Recent Reads

Where There's a Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart.  I couldn't find any descriptions of this book when I downloaded it, but figured if Rinehart wrote it, it was probably good.  The narrator works in the spring house of a health spa whose owner dies.  Due to the conditions of the will, the staff ends up engaing in fraud and impersonation.  Overall a nice little comedy.

Yul:  The Man Who Would be King by Rock Brynner.  Too often, when a celebrity's child writes about their parent the book either portrays the celebrity as a demon or trys to gloss over the parents faults until the book is dull.  Rock Brynner avoided both these pitfalls and wrote a very engaging book about his father.  The two had a rather complicated relationship.  Yul starts out as a great dad who spends a good deal of time with his son and treats the kid with a good deal of respect.  Of course, Yul also had no problems with creating his own realities to suit his whims, so their relationship had a lot of ups and downs.  Yul had a lot of potential and probably should have stuck to stage acting.  He was rarely satisfied with his movies and so stopped trying to do his best in them.   You can't help but feel a little sorry for Yul who ended up trapped in endless tours of The King and I in order to pay his bills, but on the other hand, he created his own problems.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin.  I always thought this was a book about gays in San Francisco, but most of the characters are straight (didn't matter either way, but I was a little surprised).  Surprisingly fresh for having been written in the late 1970's.  A young woman looking for change moves into a boardinghouse in San Francisco.  There's a lot of oddball characters who interconnect in various ways.  I'm looking forward to reading more of the series.

Murder at Madingley Grange by Carolyn Graham.  Graham wrote the Inspector Barnaby mysteries which were the basis of Midsomer Murders, one of my favorite shows.  This was not a Barnaby mystery.  Two young adults minding their aunts manor house decide to raise money by hosting a 1930s murder mystery weekend.  This sets the stage for the classic English country party murder.  The book is about 50 pages too long and drags about about halfway through.  The ending is somewhat clever and funny which almost makes up for it's needing a good edit.

The Case of the Fabulous Fake by Erle Stanley Gardner.  Gardner always came up with decent and different plots (amazing considering his huge output), but there is always one common thread.  Why is the client smart enough to hire Perry Mason, the best lawyer around and yet dumb enough to lie to Mason at every turn?  

The Shack by Wm. Paul Young.  A man's daughter is kidnapped and murder.  He then receives an invitation from God to spend a weekend at a deserted shack.  God is portrayed as three different people, separate but equal.  Jesus reminded my very much of painter Bob Ross.  God is all-encompassing love and not religion which might be a problem for some people depending on their level of open mindedness.  Better than I expected it to be if a touch sappy at times.

The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene.  The first Nancy Drew book.  Got this for Christmas, and judging from the cover it's the early 1950s version which still had the original 1930 text (no longer available).  I truly hope the day never comes where ebooks are the only books available.  My copy has the best old book smell (yes, I sniff books--there's worse kinks to have).  The plot holds up pretty well after all these years.

 Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie.  I often argue with family and co-workers over the state of the world.  People insist that the world is constantly getting worse, but I know it is not since I read Agatha Christie.  This came out in 1969 and there's a lot of characters making statements about the world going bad with lunatics roaming free.  Of course, in the end it all comes down to love and greed.  Christie might have disliked Poirot, but he's my favorite of her characters.  I appreciate his sense of superiority in the power of his intellect.

Ben-Hur

William Wyler directed some great films.  And he directed the 1959 version of Ben-Hur which is two hours of one of the most boring films ever made followed by 20 minutes of an awesome chariot race then another hour of one of the most boring films ever made.  Wyler was his best with films about relationships.  Why give him an epic?  So I was somewhat excited to see the 1925 version of Ben-Hur pop up on TCM earlier this month to see if it was any better.

The 1925 version clocks in at around two and a half hours.  Still long but not "oh God will this ever end?" long.  Ramon Novarro is similar to Charlton Heston in being well built and a bit over the top in his acting style. Novarro's more my type and while I'm not usually a leg woman, Novarro had some magnificent legs (shown off in barely there tunics).  Francis X. Bushman plays Messala as a magnificent bastard and easily steals any scenes he's in.  The film's full title is Ben-Hur:  A Tale of Christ and this version has more Jesus than the later version.  I was almost moved to tears when Ben-Hur offered Jesus legions to save his life, and Jesus said no "my kingdom is not of this world".  Several scenes are presented in early Technicolor  which helps add some pop to the religious scenes, and the rest is a mix of black and white and tints ( I rather like the use of tinted scenes in silents and wish it had been used more when the switch was made to sound.  The Moon and Sixpence is the only talkie I've seen that mixed b&w, tints, and technicolor and I found it very effective).  This was pre-code so there's a touch of nudity with some topless girls in a parade and a naked slave strung up in the galley.

The two big scenes are the battle at sea and, of course, the chariot race.  It's amazing what you can do when there's no laws governing film making and you have a director and producers with absolutely no regard for the health and safety of their actors.  So people probably died while filming both those scenes, but the results look fantastic.  Those are real ships in the sea battle, not just models.  The chariot race is, if anything, even better than the 1959 version.  It's faster and more dangerous looking.  That it is not super-widescreen adds to the feel that this is truly a duel to the death between Ben-Hur and Messala.

The 1925 version is available on DVD as part of a box set with the 1959 version.  I'd buy it for the 1925 version and look at the 1959 version as the extra instead of the other way around.   This is a case that color, sound, and widescreen do not necessarily make a better film.

Recent Reads

So Many Steps to Death by Agatha Christie. A political thriller about a despondent woman who is recruited to help track down scientists who have been disappearing.  I normally am not a fan of Christie's political thrillers, but this one was enjoyable and had some clever bits.  It was quite like one of Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax novels.

Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough.  Burrough's set out to explore the rise of the FBI from 1933 to 1935.  It seems like an informative book except for a few points:  Burrough spells Doc Barker's nickname as "Dock" and the people in the photo of the Hamer posse that tracked down Bonnie and Clyde are not identified properly.  A quick Google search shows nowhere else (including the FBI files that were supposedly primary sources for the book) was Barker's name spelled Dock.  If something as simple as the name of a major character is spelled wrong, how can I trust any of the information in the book?  .  So I'd call it a decent overview of the subject, but I wouldn't wholly believe the contents without further research.  It was a tad bit long, too.

Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson.  I downloaded this for free from Gutenberg after watching a film based on another Johnson book.  It's a book that hasn't aged well.  If you want to know about the social structure of Yale in the beginning of the 1900's, you might find it good, but as a story not much happens.

Have Spacesuit--Will Travel by Robert Heinlein.  As a teen I was disappointed with our library's selection of Heinlein novels, and now I wonder if I just hadn't looked in the right spot.  I only looked in adult fiction and never checked the card catalog, so it was only in the past few years that I found out Heinlein wrote juvenile fiction ( a surprising discovery considering Heinlein's obsessions with sex and breasts).  A teenager wins an old spacesuit in a soap wrapper contest and ends up involved with aliens.  Loads of fun with decent action, smart female characters, and insightful social commentary.  I love the boy's father who complains about the American educational system not really teaching students things they should know to succeed (this in 1958).  I love that the boy is smart enough to know he doesn't know anything.  One of Heinlein's best.

Washington Square by Henry James.  For a short novel, this was unbearably long.  We have a homely unloved daughter pursued by a gold digger.  Her father promises he will leave her nothing if she marries the guy (she already has a fortune inherited from her mother).  The girl also has a meddlesome aunt.  The girl is a blithering idiot who apparently expects the boy to wait forever.  The boy is not much of a gold digger since he barely seems to bother pursuing her.  I disliked everyone in the book and did not care in the least what happened to any of them.  Skip the book and watch the infinitely superior movie version, The Heiress.

Google Chrome

I hate Internet Explorer.  I have to use it at work, and I don't think more than two days go by without my curing it for its clunkiness and ugliness.  So I've been using FireFox for several years now and all was well until about a year ago.  Starting with the update that added sync, FireFox started being a bit glitchy.  I liked sync, but hated the pop-up alert when sync wasn't working since the alert doesn't go away on its own and also cannot be turned off.  Then last week my FireFox updated to version 8.something and FireFox stopped working.  Okay my computer is old and apparently FireFox doesn't always play nice with Avast free antivirus (which has also been a bit glitchy lately), but that should not cause browser failure.  Pages wouldn't finish loading, and then FireFox would completely freeze up.  After two hours of trying to find a solution on Mozilla's website (using the dreaded IE), switching to AVG free antivirus, and uninstalling and reinstalling FireFox twice I was quite frustrated.  I'd managed to get my bookmarks loaded into IE (current and a bunch that were probably years old ) and almost walked away from the mess, but then I figured I was already frustrated and should just  go ahead with installing Google Chrome.

Their website required a bit more clicking than I would have liked to see the features, but I clicked install.  Within a few minutes, Chrome was installed, my FireFox bookmarks were loaded, and everything was running great.  I was shocked at the speed and ease of use.  It syncs to your Google account, and when I downloaded Chrome to my laptop a few days later my bookmarks synced within seconds (when setting up a second computer, don't import bookmarks and sync--I ended up having to delete duplicates though that was no big deal).  Instead of separate search and address boxes, there's an omnibox.  Type in a word and you can opt t o search or click on a direct link.  Add-ons are easy.  Opening a new tap shows a pane with your most visited site and a link to the Chrome store where add-ons are obtained.  The option folder opens in a full tab instead of a little pop-up, and only things the normal person uses are there.  You can set up as many tabs as you want to appear on start-up.  Your home page is a single page of your choice.

Things I don't like.  The Ad Block Plus extension does not block as many ads as a similar program I used in FireFox.  The worst thing is that you can only print full pages.  I was paying bills and ended up having to cut and paste the pertinent information I wanted to print into Word (I'm cheap and hate printing more than I have to).  Like FireFox, it tends to be slow with loading when my computer's trying to do other stuff (like stupid morning updates), but if one tab freezes, you can often go into another tab that works fine.  I've gotten a few warnings that a plug-in isn't working but if I leave it running it usually starts working in a few seconds.

Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Chrome so far.  It looks great and is extremely easy t o set-up and use.  I highly recommend giving it a try.