Ahearn took the word of a former cop (and closed it out.
          • He later finds out Ahearn and Dobbins were academy buddies.
        • Stillwell won’t let it go.
        • He discovers the gun was stolen 10 years in a case involving Dobbins.
          • Clear implication is that Dobbins grabbed it for future use.
      • Stillwell thinks the wife made a deal with Dobbins to kill the guy and split the money.
      • Stillwell went straight to IAB with all this rather than take it to Corum.
        IAB covered up the whole thing except:
        • AH got an “unfounded complaint” in his permanent records and
        • Stillwell got sent to “the Island of Misfit Toys“. (love that! 🙂
    • 168 Now we’re back in the present.
      They have their meeting and it’s pretty civil.
      They rehash everything.
      • The only new info is that Stillwell plans to get a search warrant for the BMC, which is sure to piss everybody off over there!
    • 173 Now Stillwell is back on the island doing his regular job.
    • Connelly treats us to in more local color:
      • Still has to go handle an eviction the Zane Grey Hotel!
      • That’s a real place turns out. The author built a home out there that was later made into a hotel.
    • More pages on the life of a Catalina sheriff …
    • 186 Finally something case-related.
      • A girl named Leslie let Leigh-Ann bunk with her sometime, until Leigh-Ann stopped paying rent.
      • Leslie still has all her stuff in a bag!
    • 195 She says Leigh-Ann claimed to have a boyfriend who was gonna pay the back rent.
    • 196 The only thing interesting in Leigh-Ann’s stuff was a $1,200 pair of barely worn Prada heels.
    • 205 There was a card in the shoebox from “Dan”.

    More Island lore:
    The only 4 star hotel on the island is the Mt Ada.

    The entire island used to be owned by “chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr.”. The hotel was originally built in 1921 as his summer home!

    • 208 Leigh-Ann met a guy named Daniel Easterbrook on weekends at the Mt Ada Hotel.
    • 212 Back at the substation, Henry Gaston was there, VERY scared! He is the fellow that worked in the tour cart repair place where Stillwell got the blood-stained skill saw.
      • I thought the buffalo thing was going to be just a little side show, but it keeps turning up in the story!
    • 214 Gaaston tell a long story about his boss (and likely buffallo killer) Baby Head (Oscar Terranova) and the mayor colluding on some kind of deal over the Big Wheel.
    • 216 Stillwell lets him spend the night in the lockup because he’s so scared.
    • 218 Early in the book we met the judge who comes to the island every week, now we meet Monika Juarez the District Attorney.
    • 221 We finally hear Stillwell’s theory on the buffalo:
      • A buffalo with it’s head missing will make the mainland news, and pique interest in the extra-terrestrials that are a sure-fire draw for folks to come to Catalina.
        • Pretty weak, but I think that’s it!
    • 223 Stillwell is going to take Juarez back to the station to talk to Gaston, and that’s when the action really starts!

    Action Movie interlude

    • At the station:
      • The deputy is hancuffed and concussed, with a blood-stained head.
      • Spivak, the jerk who clocked the deputy in the bar is gone.
      • Gaston, who they just put there 2 hours ago “for his own protection” is very dead.
      • Finally, the “tech loset” was sprung open, and the hard drive where he reorded the interview with Gaston is gone!
    • 227 Stillwell gets it pretty quickly. It was all planned!
      • Spivak hit the deputy, to get put in jail, so he could kill Gaston if necessary.
    • 230 The homicide crew comes over from the mainland. Captain Corm turns out to be way more interested in keeping his own ass covered than he is in solvong anything.
    • 238 Then things get REALLY tense, Spivak is still on the island and has kidnapped Tash, to make Stillwell destroy the skill saw he still had locked up n the evidence locker. (How did Spivak know that??)
    • 240 Stillwell does some trickery with phone GPS to determine more or less where they’ve got Tash.
    • He used his diver skills to go there by Zodiac rather than on land.
    • 244 He finds them, kills Spivak and frees Tash woo hoo!
    • 249 We spend a few pages with two OIS investigators (whatever that is), going over Stillwell’s actions.
    • 261 Back on the mainland again, he goes to the fancy home of Daniel Easterbrook. His wife has kicked him out, and he’s currently living in a crappy apartment in South Pasadena.
    • He was with her the weekend she was murdered. They excanged bodily fluids the night before (which means the coroners will eventually know about him).

    In case you haven’t figured it out, the name of the book, Nightshade, is the name of a purple wildflower that grows on Catalina … like the purple streak in her hair. It is a deadly poison! 🙂

    • 270 He visits Juarez at the Long Beach Superior Court building.
    • 274 It was NOT a happy visit. Terranova has “661” tattooed on his forearm, signaling that his from Bakersfield (661 area code).
    • He’s found that Juarez is also from Bakersfield and in fact requested t be assigned to Catalina.
    • She and Terranova and Spivak were all homies from the 661!
    • She has been the leak all along.
      • That’s how Terranova knew the skill-saw was still on the island.
    • 281 Stillwell is narrowing in onthe notion that the BMC manager, Charles Crane killed Leigh-Ann.

    To wrap it all up, tbe fool Ahearn does the foolish thing and charges Easterbrook with the murder, but when they go to arrest himhe’s hung himself. [Apparently he really did, there was never any reveal that it was staged by shadowy forces…].

    Stillwell and Juarez get Terranova to flip to the point of playing recording that nails the mayor for the murder in the substation. So Stillwell has the great pleassure of perp-walking the mayor out of a meeting and on to a helicopter to the mainland.

    Sadly, looks like Terranova is going to skate on everything, even the bison slaughter. We’ll get him in the sequel!

    Charles Crane killed Leigh-Ann, we think the jade sculpture broke when he used it to kill her. She had her hooks in him as a way to keep her job until she hooked an actual rich guy. When she nailed Easterbrook she tried to dump Crane, and he didn’t take it well.

    Looks like he and Tash are gonna be ok, they’re camping on the other side of the island at the end of the book.

    Epilogue

    (all these books have one, why can’t I?)

    I commend the author for resisting the urge to set up a high-speed golf cart chase somewhere in the book. If there’s a sequel I’ll bet there is one!

    After making to the end of a 1423 page book, this little ole 336 page book seemed like an appitizer. 🙂

  • The Accountant (2016)

    When I tire of hearing about the latest Trump outrage on my TV, I scroll down my list of channels to see what cool old movie is being shown on the TCM channel!

    It’s become my favorite “escape” from the truly depressing reality of life in America in 2026.

    The next chanel below TCM in my listing is good ole TNT. Tonight it is showing The Accountant, and I got hooked on it!!

    I have a real soft spot for that movie. I think I actually saw it in my local theater!

    That was the good old days when I lived in Reno and the Century Riverside 12 movie theaters were still operating about 3/4 mile from my condo!

    Short aside:
    Reno, Nev. (News 4 & Fox 11) — The Cinemark Century Riverside 12 movie theater in downtown Reno will show its last film Thursday at 9:25 p.m

    Shorter follow up:
    It’s now a church! 🙂

    Cast

    So back to my story …
    I watched a bit of the first part where our hero is an autistic child, and boom! I was hooked! …
    so watching the rest was what I did for the next couple of housr!

    The actual movie!

    The movie opens with some disconnected scenes from a bloody shootout, that make no sense at all until well into the movie.

    Then we get a flashback which tells the story on why the Accountant is the weirdo he is:
    He, his brother and his mom and dad are at a child psychologist’s office, where they get the news that little Christian is autistic. I probably need a psychologist of my own to tell me why, but I find this scene deeply moving. This scene is basically what re-hooked on the movie last night. It sure wasn’t for the gunfights and bloodshed!

    We move forward to the “present day”, which opens on a strip mall parking lot in rural Illinois. Our hero is in his office helping a nice farm couple figure out their taxes. He has no interpersonal skills, but he still manages to suggest a sweet little home business set-up that will maybe let them save their farm!

    • We meet the Treasury agents who want to find who massacred the 9 hoodlums in the first scene.
    • We get flashbacks from when Chris was in prison.
      We meet Jeffery Tambor, who is always fun to see in a movie.
      • He was a Mafia accountant.
      • In prison he spends his time teaching our hero the fine points of accounting!
    • Later in the movie it all gets tied up in bow:
      • Mafia really wanted Tambor dead, so they pulled strings to get him released from prison, and within hours had tortured and killed him..
      • The Accountant really didn’t like that.
        • That is why he massacred the 9 hoodlums in the first scene!
      • IThey even tie in the dented thermos!
        • After he found Tambor was murdered, he had to get out of prison to revenge him, so he bonked a guard with his thermos and somehow got out!
    • Accountant gets hired by a biotech company (Living Robotics) to find the leak in their finances.
      • He finds it and pisses everybody off!
    • Anna Kendrick is the in-house accountant at the biotech company.
      • I re-kindled the fascination (that I forgot I had) with her!
      • TNT is running the movie again tonight, because showing a popular movie 8-10 times in a week is how they roll.
        • I have it on with the sound off while I work on this post …
        • except when Anna Kendrick comes on,
        • then I turn on the sound and savor every second of her calming, lovely presence. It’s mood therapy for me just to watch her! 🙂
        • Can’t get enough of her in this movie!
    • Bad guys try to kill Chris at the home of the nice farm couple.
      They FAIL, but tell him they are after Anna also!
    • He rushes to her apartment where they are in the process of trying to kill her also. They FAIL again 🙂
    • Now Chris and Dana (Anna in the movie) are on the run together.
      • There is a delightful interlude where she gets to see the inside of his Airstream and his original Pollock and Renior paintings.
    • We go back to the Treasury agents for a while.
    • Now we’re back with the Chris and Dana!
      • They get a (really nice!) hotel room.
      • She’s SO darned cute!!!
      • Dana asks him about stuff, which gives us more back story!
      • He’s autistic.
      • His family moved 34 times in 17 years.
        We learn more about what a weirdo his dad was.
      • Dana’s turn to share.
        • She tells how she lucked into the money to buy a black strapless dress for prom.
        • Dumb story, but imagining her in a sheer, black sleeveless gown made my night a little better, so my needs were met! 🙂
      • She almost kisses him, but he kills the moment.
    • More flashbacks with Chris’ creepy dad.
      • I think we’re supposee respect him for his stern but fair ways, but I’m not into it. I think he’s cruel to his children and his wife, and a jerk.
      • A really dislikeable fellow in my view.
    • Chris sneaks out on Anna at the nice hotel, never to see her again … sigh…
    • Treasury agents search his Illinois house. It’s pretty entertaining.
    • The expensive security team has Living Robotics in lockdown.
      • The head security guy is a very entertaining fellow
    • Ray, the head Treasury guy reminisces to his second, so that we get all the back story on the Federal law side of all this.
      It really fills in a lot of blanks:
      • The Gambinos tried to kill Tambor, so he turned states evidence!
      • Ray messed up and didn’t protect him enough, which is how he got dead.
      • That’s why Ray’s crew was surveillling the Gambino’s. Ray had a lot of guilt about it all.
      • Then the Accountant shows up and kills everybody. For some reason he lets Ray live.
        This is an extended replay of the first scene of the movie, except now we know Chris was the killer.
    • Oh yes, there is a dis-embodied, really sexy female voice that makes all the Accountant’s phone calls.
    • Ray is still reminiscing to his agent. “Who is the Accountant?”
      • He was in military prison, but got detailed to Leavenworth for his accounting brilliance.
      • He roomed with Tambor, they were inseparable.
      • One day a guard told him Tambor was murdered.
      • He snapped and fractured the guard’s skull with a thermos.
      • Escaped from a third floor window.
      • My thought: It’s that easy to get out of Leavenworth??
      • Now we learn how his dad died.
        • Visiting his mom’s funeral un-invited and being the belligerent asshole he was, he got into it with a security and caught a bullet.

    Almost to the end of the saga, only two more spoiler alerts! 🙂

    Security guys are still guarding John Lithgow at Living Robotics.
    Accountant attacks, because he never got to “finish the job”.

    • It’s a big bloody mess. Chris even gets shot in the leg.
    • He shoots John Lithgow, who surely deserved it!
    • The head bad guy is watching on video monitors, where he figures out that the Accountant is his brother Chris!!!!
    • … which would make him Braxton!

    All through all the flashback scenes of young Christian Wolff, his younger brother was always sitting on the sofa just watching it all and taking it all in.

    A perceptive watcher may have wondered why that brother sitting there didn’t fit into the plot at all! But not we know it was all to set up this surprise at the end!

    Now all is revealed!

    • Chris was a successful accountant/assassin.
    • Braxton was running a large-scale security company.

    So their dad managed to raise two high-functioning sociopaths, not just one!

    Only one is autistic, but they both have hearts of gold and good value systems so we’re supposed to think they are OK. meh…

    They have a lovely reunion. Lithgow is still around for the start of it, and makes the fatal mistake of barging in on them to bitch out Chris for messing up is extremely important (and lucrative) stock debut. Lithgow foolishly admits off-handedly that he still might kill Dana/Anna so Chris offhandedly plugs him in the forehead, and that is that!

    The brothers go their separate ways.

    Two more little surprises at the very, very end!

    1. Back at the Institute wher it all started, we find that the autistoc girl who befriended Chris at the first of the book is his sexy voice!
    2. We DO see Anna Kendrick one more time.
      1. She gets a package which turns out to be the original Pollack.
      2. I was very moved by this!

    The music at the as Chris is driving his Airstream across a lake to parts unknown was very moving!

    is

  • Canyonlands puzzle

    Canyonlands puzzle

    If you’re been paying attention to my puzzle saga, the Edward Gorey puzzle was the last one in my large collection of puzzles!

    Well, I finished ole Edward Gorely last week, and now I’m hankering to start a new puzzle.

    I did NOT go out and buy a new puzzle, so that means I looking into my stacks for a previously done puzzle!

    this one is the first one I have chosen to re-do since I moved to Cogir.!

    The one I chose is the top one in the left-hand column of boxes in the picture above. Maybe the fact that it was at the top of the stack influienced my decision… who’s to say 🙂 When I am finished, I will clear out a corner of my other closet and place this box there and start the stack of puzzles of I’ve re-done!

    This Puzzle

    My last few puzzles have been classic rectangular grid puzzles. Those puzzles don’t say “about 1000 pieces“, they are exactly 1000 pieces, because they are 25 rows of pieces, with 80 pieces in each row, and that is 25*80 = 1000!!

    This one is billed as “over 500 pieces”. The pieces are NOT on a grid, rather they are all kinds of goofy shapes, which makes it more fun in come ways.

    I found it online, at the Canyonlands Natural History Association website!

    I love the colors and the visually interesting composition:

    • The brightest area is usually the sky at the top or the water at the bottom, but here is is the patch of sky in the middle, peeking out from under the incredible natural arch.
    • The red sandstone on the underside of the arch is sheltered and relatively smooth, and it veritably glows in the direct sunlight!
    • The camera is in the shade of the arch, so we get just a stunning interplay of light and colors.

    I’ve finished all the colorful parts.

    What I am loving the most right now is just the irregularly shaped pieces. They really do make for a more interesting puzzle experience than the usual rectangular grid!

    Gettin there!

    So all these gray and brown pieces are really pretty hard to put together, but today right before lunch I had a little breakthrough: I noticed that the little bits of cliff side in the left half-middle are distinct because there’s bit f sagebrush visible.

    That somehow made it possible to fill the whole left middle of the puzzle.
    I was quite pleased!

    The rest of this puzzle sure is going slow!

    It took about five days to finish off the last bits of the puzzle pictured above. But finish it I did earlier tonight! 🙂

    Now I get to pick another out of my pile!

  • Bullitt (1968)

    Bullitt (1968)

    This was the Saturday night Feature movie for Steve McQueen Week on TCM.

    I’m really diggin it!

    It came out in 1968, when I was a sophomore in college. So I either saw it in the theater in Cambridge, or in Louisville in the summer.

    But I am quite sure I did see it when it came out! I had to see that car chase, with McQueen in his souped-up Mustang airborne in the hilly streets of San Francisco!

    I loved the 60’s vibe. Bullitt’s girlfriend is Jaqueline Bisset, who is a quintessential 60’s hottie!

    Everybody takes cabs. Robert deNiro is a cab driver that appears early in the move.

    Everybody, even the police, are dependent on regular wall phones to stay in touch. It was normal to ask the cabbie to pull over at a bank of pay phones so you can make a call. Or when you go into a bar, tell the bartender you’re expecting a call …

    The City looks ravishing all through the movie.

    Bullitt has the quintessential City flat. On the side of a steep street with steep parking. Up one flight of stairs just to get to the front door, then you get in the door, another flight of stairs to get to the actual flat. In a very cool San Francisco touch, there was a handle at the top of the second stairs to open the front door without walking down the stairs!

    A priceless scene. there Bullitt anxeht other cops are gathered around the telecopier. They have dialed up the Chicago PD, the device is making modem noises, then the printing drum starts whirling and three minutes later we have grainy black and white image of the guy they thought they were protecting (who is noT the dead guy!).!!

    The Story

    Bullitt and a couple of other cops are assigned to babysit a witness over the weekend.

    The federal prosecutor in charge is Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) a consistently nasty human being throighout the movie.

    the Wiki page had this delightful tidbit:

    Decades later, when Vaughn considered entering politics, he discovered that people could not take him seriously, or found him untrustworthy, as they remembered his performance in this film.

    The flat where the’ve stashed the witness isn’t nearly as nice as Bullitt’s. The view out the window is of the elevated freeway. Ugh.

    They get visitors while they’re guarding the witness. He actually un-chained the door, to let them in, but then they shot him! So he thought something else was happening!

    They shot the cop in the leg, which was nice of them. Blasted the witness with a shotgun point-blank but doesn’t kill him immediately.

    Bullitt is wandering around the hospital just staring at patients in their beds. They don’t let you do that any more!

    Witness dies in the operation room, but Bullit tries to hide it so he can keep investigation.

    The car chase was still epic, but it no longer feels super-cool like it did back in the 60’s.
    In fact it was kinda dumb to my 2026 eyes!

    After the car chase

    The bad guys crashed into an oil tank and got dead. Bullitt was able to pull into a controlled spin and walk away, but his hot Mustang is out of comisssion for the rest of the movie.

    So the next day to to go work, he gets a ride in Jaqueline Bisset’s very stylish Porsche. Which is just what a 60’s hottie like her should have!

    This is a really dumb set-up.. It happened as follows:

    • Back when dead guy was riding in the cab with Robert deNiro, he called a number in San Mateo.
    • It was the number of a young woman it turns out.
    • Bullitt’s boss is giving him all day Sunday follow leads and play out his hand before he turns it all over to Vaughn on Monday
    • So Sunday afternoon he needs to go to San Mateo to talk to this woman.
    • The SFPD is fresh out of cars for him to check out.
      • Really? The SFPD motor pool is fresh out of vehicles??
      • So he gets his girlfriend to drive him.
    • This is how we get spend a few minutes with Jaqueline Bisset and her sweet little Porsche.
    • When they get to the hotel, the woman he wanted to see has been murdered in her room.
    • Bissett sees it, and boy does it turn her world upside down.
    • Her and Stever McQueen have perhaps the dumbest conversation in the history of movies along the lines of:
      • “I thought I know you, but I have no idea who you are now”
    • Spoiler alert, at the end of the movie Bullitt gets home and she asleep is in his bed, so I guess she shook it off. 🙂

    Nailing the real gangster

    Long story short, the dead lady and the dead guy from the start were an innocent husband and wife just trying to make a buck by him impersonating the actual gangster.

    They had flights booked to Rome after all this was over. With the guy dead, the real ganster tried to use that ticket to escape the country.

    It doesn’t quite work out. When Bullit finally runs him down, he shoots a security guard and Bullit shoots him, and that’s pretty much the end of the movie.

    The OTHER super-dumb thing: The bad guy had gone through airport security and was sitting in his seat to fly to London, yet after Bullet made him force the escape hatch and take off running he had his gun with him.

    I know rules were different back in the 60’s, but STILL …, I don’t think you could hop on an international flight from SFO to London with your loaded revolver in your holster!

  • The Big Heat (1953)

    The Big Heat (1953)

    This was a fun movie that popped up on TCM this evening on Glenn Ford Night.

    Watching the news has been particularly depressing lately, so I decided to spend this evening watching a Glenn Ford movie instead of being bummed out by another evening of Trumpian noise. I couldn’t be happier with how that decision worked out.

    This is a Fritz Lang movie. The stars are:

    Glenn Ford is a city police homicide detective whose is married to Jocelyn Brando.

    I had NOT heard of Jocelyn Brando before. She’s Marlon Brando’s sister, and she was very cute and appealing in this movie … until she got blown up.
    I barely got to know her, then BOOM!, she’s gone!

    The movie opens with another police officer killing himself. He had written a long letter. His wife does something with the letter. Then she calls the police but doesn’t mention the letter.

    Glenn Ford investigates, and things get very complicated quickly.

    Glenn Ford is having a lovely night at home with his lovely wife and their cute daughter. He and his wife drink a lot! He gets the call about the suicide. He’s gotta leave his cute wife to investigate.

    The wife of the dead guy has a mysterious call with the head gangster. She wants him to know about that letter, which we come to discover is her insurance policy to stay alive, and to get paid by the bad guys.

    She tells makes up some nonsense to tell Glenn Ford her husband was depressed about health problems.

    Later Ford runs down the dead guy’s girfriend at the bar. She says he did not have health issues, and that he was planning to divorce his wife!

    Turns out the town is corrupt through and through, even the Police Chief tells Ford to lay off. Ford won’t lay off, and he eventually pisses off the crime boss bad enough that he has his stooge wire Ford’s car with a bomb.

    At the last minute, his wife hopped in the car to get the babysitter, so she got blown up instead of him. No more Jocelyn Brando!

    Now Ford’s REALLY mad! He follows a lead to the bar where all the gangsters hang out, and makes Gloria Grahame kinda like him a little bit. This pisses off Lee Marvin, who scars her for life by thowing steaming hot coffee in her face.

    Now Gloria Grahame is really mad too, and she decided to eff up as many bad guys as she can on her way out!

    She goes to the house of the widow of the corrupt cop from the intro and shoots her dead! Recall that she had set it up so that dead husband’s incrimination letter would be released if she dies!

    Grahame then goes to her old boyfreind Lee Marvin’s apartment and throws steaming hot coffee in HIS face and shoots him. She doesn’t quite kill him. Which means we get to enjoy him writhing in pain about steaming hot coffee in HIS face! We don’t get to enjoy that beautiful retribution for long before Glenn Ford comes and shoots him really dead.

    Gloria Grahame dies of her gun shot wounds, tidies everything up. We all had come to quit like her, but it wouldn’t have been in the style of these movies to have her hanging around as a cripple, so she had to die.

    And that’s pretty much the movie!

  • Hallmarked Man (2025) Galbraith

    Hallmarked Man (2025) Galbraith

    It comes back to me now that Galbraith writes BIG books!

    This is a LARGE TYPE book, which makes it be even more huge!

    The upside is that even though there are a LOT of pages (1,422 to be precise!) the large type makes each page go very quickly. I wasn’t even trying very hard at dinner and I knocked off 90 pages!

    • I didn’t like the first part of the book very much.
      • I thought about giving it up and moving on to another less massive book that I could carry in one hand 🙂
    • 8/8 – But somewhere around page 100 (less than 1/14th of the way through :)) it got interesting and engaging to me, so now I think I’m here for the long haul.
    • Galbraith/Rowling really IS a good storyteller.
      • She creates interesting characters with charming accents.
      • She’s highly attuned to English class distinctions, particularly among the inbred mostly useless upper classes.
      • She delights little snapshot conversations where one of the principles talks to one of these walk-on characters for 8 or 10 pages.
        • We may never see that character again but those few pages are often very entertaining.
    • 8/17 – p 672 – I have read a lot of pages, but by my math I am STILL not half way through the book!
    • 8/19 – p 728 – Finally half way through!!
      • Both our heroes are making each other miserable right now, but we have 700 pages to fix that!
    • 8/20 – p 817 – Now that I’ve made it past the half-way mark, the pages are just flying by! 🙂
    • 8/24 – p 1024 – Woo!, I’ve made it to the thousands!
      • Our heroes seem to making progress on their relationship!
      • Now I worry that it’s happening too soon in the book!
        There’s 400 pages left for things get better then mess up again! 🙂
    • 8/27 – Skulking my way through the 1100’s.
      Still don’t know who is the dead person from page 3, but we’ve got new boatloads of personal drama for both Robin and Strike! 🙂
    • 8/31 – I made it!! 1422 pages!
      • I finished the murder mystery part over lunch today. A lot of action, I was pretty jacked-up by the time I finished!
    • Epilogues are usually 3-4 pages, right?
      As befits a 1400 page book, the this epilogue was 42 pages.
      A lot of loose ends DID get tidied up:
      • The personal issue that their client Decima hired them for in the first place did not work out the way she wanted it to, but it actually worked out better! {As they try to convince her in the Epilogue.)
      • The long running romantic tension between our hero detectives also got semi-resolved [FINALLY!] in the last 4 pages!
        • That should make us all tune in to the next installment.
      • I 100% enjoyed the book!
        I found it deeply satisifying, and don’t tell anybody, but I cried my brains out while reading it last part of the Epilogue this afternoon! 🙂

    I (re?)-learned that Robert Galbraith is actually a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame!!!
    The whole book makes more sense (to me) knowing this!
    As I say a few times below, all those 800 pages of romance MUST have been written by a lady not a fellow. 🙂

    A little background

    The main characters in all these books are:

    Cormoran Strike

    I picture him as a big, shambling hulk of a man.

    • He runs a detective agency.
    • He fought in Afghanistan, and lost the bottom half of his right leg there. He has a lot of discomfort and recurring pain from it.
    • He doesn’t sound attractive to me, but the ladies in these books go crazy for him!
    • His parents are famous.
      Daddy was a famous rock star.
    • Mom was the famous hot wife of a rock star.
      • He seems to have existed at the edges of the “rich and famous” set his whole life.
      • England is a small island, and all the beautiful people in that set know each other and see each other at the same parties, and know the deep dirt on each other.
        It seems exhausting.
    • Day to day, he’s just a regular guy (almost aggressively so), but his being a part of the beautiful people set by birth is pretty off-putting for me.

    There’s kind of a star-f**ker vibe to these Strike books where half the people they interview are either famous or related to someone famous, and famous fictional people are always buzzing in and out of the story. It’s not my favorite thing about the stories.

    Now that I know that the author is really JK Rowling, this all a little less off-putting.

    Robin Ellacott

    His partner at the detective agency.
    She’s very pretty and smart and courageous and resourceful of course.

    • Evidently in the last book she went undercover at some kind of religious sex cult, which was very intense and stressful for her. [Remind me not to read that book!]. She’s still recovering and is a little fragile.
    • Robin was married then divorced a few books back.
    • She was raped in college.
      We’re hearing this about a lot in this book because it “messed up :her fallopian tubes” so she can’t have kids in the normal way.
      • Not wanting to discuss this with her boyfriend is one more element in the relationship strees that is an on-going theme of this book.
    • She starts this book with a serious boyfriend, a “Paul Newman lookalike” London detective. He doesn’t like her having the job she has, and he doesn’t like Strike.
      • The fact that her work is the most important thing in her life, and he wants her to give it up and have his kids is the unresolved issue of about 600 of these pages!

    More background

    At the start of this book they both have been dating other very attractive people and both secretly wishing they were dating each other.

    They are each afraid to make a move on the other because it would be unprofessional and therefore if it went wrong it would blow up the partnership which they both value extremely.

    • They’ve both had a LOT drama in previous relationships.
      • Especially Strike who seems to have been some kind of serial fornicator with the good-looking ladies of the chic set!
      • His long time girlfriend Charlotte committed suicide in a messy way!

    Robin is in a pretty serious relationship with a regular cop (Murphy). They are serious enough that they spend weekends together looking at houses. She goes along, but it secretly terrifies her! 🙂

    Strike is not dating anybody, although he is incessantly being hit upon because he is evidently such an irresistible hunk..

    They’ve hired a new contractor (Kim), former policeman who keeps trying to create siturations where Strike looks at her boobs and stupid stuff like that. Surprise, it’s hate at first sight for her and Robin and she doesn’t last.

    Have NOT seen the TV series!

    The internet tells me that there IS a seven-part Cormoran Strike series released in 2017, but it doesn’t seem to be available on my services.

    I’m actually pretty happy about that right now, because it allows me to enjoy the books the way we used to in the old days!
    You just read the damn book and use your imagination to picture what the characters look like!

    For instance I have a pretty clear mental image about what Strike looks like, but almost none for Robin.
    Calm+businesslike AND very attractive+sexy is just a hard one for me to process. Once I see the TV show I won’t have to wonder anymore, I’ll know! Which is kind of a loss for me!

    Finally, the book!

    The book opens with Cormoran visiting a potential client.
    She is a strange woman obsessed with secrecy.
    She doesn’t dress it or act like it, but she’s pretty wealthy.
    She is part of a famous family and has famous friends.

    This is where I almost gave up on the book, because I am SO NOT into that star-fucker stuff!

    Then the Freemasons entered the frame and I’m hooked! 🙂

    Galbraith starts each chapter of the book with a quote. After a couple of chapters, these started being Freemason quotes, about the quality of a man who would be a Freemason and such.

    It all sort of fits, because what the reclusive lady has hired Strike for is to prove that a dead body from a silver heist is NOT who the police say it is.

    Freemasons are really into silver turns out!

    • A company called Ramsay Silver hired a guy called William Wright.
    • Two weeks later he was found mutilated and very dead in their vault, which had been emptied of the valuable cache of Freemason silver that had been delivered there on Friday.
    • There were Freemason symbols in his mutilations, and the silver that was stolen was an extremely valuable (and heavy!) Freemason altar.

    The client is sure that the dead guy is not who the police think it is, rather it’s her boyfriend who disappeared around the same time.

    She’s got no support from his rich mom, who says he’s alive and well in Europe, but there’s no evidence of that, and she’s got the money to hire Strike to prove otherwise, so she does!

    The investigation

    Robin talks to the lady from Ramsay Silver who was there.

    They each get occasional phone threats and warnings, and Robin had a really worrisome event where some creeper came up behind her and whispered in her ear. Yuck!

    They’re pissing somebody off.

    I’m about a third of the way through this very thick book, and I don’t know what to say about it. It’s quite interesting page by page, and our heroes are finding stuff out, but there are no big reveals to report yet.

    At least half of all these pages are about the interior lives of Robin and Cormoran.

    In this part of the book it’s Robin and her handsome boyfriend. The are shopping for houses together. He’s very enthusiastic about getting the house and getting married … her not so much.

    We can see that she’s just not ready to marry to the guy. If she could just tell him then they could do other things on the weekend instead of look at houses they’ll never buy. But that’s not how folks do it in real life…

    Strike is acting even more of a mess about this.
    He spends endless time trying to set up a situation where they will together along on a quiet place for an extended time where he can declare his love and lay it all out in a top-down, orderly way as we guys like to do! 🙂

    Surprise! The right moment never happens and in fact their personal relationship steadily deteriorates over the next 500 pages.

    Now that I know a woman is writing this, I don’t see how it could be any other way! 🙂

    They spend so mych time thinking about their feelings for each others!

    This is SUCH a big book! I am somewhere around page 440, and NOT QUITE 1/3of the way through!

    Always a lot of stress at Christmas!

    late 400’s – It’s Christmas. They’re both off to visit their families. Both are really stressed by work and the fact that they are secretly hot for each other.
    But of course, families have their own set of stresses.

    Strike has a particularly unsatifactory visit to the family.

    I have trouble being sympathetic with Strike. The notion of every woman who meets you thinking about going to bed with you is utterly foreign to the life I’ve led.

    The related fact that there is a long list of women he met semi-casually and went to bed with “a couple of times” is also foreign to me. Maybe I’m just jealous, but I just “can’t relate” as the cliche goes. 🙂

    Robin get into a HUGE row with her mom. Everyone is pretty intense.

    p500 – They all – her and her brothers and their women – head to their local to get roaring drunk. That always helps family problems!

    She runs into her ex-husband Matthew, who is NOT married to the woman that broke up their marriage. This makes her get even more drunk.

    Her boyfriend Murphy has tagged along with her to visit her family. That h is doing that instead of visiting his family a pretty big sign of how “serious” the relationship officially is!

    p 507 Back to Strike …
    He’s going to a Christmas Party at his sister Lucy’s house. He shows up as late as possible. She’s really nice, and loves Strike.
    Her husband Greg however is a really asshole and never passes a chance to slag on Strike.

    p 519 Back to Robin …
    Apparently a family tradition is that they all go to the Bay Horse Pub after Christmas dinner.

    Finally it’s closing time at the Bay Horse.
    That lovely timeof night where everyone is bickering and crabbing at each other.

    Murphy is crabby, because he misunderstood a text to Robin from Strike.
    He’s VERY touchy about anything Strike-related.

    Her older brother Stephen seems a cool guy.

    She opens Strike’s Christmas present, which is a very touching silver charm bracelet.

    She’s going to spend the next 300 pages mostly pissed off at him, but on this night , when he is far away she is deeply moved!

    The New Year

    p 531 Everyone is home from Christmas and back to work!

    Robin is thinking a LOT about the bracelet Strike got her!

    • Suddenly there are porn stars in the story.
      • Porn has crept into the edges of the investigation
      • A fellow named Dick de Lion hasn’t been seen lately, and may be the body in the vault that started it all!
    • There is a another dead girl
      • A young woman named Sofia Medina
      • her roommate was a German girl named Gretchen.
      • p 564 Robin meets Gretchen
        • There’s over 10 pages of back and forth.
        • Thegood part is a rich, married guy that dated Sofia.
          He gave her expensive presents.
        • Sofia being murdered was traumatic, but what has Gretchen really upset is that they got drunk together and took sex pictures with her.
        • His name is …
    • Calvin Osgood – Sofia’s rich guy that dated the dead girl and has sex pictures of Gretchen.

    interlude

    I am page 600-something, and I am StILL not half way throiugh.

    I’m not really complaining.

    • I’m totally into the murder mystery.
    • I’m sort of invested in Robin’s travails with the hunky police detective, mostly because I’m rooting for her to break up.
    • I’m sort of invested in Strike’s long-running romantic soap opera.
      • It’s becoming more of a soap opera with hevery page!

    Given how many things have happened in the first 620 pages, it boggles the mind to think what will happen in the remaining 800!

    I amused myself in bed last night makiing a litle wager with myself about whether at the end of this book, Robin and Strike will get. it together and be ahip.n official committed relations.

    I think not.
    Long-range plot arc planner extraordinaire JK Rowling won’t let that happen.
    It’s just too easy, better to set it up as a teaser for the next book.

    More drama and a little moralizing from me

    p 587 The new hire Kim comes up with crime scene photos of the disgustingly mutilated copse that started this all.

    • We STILL do not know his identity!

    Strike gets a call saying that Bijou Watkins is telling everyone that he got her preggo back when they spent a couple nights together.

    I’m one those simple folk who tend to identify with the hero! There have been many times in the 800 pages (so far) of this book where I’m not identifying with Strike at all. Right now, when he is dealing with the collateral damage of randomly fucking a drunk and not too bright but exremely hot woman is one of those times.

    Just because you can get away with it doesn’t mean you should.

    Back to the story — so much happening …

    • p 605 Together they met up with their client Decima.
      It would be easier for Robin’s relationship with the cop of they dropped the case, but Strike wants to keep at it.
    • p 623 Bijou calls. Paternity tests were discussed.
    • 642 Their contractor Barclay had a Saturday night job to tail Plug, who’s not really part of the story …
      • What DOES affect the story is that Barclay gets food poisoning.
        • Strike has to change his plans and do the gig.
      • This simple event reverberates over the next 3-400 pages
        • He’s on the job so he’s got his phone off.
        • Robin can’t get in touch, and in their current state of mistrust she is 100% sure he’s disappeared on Saturday night to shag Bijou again.
      • They are both at acting too juvenile to have a normal adult conversation that would clear that up in a minute.
        • Just like real life, huh!? 🙂
      • She’s pissed at him for being the “thinking with his dick” kind of guy he often is … but ironically this time he wasn’t!
      • She cancels the Lake District junket with a mean email to him.
      • Strike can’t figure out why she’s so mean because …
        • He thinks she doesn’t know about the Bijou Watkins mess.
        • He doesn know that she thinks he was shagging Watkins on Saturday.
      • It’s a proper mess as they would say. 🙂

    661 Strike is vilely hung over and throwing up on the train that was supposed to take he and Robin to the love nest that he reserved in happier days before it all went to crap spectacularly.

    He runs into a friendly journalist who drops a little Masonic gossip about Lord Oliver Branfoot, who may turn out to be a big deal!

    672 Robin interviews a random teenage girl named Tia that turned out to be really charming!

    I’m beginning to see why Rowling needs so many pages.
    I would love to see her storyboard where she maps out the coincidences that made for such a disastrous weekend.

    P 700’s Robin is shadowing a creepy photoshoot guy.

    • Her boyfriend calls and bitches her out because there’s a leak in his case that was Kim’s fault!
    • Her niece has a premature delivery and the baby isn’t right, so her whole extended family is freaking out.
    • The guy she’s tracking is a real shit.
      • He tells her lies about Strike and his girlfriend that committed suicide.
      • He’s part of the evidently endless extended circle of everyone who knows everyone in the British “beautiful people” class.
      • They have a degrading pet nickname for Robin which he tells her.
      • Her stalker comes up afterwards.
        He doesn’t hurt her, but does scare the sh-t out of her.

    Cormoran is having a equally awful time but in very different ways.

    • He may be a baby daddy
      • Bijou has a charming habit is saving discarded condoms so she can use them to confuse paternity tests.
    • He slipped in the wet grass following his interview and face-planted.
      • He got super muddy and hurt his leg. It was painful and embarrassing and made him even crabbier.
    • He thinks Robin hates him, and at that very moment he’s kinda right!

    They meet at a a pub to exchange notes, and it goes badly.

    They’re both in terrible moods, and both did NOT to their usual thorough job on their work because they are so distracted by EVERYTHING … and neither one of them would share what was really bothering them.

    I’m beginning to see why Rowling feels like she needs 1400 pages to tell this story!

    She loves doing goofy British accents and describing odd little corners of the island.

    Our heros are working together …

    Both are still really about their internal dramas, and so not inclined to communicate with each other in a way that will improve understanding!
    It’s so much like real life that I find it quite excruciating toread about.

    There’s this character called Tyler.
    I’m nearly to page 800 and I don’t remember how they introduced him to the story, but he is a good candidate to be the person who was dead and mutilated in the first chapter oh so many pages ago!.

    The story of how Tyler got his life ruined in his home town was classic Rowling.
    A GOOD thing! 🙂

    742 The pair of them (Robin and Strike) are in Ironbridge, picturesque town on the Severn River where Tyler grew up.
    The old lady (Tyler’s mom) they want to interview is way up on a very steep street.

    [Nice descriptive detail:
    Houses on both sides face the river, so the houses on the left have their backs to you.]

    • They are both in terrible moods, but Strike has the additional drag that he hurt his leg at the last interview, and he’s too stubborn and pissed at Robin to tell her he’s in pain or to ask for help.
    • She’s too pissed off to help anyway! 🙂
    • 744 The old lady is not home.
      • They’re peering in the windows.
      • The guy across the street (sporting a Steely Dan t shirt 🙂 comes over.
      • He is extremely belligerent in his north England dialect about
        “What do you outsiders want?!”
    • After they get him quieted down, he turns out to be really nice!
    • He invites them over to his place to wait for the old lady to return.
    • Strike lets Robin do the interview since even he knows he’s a cranky, uncomfortable asshole right now.
    • His name is Ian Griffiths.
      Save that in your memory bank for later! I .didn’t even include his name first time around, but came back an added it to mark the first time he’s introduced into the story!
    • Since they are just killing time, Robin ask this guy why Tyler has such a bad reputation in his old neighborhood.
      This part is classic Rowling commentary on the politics of class in Britian, and kind of a Roshomon moment:
      This is one nice neighbor’s take. Local girls they interview later have takes that are pretty much opposite!
      • Tyler was a nice teenager working as a mechanic at the auto shop.
        He wasn’t too bright, and if you were nice to him he thought that ment you were into him.
      • He had a cute local girlfriend he thought he was gonna marry.
        She did NOT think that!
      • Then, rich, fancy city people moved into the big house at the top of the hill.
        True.
      • Everybody adored new people because they were rich and fancy and the locals were not.
        True.
      • 752 Big concert in another town, they all want to go,
        • Rich kid’s “couldn’t get a lend of Daddy’s Range Rover“., so he asks of Tyler would drive. Tyler got sick but let the rich kid use HIS car an drive it to the show.
          The rich kid is dating his former girlfriend of course.
        • The rich kid crashed the car and he and the girl were killed.
        • Simple local tragedy so far, but then the rich family starts putting it out that Tyler tampered with the car, because their perfect boy wouldn’t have just fucked up like that on his own.
    • So there it all is, rich people being jerks to the simple folks

    Legal aside:

    p 790 – Turns out pepper spray is illegal in England! I know this because Robin is “weeping” this morning because she rubbed it while she was making a home-made batch (chilies, cayenne, garlic and vinegar) in case the creepy guy attacks again. It would be illegal even to be found carrying it.

    [Checkov’s gun alert! If it’s introduced in the story, it’s going to matter later! :)]

    Back to the story:

    Robin and Barclay are out today surveilling a woman named Fiona, who’s in the sex trade and has a big, mean boyfriend. The reason Barclay is here is to look out for him returning while he does the interview.

    792 Robin learns about the bad prawn incident!
    She is processing the info that Strilke was working Saturday night, not shtupping Bijou Watkins again!

    796 Fiona tells Robin that Dick (real name Danny) de Lion is from some place with no cars. There’s a rich guy in the background that has paid all of them for sex (boys AND girls!).

    He also paid for Danny’s new teeth! Danny threatened him somehow and now fears for his life and has disappeared.

    816 They are still surveilling this awful guy Plug. His son was bitten by a dog. Now they think Plug’s into dog fighting.

    • There’s a lot of pages on Strike having to get a paternity test for Bijou.
    • There are even more pages of Robin an her cop boyfriend shopping for a house.
      • The on-going fact that she and Strike are working on a case that had been officially closed by the police is a sore subject between them.

    824 Robin gets a whatsapp from the daughter of Steely Dan guy.
    He loved Tyler, but he daughter says he’s a creep! See my italic comments above 🙂

    833 An Army buddy gets Strike a tour of the Freemason Hall.

    844 Finally, a good set up fpr our heroes to make up!!

    Robin is surveilling someone they call Mrs Two-Times. (They’ve nicknamed her husband Two-Times, since he’s always two-timing his wife! 🙂

    Robin is surveilling the wife tonight at a nice restaurant.
    Midge is supposed to join her, since two women chatting is a LOT less noticeable than one woman alone. Bur Midge has to bail for some reason. Strike seizes the opportunity and shows up for quality time with Robin!

    845 So there they are, having a nice quiet dinner at a nice restaurant, with nothing better to do thatn maybe figure out their issues a little bit!

    I guess I’m pretty invested in these characters and this book, because this fictional even made my whole evening a lot nicer!!

    They do a lot of catching up. But book ought to come with a storyboard, si you can keep track ofall the minor characters that come and go, then come back again 200 pages later …

    856 As of this page in the book, Robin and Murphy are still house shopping, and in fact have an offer in on one they like. So even though it’s a nice dinner, Strike’s big picture hopes are dashed yet again! sigh…

    860 Strike does the paternity test.

    864 Robin is trying to track down Cosima, one of the beautiful people. She has a pretty intense phone interview with Zeta a girl from Tyler’s home town.
    It’s all about crappy men can be to women where they think they can.

    867 Robin unleashes this great zinger:

    Robin was sick of bullying, callous, deviant men … (but she had to show her boyfriend a cheerful face when he got to the pub…)

    Hard to imagine a dude writing that sentence.

    • 870 Robin has a lengthy chapter of drama with Murphy about houses and babies.
    • Strike is trying to run town Todd the security guard at the Silver shop.
    • 893 Strike gets the phone call he’s been hoping for telling him that he’s NOT a dad!!
    • 905 They have tailed Pug into the countryside around Ipswich, to a big time dog fight!
      • 909 Strike actually goes into the arena to get video.
      • Towards the end he gets spotted.
      • A big scary dog is sicc’ed on him!
      • It’s going to get really mess, but Robin saves him with her homemade pepper spray [Checkhov’s gun comes through!]

    New Chapter

    • 917 They’ve determined that the place where Danny) de Lion grew up with no cars is the island of Sark.
      • It’s British but closer to France.
      • They’ve booked a flight together(!) in a few days.
    • Robin and Murphy have a few more pages wrangling about houses and babies.
    • 924 She has a little cat fight with Kim, who really has it in for her.

    Sark

    • 929 Finally flying to Sark!
      • Actually, they fly to Guernsey, then take a ferry to Sark. Ten pages of catching up on the plane.
    • 938 Arrive Guernsey, take taxi to town of St Peter Port, for the ferry to Sark.
    • 941 45 minutes later the are on Sark, where they will have to walk wherever they want to go. A tractor takes them and the other visitors to their rentals.
    • 942 The walk to de Leon’s house, and meet Danny’s short but thick and mean brother Richard, who is brandish a piece of firewood as he approaches.
    • 950 They putter about the island for a fwe pages..
    • 956 They find Danny gardening up the hill, and he clocks Strike in the face with hiw shovel!

    Then they have the now-familiar scrum where they convince him they aren’t the law or the bad guys. Robin tackles him!

    [IMO, this is another sign that the author is a woman:
    the female protagonist gets todo a lot of the “heavy lifting”    .]

    Oliver Branfoot

    960 It’s FINALLY becoming clear that this rich guy names Oliver Branfoot is the force behind a lot of the bad things in this book.

    • He’s the sugar daddy that took sex pics of Sofia Medina and her friend, and who probaby who had Sofia killed.
    • He paid for Danny’s teeth.
    • He thought that the body in the vault was Danny. I think he still does!
    • That’s what put Danny in danger.
    • 971 He has agreed to talk to Robin.

    She is cooking dinner for Strike

    They have coffee. She gets dinner to cook at their lodge.

    Like all the men in this book, I’m starting to love her too.
    Fixing food will do it for me every time! 🙂

    • 979 She’s cooking, keeps gettin texts from Murphy.
    • 984 She can’t stop crying, and has to tell Strike that she lost a baby.
    • 990-998 Working over the list of suspects by the fireplace.
    • Sounds pretty sweet!

    page 1000!! Back in London.

    • 1001 Kim is supposed to watching Mrs Two-times, but she’s gonna be late, so Strike show’s up.
    • 1007 Kim finally shows up, she’s been beat up by her old boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It’s a complicated world out there!
    • 1012 She starts making a pass at him, and he shut’s it down pretty brutally.
      • “We’re not going to fuck … ever!”
      • She quites the next day.
    • 1013 Robin’s staying at Murphy’s place. She gets Wynn Jones for a phone interview, and surprise he is exactly the juvenile slime bag we thought.
    • 1026 They banter until he says she’s got to show him her tits to get more informatin. That’s the end of that conversation.
    • 1029 Murphy comes back from the gym and she finds a Vodka bottle in his gymbag.
    • 1035 He comes back happy and carefree from picking up for him and Robin to find his whole life turned upside down by the vodka bottle discovery.
    • 1038 Robin has backed her bag and moves out.

    Brian Judge -> Barnaby’s

    • 1030 Strike tails the disgusting Plug, to a place outside a junkyard
      called Brian Judge Scrap.
    • It’s the middle of the night, and while he’s waiting for Plug, a familiar looking man pulled up in a rusted van. He drives in inside and leaves it. He walks back out and gets in a car and drives away.
    • 1039 We’ve progressed from late night to very early morning.
      • Strike has it in his head to run down the “last known address ” of Todd’s mother.
    • He does find it.
      • It’s a disgusting place.
      • Nobody answers his knock.
      • He’s negotiating woth some street kids to not mess with his BMW, then decides to use his skelton keys to peek into her house “to make sure she’s all right”.
    • 1043. Well, whatd’ya know, … the bodies of Jim Todd and his mother are lying in the living room in an advanced state of decay! Yuck
    • Good citizen that he is, Strike waits for the police..
    • The next few pages are his interview with Scotland Yard.
      • They are a perfect little gem of Rowling dialog!
    • 1053 There are two cops:
      • A white man around 50, cheap clothes and overwhelming body odor.
        • He’s investigating Sofia Medina.
      • a mid-30’s woman with red hair. A large mole on her cheek, gaps in her teeth, but good complexion and attractive green eyes.
        • Turns out she is the informant Murphy has had for the whole book (Iverson).
          • He may have shagged her back in the day.
        • She’s investigating the “silver vault murder”
    • 1058 They do a lot of sparring. They even mention Murphy.
    • 1065 Everyone is eventually tires of the game.
    • 1066 The police don’t charging him or keeping overnight.
      • In return Strike tells them that the mysterious Barnaby’s is the junkyard he visited tonight!
    • 1070 Robin/Murphy drama
    • 1073 She meets Strike at a cafe. They are both kind of a mess:
      • He’s still awake from being with the police.
      • She can’t sleep for all the relationship drama.
    • 1074 Strike reports on his busy night.
    • 1077 She tells him Murphy’s having a hard time.
    • He tells her Kim quit. They’re both kinda relieved about it.

    Robin has quality time with Dino Longcaster

    • Robin STILL wants to talk to Cosima Longcaster about why Decima’s missing boyfreind Rupert was at the fancy party beforehe tisappeared.
    • 1091 She waylays her outside her dad’s fancy club, Dino’s.
    • 1093 That fails, but Cosima must of complained to her daddy, because he comes out and invites Robin inside!
    • It’s a strange interview.
      • 1095 He calls Rupert “the jellyfish”.
      • 1096 He orders Robin a Dubonnet and gin, “the Queen’s favorite” 🙂
      • He gives Robin fashion advice she didn’t ask for or want (but follows later)
      • He does bring Cosima in for the info Robin wanted.
      • 1098 He shows her an old family picture. She really does get a lot of good background on Decima’s wierd inbred family (not literally, I think 🙂

    Strike’s at the office

    • 1106 They both endup at th office late that night.
    • 1123 Weirdly, Mrs Two-Times comes to the office to hire Strike to investigate her hubby.
    • This is why I love this really long book!
      • She knows Strike’s firm been watching her for her husband, so she hires the firm to watch him for her also.
        • At the same time Can you do that?
      • They shake on it, and off she goes! 🙂
    • 1127 Strike learns Murphy’s off the wagon.
      • The new hire Wardle was on the police force at the start of this book, so !he knows all the current inside gossip, including that Murphy fell off the wagon!

    Bad day for Robin

    • Emergency call from her (still…) boyfriend to come over and meet his parents for the day.
      • 1138 Mom is nice enough, Dad is not very likeable.
      • The dudes watch football, Robin checks work phone, and mom knits.
      • 1143 She’s gettin stuff done on the phone. She’s pictures Chloe Griffith in Instagram.
    • 1147 Murphy yells at her for being on the phone while he was engrossed in a football game.
      • He’s showing a lot of dry drunk symptoms. :<
    • 1149 She searchs his room for vodka, but finds a wedding ring! EEEK!!

    Strike is off to the “West Country in his BMW”

    • 1152 Strike STILL can’t make himself come clean to Robin.
    • In his mind he’s SURE she has accepted Murphy’s proposal, and just ins’t telling him.
      • Could NOT be farther from the truth as we know!
      • He’s such a moron in this Robin stuff.
    • 1160 He’s found the place called the Golden Fleece, where Tyler might be working. It wasn’t Tyler, but he does get waylaid my an MI5 agent.
      • He’s an arrogant fuck, and he pisses Strike off (big mistake!)

    Robin visits Mr Whitehead, gets assaulted again

    • 1166 This is the dad of the boy that got killed in the car accident.
    • This turns out to be another Rashomon moment, because his version of events is quite different from the other two quite different versions we’ve heard.
      • 1169 He thinks the car WAS messed with, but it was Chloe Griffin who did it, NOT Tyler!
        • Didn’t see that coming!
      • 1172 He says Chloe made a creditable threat to kill Tyler and Ann-Marie … over something that sounds insignificant.
    • 1178 She thinking about all this instead of paying attentiion to her surroundings getting into her car, and her stalker gets her!!!!
    • He’s strangling her, but she does get her hands on her pepper spray and “neutralizes” him!
    • 1181 Strike has a phone call with Danny de Lion, to smear Branfoot before Branfoot has a chance to eff him up. Great advice, and he takes it this time!

    Strike is gonna get smeared by the gutter press, so much as he hates the idea, he has to visit his dad to get a good lawyer!
    (Spoiler alert: Dad seems like a nice guy, and Strike should lighten up on him.)

    • 1182 His press buddy tips him off, and it sounds bad!
    • 1185 He swallows his pride and visits his rock star father to get the help of his lawyer!
    • Jonny Rokeby was a big time rock star with his band the Dead Somethings. He treated Strike badly as child but wants to “know his son” in his old age.
    • I really like the guy from these few pages!
      • He’s on his best behavior of course, but he seems sincere and I think Strike should give him a chance!
    • 1186 Jonny does introduce him up to Denholm his fearsome lawyer.
      • Jonny want’s to pay for it, Strike categorically refuses.
      • 1189 They bicker about money for a while. Strike wants NONE of his money …
    • 1192 Jonny: “I behaved like a cunt, I’m fuckin admittin it, all right?“
    • 1193 He learns more that I need to know about how he was conceived!
    • 1196 Robin calls, she at the police tation about the attack.
    • 1198 Strike’s sister Pru thinks he’s in love with Robin and they should be together. (duh! …we readers say after 1200 pages. of this…)
    • At the front door Strike agrees to “have a beer” with Dad! Yay!
    • New Chapter
    • Robin’s at home still feeling beat up.
    • 1206 A lot of self-doubt about being the weak link, etc.
    • 1208 Strike is thinking about Robin.
      • He’s sure that’s she’s engaged but not telling him!.. (she’s not…)
      • His plan is to approach his next convo with her
        “with a tact for which he was not generally renowned.” 🙂
    • 1214 “You’re the best I’ve ever worke with, Ever!”
      Strike does manage to work that in!
    • 1215 “You didn’t want to lose me. I don’t want to lose you.”
    • Strikie tells her about visiting his dad and the lawyer stuff.

    Sir Oliver Branfooot

    • 1226 First surprise is that former employee Kim is at his side. It’s gonna be spicy!
    • 1227 A very entertaining chapter!
    • Very satisfying in that Strike comes out on top in the little pssing match that this whole expensive meal was.
    • 1230 Branfoot goes out of his way to be mean to Robin.
      • We can guess that Kim had a hand on that part.
    • 1233 Kim has blabbed everything abut their working for Decima.
    • 1236 She thinks she’s provided killer dirt on Strike and Robin
    • 1237 Finally Strike turns the tables.
    • Branfoot is the rich guy who turns people with sex, usually older dudes with too-young girls. He secretly films them.
    • 1239 Strike correctly figures he got Kim on this scam.
      • She knew the plan to seduce a fellow.
      • She didn’t know he would keep the film to used against her!
    • 1240 Strike drops the news that de Leon is alive and talking to the press!
    • 1241 Branfoot stalks out. Then Kim stalks out!
    • 1243 Robin really enjoyed it!

    Strike drives to Heberley

    Heberley is where Charlotte grew up, and still the home of her awful mother, Tara.

    • 1253 He gets in by impersonating a delivery guy.
    • 1254 He snoops while the maid is fetching Tara and sees the missing nef we’ve heard so much about in her dining room.
    • A nef is “extravagant table ornamental container made of precious metals in the shape of a ship” [wiki page]
    • That’s basically what he drove there to do, to confirm the presence of the nef.
      • They say horrible things to each other for few more pages, then he leaves.
    • Recall that all the way back at the start of the book, 1250 pages ago(!) Strike was hired by Decima Mullins? to prove that the motilated body in the silver shop safe was her boyfriend Rupert Fleetwood.
      • This nef was stolen around the time of the morder.
    • By finding the nef, Strike thinks he has proved the opposite, namely that Rupert Fleetwood is NOT the mutilated body, but is alive and well and hiding at a Clairmont Hotel somewhere in Europe!
    • 1264 He has a faairly short convo with Decima, reporting all this.
      • He says their contract with her has been satisfyied by proving that Rupert is alive, so he terminates it.
      • He basically wasn’t comfortable taking any more of her money.
      • Boom! After all these pages, it’s over.
    • 1265 He reports all this to Robin.
    • 1268 Robin is having trouble letting it all go.
    • 1271 She gets visited by her brother Martin who seems to me another of those handsome but weak and useless men that populate this book.
      (i.e. everyone but Strike 🙂
      • His wife kicked him out because he’s an asshole.
    • 1289 Robin gets a long late-night email from Chloe Griffiths
    • 1291 Strike is still looking for Rena. (I’ve forgotten who Rena is!)
    • 1299 There is a terrorist attack on Westmonister Bridge … in case everyone isn’t stressed enough…
    • 1306 Strike finally runs down a mentally ill Rena huddled under a bridge in Camden.
    • 1318 Robin gets in phone touch.
      • Strike has banashed her to working at home because the police released her attacker! 🙁
    • Midge finally intervierws Hussein Modammed, the fellow living in the same dump apartment bldg as Willian Wright.
      • Recall that this is hte name the dead guy was using when he was killed.
      • Willian Wright had “weights” in hos room with gold lettering on them.
        • Not sure why this is important, but everyone is pretty excited about it.

    I can’t quite remember how we got here, but Strike and Robin are convinced that Ian Griffiths is the chief thug that has done most or all of the murdering in this book.
    He and his crew of misfits have also done most of the sexual assaulting.

    • 1333 Robin and Midge are meeting for a job.
      • They are going to check the walls of the basement of Ramsay Silver.
      • In a pricelss bit of dialog, Robin asks her how she’s doing?
        • “Not bad, I did a bit of rebound shagging last night!“
    • 1335 Strike is also meeting up for a job.
      • He’s invited Wardle and Barclay:
        • both are big, rough ex-cops who will be handy if things get rough, which Strike thinks is a good possibility.
    • 1339 Robin and Midge have broken through the wall in the back of the storage cabinet in the basement.
      • Surprise!!
      • The silver never left the building! It was there all along!
    • 1343 Strike and his buddies are back in Ironbridge, the little town where so much of this book happened.
    • The crew of rapist/thugs are all at Ian Griffiths house next to Tyler Powell’s old family house.
      • We were there like 1000 pages ago, and Griffiths did a great imitation of being a nice, normal guy!
    • 1344 Strike thinks all the thugs are at the pub, so he breaks and enters (again)
    • Wynn Jones was sleeping upstairs. Strike clonks him and frees Sapphire, a 13 year old girl they had chained to the radiator.
    • Ian Griffiths comes home from the pub. It was a big, dramatic scene, but by page 1356 they have them all subduesd.
    • Strike interrogates them for a few pages before calling the police.
    • 1368 This guy Griffiths is pretty much the mastermind.
      • A ton of confusing little plot points are clear up as being purposeful misdirection.
      • They made Sapphire impersonate Chloe Griffiths, who is actually dead.
      • With fake emails and texts, they’ve made us believe Tyler is alive and well and working at a pub somewhere.
        • When in fact has he’s the mutilated guy in the vault!
        • I.e. he’s been dead since the start of the book!
    • 1377 The last thing we learn before the police arrive is that the girl Chloe Griffiths that they thought was in Europe is really named Jolanda and was Ian’s abused daughter. She is buried under the floor of this house. (yuck)

    Epilogue

    Well, that was exhausting!

    • 1381 Strike attends the funeral of his army mate that killed himself.
    • 1383 The tell-all on Sir Oliver Branfoot was published,
      • Griffiths did the murders, but Branfoot ordered them.
    • 1386 They found Tyler’s hands in Petts Woods where Strike thought they would be.
      • Now they can PROVE he is the body!
    • 1389 Robin is on a work trip to Sardinia, … purpose unknown.
    • 1399 She arrives at the Hotel Serenita.
      • She goes to the dining room to eat after her long trip to get here.
      • She doesn’t have to ask around, because the elusive Rupert Fleetwood bings her the menu!!
      • 1401 She sets him straight on it all.
        • Decima’s child, his child, is healthy and normal.
      • Decima was his half-sister.
        • That’s why he bugged out, he couldn’t keep committing incest.
      • Dino Longcaster banged his mother back in the day, and here we are.
      • 1406 Robin convinces him to call Decima and come clean.
    • 1407 Back in London Decima visits Robin and Strike at the office.
      • She leaves, then Robin heads out the door to meet her Murphy in his birthday, where he will almost cetainly propose to her and give her that ring!
    • For some reason, after allll these page and allll this drama, here on page 1413 Strike decided it’s now or never!
    • So he chase her down the stairs to tell her!
    • 1414 He stutter and blithers and beats around the bush for a awhile.
    • 1415 Finally he just blurts it out: ‘I’m in love with you.’
    • 1416 First disbelief….
    • 1417 Then anger … now she mad, as well she should be!
    • 1418 Strike: ‘I don’t want an affair. I want to be with you. Marry me.‘
      • Strike surprised himself when that popped out! 🙂
    • 1419 She really does leave this time.
    • 1421 Back on the office, the phone rings … and rings and rings.
    • Strike numbly stares into space then goes upstairs to get fish food.
    • And that’s how the book ends!!!!

  • Mansfield Park (1999)

    Mansfield Park (1999)

    Love me some Jane Austen!

    This is just a movie review. I am not reading and reviewing the Jane Austen Mansfield Park the book simultaenously!

    The internet says that the gorgeous building in the Featured Image was known to Jane Austen and was the inspiration for the book!

    I saw this movie at the Sequoia Theater in downtown Mill Valley in 1999 or 2000 when it came out. I’m seeing it quite a differently now than I did then.

    Seeing a movie about the manners of well-to-do white folks in the early 1800’s was very fitting when I was living in the 21st century version of that life in downtown Mill Valley. 🙂

    The Cast

    The movie

    Fanny Price is just a delightful character!
    Frances O’Connor plays her perfectly, seems to me.

    I really liked the way the movie starts, with little 10 year-old Fanny being sent off to live with her rich relatives.

    It wasn’t clear to me what the family connection was that enabled this, so I looked up the family tree here. It says that these three women are sisters:

    • Fanny’s mom Mrs Price – she’s the sister that married for love (therefore the poor one).
    • Lady Bertram – she’s the sister that married for (big!) money.
      She takes care of the others.
    • Mrs Norris – the sister that married for security I guess.
      • She is Lady Bertram‘s housekeeper.
      • She married a clergyman who dies off-sreen early in the book.
      • She is a perpetually unhappy, bitter person.
        • She is particularly vile towards Fanny, the only person in the house she can be mean to without penalty.
        • Living at the beck an call of your rich sister might to that to you!

    I guess that’s how they did it back in the day. The Bertram’s had all the money, so one sister became their live-in housekeeper. The other got married to just a regular guy and lived with him. When her child was of a certain age, her family bundled her off to to learn manners and grow up with a better class of people.

    None of the characters is actually evil, but they all (except for Edmund 🙂 are “flawed”. That is they are nice when it suits them, but peevish and selfish much of the time.

    Mrs Norris was a bitch from the first time we were introduced to her. To be fair, there are occasional moments later in the movie where she does NOT treat her niece like shit. But they are rare and short-lived.

    Sir Thomas is lovely when we first meet him, coming downstairs to greet 10-year old Fanny. He was very thoughtful and kind then.

    But he’s never quite that nice again in the whole rest of the movie!
    What with the slaves getting restless in Antigua he’s got a lot on his mind!

    Lady Bertram spends the whole movie in her chair drinking some clear British liquor. She doesn’t contribute much to the plot except comic relief for being half in the bag all the time. There’s never a hint in their daily interactions that she and Mrs Norris are sisters. She just treats her like a housekeeper.

    It’s a very rough introduction for Fanny.

    Sir Thomas thought Fanny would be living with Mrs Norris, but Mrs Norris ain’t having that! They argue about it right in front of her, which was not cool.

    Fanny is eventually allowed to clean out the attic in the main house and live there.

    While she’s sobbing to herself in her new room (the attic), Edmund comes upstairs to meet her. Edmund Bertram (Jonny Lee Miller), is the best person in the book (except for Fanny of course)

    Somehow, we know that he’s the one, even though she’s 10 and he’s 15-ish.

    And sure enough, after we go through an hour and a half of flirtations and romances and 15-20 years of aging on the part of both of them, by the time we get to the closing credits they are married!
    I for one couldn’t be happier about it! 🙂

    They start with the usual movie trick of showing her growing up every few years until she is the lovely and accomplished 18 year-old that the story revolves around.

    I’m not going to o a play-by-play on this one. I wore myself out doing Smiley’s People.

    The Crawfords come to town

    Things start happening. The Crawfords: .Mary Crawford and Henry Crawford come to live with the clergyman and are “introduced to society”.

    Mary does some heavy flirting with Edmund, which upsets Fanny, but in the end it all works out. Mary was not impressed that Edmund is entering the clergy.

    Edmund has two sisters: Maria and Julia. Maria is the older and is thought to be quite the catch even though I think Julia is prettier. As the oldest sister though, Maria is closer to the money. She has a great body we find out much later. 🙂

    I did not pick up on this when I saw the movie 20 years ago, but Mary Crawford seems to have the hots for Fanny Price at a couple of different junctures. It’s probably the bad influence of too much internet, but I got a low key lesbian vibe from her those two times!

    They are practicing for a play and she’s pawing all over Fanny.
    Arguably this was just to get Edmond worked up, but then this happened….

    Fanny is picking apples and gets caught in a rainstorm and ends up inside with Mary Crawford, who seems a little too excited to help her get her wet clothes off. This was pretty exciting for me 🙂

    Slavery

    There is a thing that is highlighted in this movie more that Austen did in the book, and it is that this whole English upper-class world is build on slave labor.

    Director Patricia Rozema makes sure we know that firehose of money that maintains Mansfield Park and that all the book’s characters live off of comes from slave labor on a sugar plantation in Antigua.

    This choice gets a lot criticism on the Wiki page, but I think it’s interesting!

    In general … where does all the money for the big estates all over England come from? It sure the heck didn’t come from farming the local crops. It the “fruits of empire”.

    England ran most of the developing world at that time. Heck, they were running the American colonies 15 years before the time of this book! So all that wealth from all over the world was flowing back to England to keep a bunch of upper class twits like the Bertrans and the Crawfords in fine clothes and snuff.

    Sir Thomas Returns!

    Thomas Jr doesn’t play a big part in the first part of the movie except to upset his dad and get blind drunk, but he’s Edmund’s older brother. He will inherit EVERYTHING and Edmund will get crumbs. That’s the way they did it.

    Sir Thomas heads off to tend to his affairs on Antigua, and takes Thomas Jr to try to straight him out and learn the family business. Surprise, he comes home early, roaing drunk.

    Most of the romance and craziness happened while Sir Thomas was gone.

    He’s a little strange when he returns, I think having slave women at will was bad for his personality. He’s clearly thinking sexy thoughts about Fanny, and not shy about thinking it out loud!

    I learned a little something about English law at the time. Maybe I knew, but I’d forgotten. He was thinking out loud about bringing a slave woman back to work around the house, and Fanny points out that

    if he brings a slave back to England he’ll have to emancipate her and she’ll be a free Briton!

    He’s much more cool to Fanny after she says that!

    Mr Crawford asks for the hand of Miss Price

    Maria Bertram consents to marry the really boorish rich guy, Mr Rushworth. She wanted to do it in the next two weeks for some reason that eluded me. This is the occasion for this hall of fame quote from Fanny:

    Maria was … “prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry.”

    Anyway, with Maria out of the picture Henry Crawford’s restless eye lights on Fanny.

    Starting about 50 minutes in Henry suddenly discovers tnat Fanny is the most fascininating woman in sight (which of course she is!). And he asks Sir Thomas for her hand in marriage.

    Boy did this shake things up!

    I’m actually having a hard time making myself watch the movie at this point, because everybody is so uncomfortable!

    Henry is making Fanny uncomfortable. He is being very sympathetic and appealing and getting totally crushed by Fanny anyway.

    Sir Thomas kicks her out for not accepting this great proposal, so Fanny has to return to her very poor family.

    Henry follows to woo her some more, which makes everything worse … it’s a mess.

    It all gets sorted in the last 20 mnutes

    As I said above, I almost bailed out on the movie, but I’m glad I didn’t.

    Crawford proposes to Fanny at her dirt-poor family’s house, and she said she’s rather stay with her dirt-poor family. It was really intense and made me uncomfortable (I would talk to my therapist about if I had one.:)

    Once we made it through that, everything calmed down and things slowly resolved themselves.

    • Older brother Tom made himself useful to the plot by partying way too long and hard and being brought home in the back of a wagon near death.
    • Good old Edmund shows up at the Price family hovel to ask Fanny to come bacck to tend to Tom.
    • This works great. All the Bertrams are glad to have her back.
      • Mary Crawford, not so much, she knows how Edmund feels…
    • Henry Crawford returns to form as the shameless rake he is.
      • Fanny accidentally busts in on him and Maria Rushworth (Bertram) fucking like bunnies in the pantry!!
      • I don’t remember THAT scene from the theater back in the day!!
      • The dress style of that time seemed to be scoop tops that show a lot of cleavage. (a positive feature of the movie IMO. 🙂
        • Maria had always looked pretty great in her dresses, and she looks really great in no top at all!
      • The upshot however is that she is disgraced. She has to leave her husband and go live in a little cottage because Henry declines to marry her. … harsh!
    • Tom starts to improve.
    • There is a family gathering one day where it all comes to a head.
      • Mary Crawford makes a crack about Edmond inheriting the estate of Tom dies.
      • Edmond is appalled, the conversation goes down hill from there.
      • After Edmund officially breaks with Mary, he feels free to declare his feelings for Fanny.

    About effing time thinks everybody who ever watched or read this story!

    … and they live happily ever after!

  • National Parks collage

    National Parks collage

    I love National Parks and I love Deco style – these cool Deco typefaces and the graphic style of Deco poster art!

    I know I like this stuff but I’m not even sure I’m calling it be the right name … is is Deco?

    The images

    The eight posters left to right, top to bottom are:

    1. Yellowstone National Park
    2. Lassen National Park
    3. See America – Arches National Monument
    4. National Parks Preserve Wildlife
    5. See America – Welcome to Montana
    6. Grand Canyon National Park
    7. Zion National Park
    8. See America – Carlsbad Caverns National Park

    They are all 1930’s vintage.

    The ones that I find the most striking are Posters 1, 2, 6, 7.

    All four of my faves are all for the “Ranger Naturalist Service“, and they all use that deco font that I love so much!

    “The Ranger Naturalist Service refers to the historical educational branch of the National Park Service established in the 1920s.”

    The overall effort was the See America campaign! From the Share America website:

    “The See America campaign was developed by the U.S. government’s Works Progress Administration, a Depression-era agency that put unemployed people to work and, with this project, also encouraged tourism. There were 14 original designs for the posters”

    The designs and colors in all of the panels are really quite striking.

    OMG!!! Here’s to you Google!

    I googled “typeface of National Park posters“, which is a pretty weak question, but it was good enough to produce the answer!

    A modern company is selling a rendition of that font and calling John Muir Sans!

    They are from “the WPA Era”.

    Only 14 original silk-screen national park poster designs were produced during the WPA era between 1938 and 1941.

    1. Coronado National MemorialThe puzzle
    2. Grand Teton
    3. Grand Canyon
    4. Yosemite
    5. Yellowstone Old Faithful
    6. Yellowstone Falls
    7. Glacier
    8. Mount Rainier
    9. Zion
    10. Crater Lake
    11. Lassen Volcanic
    12. Wind Cave
    13. Great Smoky Mountains
    14. Boulder Dam (Lake Mead)

    Anyway, this puzzle has a variety of cool colors, and some very cool fonts. It is set up in eight distinct panels, so the cool orange color that may have caught your eye right off, is probably only occurs in a single one of those eight panels! I’m guessing that this puzzle is gonna go pretty easily….

    Love those colors, love that font!!
    Love the colors. Love the cowboy vignette!
    Love that 30’s hiking gear!
    • The VERY first thing to catch MY eye is the green on green text of the Zion panel.
      • Whoever set up the typefaces here this went hog-wild on the word “ZION”!
    • Second was the black on mauve text of the Grand Canyon panel
      • and the black on darker mauve text at the bottom of the Lassen panel
      • and the yellow on brown text at the top of the Lassen panel.
        A lot going on in the Lassen panel! 🙂
      • and the gray on black text at the bottom of the Yellowstone panel.
    • Those panels are the “30’s Deco style” ones that I’m so crazy for!

    Then I started laying out and it went pretty quick!

    I am 3/4 the way done.

    • 1,2 totally done!
      • 1 – loved all that blue and white, and the wonderful deco lettering
      • 2 – loved that rasberry color and the strange yellow sky,and the cool deco lettering
        • There has been no active eruption such as the artist depicts in human memory!
    • 7,8 almost totally done – just missing 1 and 2 pieces respectively
      • 8 – All those deep, dark blues with a little splashes of white were really fun.
        • “See America” is a pretty boring font.
      • 7 – This one was really fun!
        • I love the actual formation in the image, and I love the deco-ish way the rock faces are depicted .
    • 3,4,5,6 all need some work!
      • 4 – is the best pice of graphic deign in the page.
        • The deep red sunset shading into lighter orange beneath
        • The artful-ness of the two sheep against the sunset, their lifelike postures …
      • 3- the one next to it, the See America one with the holes in the rocks was also fun
        • The deep, dark reds and the lighter reds were fun.
        • I like how the gray tree-color sets off the reds.
      • 5 – This one is pretty simple a little boring, just black and white.
      • 6 – This one turns out to be the absolute hardest panel by far!
        • All those grays and rasberry’s are so noisy! It’s hard to get a handle on what’s going on!

    That rasberry color is kind of a unifying theme for the puzzle!

    • the light raspberry background to the text in panel 6
    • the darker rasberry background to the text in panel 2 color
    • that color is also echoed in the lighter red-browns in panel 3