Stickybuffalo.com

Apparently, when I say that I’m busy, I’m actually exaggerating a good deal less than I often suspect may be the case. You know how much I usually read, after all. The last few months, however, BCBR has been on hiatus not because I had no time to post, but because I read next-to-nothing.

I did manage several books in January, during which month I started that big contracting job, but the subsequent two months which fell entirely during the contracting period really tell the tale. On my booksihaveread list, for each of the months of February and March of 2011, I have precisely one book. And I had nothing for April as of the last day in busy-mode… since when, however, in spite of a week-long vacation in France the number has zoomed up to seven.

I just found this interesting. But let us proceed to the books, themselves.

Dark and Tangled Threads of Crime, William Secrest. A biography of Victorian-era San Francisco Detective Isaiah Lees. Pretty good. Lees had a long, colorful career in a colorful era, and Secrest tells the story well, working in just enough context without straying too far from his primary subject. In all fairness, aside from the obscurity of the subject matter, Threads of Crime is probably deserving of a larger and more sophisticated publisher than whoever put together this edition with its flourishy, amateur-desktop-publisher design. Look past that and this is a good job of research and writing.

Bloody Crimes, James Swanson. Oh how I have waited for this book. Swanson’s first book, Manhunt, is absolutely riveting. So the prospect of a second helping of Civil War fugitive adventure was an exquisite torment. Perhaps only Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, if it ever arrives, will exceed the anticipation I felt when I finally had Bloody Crimes in my large grasping hands. (more…)

I’ve noted a time or two how some sites and personalities I follow, online, prove themselves consistently, while others are much more like Terry Crowley. That is, I may read regularly but find most of the material silly, disastrously wrongheaded or just plain dull, or I may only look occasionally when I happen to remember that the site exists, and yet… eventually something always comes along that’s not only good, but so good that I never manage to completely drift away from the source.

So it is with NPR.org’s cosmology blog, 13.7.

A lot of what ends up on 13.7 is just bafflingly abstract. The same could very possibly be said of a lot of what I write, but I can understand my own digressions into angels-on-pins ephemera, at least, even if no one else can.

Every now and then, though, 13.7 and particularly Astrophysics professor Adam Frank comes up with something which manages to speak to me while still being so high-flown and unusual as to be memorably thought-provoking. Frank’s post of yesterday, “How to Save the World by Saving Yourself,” falls into this category.

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While I’m at it? Here’s stickybuffalo’s official statement on the wedding of the century or whatever other insipid hyperbole is being used to describe it:

Got that? Honestly, I love Britain, but this week I pretty much feel like hauling down the Union Jack, actively avoiding any kind of British styled pub whatsoever, and even suspending visits to the BBC web sited (except that their coverage of this nonsense actually seems to be no worse than anyone else’s).

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