Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Firing watch.

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

The Seattle Mariners (43-70) fired Don Wakamatsu, their manager, yesterday. As the Seattle paper notes, this took place right before the Mariners’ celebration of Japanese heritage day, and Wakamatu’s firing was just the latest in a long string of odd incidents this year.

Missed this on Sunday, but the Pirates fired their pitching coach and bench coach.

And the city of Maywood (remember Maywood?) is considering firing the city of Bell, due to the ongoing salary scandal in Bell.

Not exactly a firing, but I’m going to throw this in anyway: LA County Sheriff Lee Baca is refusing to release records involving the death of Ruben Salazar. Salazar was a television journalist covering an anti-Vietnam war rally in East LA on August 29, 1970; he was killed when a sheriff’s deputy fired a tear-gas grenade into a bar and hit Salazar in the head.

The LAT doesn’t mention this aspect of Salazar’s life, but I will. I’ve been interested in Salazar ever since I read The Great Shark Hunt and discovered Salazar was a close friend of Thompson’s. Actually, more than just a close friend; the “300-pound Samoan attorney” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was Salazar (who, according to Thompson, was somewhat upset that Thompson chose to conceal his identity).

Edited to add: Whoops, I was mistaken. I had Salazar confused with Oscar Zeta Acosta. That’s what I get for relying on my memory while I was at work, and not waiting until I got home to check my sources. HST did write about Salazar in The Great Shark Hunt, though.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Firings, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

After action report: Las Vegas, NV.

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

I covered a lot of stuff in my previous travel report, so this will mostly just be updates.

  • Project e worked spectacularly well at DEFCON. This is the first chance I’ve had to really push the battery life, and I was able to get an good 12+ hours out of the battery without running it totally dry. (This was with the machine set to “powersave” and putting it into “standby” or “hibernate” when I was in the dealer’s room, or driving around with Mike the Musicologist and Andrew. Continuous usage with the wireless would have been more like 6+ hours, I think, which is still pretty impressive.)
  • My one regret is that I forgot my Alfa external WiFi adapter. I would have enjoyed playing with that at the convention.
  • The 5.11 bailout bag also worked out well for lugging around Project e and various other equipment. Again, I was able to carry a pretty good load, including the laptop, charger, books, a couple of bottles of water,  the small camera, and miscellaneous other necessities.
  • MtM has the Nikon with him and has been taking a lot of photos. As you saw below, I did use the Nikon to take some Gehry photos. When I have more time, I’m going to put up an expanded and annotated Flickr photo set; I did some side-by-side experiments with aperture priority vs. automatic exposure.
  • Food in Las Vegas was, without exception, pretty darn good. The worst meal I had (at the Four Kegs) was still better than average (and I didn’t order the stromboli, which is the house specialty). We also had a very good (if loud) tapas meal at Firefly* on Paradise, the usual wonderful meal at Lotus of Siam, the previously mentioned dinner at Shabu-Shabu Paradise, and a Moroccan meal at Marrakech. (I had not previously had Moroccan food, so I can’t comment on how authentic it was. I certainly enjoyed my meal, and the belly dancer didn’t hurt.)

    Vegas does have something of a shortage of good breakfast places outside of the casinos (and even inside of the casinos, if you’re not looking for a buffet). We had several good breakfasts at Blueberry Hill on Flamingo and one excellent breakfast at The Egg and I on Sahara. I know that MtM and Andrew went to a good Italian place in New York, New York while I was at the convention, and I’ll let them comment on that.
  • Between Tucson and Las Vegas, the refurbished Kindle I ordered arrived, and it went on this trip. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the Kindle later on, but my first impression is “Meh”. I did manage to read John Clark’s Ignition! in PDF format and a Project Gutenberg MOBI format copy of Heart of Darkness without too much trouble, but my experiences with other PDF files and eBooks have been inconsistent.
  • On the other hand, I finished, and highly recommend, Ubuntu for Non-Geeks 4th Edition and am almost finished with Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2nd Edition (also recommended). No Starch Press rocks. And the coupon code “DEFCON18” will get you a 30% discount. And they’re running a half-price sale on all e-books.
  • My Southwest experience this time was much more pleasant. No misplaced bags, and no flight delays. One thing that was particularly unusual was going through the security line in Las Vegas; I had, literally, no wait. Just walked straight up to the TSA agent and got in line for the metal detector. It took longer to take my shoes off and the laptop out than it did to get through the rest of security.

My thanks to, in no particular order, the DEFCON 18 staff and presenters, No Starch Press, UNIX Surplus, SEREPick, Lotus of Siam, Shabu-Shabu Paradise, Sarah at the iBar in the Rio, and the unknown belly dancer at Marrakech.

Special thanks to my high-speed, low-drag travel companions in the primary, Mike the Musicologist and Andrew “Porous concrete? What were they thinking?” Wimsatt.

Posted in asus_eee, Books, DEFCON 18, Endorsements, Food, Gehry, Kindleing, linux, Photography, project_e, Thanks, Travel | 3 Comments »

DEFCON 18 notes: Day 2.

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

Saturday was kind of a rough day at DEFCON 18. But then, Saturday is always a rough day at DEFCON.

I don’t feel it’d be fair to review or summarize the “Extreme-range RFID Tracking” panel; I came in about 20 minutes late. (We lingered a bit over a very good breakfast at Blueberry Hill.) What I was able to gather is that Padget’s set a new record for long distance RFID reading, and that upping the radio power works for increasing RFID reading range up to a point. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added link to Black Hat 2010 version of paper. Here’s a link to Paget’s blog entry about the session.)

I was not able to get into “Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines Redux” due to extreme overcrowding. (Edited to add 8/9/2010: The Black Hat website has what purports to be MP4 video of Jack’s version of the presentation at Black Hat 2010. I have not sat down and watched it yet.)

I did attend the “This is not the droid you’re looking for…” panel, mostly because I was camping out for the next talk. This panel turned out to be more interesting than I expected; the presenters demonstrated a proof-of-concept rootkit for Android phones that allows you to do all sorts of fun stuff; grab contact information, grab SMS messages, grab location information (all three of these are stored in SQLite databases on the Android), and even make phone calls from the phone. The presenters haven’t weaponized the attack yet, but claim it should be easy to do so.

“Practical Cellphone Spying“: Another nifty panel. Padget discussed the concepts behind IMSI catching, and gave a live demo of cellphone interception on the AT&T network. The key takeaway here for me was that the same technology used by law enforcement to intercept calls is now coming down to the point where it will be wrapped in a turnkey package and sold to people with more questionable motivations. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added link to Paget’s blog entry which includes slides.)

“How to Hack Millions of Routers“: I went to this because Lawrence put in a special request. The short version is that a large number of commercially available routers (such as those used by Verizon FIOS) are vulnerable to a clever attack using DNS rebinding and load balancing. Heffner has also released a tool that automates this attack. (This is another Black Hat talk that got a lot of attention in the press; the link above includes a copy of Heffner’s white paper which details the attack vector.)

(Edited to add 8/9/2010: I’ve added a link to Heffner’s Black Hat version of this talk, which as far as I can tell, is pretty similar to the DEFCON 18 version.)

I didn’t attend either “Hacking with Hardware: Introducing the Universal RF Usb Keboard Emulation Device – URFUKED” or “Programmable HID USB Keystroke Dongle: Using the Teensy as a Pen Testing Device“. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added a link to the Teensy project from the Irongeek website. The bottom of that page has a link to the DEFCON presentation. I’ve also added a link to HackerWarrior.com for the USB Keyboard Emulation Device; that directory appears to contain a copy of the presentation, plus code.)

Instead, I left a little early, had a very nice sake fueled dinner at Shabu-Shabu Paradise in Henderson (a restaurant I enthusiastically endorse), sidecars at the iBar in the Rio (sadly, we did not get to play with the Microsoft Surface), and Penn & Teller.

The three of us saw Penn and Teller back in 2006, and we wondered how much the show had changed since then. Mike the Musicologist estimated that about 50% of the show was new; I think the percentage is a little higher than that, but my memory may be faulty. I was not unhappy that they ended the show with the .357 magnums; the bullet-catching illusion fascinates me, and I’m still trying to figure out how Penn and Teller do it. (Jim Steinmeyer’s The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo is a very good history of the bullet-catching illusion, and yet another book I strongly recommend to anyone with even a casual interest in the history of magic.)

The other thing we all noticed is that Penn and Teller’s show has become a bit more explicitly political; in addition to the .357 magnum closer, which has always included 2nd Amendment references (and big kudos to P&T for reciting the Four Rules), the show also included references to flag burning, the Chinese Bill of Rights (“What Chinese Bill of Rights?” Exactly.) and the stupidity of the TSA. Penn and Teller even sell the Security Edition of the Bill of Rights in their gift shop for a lousy $5. (Quote: “We want McCarran Airport to be flooded with these.”) Not that any of us were bothered by the politics; I think all three of us lay claim to at least some form of Libertarianism. And if you’re the kind of person who would take offense at Penn and Teller’s politics, I won’t tell you “don’t go”; I’ll tell you “go, and have your world view challenged”.

(I’d also like to give Penn and Teller kudos for keeping gift shop prices low. Both Andrew and I picked up DVDs of the Teller-directed “Macbeth” for only $10. Teller, if you’re reading this, thanks for signing my copy. And for everything else you do, too.)

Posted in Books, DEFCON 18, Endorsements, Food, Geek, Guns, Magic, Radio, Travel | 1 Comment »

Steak!

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

The LAT writes about the closing of Edward’s Steak House, a 64-year old steak house in El Monte. I’ve never eaten there, but it sounds like a place I would have enjoyed trying.

By way of Marginal Revolution, I found out about a fairly new book that’s relevant to my interests: Steak: One Man’s Search for the World’s Tastiest Piece of Beef.

Posted in Beef, Books, Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

Obit watch.

Monday, July 12th, 2010

Harvey Pekar.

Edited to add: Reason tribute.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Books in brief: Friends of the Family: The Inside Story of the Mafia Cops Case

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

The Mafia Cops case is a great story for true crime lovers. Two retired NYPD cops are arrested, accused of being in the Mafia’s pocket for almost their entire careers on the force, convicted, have their conviction partially overturned, reinstated on appeal, and wind up with lengthy prison terms. Adding additional savor to the case are such minor details as:

  • These cops didn’t just sell inside NYPD information to the mob: they’re accused of actually performing hits for the mob themselves, using their badges as cover.
  • One of the convicted cops actually wrote a book about how he overcame his upbringing in a Mafia family to become a decorated NYPD officer.

This has the makings of a pretty decent book.

Friends of the Family: The Inside Story of the Mafia Cops Case isn’t that book.

I  expected a book co-written by two of the people who worked on the case (a former NYPD detective and an assistant DA) to be at least somewhat compelling. Instead, that’s actually the source of the book’s biggest problems. Problem number one: because Dades (the detective) and Vecchione (the assistant DA) are co-authors, the book is told entirely from their point of view. This is a problem because the decision to prosecute the Mafia Cops at the Federal level, rather than locally, was rather controversial, and frankly questionable. The conviction was initially overturned because the Federal prosecutors chose to bring RICO charges against the two cops: there are legal questions about whether their ongoing criminal activities fell inside or outside of the statute of limitations. An outside observer could have written an interesting book giving both sides of the case: because Fisher chose to work with Dades and Vecchione, his coverage of the question is mostly quoting uncritically the griping of the local cops and DA’s office. It reads like an episode of NYPD Blue: The Bad Years.

A second problem is that Dades and Vecchione are not well served by their ghost writer. Vecchione, in particular, comes across as a cypher. We know nothing about him going into the book, and little more than nothing coming out.

The book’s third, crippling, problem is actually related to the second problem. If Vecchione is a cypher, we end up knowing too much about Dades. Why is that a major issue? Because a great deal of time and space in the book is devoted to Dades and his issues. Dades is bitter: he feels he’s being forced into retirement after 20 years of service to the NYPD. Why does he feel “forced” into retirement? Let’s go over the reasons:

  • Dades cheated on his wife with the wife of a suspect he arrested.
  • When he broke off the relationship, the woman he was cheating with accused him of rape.
  • Dades was cleared by NYPD Internal Affairs.
  • Dades also managed to avoid a charge of “conduct unbecoming an officer”. The book doesn’t specify how he did that, and I actually am curious. After all, he admitted the affair…
  • In spite of all this, Dades feels like he has to retire because he’s made enemies within the department, and within Internal Affairs specifically. Dades is bitter, resentful, and wonders why he is being treated like a criminal. After all, what did he do wrong? (Except for the whole cheating on his wife, jeopardizing a criminal case, and making the department look bad thing.)

In addition to Dades and his resentment about being “forced” out of the NYPD, a considerable amount of space is devoted to Dades and his attempt to establish a relationship with the father who walked out on him when Dades was a kid. I figure there’s about two people, maybe, who care about that. The rest of us wanted the ghost writer to shut the hell up about Dades and his father issues and get back to the case already.

I have not read it yet, but I suspect The Brotherhoods: The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia is a better book about the same case. In an ideal world, Jerry Capeci would write his own book about this case as well. In this world, I can’t recommend Friends of the Family.

(I’d like to thank Patrick at Popehat, who encouraged me to write this review.)

Posted in Books, Law | 2 Comments »

And the head coach wants no sissies…

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Happy Bloomsday, everyone!

Use your freedom of Joyce!

For some reason, I started thinking about food, and stumbled across these two links to Bloomsday Breakfasts. Enjoy. As for me, I think I’ll stick to some Gorgonzola and a glass of Burgundy; I’m not much for the inner organs of beasts, with or without relish.

One of these years, I’m going to get it together enough to do my own Bloomsday greeting cards.

(Subject line hattip, for those of you who didn’t get enough Dr. Demento as a child.)

Posted in Books, Food | Comments Closed

The Hidden World of Girls.

Monday, June 14th, 2010

I’m a day late and a few bucks short on this (somehow I missed it the first time around) but I did want to put up a link to this story from NPR’s “The Hidden World of Girls” project, featuring my friend Pat Cadigan.

(Lawrence and I discussed this: I get the Pat Cadigan beat, he gets the giant spider beat. Seems like a fair split to me.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Music, Radio | Comments Closed

Why does a Yugo have a rear window defroster?

Monday, June 14th, 2010

Quick thoughts on Jason Vuic’s The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History:

  1. This is almost as much a biography of Malcolm Bricklin as it is a history of the Yugo. I’ve hung around with enough car people to have heard of Bricklin, but not at the level of detail Vuic provides. One might say that Bricklin is a “colorful” character. One might also say that some of his business dealings pre-Yugo, Yugo, and post-Yugo, were…well, in the interest of avoiding lawsuits, let’s just say “a touch irregular”.
  2. Vuic makes an interesting argument that the Yugo wasn’t actually that bad a car. The short summary of his reasoning is: it was sold in the United States, therefore, it wasn’t that bad. A more elaborate summary of Vuic’s reasoning is that any car sold in the U.S. has to meet a certain minimum set of Federal standards; any car that can meet those standards is, almost by definition, not that bad a car. He goes on to argue that the Subaru 360 (a car I’d never heard of, but I was three years old when Subaru started importing it) is actually a much worse car. (I think Vuic undercuts his argument when he points out that the 360 was not sold as a car; it was actually sold as a “covered motorcycle” to get around U.S. safety standards. And guess who imported the 360 into the U.S.? Bricklin.)
  3. Vuic also manages to make Yugoslavian geopolitics somewhat interesting.
  4. He has a good sampling of Yugo jokes.
  5. And his endnotes show that he did his homework; he’s got citations to things like Composite World magazine and biographies of obscure Canadian (wait, is “obscure Canadian” redundant?) politicians. Reading the endnotes, I often found myself wondering, “Where did he dig that up?”

I was expecting, based on the reviews and excerpts I’d read online, that this would be at least a halfway decent book. The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History is much better than that. I’d recommend it to any auto buff. (You can get it on the Kindle, by the way.)

Posted in Books, Cars | Comments Closed

Sometimes, you’ve just got to shake your head…

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

…and say “Wow”.

Tim Rutten reviews the new Chuck Barris book, Della: A Memoir of My Daughter, in the LAT.

Pull quote:

…it is difficult to understand how a reputable house like Simon & Schuster came to publish this wretched volume.

Posted in Books, Clippings | Comments Closed

Timeless. Changeless.

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

In my family, there’s a running joke: you know it is a slow news day when the local paper runs a story about the timeless, changeless ways of the Amish.

The NYT covers the sudden Federal interest in changing Amish farming practices. Specifically, cattle runoff from the Amish and Old Order Mennonite farmers around Chesapeake Bay is destroying the bay’s ecosystem; the Feds are trying to persuade the farmers to implement practices that would reduce runoff, and even offering government grants to farmers. Of course…

Persuading plain-sect farmers to install fences and buffers underwritten by federal grants has been challenging because of their tendency to shy from government programs, including subsidies. Members neither pay Social Security nor receive its benefits, for example.

In other news, William Grimes (author of Straight Up or On the Rocks and no slouch on the cocktail front himself) covers the reissue of Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto.

(That reminds me: has anyone out there read Chasing the White Dog yet?)

Instead, because Congress allowed the tax to lapse for one year and gave all estates a free pass in 2010, Mr. Duncan’s four children and four grandchildren stand to collect billions that in any other year would have gone to the Treasury.

Yes. I am sure Mr. Duncan arranged his death with the favorable tax consequences to his children in mind.

Oh, guess what? David Lee Powell has filed a new appeal!

Houston attorney Richard Burr said in a 53-page application for a writ of habeas corpus that Powell has been a model inmate, that he poses no threat to society and that to execute him would violate his constitutional rights prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.

Posted in Amish, Books, Clippings, Law, Mixology | Comments Closed

“…think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Two of my favorite authors showed up while I was making the Internet rounds this morning.

The San Jose Mercury News has an interview with Tim Cahill, who just finished a semester of teaching at San Jose State. I hadn’t heard much from or about Cahill in a while, and the interview explains why.

Slate has an interview with Anthony Bourdain, specifically dealing with issues of right, wrong, and taste.

I was just in Liberia recently, and although I find certain tribal practices personally deeply repellant, I’d always felt uncomfortable with the idea of these “enlightened humanitarians” going to Africa and lecturing people who don’t have clean water and have been living with these systems for centuries about how to behave. And yet I gotta tell you, Liberia made me ask myself: Are some things just wrong? Genital mutilation would be one. Some of the practices of some of the traditional tribal elders—witch doctors, basically—are another. I really wonder whether there are absolutes in some cases. It’s something I’m wrestling with, clearly.

This interview is part of a series, “The Wrong Stuff“, by Kathryn Schulz, and is tied in to her forthcoming book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. This book sounds like something that’s right up my alley; I’ll report back once I’ve obtained a copy and read it.

I also wanted to link to this story about a Baltimore shooting involving an off-duty cop (hattip: Balko); not because I want to comment on the story itself (that’s being ably handled at Balko’s site), but because of this:

Baltimore Police Maj. Terrence McLarney, head of the homicide unit, said there is no indication the two men met inside the establishment or knew each other.

Terrence McLarney? Terrence f’ing McLarney? Tell me this can’t be the same Terrence McLarney who was a Detective Sergeant in Homicide when David Simon wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets? The one who graduated from the police academy in 1976, per Simon? That’d be, what, 34 years in, and McLarney’s still on the job? That’s not unheard of (and how’s Donald “The Big Man” Worden doing these days, anyway?) but given Baltimore PD politics (which McLarney seemed to be in the thick of), I’m a little surprised.

(Subject line hattip.)

Edited to add: Well, McLarney and Worden both have entries in Wikipedia, believe it or not. And Worden apparently played “Det. Donald Worden” in a Season 5 episode of The Wire. McLarney’s entry says this:

In July 2008, McLarney was named the official commander of the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit, a position he had been the acting commander of since May 2008.

So, yeah, seems like the same guy.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Three men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong…

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

Slate has an interesting summary/review of Milton Rokeach’s book, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (which is out of print, but shows up semi-frequently at my local Half-Price Books. Amazon wants $90 for this?)

Rokeach’s book is one of the more fascinating works of psychology I’ve read. I’d put it up there with When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of A Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, although the latter book is arguably more sociology than psychology.

Basically, Rokeach found three men in an asylum, each of whom believed he was Jesus Christ…and then put them together to see what happened.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Neuroscience | 1 Comment »

So how was your day?

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

My primary care doctor has been on my case to see a cardiologist. She sent me to one practice, who we’ll call “Austin Heart”. I fired them after my first visit. This time she sent me over to a practice we’ll call The Grace L. Ferguson Heart (And Storm Door Co.) (Grace for short), conveniently located in the same complex as her office (and right next door to a place we’ll call The Hospital).

I go in last week. They interview me, do an EKG. Some minor abnormalities on the EKG, but “nothing that really causes us concern”. Still, given my age and other factors, they want to do some tests “just to establish a baseline”. “Fine,” I say, “let’s get those scheduled and get them all knocked out in one day so I can minimize the amount of time I have to take off work.”

So they schedule a nuclear stress test, an echocardiogram, and a PADNET test (for peripheral artery disease) for this morning. Except for some reason they can’t schedule the PADNET test; I have to call The Hospital and schedule it myself. I figure this is going to be just a half-day thing, right? So I schedule only a half-day off work, and spend Monday night and all day Tuesday off coffee, soda, chocolate (not that I eat a lot of that anyway), tea, and anything else with caffeine in it.

Show up this morning. Somehow, the camera for the nuclear stress test had gone down over night, and they weren’t sure it was going to come back up. It takes time for “the heads” to come up to operating temperature.

Fine, we can still knock out the echo and the PADNET, and maybe the camera will come back up. So we do the echo, they call over to The Hospital and move my appointment up, I walk over to The Hospital and check in there.

The Hospital is out-of-network (OK, fine) and I haven’t met my $500 deductible for the year, so they want $500 RIGHT NOW for the test. “How much does this test cost?” <clerk calls manager> “Between $400 and $500.” Fine. Pay the $500. This test basically consists of one guy and 30 minutes of his time, mostly putting on and removing blood pressure cuffs from my arms and legs, and working the machine that actually pumps up the cuffs and takes the readings. You can’t tell me this is a $500 per person machine.

(But, as a side note, The Hospital is VERY NICE. If you’re going to go to a hospital, this is the one you want to go to. It even has a cafe I’d actually be willing to eat in, although part of that may have been that I hadn’t had anything to eat except some Pringles in the morning, and no coffee, soda, or tea.)

So I go back upstairs to Grace after they run that test. They tell me Dr. X (not THE Dr. X) will be in to see me in a few minutes. Then they come back and say, “Oh, the camera’s up, we can do the test now.” So the Nuclear Camera Guy rounds me and the four other people who were also scheduled for camera time up and takes us back down to The Hospital’s nuclear lab. Lucky me, I get to go first, since I had the earliest scheduled appointment. It only takes him two tries to get an IV into me (the second try he stuck the back of my left hand, so I now have a nice little puckered place there). Then I get to spend a half-hour in the imaging camera, which is about as roomy as an MRI machine when working (but without the magnetic fields, which is a good thing, since I had a pocket full of metal). Then they take me out and tell me they’ll come get me in a hour and a half (1:30 PM) for round two.

Of course, I’m supposed to be at work at 1, so I had to call my boss, tell him it looks like this is going to be an all-day affair, get the number to call and change my schedule from him, call and change my half-day to a full-day, wait around, spend another half-hour in the camera, go back upstairs to Grace; by now it’s 1:45 PM or so.

(Of course, since all the tests are done, I stop by The Cafe in The Hospital and tell the woman behind the counter I want an extra-large coffee. If I had been thinking about it, I would have told Nuclear Camera Guy to leave the IV line in, and just had the girl behind the counter inject that extra large coffee straight into the vein.)

“Did you need something else?” “Well, I thought Dr. X wanted to see me after the tests.” “Let me check.” <comes back> “You didn’t see him already?” “No, he was going to see me, but then the camera came back up, and we went down to that.” <wait> Very nice nurse comes out and explains politely that it’s going to take some time for him to look over the results (which I expected), he’ll call me, and I can go ahead and leave.

Leave. Five minutes down the road, cell phone rings. “How far away are you? Can you come back? Dr. X wants to see you.” “I can come back. I’ll come back. I WANT TO GET EVERYTHING TAKEN CARE OF TODAY.” (By this time, I have probably used the phrase “I  WANT TO GET EVERYTHING TAKEN CARE OF TODAY.” with the capitalization, at least a half-dozen times to everyone in the office.) “Let me check.” She puts me on hold. Meanwhile, I’m hanging a U turn and heading back. By the time she gets back on the phone, I’m pulling into their driveway. “Can you come back on Friday?” ” I WANT TO GET EVERYTHING TAKEN CARE OF TODAY. If I have to wait, that’s okay.” “Well, Dr. X left for the day (at 2 PM; ah, the exciting life of a cardiologist) and he won’t be back. Can you come in on Friday?” “Okay, fine, if we do it early.”

So now I have to take more time off work so I can go in at 8:30 AM on Friday, which is going to look real good. Plus, it isn’t like I have unlimited time off work.

The thing that really aggravates me is that everyone was so nice and apologetic about the problems with the camera and all the waiting around. Camera Guy kept apologizing to me, and even offered to buy me a Coke if I wanted one (which I didn’t, plus I didn’t think I was supposed to have caffeinated sodas until after the tests were over). I’m very happy with Grace, and with Dr. X, so far, but this was just one of those days.

At least I finished What the Dog Saw.

Edited to add: And, since the whole point of the nuclear stress test was to get imaging of my heart: when I see Dr. X on Friday, I plan to ask him if I can order some color glossy prints, perhaps 8″ x 10″s. If I can, I’ll scan them (copyright permitting) and post them here.

Posted in Books, Geek, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

True crime.

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Bill Crider, one of nature’s noblemen, points us to this list of “The 25 Best True Crime Books” from the Forensic Colleges blog.

Blogging about other people’s lists seems to me to be non-productive (de gustibus non disputatum and all that), but I’m making an exception here because this seems to be a pretty solid list. I’ve read 9 out of the 25 listed, and mostly agree with those choices.

Of course, I have a few quibbles:

  • I wouldn’t have put both Mark Bowden books on the list, though he is a heck of a good writer. Finders Keepers would be my pick for the list: Doctor Dealer is only a so-so book (and a very early Bowden).
  • I confess that I have not read Killer Clown, but it will have to be one heck of a book to beat Buried Dreams on the Gacy front.
  • The Amanda Knox case is fascinating and troubling, but it seems a bit early to be putting Angel Face on a best list. I have something of the same quibble about The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher.
  • I’ve read Crime and Science – The New Frontier in Criminology, and it seems odd to pick that over Thorwald’s much more famous Century of the Detective. To be fair, though, I’ve only read the latter book in the Reader’s Digest Condensed Edition. I’ve been trying to find a cheap used copy without much luck.
  • Blood and Money is actually a 1976 book, though it appears to have been reissued in 2001. (I read that for the first time last year; it is a swell book that belongs on the list.)
  • The Onion Field, dammit!

Posted in Books, Law | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »