Unutterably Silly So what are you doing RIGHT NOW?

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Blossom

...We're moving back to North Carolina ... sometime possibly at the end of February....

You have a long drive ahead of you. I hope the weather's nice; February can be rough. At least once you get to NC you'll have good roads to travel.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

You have a long drive ahead of you. I hope the weather's nice; February can be rough. At least once you get to NC you'll have good roads to travel.

Thanks. Did I tell you about the time we moved from Whiteman AFB to Boone, NC in a blizzard? My adventurous husband decided to go through WV turnpike and come down to Boone through the Blue Ridge Parkway in a 18 foot Uhaul carrying a car on a trailer. We were the only ones on that narrow parkway. No siderails and steep drop offs all around then free falling comes on the radio. My 22 year old self had never been so scared.

Then in 2002 We left in a blizzard from Boone to live at Offutt AFB in Nebraska in February. I was so sick with pneumonia I don't remember much but I think we took the Tennessee route that time in a car. The military moved us so no uhaul.

The move back to North Carolina in 2004 was nice and in the Fall. I had Maisy on my lap. She loved it. We moved to the beach that time.

Sent from my Nexus 7

[ReadOnTheRun]

I am getting ready to start a brand new Paleo Diet on Monday, so I just finished going through the paleo cookbook and laid out my meal plan and prep for the upcoming week. I am excited to get going on this diet. From the looks of it, it doesn't seem too restricting so I am pretty excited for that.

Well now I am off to the grocery store to load up on all the ingredients!

[Rumpelteazer]

Waiting until it's time to go to the busstop to go to the nearby town. Initially I had planned to go on Saturday, because I thought that was market day. However, on Wednesday evening I discovered that the market is on Wednesday. I've decided to go today, that way I have to lazy days to end my vacation with.

I have to remember to look at the timetable for the bus back. I also went into town on Tuesday and from the times I had looked up I thought there were two buses an hour. But that isn't the case, between 11am and 3pm there is only one bus an hour. So on the way back I had the choice of waiting for 45 minutes or walking back to the park, which was just over a mile. I walked back, that was quicker and it wasn't an unpleasant walk.

[Rumpelteazer]

I'm making brownies. I've just put them in the oven. Today and tomorrow are lazy days I've decided. The only thing I plan to go out for is tonight to get a take away dinner and tomorrow morning to get fresh bread rolls.

Whilst waiting for the brownies to bake I'm doing some online (window) shopping. Right now I'm on the hunt again for a blanket. It's so hard to find one that isn't too expensive and/or too small; I want a blanket that I can properly curl up under on the couch. A two person blanket is too big, but most single person blankets are only 6 feet and that's too short to properly take a nap with (I tend to pull up the blanket high, if it's too short that won't work unless I like cold feet).

[timebug]

Browsing the net and looking at this forum,as
opposed to watching the dire helpings of tosh
currently on tv!

[Hitch]

Trying to motivate myself to go into my home office and work on the s**t that the g*dd*mn auditor is requiring for the bl**dy A*dit. (WHY, why on earth, would they actually ask for the house title documents, and loan documents??? Why? I have a mortgage, a mortgage company and the 1098. WHAT on earth can they possibly glean from the title docs?????)

Almost all my so-called "days off" since NOVEMBER have been spent doing this sh*t, for a RANDOM AUDIT, FFS!!!

Hitch


Hitch

[astrangerhere]

Sitting with my coffee and making notes on all the passages I marked when reading Passing last night. This is for the February discussion of the New Leaf Book Club.

[timebug]

Preparing for extensive major supplies trip, by
sitting here at this forum with a mug of coffee..

[Hitch]

More Perry Mason. (sigh) Case of the Stuttering Bishop.

[drjd]

Originally Posted by Hitch

More Perry Mason. (sigh) Case of the Stuttering Bishop.

D..D..Don't you like it?
Incidentally, I am arranging all my books of Erle Stanley Gardner in proper folders right now. He is one of my choicest writers and I have read all his books of Perry Mason, Bertha Cool & Donald Lam and Doug Selby series. I'm trying to convert some mobi format ebooks bought from Amazon years back, to epub format through caliber. I'm not an expert of Calibre though, and rarely use conversion. I'm also trying to find other ebooks of Gardner written under various pen-names, which seems a difficult task.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I love ESG because he plays FAIR. As much as we all love us some Sherlock, the truth is, you could never solve one of his, because you have no way of knowing that Sherlock sniffs rare apple tobacco from the outer regions of Timbuktu, which was smoked only by the indigenous...well, you know what I mean. ESG gives you all the clues. He hides nothing; he uses good old illusion and prestidigitation and misdirection. That's fair play, to me.

My basic assumption for mysteries is that "playing fair" means all of the clues the detective uses to solve the case are revealed to the reader, and the reader should be able to also solve the case. The trick is revealing the clues in such a fashion that the reader doesn't realize they have been. Agatha Christie was the absolute master at that sort of indirection.

But I suspect Doyle was writing Sherlock Holmes stories before that notion of fair play became established. We do have fun watching Watson trying to use Holmes' methods and failing miserably.

But some mysteries I read aren't "Whodunits". An example is later work by the late Nicholas Freeling (who wrote the Inspector Van Der Valk and the Henri Castang series.) Who the killer was is clear early on. Freeling is more interested in exploring the motivations, and why the killer committed murder. They are character portraits using mystery as a framing device.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Then in 2002 We left in a blizzard from Boone to live at Offutt AFB in Nebraska in February. I was so sick with pneumonia I don't remember much but I think we took the Tennessee route that time in a car. The military moved us so no uhaul.

A late friend was a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. She was transferred to a new base and her husband was going with her. The Army handled the move and she discovered the joys of Army packing. The work detail assigned to pack her stuff made no assumptions. This wrapped object was an ashtray. That wrapped object was what was in the ashtray when they packed it...

The new base was in Enterprise, AL, which was its own strangeness. Its claim to fame is a commemorative statue to the boll weevil in the town square. Apparently, the first settlers in the area tried to grow cotton, like everyone else. The boll weevil cleaned them out. Instead of trying again, they shifted to peanuts as the cash crop, and did nicely, thank you. They decided brother Boll did them a favor, and deserved to be honored.
______
Dennis

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by drjd

D..D..Don't you like it?

I love it. I do. ESG was a master of his craft, really.

Incidentally, I am arranging all my books of Erle Stanley Gardner in proper folders right now. He is one of my choicest writers and I have read all his books of Perry Mason, Bertha Cool & Donald Lam and Doug Selby series. I'm trying to convert some mobi format ebooks bought from Amazon years back, to epub format through caliber. I'm not an expert of Calibre though, and rarely use conversion. I'm also trying to find other ebooks of Gardner written under various pen-names, which seems a difficult task.

Good god. To this day, most of my books--the books I own--are still in print. I had some thousands before I started with eBooks, so...I have a ways to go yet. ;-)

And nothing on God's green earth would convince me to convert my personal library. NOZZING. I don't want to do for recreation what I do for work. No-thank-yew-verra-much.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

My basic assumption for mysteries is that "playing fair" means all of the clues the detective uses to solve the case are revealed to the reader, and the reader should be able to also solve the case. The trick is revealing the clues in such a fashion that the reader doesn't realize they have been. Agatha Christie was the absolute master at that sort of indirection.

Indeed she was, and so is Gardner. And yes, my concept of playing fair is that we get the clues, and thus, we can detect the criminal. If we don't, well, that's our brains' faults, not the writer's. Good prestidigitation is a true art.

But I suspect Doyle was writing Sherlock Holmes stories before that notion of fair play became established. We do have fun watching Watson trying to use Holmes' methods and failing miserably.

Yes, the concept of "fair play" in mysteries really came later.

But some mysteries I read aren't "Whodunits". An example is later work by the late Nicholas Freeling (who wrote the Inspector Van Der Valk and the Henri Castang series.) Who the killer was is clear early on. Freeling is more interested in exploring the motivations, and why the killer committed murder. They are character portraits using mystery as a framing device.
______
Dennis

To me, those are not really "whodunits," as you note. They are explorations of human behavior, etc. Somewhat like Columbo, in a weird way. Or other authors, where the enjoyment is in the "how" of how the protagonist traps the badguy, or even those that explore the depths of the kinky psyche. I enjoy those, but I don't perceive those as mysteries in any real sense. To me, deciding the whodunit is the joy of it.

(It's like watching something relatively mindless, like "Death in Paradise," or whatever it's called, or Father Brown in this newest iteration. The mystery isn't; you can figure out who did it in the first 5 minutes, tops. The enjoyment is the ensemble, or the comfort-food factor of the environment, the coziness of it, etc. Altho I suspect that "Death in Paradise" is probably DOA, given their filming location--after all, Guadeloupe, where it's filmed, is right next to Dominica, which I know ALL TOO WELL has been scraped naked by God's very own Grader, the last honking Hurricane. Utterly devastated Dominica, I mean...in ways that cannot be imagined if not seen.)

Hitch

[Rumpelteazer]

Sitting in bed trying not to drip onto my sheets. I had to sneeze hard and it gave me a nose bleed. I hate winters, even when it isn't especially dry or cold I'm prone to nosebleeds. But, the thought of having it fixed by the doctor scares me. It has to be done to blood vessels in both nostrils and I just can't shake the image of the doctor sticking a sort of soldering iron in my nose.

I'm also a bit sad tonight because I heard that one of our neighbours across to canal from us, a furnishing and home decor shop, is closing down in Apri after 34 years. It's a family run business, parents and their daughter, and they were really nice people.