25. Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) (12/31/25)
Thanks to my alphabet project, I finally picked up this book. It's eye-opening, about the criminal justice system in this country, by the man who, in 1989, founded the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, to help individuals unjustly sentenced to death row. Their work spread to helping children sentenced to life in adult prisons and many other concerns. Several Supreme Court cases have been decided on EJI lawyers' testimony.
This book details one case in particular, that of Walter McMillian, who was sentenced to death based on false evidence extracted by corrupt officials in Alabama. The plain fact of the matter was clear—Walter was miles away from the incident he was later arrested for, the murder of a young woman in a dry cleaners, and he had dozens of corroborating witnesses. But he was Black, and the prosecutors needed a perp. In telling his story, Stevenson outlines the arbitrariness and intractability of the US justice system, especially in Southern states where Jim Crow is still very much alive and well.
Interspersed are many other stories, of individuals arrested for crimes and dealt unjust punishments. Stevenson gets to know these people individually and makes them all real to us readers. Some of them—including Walter McMillian—he succeeded in getting released from prison. Others, at the end of the book, are still awaiting clemency. The stories he details take place over the course of years, in some cases decades.
In 2020 this book was made into a highly rated film, Just Mercy. Here is the trailer.
The Equal Justice Initiative is still going strong. They explain their project(s) better than I can. The page on criminal justice reform is worth a look, if you're interested.
Another feature of the site is a Racial Justice Calendar, which provides a day-by-day calendar of significant events in our country's racial/racist history. Today, December 31, 118 years ago, for example, in a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Judge Thomas Norwood, a former U.S. senator, advocated the death penalty for Black people in interracial relationships.
This year I had no goal of a specific number of books to read, as I have had in some years past. Just... to read. So here's my 2025 list, twenty-five in all. And as so often, many of the books I tackled were thrillers/mysteries. I do like a good story. Those are marked by an asterisk.
(I'm still working on the last book, but I'm sure I'll have it done by Thursday. I've got less than 100 pages to go, plus it's riveting. And that's saying something, since it's nonfiction.)
2/23 Philip Roth, The Plot against America 2/23 Martin Walker, The Patriarch* 3/18 Raynor Winn, The Salt Path 4/3 Kate Atkinson, Case Histories* 4/16 Mick Herron, Dead Lions* 4/23 Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief 4/28 Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days 4/30 Mark Salzman, The Man in the Empty Boat 5/6 Percival Everett, James (audio mostly) 5/30 Yangsze Choo, The Fox Wife 6/4 Elizabeth O’Connor, Whale Fall 6/19 Mick Herron, Real Tigers* 6/24 Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional 7/29 Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch 8/3 John Kenney, I See You’ve Called in Dead 8/11 Jess Walter, So Far Gone 8/24 William Kent Krueger, Iron Lake* 8/30 S. A Cosby, King of Ashes* 10/18 Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook* 10/21 William Kent Krueger, Boundary Waters* 11/11 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines 12/3 Mick Herron, Spook Street* 12/9 Andrea Lewis, What My Last Man Did 12/25 Brian Phillips, Impossible Owls soon Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Sixteen by men, only nine by women—I'll change that up next year. Nine thrillers/mysteries. I probably won't change that up. April was a winning month, closely followed by August and December. Maybe next year I'll try for at least one book a month, but maybe it doesn't matter. At all.
I have started back on my alphabetical challenge, with the last couple of books here—I and J. I've already got the next book sussed, but it's in German, so next year might be even fewer titles. We'll see. It's not a contest. I read for the pleasure of inhabiting other worlds, to learn something, to expand my awareness and my empathy too. Sometimes I read to practice one of my languages. Or simply to be engrossed, entranced, entertained. There are so many reasons to cuddle up with a book.
P.S. I found a different K book, in English, so the pace can stay steadily directed forward. But I am going to schedule a daily fifteen minutes, half hour, for the German K book as well. Slowly by slowly I will get it done.
24. Brian Phillips, Impossible Owls: Essays (2018) (12/25/25)
I have no recollection of where I heard about this book, but I'm glad I did. A collection of eight essays, it ranges far and wide and is full of sparkling writing. The subject matter covers the 2013 Iditarod, sumo wrestling and the writer Yukio Mishima, Area 51, the Russian animator Yuri Norstein (whom I devoted a post to last week, I so enjoyed that essay), man-eating tigers in India, "science fiction in small towns" (in particular, Phillips's interesting takes on Wrath of the Titans, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and The X-Files as reflections of American society), Queen Elizabeth II and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, and finally, the checkered story of a woman, Lydie Marland, from the small town Phillips grew up in, Ponca City, Oklahoma.
The "impossible owls" of the title aren't addressed specifically, but in almost every essay owls make a brief appearance. For example, here, in describing the sumo phenom, Mongolian-born Hakuhō Shō, it is in contrast to Gagamaru,
the Georgian wrestler who is currently [2014] the largest man in top-division sumo—440 pounds and a little over six feet tall—[and] looks like a canyon seen from the air, all crevasses and folds. Hakuho, by contrast, is a single large stone, an owl quickly sketched by Miyazaki. His face is vague. Once in a while he will glance to one side with what looks like critical intelligence. Then he blurs again.
In the Area 51 essay, "The Lost Highway," Phillips describes meeting "a man who said owls forecast his destiny." This man, Mike, speaks freely of paranormal events he has experienced, or given thought to. "There's a beauty to his stories," Phillips writes,
most of which are about how, when something truly inexplicable happens, owls tend to turn up around the edges of the event. You'll see a dozen of them on a telephone wire, and then, around the next corner, the spacecraft. Owls appear with unnerving frequency in what those who believe they've been abducted call screen memories, artificial recollections implanted by aliens to mask what really took place. Mike's written a book, collecting accounts of owls in paranormal events. He thinks they might be psychic projections of extraterrestrial beings. As in cloaks that aliens wear to hide from us. The more real an owl appears, perhaps, the less likely it is to be what it seems. Perhaps many of the things that seem most vividly real to us seem so because they overlap a world of dreams. Mike described lying in the woods, looking up, feeling the silent passage of owls' wings.
In "Man-Eaters," Phillips hears a fish owl, its call sounding
nothing like the who, who of the owls I was familiar with. It was a low moan, mmmmm, faint but insistent, the sound of a person stunned with pain. Very hard to spot in this light, Mr. Sharma [his guide] said. . . . Then I saw it. It was perched on a fallen tree limb a short way ahead. It was the most beautiful bird I had ever seen. Its body was brown, with a white outline, and the feathers of its head were white. It was beautiful because of its marvelous tail, which fanned out behind it, and because of the angle of its head, which somehow implied a gentleness and thoughtfulness quite different from what most owls' heads express. I stared. Just when I was about to point it out to Mr. Sharma, we drew a little closer, and I saw that the owl was only a broken branch extending from the fallen limb.
When he describes the original 1981 Clash of the Titans, which he saw as a kid, he said he loved
in particular the golden owl, Bubo; years later, when I read "Sailing to Byzantium" for the first time, and got to the part where Yeats asks to leave his mortal body and be refashioned as a golden bird, Bubo was what I pictured him becoming.
An owl—a real one (or maybe just an imagined one)—shows up as well in Phillips's recounting of The X-Files at the very end of "In the Dark: Science Fiction in Small Towns." A "monstrous owl" makes a cameo appearance in the "Her Castles" section of "Once and Future Queen," about ERII. And finally we have a pair of stone owls, their eyes containing "tiny red lights," on the staircase landing of the Marland mansion in Ponca City. (I'm sure there was a mention of owls in the Iditarod piece, but I hadn't started dog-earing yet, and the mention was so brief that I can't locate it by skimming.)
In any case, there you have a sample of Phillips's excellent writing and whatever explication we're going to get about the impossibility of owls.
This is his only book, though he has also hosted two podcasts, Truthless, about "the lies people tell,"and 22 Goals, about the history of the World Cup.He has also written a number of book reviews for the Poetry Foundation.
Well, I'm glad he collected his essays into this book. I learned a lot.
I took myself out for a walk this afternoon, before rain sets in. My old habit was to turn left from my house, walk through the local park with its children's playground, basketball court, baseball field, and dog park, and across the highway to the Frog Pond Wetland Reserve, a 17-acre oasis with an encircling path, whereupon I would complete several circuits while listening to podcasts. Here are a couple of photos; it's a beautiful spot, a wonderful place to indulge in nature and only a five-minute walk from home.
But as I say, I used to do that. For the past year-plus, the Frog Pond has been off-limits as a bike path is constructed that, upon completion, will allow users to walk or cycle under the busy highway—a definite improvement.
So I have had to find other walking options. Today's took me out of the house to the right, past a plant nursery (that is in the process of shutting down—I wonder what will come in in its place), and along the constantly changing other half of the bike path—the most recent progress being pavement (last week) and tall black lightposts (the last couple of days). I then pass the Safeway supermarket (parking lot jam-packed today, two days before Christmas), cross the busy thoroughfare that is Fremont Boulevard, and descend some railroad-tie stairs—where homeless people often hang out, but not today—to Laguna Grande Regional Park. Sometimes I just walk around the laguna, but today I continued on across also-busy Del Monte Boulevard to another bike path that takes me up on the dunes with lovely views of Monterey Bay. From there it's back to Laguna Grande and home. It's about 4 miles in all.
Today I took some photos, ranging from view shots to close-ups of patterns that I found interesting. Here they are. Click on them to see them larger.
Laguna Grande. As I took this photo a weathered man on a bike pulled up. He commented on how lovely the hotel was, reflected in the water. I pointed out the ducks, which he admired. His name was Mike.
Beat-up reflectors on the bike ramp
Two people and their dog—and Santa Cruz across the water
Peeling paint retaining wall
The sandy bike path and a big sky. (This is approximately where the two people and their dog were when I snapped them.)
A remnant of what was next to a tennis court; I wonder if the construction workers are preserving it as something of a joke. Will it survive the finished project? Will the tennis court return?
Santa has been hiding under these fake flowers for a very long time, by the looks of it...
I enjoy using my camera to see what I can see. It reminds me what a beautiful place I live in. I do need to find some more walking options, though. The Frog Pond will be closed off for another year.
In October 2024 I did a workshop with the Astoria, Oregon, artist Elise Wagner in encaustic (i.e. wax-based) art. I do not think of myself as an artist, and that workshop definitely convinced me that I will never be an encaustic artist. It's hard! But the results are beautiful, if you know what you're doing. Here are some of Elise's works.
Here, Elise talks about her process.
I enjoyed (truly!) my weekend feeling utterly (truly!) incompetent. I also enjoyed being surrounded by artists—my two fellow students are bona fide artists. I am glad that people out there are continuing to make work that opens our eyes to the beauty and meaning of it all.
You know how sometimes you discover something so wonderful, you wonder how or why it's been withheld from your consciousness, your understanding of the world, for so long? So many fabulous people, activities, creations, etc. etc. out there, of course you can't bump into them all, or even a tiny fraction of them. But/and, oh how lovely to have your world thus enlarged at least every so often.
That happened to me today as I read an essay in the book I'm currently tackling, Brian Phillips's Impossible Owls (the title alone enlarges my world), which I will report on anon. The essay in question is titled "The Little Gray Wolf Will Come," and it concerns a Russian animator named Yuri Norstein, considered by some to be the greatest animator in the world. His output is relatively small, just a handful of short films. Phillips became interested in him when he encountered a reference to a project Norstein had been working on, about the great Gogol short story "The Overcoat," for thirty-seven years. And that was as of 2013.
I just want to keep him alive in my consciousness, so I'll post a few videos and links.
First, what he engages in here is astonishing cut-out animation, which he accomplishes together with his wife, Francheska Yarbusova. It is briefly described in this introduction to his corpus:
Here is his utterly charming 1975 film Hedgehog in the Fog (Ёжик в тумане). (In addition to the visuals, I love listening to the Russian narration.) It's quite possible that the first word I ever learned in Russian—besides da, nyet, dosvidanya, and (thank you, Clockwork Orange) kharasho—was yozhik, or hedgehog. That from David, who took Russian in high school, and they'd throw a little stuffed hedgehog around the room to tag the next one up to read or respond to the assignment. And who doesn't love a yozhik?
Then, Tale of Tales (Сказка сказок) from 1979, about "the way memory is conjured up." (The version here is fairly low-res, but it has English subtitles. For a high-res rendering, go here.)
A few years ago, the Atrocity Guide posted a short film about Norstein and Yarbusova's "Overcoat" project (Шинель), titled The Animators Who've Spent Forty Years on a Single Film:
And here are 5 minutes of clips from the project. As one commentator notes, it takes 200 hours to animate 12 seconds. So far, they've finished about 25 minutes of what might end up being an hour-long project. That is dedication. Obsession. Genius or madness, or both.
I've just now stumbled on this creator. But from the bits I've seen so far, I would have to agree that Yuri Norstein is one hell of an animator. And he seems to have a beautiful heart and soul as well.
I was scrolling through the internet just now, as I try not to do... One thing I found ludicrous:
I mean, seriously, ha ha and HA, using AI to "save time by reading a summary"? Of a poem??? Sure, sure, it's a long poem. But... a summary??? And mostly, mostly, mostly—AI is upon us. How will we maintain our humanity?
But then I came across this bit of fluff, in the Washington Post:
And I of course did take the quiz, the questions being something along the lines of "Are you happy?" "Are you leading a meaningful life"—on a scale from 1 to 10.
How the heck am I supposed to know? You're supposed to tell me!
Here's the final question #13, with my answer (given only three choices to define one's ideal life):
And here's the upshot, from this 13-point questionnaire:
You are part of a small — but substantial — group of people who preferred the psychologically rich life, including 13.2 percent of Americans, according to a 2020 study with participants from nine countries — the United States, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India and Angola.... Germans were most likely to endorse seeking a life of psychological richness at around 17 percent, while Singaporeans were least likely to prefer this path, at less than 7 percent.
Here’s how to cultivate more psychological richness in your everyday life:
Embrace more playfulness, curiosity and spontaneity. This can be something as simple as taking a different route to work or home and noticing the newness around you. “Find something new from the familiar, and change your routines a little bit here and there.... Have a certain time that you can be spontaneous every day.”
Try a new activity. There is discomfort in not being good at something, but pushing past your comfort zone is a way to grow into the new and (previously) unknown. “Start by reaching for richer experiences and becoming a little bit more comfortable with tolerating negative feelings, tolerating discomfort,” Westgate said.
Journal and reflect on your experiences. Psychological richness is more akin to career highlights, but even the most profound memories can fade with time. Writing them down and even sharing them with others can help you hold onto your life-changing experiences.
Honestly, all that is not bad advice. I already journal. I like new activities. I do keep exhorting myself to play more. But seriously: a certain time of day to be spontaneous??? Do these quiz fabricators not know what spontaneity means?
Still, the idea that I'm "furthest down the path to Happiness" gives me some comfort. We need to celebrate our victories, no matter how they come dressed.
The other day I wrote about my Project 365s—a way of continuing to move forward, and to stay somewhat focused, by doing a particular task, no matter how small, every day. That day I (hopefully—as in, full of hope) started a new daily photo project, and so far, ten days in, I'm doing it. I already took a picture for today ☞, but I will see how the rest of the day plays out, it being early (8:45) yet. Something better may come along. (Later: it did.)
A friend of mine (one of the Howlers) has what seems to be a long list of actions she tries to accomplish every day, a daily haiku and journal entry among them, but I'm sure I've heard her mention more.
Me, I'm good with one expected activity a day.
But I also like list projects. Just now—that time of year when lists are sprouting up everywhere—I got sidetracked by a NYT list of the best thrillers of 2025, which steered me to the writer William Boyd, whom I've heard of but not read, and who seems to be highly admired, and who I decided I probably must read, and oh! he has a new series just started, and yes! I do love book series... and then the Amazon page I'd gotten steered to to find out more about Boyd mentioned a book by Michael Connelly, whose Harry Bosch books I'd started reading one by one, and I got to wondering how far I'd gotten. (Yes, this is how I too often roll, or rather trip: from one random thing to another.)
I happen to have a handy list of all my blog entries, which includes the book reports I started doing with regularity back in 2016. So I searched for Connelly, and it turns out the last one I read in the series was the seventh (having somehow skipped the sixth), in May 2023. That report also mentioned that I was trying to read books in alphabetical order:
Martha Wells, All Systems Red (loved that one)
Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (also loved)
John McPhee, Draft No. 4
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers (this one too)
Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet (as well)
And then, right about the time of that seventh Bosch book, I forgot about that project, distracted by something or other. But just now I'm thinking, hmmm, I still like that idea. It can be tricky to find a new title among the many (many) hundreds that I own. The alphabet can be a handy filter/decider. So I scanned my shelves, and found a fetching title starting with I: Impossible Owls, a collection of essays. Only it turns out that the novel I picked up just yesterday—coincidentally? providently? eerily?—also starts with I: Imagine Me Gone.
So yes, I think I'll head back to that project, after a little gap of a year and a half. Let's see how far I can make it this time.
My other alphabetical list project, which is still but an idea—I've only ever tackled A—is a cooking endeavor: the national dishes (loosely defined) of the world. A was for Aruba and its wacky keshi yena, or meat-stuffed cheese. Maybe I'll pick that up in the new year: one letter every two weeks. Starting with B... is for... Belgium (moules-frites, or perhaps stoofvlees aka Flemish stew)? Burundi, Bahrain, Bermuda? Bosnia (Bosanski lonac aka Bosnian stew)? I'll think about it. One project at a time is probably more than enough for my poor distractable self...
23. Andrea Lewis, What My Last Man Did (2017) (12/9/25)
This book is by a friend of my sister-in-law, who can't praise Lewis's writing highly enough. In January the three of us will be participating in an online workshop together, and I thought it would be instructive to read this book by way of introduction.
Comprising ten linked stories, it begins with two sisters, narrator Hannah, 23 years old, and her older, reclusive genius sister Iris, in 1975 in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a year later, Galveston, Texas. The action then goes back in time to 1895 New Orleans, from there hopscotching to 1901, 1917, and 1932, all still in Louisiana; 1945 Sacramento; 1948 London; and 1962 Galveston. The final chapter brings us full circle back to Las Cruces and 1976, where Hannah is still casting about for some direction, some grounding, while Iris stumbles into (we hope) happiness. In the meantime, we've met their grandparents, their parents, the beloved foreman of the family's Texas rancho, and various other key (or merely interesting) characters.
One chapter is entirely epistolary. Most are written in the first person, as told by various individuals. Lewis has an amazing grasp of place and time, and every detail helps paint a picture. In some chapters all the detail became a bit exhausting for me, and all I could think of was the research Lewis must have done to come up with, for example, the very specific Fiat-Allis 16-B tractor or the Beech D17 Staggerwing bi-plane, built in 1945, or the Caminada Hotel on Grand Isle, Louisiana, which Lewis may have invented, but I wouldn't be surprised if it actually existed and actually was destroyed in the actual hurricane of August 12, 1901. To name but a few examples.
Craft guides talk about the "telling detail": rather than describing every last feature of a person, say, you pick out one or two that encapsulate a character. Here's where Lewis, to my mind, sometimes goes a bit too far. For example:
[Five-year-old] Angelica twirled six rows of pearlescent pop-beads she wore on one wrist. She had on a Superman t-shirt and a skirt with a print of yellow light bulbs and green telephones. Her fine, white-blonde hair hung limply around her shoulders. "Can you say hi?" Rick [her father] asked. "I have a pet tarantula," Angelica said. "Her name's Mabel." "Really?" "I have dirt in my sandals." She sat down and took off one white plastic sandal and shook it.
It's a thorough picture, to be sure, and there's nothing at all wrong with it. It just felt a little... too much. Not a complaint, really. Lewis is a masterful writer. But now I can't get the light bulbs and telephones out of my head, and it leaves me wondering what the skirt's background color was. I've settled on white.
Overall I very much enjoyed this erudite and clever book—the linkages among characters, the times and places past. I understand that Lewis is now working mostly in flash. On her website, she includes a humorous set of writing instructions titled "Flying High: Better Writing through Simple Fixes by K. Hart Undertwis" where she (deliberately) takes some of those craft guides' suggestions several steps too far.
Now that I've managed to break myself out of the thriller/mystery genre, maybe another work of literary fiction is in order before I march back to the atomic bomb. Let's see. There must be an enticing book around here somewhere!
I am trying to get out for long walks every day or so, and today I succeeded: 14,642 steps (when I happened to have the phone, my current step tracker, in my pocket). And when I go for long walks, I tend to listen to podcasts.
Today I started with Grammar Girl, talking with editor Peter Sokolowski about the very recent release of the 12th Collegiate Merriam-Webster Dictionary, an actual print edition. It's been 22 years since the 11th. This is a big deal. Okay, okay, it may only be a big deal for a language nerd—and actual physical dictionary user—like me, but seriously: big deal! Here's what I may have listened to:
I then moved on to Ezra Klein, which as always was interesting. It was his end-of-year ask-me-anything wrap-up.
I do love thinking about language, how it works, how it means, how it distorts, how it evolves.
And if that's not enough, here's what I learned about the word algorithm:
algorithm(n.)
1690s, "Arabic system of computation," from French algorithme, refashioned (under mistaken connection with Greek arithmos "number") from Old French algorisme "the Arabic numeral system" (13c.), from Medieval Latin algorismus, a mangled transliteration of Arabic al-Khwarizmi "native of Khwarazm" (modern Khiva in Uzbekistan), surname of the mathematician whose works introduced sophisticated mathematics to the West (see algebra). The earlier form in Middle English was algorism (early 13c.), from Old French. The meaning broadened to any method of computation; from mid-20c. especially with reference to computing.
I've been moving slowly through a book I've had on my shelves since 1988, the multiply award-winning tome The Making of the Atomic Bomb—700-plus densely packed, small-typeface pages, with big personalities and complex physics (this last not my strong suit, to the say the least). A little over 100 pages in, I felt the need for something fast-paced, and amusing.
What better choice than a Slow Horses book? The next in the series (I finished the third back in June) was Spook Street, which in the TV adaptation features Hugo Weaving as a bad guy. This time, I especially enjoyed, in addition to Herron's consummate style and the various now-familiar characters, comparing in my mind the written version to the visual one. Because in certain respects they are quite different, as befits the different media.
Beginning with the prologue, which brings us very slowly into a shopping mall (or "cavernous retail pleasure dome"), and into the consciousness of a security guard, who is watching the crowds, and soon notices larger-than-usual groups of teenagers approaching from all directions, and he goes on the alert—only to realize it's a flash mob! Innocuous! Fun! Ah, but not everyone approaching is in that mob. One person in particular is anything but innocuous. Decidedly not up to fun.
The very slow buildup of those few pages was probably presented in the series (I'd have to go back and watch the beginning again) over one or two minutes, at best. Wewould see the moving crowds, the security guard, and yes, we'd experience the explosion, but the beauty of words is that it can slow down action, give small details. Just try and show "the air was damp and miserable, a tickle at the back of Samit's throat suggested an oncoming cold, and he was wondering where he might cadge a cup of tea"—and the evocation of character (a minor, short-lived character) thus conveyed. Even the description of the flash mob getting going is at once a bit threatening—"it started—at the same precise moment the whole crowd, dozens upon dozens of kids, milling by the fountain, blocking the entrances to shops, climbing on the water feature's surround"—until the scene transforms into something joyous: "every single one of them, it seemed, stripped off their jackets and coats to reveal bright happy shirts beneath, all lurid primaries and swirls of colour."
As I recall, the TV show made a plot element in France much more central than it is in the book—or rather, in the show we see a particular house in France, and the people who lived in it, and how they interacted, and we go back in time to do so: we spend quite a bit of time in France. Whereas in the book, the house burned down several days previous to a certain character's visit to it, and he quickly returns to the UK; the story of the house, its significance, is then related in snatches as the facts are stitched together by Lamb and his slow horses. The house is important, yes, but we learn its importance in different ways depending on the medium.
I love that.
In the end, most of the slow horses emerge unscathed (most, not all), and the bad guys get their just deserts. Well, again, mostly—because apt punishment would be inconvenient for the intelligence service in the long run. As Jackson Lamb comments on hearing this news, "Plus ça bloody change. I swear to God I'd defect, if there was anywhere worth defecting to these days."
A few chapters in, MI5's operations chief, Diana Taverner, is waiting on the Thames bank to talk to Emma Flyte, the new head of the Dogs, the get-your-hands-dirty security branch of the service. Talk to, or make sure Flyte knows her place. I enjoyed the way this scene featured a garbage barge (here I've extracted just those bits):
A barge was puttering down the Thames, rubbish piled high in its middle, and there were seagulls all over it, a great boiling mass of them, arguing and scrapping for riches. Earth has not anything to show more fair. For Diana Taverner, it looked like politics as usual. . . . The barge, some hundred yards downriver now, let out a whistle; a curiously jaunty note for what was basically a waterborne dustbin. The gulls ballooned away, scrambled for purchase in the air, then renewed their cackling onslaught. . . . The seagulls' cries were ever more distant. You moved the rubbish somewhere else, and the racket followed it. It all seemed so simple, put like that. Complications only set in once you moved away from the metaphorical. Free from observation she awarded herself a cigarette, willing her mind into a blank: no plots, no plans, no corkscrew machinations. Around her, the world carried on: business as usual on a January morning, and London recovering from the seismic shock of violence. In front of her, only the river; grey, and endlessly travelling elsewhere.
Okay, I said virtually nothing about the plot. You'll just have to read the book yourself. It's worth it. I love the Slow Horses books.
And I will resist the temptation to dive straight into the next one, London Rules—which we just two weeks ago finished watching. Then again, since the TV version is still fresh in my mind, wouldn't it be instructive to compare?
In my lazy way, I tried searching for photos I've taken on December 2's past, thinking I'd take the easy way out today and post old photos from Flickr. And the only hit was this one:
My climbing partner Mike at Red Rocks outside Las Vegas. 2007. I remember those rocks. They reside still in my fingertips.
Here are some photos I took on our couple of trips to Red Rocks. Marvelous memories of balancing on rock.
Those are my rock shoes dangling down there, in case you're wondering. They are 5.10s, pink.
I've undertaken several blogpost-a-day projects over the past decade-plus—of which this here is a shortened, sputtering version. In the past, I've actually managed to follow through—every day, for 365 days—some four or five times. It's a good practice for me. I don't know why it's become so difficult. Or rather, why I've become so lackadaisical. I mean, sure, it doesn't really matter if I succeed. But it's the principle of the thing. It's a way of paying attention, staying engaged. Surely that matters.
Years ago, beginning in 2007, I undertook a few photo-a-day projects, which I posted on Flickr—where, back before FB sunk its hooks into me, I was quite active. Here are the links:
Project 365 (begun on May 23, 2007—my mother's birthday, her last one with us—with the above photo) Project 365, Take 2 (begun January 1, 2009) 365:3 (begun August 9, 2010) Photo-a-Day, Take 4 (begun December 23, 2012, in the days when I was enamored with Snapseed tools)
The daily blogpost projects are, I suppose, an elaborate version of those daily photos-plus-captions.
As Mary Oliver famously wrote:
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
I guess that's what I'm trying to do with all of these projects: pay attention, find something fascinating or beautiful or moving or funny (etc.), and tell about it.
Today I created a new album on Flickr, Project 365 Take 5, and posted this shot, from breakfast out while we waited for our car to be serviced. (I love condiment caddies, what can I say?) Perhaps heading back to simpler expectations is good for me just now, when my daily to-do list manages to be all over the place. If I manage to make one at all.
It's possible I will remember tomorrow, and post a second photo. And then, continue following through until next November 30. Wish me luck!
I have been meaning for ages to get into the garage and do a thorough sorting-and-culling. And today I started—not through any great resolve, but because I thought I might get into the mood by cleaning out the pantry. The pantry should be easier than the garage, right?
Wrong.
I was immediately hit by nostalgia—a gold-leaf vase that was my mother's; lacquer soup bowls, a sake set, tiny condiment dishes from our (second) honeymoon in Japan, lo these 43 years ago; a somewhat chipped set of Limoges china that was my grandmother's. But I also found myself unable to deal with the useful stuff.
What if I made space in the garage and just started moving the pantry objects there? Wouldn't that make it easier to assess keepability? Clear out from the pantry everything but actual food and cooking tools.
Sure, I said hopefully.
And so I waded into the garage. (It's not really that bad—we're not full-on hoarders. But out of sight, out of mind, and somehow more and more stuff manages to get dropped into the "out of sight" void.)
We have two large sets of shelving, on either side of one half of the garage. We set them up almost fifteen years ago now, when we remodeled. Brand-new house! Spanking-clean garage! And when we moved our stuff back from storage, most everything that wasn't furniture or kitchen gear went straight into the garage. (That includes many, many books, but they're in the other half of the garage. Out of sight!) And there it has sat.
Some shelves do get fairly frequent visits—the one holding the toolbox, the ones holding camping and backpacking gear, the one with TP, paper towels, and other household items. I pretty well have an idea what's on the left side of the garage. The right side, though? It's a mystery. But a mystery I feel ready to tackle.
Today, I succeeded in dealing with three whole shelves, of fifteen (on the left, easy side). Huzzah! One held many dozens of rock climbing guides and ski manuals. I culled about two-thirds of those, but am (for now) keeping a few. (Nostalgia.) I'm hoping the owner of the rock gym in town might want the castoffs. Another shelf held some office supplies, some of which I have moved into the (also-needing-attention) "bill-paying room," as we call the little household office. And there were miscellaneous items: a jump rope (huh?), a dSLR sensor cleaner, my father's old Schief protractor set, an old hair dryer, which for now are in a box ready to go... somewhere. Eventually, I envision a run to our local dump, and its resale store.
In the meantime, I will take photos of anything of sentimental value I see no need to keep but still want to remember. As I did when we cleaned out my mother's house after her death in 2008, keeping some of her things but mostly just taking photos. Maybe I'll finally be able to let go of the things I kept.
Anyway, I mentioned podcasts in my title. One was Ezra Klein talking with Patti Smith ⬇︎. The other was First Draft and a conversation with poet Diane Seuss. I thoroughly enjoyed them both, grounded, wise, thoughtful women.
And for Diane, here's a poem she read. It's fourteen lines, which I think makes it one of her sonnets?
[Here on this edge I have had many diminutive visions.]
Diane Seuss
Here on this edge I have had many diminutive visions. That all at its essence is dove-gray.
Wipe the lipstick off the mouth of anything and there you will find dove-gray. With my
thumb I have smudged away the sky's blue and the water's blue and found, when I kicked it
with my shoe, even the sand at its essence is pelican-gray. I am remembering Eden.
How everything swaggered with color. How the hollyhocks finished each other's sentences.
How I missed predatory animals and worrying about being eaten. How I missed being eaten.
How the ocean and the continent are essentially love on a terrible mission to meet up with itself.
How even with the surface roiling, the depths are calmly nursing away at love. That look the late
nurser gets in its eyes as it sucks: a habitual, complacent peace. How to mother that peace, to wean
it, is a terrible career. And to smudge beauty is to discover ugliness. And to smudge ugliness is to be
knocked back by splendor. How every apple is the poison apple. How rosy the skin. How sweet
the flesh. How to suck the apple's poison is the one true meal, the invocation and the Last
Supper. How stillness nests at the base of wind's spine. How even gravestones buckle and well
with the tides. And coffins are little wayward ships making their way toward love's other shore.
I stumbled on a delightful comedy from Spain the other week, Old Dog, New Tricks—or in Spanish, simply Animal. I'm enjoying being in a different place—Galicia—and listening to the Spanish, much of which I (tell myself I) understand, though of course without the subtitles I'd be pretty lost. "Much" not necessarily being "enough."
It got me thinking about other foreign series I've enjoyed, such as the irresistible Crash Landing on You from Korea:
And Lilyhammer, which is in English and Norwegian:
And the Danish/Swedish The Bridge (Broen/Bron):
I know I've encountered a couple of mystery/police series recently from Iceland and Finland (good old nordic noir). In any case, it got me wondering what foreign series are on Netflix right now, and wouldn't you know, there are lists!
In fact, Netflix's own website Tudum is a wealth of information for anyone wanting a Top Ten list, not just for now or for foreign series, but going back in time, week by week, to June 2021. You can filter for "Global" and "Non-English," and pow, all sorts of suggestions. Like, right now, the top ten are Last Samurai Standing (Japan), Dynamite Kiss (Korea), The Crystal Cuckoo (Spain), As You Stood By (Korean), Envious (Argentina), Delhi Crime (India), Rulers of Fortune (Brazil), Physical: Asia (Korea), 50 Seconds: The Fernando Báez Sosa Case (Argentina, documentary), and The Asset (Denmark).
If I google "Netflix series in German" (or French or Italian or...), a Netflix page shows me all the usual categories: Your Next Watch, Bingeworthy, Crime, International Drama, etc. etc. etc. Presumably, I could spend all of 2026 watching only German shows! But David might not like that so much...
I even found a feature for learning Spanish via the (dubbed) Big Bang Theory:
Anyway, I might try one of the above top ten shows—maybe stay in Spain with The Crystal Cuckoo—once I've finished off a few series and am casting about for what's next.
All this despite the fact that I really don't like subtitles, because my attention becomes so split between what's going on on the screen and what's being said. Of course, that's sometimes the case even with English-language shows (The Wire, and many British shows: subtitles have come in handy). And if I have some smattering of the language, my attention split actually becomes three-way, since I try to listen as well, but listening to another language requires effort.
Maybe I'll go for a Finnish series—Deadwind or Bordertown are two possibilities—to do away with that third splitting of attention. Finnish being nothing more than background noise to my ears—unless someone says terve (hi) or sauna. Or, yes, Korean, where I understand not a single word. Maybe I'll rewatch Crash Landing on You. I really did love that show.
I've only ever seen a porcupine once in the wild, forty-four years ago—on our honeymoon, when we camped our way up through Utah (where we spotted this amazing creature), to Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, then back down through Washington and Oregon. Great trip!
The porcupine we saw was a North American porcupine (Erethizon dorsatum, the genus name coming from the Greek for "to irritate," the full name meaning, loosely, "the animal with the irritating back"). It is the second-largest rodent—yes, it's a rodent—of North America (after the beaver), reaching 3 feet in length (plus a foot-long tail) and some 20 pounds in weight.
What brought this animal to mind was an orange-spined hairy dwarf porcupine that the photographer of vanishing animals Joel Sartore posted on FB. He photographed it near Rio de Janeiro and comments that this species, Sphiggurus villosus, is "found throughout parts of South America [and] occurs in a wide range of habitats including tropical savannahs, wetlands, and rainforests. They are most active at night, and are sometimes spotted near human communities." These cute creatures are up to 18 inches long (plus tail, which is almost as long) and weigh up to 5.5 pounds.
And that's just two of the 29 species of porcupine: 17 in the New World, 11 in the Old, and I don't know where that other species lives. Not Antarctica, that much is sure. (I'm just googling, and when one googles the natural world, the results are invariably all over the place. These numbers are from Wikipedia, and clearly no one did the math.) There are two families, the Erezithontidae, in North and South America, and the Hystricidae, in southern Europe, Africa, and Asia. Each family has three genera. The two families are only distantly related, but are classified within the same infraorder (Hystricognathi) of Rodentia (along with various other rodents such as mole rats—naked and otherwise—agoutis, chinchillas, and guinea pigs), their commonality being the unique bone structure of their skulls.
The largest porcupine is the crested porcupine (Hystrix cristata), found from Italy into sub-Saharan Africa. It weighs up to 60 pounds. The longest of its quills are 14 inches long, and when it shakes them it produces a hissing sound like a rattlesnake. It's also the second-longest-living rodent (after the naked mole rat), living up to 28 years (the mole rat: 37).
The smallest is the Roosmalen's dwarf porcupine (Coendou roosmalenorum), an arboreal species that lives chiefly in the Madeira biogeographical province of northern Brazil. "Squirrel-sized," it weighs a little over 2 pounds. Only a few sightings are confirmed.
Here is Rico, a Brazilian porcupine (Coendou prehensilis) who was a favorite of visitors at the Cincinnati Zoo. Sadly, he died this spring after a short illness from a liver infection, age 8.
And because it's impossible to get too much of Rico, here's a demonstration of his prehensile tail—and more!
Finally, in case you were wondering, the name porcupine comes, via Latin porcus 'pig' + spina 'spine, quill', from Old Italian porcospino, 'thorn-pig'. Well named! As is the German Stachelschwein, basically the same meaning. Porcospino. Stachelschwein. I may be muttering these two words under my breath for the next few days, until I find something new to fascinate me...
And finally, porcupines and hedgehogs are not related. Don't get me started.
P.S. Yes, two posts today, because heck—I can make it to 100 by the end of the year. I can do it! (I shoulda included my book reports in the numbered posts. What was I thinking?)
P.P.S. Yes, I might just have to do a post that features the naked mole rat.
P.P.P.S. And one on the hedgehog, of which there are 17 species—good grief, who knew?
Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth. After nearly 50 years in space, NASA’s Voyager 1 is about to hit a historic milestone. By November 15, 2026, it will be 16.1 billion miles (25.9 billion km) away, meaning a radio signal will take a full 24 hours—a full light-day—to reach it.
An artist's rendition, obviously
And so I looked it up, having misread the 2026 as 2025 and thinking this amazing event was being celebrated far and wide! Well, no, not yet. So I did a little research (starting with an informative article from, of all places, USA Today) and thought I'd share some of it here. Some factoids, a few diagrams, even a video or two. More than you ever wanted to know! But I found it fascinating. Human ingenuity at its best.
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977. It is traveling 10.6 miles a second. (Light, meanwhile, travels 186,282 miles a second.)
Curiously, Voyager 2 was launched earlier, on August 20, 1977. This was because it had a longer (more distant) mission and different trajectory than V1. It is also traveling a little slower, at 9.6 miles a second. (It is presently only 19.5 light-hours away from Earth, and I find no estimate of when it might reach a light-day away.)
Both missions included exploring Jupiter (1979) and Saturn (1980 for V1, and 1981 for V2), but V2 then continued on to fly by Uranus (1986) and Neptune (1989).
Here's a NASA video titled "A Once-in-176-Year Chance! Why Voyager Launched in 1977":
Voyager 1 left the solar system on August 25, 2012 (meaning it crossed the heliopause, the band where the solar wind's pressure is balanced by the pressure of the interstellar medium). Since entering interstellar space, the craft has been studying plasma waves, cosmic rays, and magnetic fields in the heliosphere.
Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause in 2018. Only two other probes have or are on the way to accomplishing this feat: Pioneer 10 and 11. Launched in 1972 and '73, they crossed Neptune's orbit in 1983 and 1990, respectively. In the meantime, however, both have ceased to transmit (2003 in the case of 10, still earlier for 11), so their present location is unknown (though I bet a science wonk could calculate a pretty good estimate). Meanwhile, New Horizons (launched in 2006)is presently in the Kuiper Belt (home most famously of poor demoted Pluto), which it will exit in 2028 or 2029—and then on to the heliopause!But for now and ever, Voyager 1 is winning the race.
And what is the big gray band, well beyond the heliosphere? Why, it's the Oort Cloud, of course—a theoretical donut-shaped band composed of trillions of icy objects—including water, ethane, and methane ices—left over from the formation of the solar system. Which Voyager 1 won't reach for another 300 years, and it won't leave it—assuming it survives all that ice—for 3,000.
So we're quite happy with this little new milestone of a light-day! Only one earth-year to wait!
