A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie

The BBC has been producing new versions of the Miss Marple stories with Geraldine McEwen in the lead role. I view this as utterly unnecessary, as they did them all twenty years ago with Joan Hickson, and she nailed the role so perfectly that everyone else looks like a bad fake. It would be like trying to make new Sherlock Holmes episodes, with someone not nearly so good as Jeremy Brett. He did it perfectly, so why make a product that is bound to be inferior? Nevertheless, they have made these new episodes, and I've watched a few of them.

They are terrible. Now, the actors are good (though Geraldine McEwen just isn't as good as Joan Hickson), the costumes are good, the sets are beautiful. The production values are good. But the scripts are not. Here we have an edgier Marple. Agatha Christie made no attempt to explain why her sleuth was a spinster--some women are, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the new Marple has mentioned more than once that her lover died in World War I. And in one story (one I saw a while ago--don't remember which one) she said that her lover had been a married man. The real Miss Marple would not have done that, and even if she had, she would never have told anyone. This is just wrong.

After seeing the first half of A Murder is Announced, I picked up the book to re-read it, and was appalled by the changes they'd made in the show. Miss Marple comes to stay with the daughter of an old friend so she can poke around. The person she stays with in the show is a different person than the one in the book. The retired colonel with a much younger wife in the book is now single, pining for a neighbor lady, and was thrown out of the military for drunkenness. A character who was specifically described several times in the book as a striking blonde has become a brunette. The two single women who share a house in the book have become openly lesbian. And one of the characters suddenly blurts out in front of a crowd at the post office that she isn't really a widow--her son was born out of wedlock, and she's just been trying to appear respectable for the last 20+ years. And the young man who has fallen in love with a pretty woman in the book is now a jealous mama's boy who is trying to ruin his mother's romance. Everyone seems to be much grottier and have darker pasts than Christie ever intended. Three characters from the book do not even appear in the show. Likewise, they entirely changed the last scene, in which the murderer is revealed, and how it's determined. Among other things, the cook assaults the murderer, instead of the reverse, as Christie wrote. It's wrong, wrong, wrong, and they should be ashamed of themselves.

I need to track down the Hickson version of this one now, to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

My New Toy

So, I am finally dipping my toe into the technology of the 21st century and have gotten an iPod Shuffle. Probably most of you out there in blog land will not think this is an amazing thing, but consider this: most of my music collection is still on cassette tapes. As my car is ten years old and still has a tape deck (and no CD player), this has been working fine for me. When CDs started coming out in the 80s, I saw no reason to buy them: they cost more, they're more easily damaged, and it required buying new eqipment to play them. In the 90s, there was no music worth buying. It was an entire decade of cultural wasteland, from grunge to rotten fashion to ugly shoes. Every year that we travel farther away from the 90s is a good year in my mind. I occasionally buy CDs, but I'm always cautious because I hate wasting my money to discover that the good song on the radio was the only one on the whole album worth listening to. (Alanis Morisette comes to mind--there are two good songs on Jagged Little Pill. Alas.) I am amazed by people who have hundred of CDs in their collection. I can't imagine why they would waste all that money.

Obviously, I am not an early adopter of new technological toys. I would far rather spend my money on books or bike equipment than expensive little plastic gadgets. Even when I do buy equipment, my tastes run conservative. My cell phone was free, and I use it to make one or two telephone calls per month. It doesn't have a camera. It doesn't have different ring tones. I don't play games on it, or IM people when I get bored. My cell phone is a tool, not a toy. I am still unconvinced why DVDs are better than video tapes, except that they sometimes come with extra features. My printer on my home computer died years ago, and I have just now gotten around to replacing it. The new printer was on clearance for very cheap, and still I wondered if it was a frivolous purchase that I could live without. I don't have caller ID. I don't belong to Netflix because I don't watch enough movies to be able to justify the cost. I only just got a cash card a couple of years ago, because I was getting along fine without one. Last year I was given a microwave for Christmas--the first I have ever owned. I got along fine without one.

So, why did I want an iPod Shuffle? Because I like being able to buy one song at a time. And, more importantly, I can go running with it. It's tiny and clamps right on to my clothing. It hardly weighs anything, and it doesn't have a hard drive, so bouncing around doesn't cause problems for it. It doesn't need an extra carrier to attach to my body, sweat shouldn't be a problem, and I'm unlikely to drop it. And running is tedious and painful, and I need all the distractions I can find to make it more tolerable.

The ear buds aren't quite as comfortable as I'd like, but they're okay. And the sound quality is very high, since they play directly into your ear. It's incredibly tiny, so I can carry it around in my purse or my pocket when I'm not using it. Yesterday I discovered how great it can be: my office mate had asked someone to come in and show her how to do something on her computer. It took hours. Under normal circumstances the sound of two people talking for hours just a couple of feet away from me would have prevented me from being able to concentrate. However, I turned on my iPod, and I got my work done. Heaven. This is one little piece of technology that is worth every penny.

A Sunday in Hell

A Sunday in Hell is a cycling documentary about the 1976 Paris Roubaix race. Know as the Queen of the Classics, Paris Roubaix is a hard race across northern France. It is known for the pave, sections of old cobblestone paths that the race follows. They are rough and bumpy and dangerous. Crashes and flat tires are common, and to win you must be not only strong but lucky. Depending on the weather, it's either wet and muddy or dry and dusty. 1976 was one of the dusty Roubaixs.

A Sunday in Hell is quite a good cycling film. It takes two hours to follow a one-day race, so there is plenty of time to focus on the details and explain how things work for viewers who aren't already knowledgeable about cycling. The scenery of northern France is beautiful, and it was fascinating, from my perspective, so watch a race with so many of the big-name older riders, such as Eddy Merckx, Francesco Moser, Freddy Maertens, Joop Zoetemelk, Raymond Poulidor, and Roger De Vlaeminck. These are names I've heard many times, but all are long-since retired, so this is first time I've been able to see them race. It was also interesting seeing the equipment they used, and how things were managed before race radios became common--the tactics were different then. Likewise, these days team mechanics aren't allowed to ride on top of the team cars, but they did it then. And I was quite surprised to find that riders who'd pulled out of the race hitched rides from spectators who drove them to the feed zone for pickup. That would never happen now. And these little differences were very interesting to me.

The film was made to an old-fashioned sensibility, of course. By modern standards the images all seem a bit underexposed, and the colors are off a tinge. Between that and the narrator, it reminded me a lot of the educational films they used to show us when I was in elementary school. Likewise, the pacing is a bit slow by today's standards. The camera work and image quality pale in comparison to a more modern equivalent, like Hell on Wheels. And the music is very .. um ... well, a bit Wagnerian. However, it was still very interesting to me, largely because of the differences in things then and now.

If one is looking for a cycling documentary to get, start with Hell on Wheels. It's really amazing. Then I would suggest getting Overcoming. But A Sunday in Hell is just below that level, and is well worth watching, especially if you love the northern Classics.

Because I apparently have too much time on my hands

The aftermath of some race crashes from YouTube. Probably not for people who are squeamish about blood.

Here

The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross

The Jennifer Morgue could easily be described thusly: James Bond meets H.P. Lovecraft.

It is the sequel to The Atrocity Archives, a novel which came out a couple of years ago about a computer geek who works for a secret agency for the British government and fights infestations from the netherhells. It was a heck of a lot of fun, so I was looking forward to The Jennifer Morgue. In this book, we again follow the adventures of Bob the secret agent, who has been unwillingly paired with a demon from the Black Chamber, which is apparently the U.S. He has been sent off to impersonate James Bond, despite his utter lack of qualifications. Together with his succubus partner, they get into big trouble in the Caribbean.

There are a lot of fun bits in this book, but I didn't enjoy it as much as The Atrocity Archives. Perhaps it is my utter lack of interest in James Bond (though I've seen all the movies from Connery through Dalton, I've never much enjoyed them, and have no desire to ever see another), but it just seemed a bit thin. I was even bored in places. However I did like his souped up Smart Car, and some of the other gadgets he's given for his mission.

I suspect my problem was that this novel was more Bond than Lovecraft, and I would have preferred the reverse. Tentacles from the deep may be the motivation for the evil guy's actions, but they just seemed like a bit of a maguffin--a cellophane-thin premise so that we could have a Bond novel. And, though there was lots of action, I found it a bit dull and shallow. However, I am sure that many people will enjoy it very much. Just not me, apparently.

Doc Savage: Repel

Repel is the second story in the Doc Savage volume I bought, paired with Resurrection Day. Like Resurrection Day, this is good, dumb, pulpish fun.

In Repel a volcano begins to erupt on a Pacific Island. Strange phenomena are reported, so Doc and his five friends and their pets go in secret to the island to investigate. Once there, they have harrowing encounters with an invisible creature who has apparently emerged from the volcano.

The bad guy in this one is Cadwiller Olden, a criminal mastermind who happens to be a midget. Everything gets a bit odd as one of the point of view characters is enraptured by the midget's physical beauty and perfection. We also learn that Olden is well aware of Doc and company, and he gets one step ahead of them, capturing both the mysterious Repel that has come from the volcano and four of Doc's five sidekicks, who he takes as hostages. Then he starts robbing banks.

Doc eventually outsmarts the nefarious midget, locating the mysterious Repel and rescuing his friends. He then takes the crime boss's henchmen and puts them through his special university which reforms criminals into loyal, trustworthy citizens. There's something a bit creepy about that, really, but it's portrayed as a good thing. There is no attempt to explain how this works, of course. As I said earlier, it's good, dumb, pulpy fun. I enjoyed this work enough to purchase another in the series, and I look forward to reading it.

Minicon 42

I've just returned from Minicon, a science fiction convention I attend every year with a friend. I wrote a long post detailing what we'd spent the weekend doing, and found it was too long and probably boring. Instead, I will be brief.

It was a pretty good Minicon, though not a great one. I always have fun anyway, because this is my time to get away for a weekend with an old friend I don't see very often any more. We hang out, eat out, and get caught up. We would have a nice time even if we weren't at a convention. We went shopping on our way to convention, and I spent too much money, but like the stuff I bought. We had lunch at Everest on Grand, where I ordered steamed yak dumplings and she had lentil soup.

The convention, as I said, was okay but not great. For me, the highlight was probably the Saturday night Celebration of Mike Ford, a local writer who died last fall. It was both funny and sad, and I'm very glad I went. Otherwise, I got a lot of knitting done. Knitting in panels is great--even when the conversation is boring or has shifted to topics I'm not interested in, the knitting helps keep me from boredom. I got a lot done, too. We also watched a couple of documentaries I'd brought along--Overcoming and Hell on Wheels.

Next year's guest of honor will be Alastair Reynolds. I will be there, of course, and I'll enjoy it, as always.

Pandora's Star by Peter Hamilton

I've been struggling with this book for 2 weeks, and I've lost the will to continue. A friend who has read it tells me it ends in a cliffhanger, and she didn't have the will to read the second one. I am mildly curious about what happens, but not enough to struggle through the remaining 400 pages. The 600 I've read were too much. So--

Can anyone spoil this for me? Tell me, briefly, what happens. Please. I'd really appreciate it.

Doc Savage: Resurrection Day

I was very pleased when I found this yesterday at Borders. A few months ago I was looking for some Doc Savage, and was surprised to find that there wasn't even a single volume of Doc in my library system (26 affiliated libraries). However, now they are apparently reprinting some of them. Cool! Resurrection Day is the first half of a double volume, paired with Repel. It is a comic book-sized version published by Nostalgia Ventures which, according to the copyright page, is an imprint of Conde Nast.

Doc Savage was a pulp hero who appeared in the 1930s and 40s. Known as the Man of Bronze, he was fabulously wealthy, tall, strong, and good looking, a super-genius who fought crime. He had been scientifically raised by his parents to become a crime-fighting machine. Together with his five friends--Ham, Monk, Renny, Long Tom, and Johnny--they make the underworld quake in their boots. It's good, dumb fun. The author, Lester Dent (under the pen name Kenneth Robeson), kicked out a story every few weeks for years. They were quickly written, fairly illogical, but still rather charming.

In Resurrection Day, Doc announces to the world that he has developed the technology to resurrect someone from the dead. However, as the chemicals are very rare and take years to properly process, he has only enough to do it once. He then asks the American people who they would like to resurrect, and the votes come pouring in. I won't spoil it by telling you who was selected, but the evil General Ino manages to substitute corpses, and the wrong man is resurrected. They resurrect the Pharoah Hah Pay-deh-eh-gahn (whose name Dent took from the song Happy Days are Here Again) and there's a struggle between Doc and company and General Ino for possession of the newly revived king. (Fortunately Doc and his archaeologist friend both speak the pharoah's language. There is no explanation of how General Ino talked to him.)

The reason everyone wants possession of the pharoah is so that he can tell them where to find his tomb, which was apparenly never found (Our guy wasn't buried in it because he died while at war with the Israelites, who mummified him using a technique that didn't involve removing all his internal organs, which is why the body was intact enough to revive. Pulp standards of truth weren't very high.). Thus begins an adventure across the deserts of Nubia and Egypt, as Hah Pay-deh tries repeatedly to double-cross both sides.

I was pleased to find that Doc didn't rescue a single maiden in distress. In fact there isn't a single female character in the story, now that I think about it. However, Doc several times has to rescue his 5 friends. On one occasion Ham's pet pig, Lassie-like, goes running off to summon Doc to rescue them. I found that sort of amusing. Indeed, I found the whole thing amusing. There are plot holes you could drive a truck through, but it's still fun. For example: they need to transfer the newly-revived king from Doc's office to his secret warehouse. How do they get there? They call a cab. Doc may have his own plane, but apparently he doesn't have a car. We later find out that Doc has his own secret subway line between the two buildings, but they didn't use that. After all, that would have made it too hard for them to be ambushed on the way. Nevertheless, I had a blast reading it.