It Isn't Easy Being a Cop

For me, the worse job in policing is looking through the possessions of a murder victum. A lot of the time when a murders an open-and-shut case, which mostly they are, it's not necessary to do it,  but sometimes there's no choice, and it's a painful process, the reason being that it puts flesh and bones on people, gives you insigts into what made them tick, this only serves to make them more human. When you've trying to rational and objective, this is something you really could do without.

Bent cop DS Dennis Milne

in Simon Kernick's

The Business of Dying

In the 70's Darth Vader was Superman's Trainer

The book Superman, by Larry Tye, there is a paragraph describing Christopher Reeve's training regime. The exercise and bodybuilding training plan was put together and run by "...Dave Prowse, a body builder and gym owner in London...". And who is this random "Dave". Only the honorary leader of the 501st Legion that's who.

The Addict Doctor in Reality and Fiction

...his remoteness, severity, and mordant sarcasm were the products of a daily struggle with addiction.

Frederick Crews, in the review

 Physician Heal Thy Self: Part 1 about the book

 Genius on Edge: the Bizarre Double life of Dr. William Stewart Halsted
 in the New York Review of Books Volume LVIII, Number 14

That sentence fragment could also describe a certain fictional doctor.

Archives, Computers And The End of Histroy

Solzhenitsyn is one of the last major writers to leave behind a vast archives of handwritten manuscripts. (His successors will bequeath their hard drives if they dare.)

David Remnick,

 In the Archives: the Widow's Peak,

The New Yorker, June 18, 2012

Computers make it easy to duplicate, manipulate, search, relocate information. At the same time it makes it easier lose stuff down the memory hole either by action, inaction, error, or mechanical failure. But any simple filing cabinet has a solidity that makes it hard to chuck out the window. I have came across several different predictions about our future data storage needs from sci-fi witters and/or futurists.  There is the scenario that we must eventually need to go space so we can find new places to store our records. In Raj Whitehall's world everything was in computer databanks, when computers failed. So all records, history, knowledge is lost. I have read other futurists that suggest this is the likely outcome and that future history will note a "dark age" where there are scattered and fragmentary records in proprietary obsolete formats.

Computers are great for ephemera, but there needs to be hard copies for posterity.

Reality Undramatic

"Generally speaking", Lobsang  pronounced, "reality having little sense of narrative, ancient sites are not heavy with swinging blades that decapitate, or rock panels that fold back to fire darts."

Lobsang, after discovering the enigmatic ruins

 of  a dead civilization in

The Long Earth

Ad for Mayan trap merchants from luvthecubs

 posted at Crack's 16 Unseen Jobs That Must Exist in Movie Universes.

A Kind of Respect/Fear

...the politeness you might observe when dealing with a politician belonging to a country that had nuclear weapons and a carefree approach to their deployment.

How Joshua Valienté

is treated after joining a powerful mega-corporation

 In The Long Earth

Star Trek Recruiting Poster

Posted by Doragon in his thread/story Star Trek: A New Beginning

Things ARE Getting Better all the Time

As an antidote to easy pessimism here is a UN report, or UNish, about inter and intra state violence, Human Security Report 2009/2010. According to the numbers things are getting better. There is still war but the numbers and severity has decreased. Of course people are still dying. But then things can always be bad as this passage from The General by SM Sterling shows.

Of course, the last battle—his first—had shown him you could get killed very dead indeed in the middle of the most smashing victory. Gharsia's lungs and spine blasted out through his back illustrated quite vividly what could happen to an experienced veteran on the winning end of a one-sided slaughter.

Link to the report from dingbat, in the the thread Star Trek, a New Beginning. at AH.com

Second Careers in Tokyo or Life After Crime

He explained that Tokyo job prospects are poor for an uneducated middle-aged man with nine fingers and tattoos that show beneath a dress shirt.

Former Yakuzi Mochizuki explains

  why he is a chauffeur/bodyguard

  for crime reporter Jake Adelstein.

 In New Yorker article, All Due Respect,

January 8, 2012.

Else where in the article there is mentioned of the book Tokyo Underworld: The Fast Times and Hard Life of an American Gangster in Japan, a book I heartily recommend. It is rollicking story about mid 20th century Japanese crime centered around New York wise guy Nick Zappetti.

One Line Description of Jobs the Monster

...Jobs could be charming to people he hated as easily as could be insulting to people he liked.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Wilhelm II, The Cosplay Soldier

...The irony was having avoided - courtesy of his mother - the years of strict military training that a normal Hohenzollern might expect, Wilhelm had none of the disciplined mental habits of a Prussian officer. Or rather , he looked and played the part - perfectly turned out, moderate if not ascetic in his eating and drinking - but he had no habit of application. Just as he had been a dilettante student, so he was a dilettante soldier. His adjutant, Adolf von Bülow, the experienced soldier seconded to see him through the army, admitted that after five years in the 1st Foot, Wilhelm had completely failed to learned the true values of soldiery.

Miranda Carter in,
George, Nicholas and Wilhelm:
Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I,
describing the "martial" qualities of WIlhelm II.

Musicians and Debt

It looked like the kind of music emporium which doubles as a pawnshop, since every musician has at some time in his life has to hand over his instrument if he wants to eat and sleep indoors.

Soul Music, Terry Pratchett

See also Ray's Music Exchange in the Blues Brothers

On the Rarity of Highwaymen

"... This is civilization. They don't rob you on the road in civilization." He glanced down at the satchel again." They wait until you've got into cities. That's why they call it civilization."

Dwarf Horn Player Glob in Soul Music, Terry Pratchett

Rome in Histrorical Fiction and Sci Fi

Rome has show up in many different kinds down through the ages. This is not meant to be a complete list but merely my favorites and highlights.

Historical Fiction

• I Claudius/Claudius the God: These are written in the form of the autobiography by the emperor Claudius. The first book is life up to be acclaimed as emperor by soldiers. The second book is his life as emperor as well as the telling of the life of friend Herod Agrippa. Well worth reading.

Sci Fi and Alternative History

• Lest Darkness Falls: An American in Rome stumbles through a hole in"the space time continuum" as they would say and ends up in a post imperial Rome of the 6th century.

Undercover Cops - The Best Liars Ever?

He continued smoking while we continued questioning him carefully and as diplomatically as possible about the aspects of his testimony the previous evening, trying our best not to rile him, but I think it was too late for that. He answered the questions without pause and didn't appear to be lying, but of course you wouldn't be able to tell with a man like him anyway. His whole job was one lie after another...

DI Gallan questioning Stegs
in The Crime Trade by Simon Kernick

The "Reliable" Criminal

"...They're reliable."

Which was a refrain I'd heard plenty of times before about criminals. They're reliable. The problem was, for most part, they weren't. They tended to be paranoid, highly strung, violent, and often drugged up, which was a pretty lethal combination. In the course of my career I've had two guns pulled on me, four knives, an axe, a tyre iron, even a fake medieval ball and chain. I've been held down by a gang of crazed thugs, flying on a diet of vodka and crack, who doused me in petrol and threatened to burn me alive unless I gave them the drugs I was supposedly carrying (I didn't, and they didn't), and many's the time I've woken up wondering when my luck's going to run out.

Undercover cop Sean Egan
in Simon Kernick's
The Last 10 Seconds.

The Matrix Effect

Ah, the early'90's: I was so innocent I barely knew which demographic I was.

Scott Brow in
Wired 2009/09/11 article "Geeky Friday

There is also an old saying that you should never examine too closely how sausages or laws are made. At the end of The Matrix, Neo can only see perceive the programming but not the our constructed reality.  Media training is good but it also robs you of the pleasure of pure consumerism / fandom.

George Orwell - Resource Site

Orwell.ru is a Russian domiciled site dedicated to George Orwell. Because of differing, or nonexistent, copyright laws this site has just about everything he wrote from the early novels, the reportage/sociology, articles. It has even collected his early poetry.

In Orwell latter years he was not popular with the Soviet Union, Comintern, British communists, fellow travelers and other people with the same ideological leanings. It is interesting that his work is up on a Russian site, with Russian translations. However this site is at .ru not .su

Canadian Army Mines and Boobytraps Manual

I am reading Canadian military Mines and Boobtraps, 1999 on Wikileaks right now. In a section about detecting minefields lists among other indicators these these signs :

f. empty containers of mines and components or explosive
packaging, wrapping and seals which may have been left
deliberately and booby trapped;
g. human and livestock corpses;

In a later section about dogs to detect mines it lists among other "unavoidable limitations".

(3) inexplicable off day in a dog.

The correct procedure for search individual mines in a minefield is laid out as.

"Ferro-magnetic objects should not be used to prod for mines, except in an operational emergency where it is deemed that the risk of personal injury due to accidental detonation is less than the operational risk."

The manual lists how to arm , disarm and place the mine various mines Canada had in its inventory at the time. The claymore helpfully has “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY” written on the side that faces the enemy so that it always sited with “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY”.

In the Land Of the Wolves - Chernobyl and area

Elena, a Ukrainian photographer and motorcyclist has put together a site of photographs of her travels into the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Here for the photographer's site. Here for information on the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Above is the actual nuclear plant. The record of her journeys are filled with rusted out equipment, abandoned disintegrating building and healthy and unconcerned wildlife. A higher background radiation that wildlife pays for a larger habitat and reduced human caused predation.

Has anyone else read the book the World Without Us. What has been happening here and what is discussed in the book gives hope for the future, with or without us.

(link from Goranga!)