Actually I don’t know if this is a rose. It’s a flower. And it makes a pretty bookmark, but one I’d never use because it feels quite fragile. I think if I dropped it on a hard floor it would shatter. The actual clip part is just plastic but I’m not sure what the decoration is.
Book: Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Apparently The Bungalow Mystery is something a bit different for a Nancy Drew mystery in that the 1960 revision (which I was reading) of the original 1930 edition made the plot considerably more complicated. I didn’t compare the two so I can’t say, but I did come away thinking this, the third book in the series, was the best so far and the first I actually enjoyed.
It’s a double plot. The first strand is introduced when Nancy and her BFF Helen Corning are caught in a storm while out boating. Apparently they don’t have lifejackets or any life preservers on board either, which is a lack of common sense and practicality that we don’t expect from Nancy.
When their boat sinks, however, Nancy and Helen are saved by another girl named Laura Pendleton, which leads to their soon getting involved in a mystery. Laura has been recently orphaned and things have been arranged for her to become the ward of a couple, the Aborns, who were friends of her mother but whom Laura has never met. Unknown to Laura, however, a pair of frauds have taken the place of the Aborns, looking to get their hands on Laura’s inheritance. Meanwhile, the second strand of the plot has to do with Nancy’s dad, lawyer Carson Drew, investigating the theft of some securities from a local bank. You won’t be surprised to learn that these two crimes are connected.
Nancy’s investigation of the phoney foster family is what we spend most of our time on, and I found this part of the story quite compelling. It reminded me of the M. Night Shyamlan movie The Visit, but I guess you could take the idea back to Little Red Riding Hood. And, like those other versions, it’s pretty dark stuff. The real Mr. Aborn, for example, is being kept chained in the basement of a shack in the woods and it looks as though the villainous Dowds plan on leaving him there to die, along with Nancy when she gets caught trying to rescue him.
In addition to this darkness I thought there were moments that indicated a more adult flavour to the matter of sex. I may be reading too much into things here, but I think it’s there when Nancy checks into her hotel before making a night trip to the house Laura had been trapped in. Let’s keep in mind that in the revised versions of these books Nancy is 18 years old (not 16) and is described as being an attractive young woman.
Awakening at six o’clock, Nancy put on the simple black cotton dress from her suitcase and pumps. After brushing her hair until it snapped with electricity, she was ready for supper.
“What will it be this evening, miss?” asked the friendly waitress.
Nancy selected steak, a baked potato, and tossed salad, then sat back to enjoy the soft dinner music playing in the background. The orchestra was in an adjoining lounge.
Nearby diners regarded the lone girl with interest, for the prospect of the daring adventure had brought a becoming flush to her cheeks.
“If I’m wrong in suspecting Jacob Aborn of being dishonest,” thought Nancy, “then I guess I’d better give up sleuthing!”
Upon leaving the dining room an hour later, she lingered on the porch for a few minutes, watching couples dance. As a red-haired young man began to walk toward Nancy with an invitation in his eyes for her to dance, she hastily went to her room.
Chuckling to herself, Nancy said aloud, “Romance and detective work won’t mix tonight!” Then she changed to walking shoes, sweater, and skirt.
Can you blame the diners for noticing with interest the girl in the black dress with the electrically-charged hair and flushed cheeks? Or the red-haired young man for targeting her? There’s something undeniably erotic about this scene. And don’t get me started on the possible significance of the threatened theft of Laura’s jewels. Just read Freud’s Dora case study.
These mature undertones don’t mean there’s no room for sunshine and lollipops though. There are also signature moments like this:
When the three girls stepped outside, Nancy took a deep breath of air. She loved the earthy smell of the forests surrounding the lake resort, particularly the scent of the tall pines.
“What a day!” she exclaimed. Only a few fleecy white clouds broke the clear blue sky.
What a day, what a girl! “Miss Drew, you’re the most ingenious girl I’ve ever met,” Mr. Aborn exclaims (“admiringly”) when she rescues him. “You’re the most courageous girl I’ve ever met,” a prospective boyfriend tells her later. “You’re a whiz of a detective, all right.” More than just a pretty face with a healthy glow, that’s for sure!
And finally there are all the nice period touches. When the Dowds are captured after crashing their car and are then whisked away to a hospital the police lieutenant in charge tells us that “They’ll get a nice long rest after that in the state pen. I shan’t try to question them now.” I love that “shan’t.” I also love being told that the elevator Nancy enters at one point is “self-operated,” so that she has to push “the fourth-floor control” herself. Which I guess means she presses a button? A bigger puzzle though is why the bungalow of the title is repeatedly described as having two floors. I did a bit of research into this and I guess some bungalows have two floors (or, more often, a single floor and an attic), though the term is usually reserved for single-floor dwellings. But perhaps not in 1930.
It all adds up to an enjoyable adventure with an interesting plot, lots of action (Nancy is even knocked unconscious by Stumpy Dowd’s “stout cane,” the symbolism of which I won’t dig into), and some funny bits too, like Nancy being mistaken for a dog-walker. I don’t plan on reading many more of these, and there are many more to read, but even if I stop here I’ll at least have fond memories of this one.
This is the second volume in the Criminal series by Brubaker and Phillips and the action picks up sometime shortly after the events of Coward, with the main character here, Tracy Lawless, visiting Leo Patterson in prison at one point. Even though these are technically standalone comics, there is a larger story being told about the interactions of multiple generations of families involved in the criminal life of Center City, and with Lawless we see the web being drawn tighter.
Tracy Lawless is what’s known as a hard man, also known as a badass. He’s been in trouble with the law. He’s been in combat in Baghdad and Bosnia and “seen things he’d never imagined.” He’s a big guy and tough and has all sorts of skills when it comes to violence. He’s got burns on one side of his face, though this is something that doesn’t really register in Sean Phillips’s drawing. And he’s on a mission to avenge the murder of his little brother Ricky, which happened while Tracy was stuck in a military prison.
As with Coward, the plot itself is standard noir. There’s a heist that’s planned and things go off the rails because of double crosses and the like. There’s a femme fatale named Mallory. There’s a suitcase of stolen money that comes with more problems than it’s worth. And bubbling away underneath there’s the motivation of revenge. If not revenge, then all of these stories deal with some kind of payback, which is the real currency of Center City.
It’s all very readable, and looks good (though Phillips did turn in some lazy pages, I thought). I also liked the world building and the deft time management, the way the story slips ahead and then back in subtle ways. I don’t mean the flashbacks, which the series has a lot of and that are clearly signaled, but smaller shifts within the time present of the narrative. Given that this is all such familiar ground, that skill and professionalism in the storytelling makes a real difference.
Well, they are certainly coming along. But they are being rented out to students and I thought they were listed as being ready to move into by September 1. Which is only a week away. They don’t look like they’re a week away from having people living in them. So I don’t know how that works. I hope they don’t try to finish them in a rush. A man in a rush makes mistakes.
A couple of months ago I had a post wondering about the possibility of a Great Crash occurring in 2026. There were various reasons for concern, which I tend to focus on because in investment terms I’m what’s known as a permabear. Meaning I always feel like everything is about to collapse.
I was thinking more on this subject this past week for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was talking to an acquaintance who is a financial advisor and I told him how I thought the economy was about to go smash and that the trigger was going to be a debt crisis. This rhymed with something Andrew Ross Sorkin says in the introduction to his recent book 1929: “The almost singular through line behind every major financial crisis is one thing: debt.” If you had parents or grandparents who grew up in the Great Depression you know this because they probably drilled it into you. When things get bad, debt is the multiplying force, making everything much worse.
When I said this to the financial advisor he immediately asked what kind of debt I was talking about. I said every kind. Or all three levels, as these things are usually arranged. To go through them in order:
(1) National debt: A few days ago the U.S. announced that their debt had hit $40 trillion, a number that would have been simply unimaginable only ten years ago. In that same decade (actually it’s been less than ten years) the debt has doubled. As a result, the U.S. has spent almost $1.4 trillion in the last 12 months alone on interest payments, which is more than they spend on their military or on Medicare (and they spend a lot on those things). The numbers are staggering, and unsustainable. Note how this chart just begins in 1995.
There are only a few ways of getting out of such a debt spiral. First, the U.S. could renounce their debt completely and effectively declare bankruptcy. This is unlikely. Second: the usual right-wing talking point has it that the economy can grow its way out of any debt. This is frankly impossible now, so much so that my jaw actually dropped when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview just a couple of days ago that “there’s nothing magic about the $40 trillion number, and we can grow our way out of that.”
This is a fantasy and Bessent knows it. If he didn’t, he found out when he tried to bring bond rates down by buying up debt (at the same time as he was claiming $40 trillion was just a number), an action that brought less than 24 hours of relief. Nevertheless, his boss would echo Bessent’s statement just a little later the same day, saying “The way you take care of debt is with growth . . . the growth will take care of that [the debt] very easily.” The commander-in-chief then made the bizarre pronouncement that “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.” No one knew what he was talking about.
So that leaves the third alternative, inflation, which is already rising as a result of tariffs, an energy shock, and the rate at which the Federal Reserve has been printing money since COVID. This is the most likely scenario, but it’s one where the solution brings a host of other problems in its wake.
There are two things I’d add. First of all, I’ve been talking about the American situation only because any American crisis is going to be felt all over the world, maybe even worse than in the U.S. And second, the situation in the U.S. is all the fault of their federal government. The war in Iran was a war of choice. The One Big Beautiful Bill (a budget bill) blew up the debt. Trade wars and tariffs are inherently inflationary. What’s happening now is the result of deliberate policy decisions. None of it had to happen.
(2) Business or corporate debt: I think this is a huge problem but not discussed as much because much of the debt is hidden in the labyrinth of private equity and the shadow banking system. Enough is known about the sheer amount of debt being concealed though to cause some anxiety, as credit spreads are widening and lenders are looking to insure themselves (read: cover their asses) by creating the sort of hedges that will sound familiar to anyone who remembers 2008. Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Special purpose vehicles. Subprime lending. It’s all coming back. They haven’t even changed the names.
The purpose of all these maneuvers is to keep debt off the books. And we’re talking a lot of debt, though the exact figure is being kept as secret as possible. When the tide goes out though, as Warren Buffett has said, we’re going to see a lot of people have been swimming naked.
(3) Personal debt. Consumer debt and credit card debt is at an all-time high and personal savings are now at their lowest levels since it became possible to keep track of such things. What I find particularly concerning though is how margin debt in the U.S. (money borrowed to invest in the stock market) has exploded by nearly 50% in the past year, going from $1 trillion to $1.4 trillion. One place you see this is in the take-off in the number of leveraged ETFs that are being launched, though the preferred language now is to call these “enhanced” rather than “leveraged” funds. Note in this chart that the numbers for 2026 are lighter shaded because they only count funds launched so far, not for the full year.
A little leverage can be a useful part of any investment portfolio, juicing your gains, but leverage works against you when things go south. This was seen in a couple of examples just this month: (1) the frequent shutdown of the Korean stock exchange as single-stock leverage ETFs went into death spirals and (2) the collapse of the Situational Awareness hedge fund, which skyrocketed by making leveraged bets in AI infrastructure stocks but then had to be sold off when its positions (they were leveraged up to 400%) became untenable.
Retail investors buying stock on margin is of course one of the things that created the conditions for the Great Crash in 1929. It is taking off again now as more and more people come to view investing as the equivalent of gambling or sports betting. The consequences may be the same. Most people will lose.
No one can say for sure what’s going to happen to the global economy in the months ahead, but my concern is only growing more pronounced as I see these conditions worsening and not much in the way of a rational political response. Meanwhile, any increase in interest rates now will be seen as the sounding of the final trumpet in the Book of Revelation, which perhaps it would be since the debt accumulated has been the result of cheap money and any tick upward in its cost will be disastrous. There are a lot of bad loans out there.
So I think we’re moving ineluctably towards something more profound than a mere stock market correction, and I think the triggering event for a significant economic crisis is going to be related in some way to these debt issues. But as a permabear I always expect disaster, which means I’m always happy to be proven wrong. I hope for the best while fearing the worst. Nevertheless, I feel so sure about a crash coming within the next year that I’m happy to put a pin in this prediction. A year from now we’ll see if I was right or wrong.
I actually hadn’t read this comic, which came out in 2005-2006, before seeing the 2014 movie they made of the same name that was loosely based on it. I remember liking the movie but honestly can’t remember a thing about it now except for the return of Bucky Barnes as a Russian killing machine with a cyborg arm. Which was all it really took from the comic, as it turns out.
Apparently bringing Bucky back from the dead was a big deal, as writer Ed Brubaker tells us in an afterword to this collected edition that recounts how Winter Soldier came to be. “There are several constant truths in Marvel Comics, or unwritten rules, if you will. And one of them was, no matter what else you did, Uncle Ben, Gwen Stacy . . . and Bucky Barnes all stayed dead.” So, leaving aside the long, phantasmagoric afterlife of Gwen Stacy, coming up with a storyline where Bucky didn’t die in that midair explosion but fell into the sea and was flash frozen, to be picked up by the Russians and turned into a super Cold Warrior, was pretty radical.
And it works. I thought Brubaker crafted a detailed and complex story with plenty of moving pieces and WW2 flashbacks. It really sucked me in. Indeed, the only problem I had with it is that it wrapped up too quickly, with the aid of that laziest of all plot devices the Cosmic Cube. Otherwise I was on board with all of it, which I wasn’t expecting given that Bucky Barnes was one of those teenage superhero sidekicks I dislike so much. Robin. Rick Jones. Bucky Barnes. I can’t stand them.
But Bucky, who was Brubaker’s “favorite character” as a comic-loving kid, is all grown up here and he’s quite the bad-ass. The thing is though, he’s not really that important a character in this story arc. He’s mostly kept in the shadows until the end, and the main story line has to do with Cap trying to figure out what’s going on with the Russian general and the Cosmic Cube. I found all of this quite engaging though, both in terms of the plot and the characters. The art wasn’t quite my thing aside from the somber palette, but overall I think this is a comic that deserves its high reputation in the Captain American canon.
Upper Canada was what Ontario was known as in the olde days. Upper because it was further up the St. Lawrence, as opposed to Quebec, which was Lower Canada. Upper Canada Village is a “living history” tourist destination located in Morrisburg, a town on the St. Lawrence. I think I may have gone there once as a kid, but I don’t remember. If I did, I’m sure I didn’t get this bookmark on that visit so somebody must have got it for me later.
Book: Nature and Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In his introduction to this squib in The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories, editor Otto Penzler says that “To describe it as trivial overpraises it. It is included here as a curiosity – nothing more.”
Small praise indeed! But understandable, given how slight a story it is. Its main claim to fame is that it was written by Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne, who was also a mystery writer himself. It was first published in October 1903, making it contemporary with Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Empty House,” which was the story that brought Holmes back from the dead. So here we have Holmes appearing to Watson like a ghost and explaining that he’d been in hiding since apparently falling from the Reichenbach Falls. The title has no relation to anything, not even Pope’s poem. As for Moriarty, “There is no such man. It is merely the name of a soup.”
That’s not much of a punchline, and it’s not much of a story. I include it here only as a curiosity.
Just after posting on the fallen soldiers I went for my morning walk and came across this sorry sight. Toppled bins is one thing, but not if they’re out in the road. Luckily it was early and I was able to pull this comrade up onto the curb. Not good!
After the truck has finished emptying them, the bins aren’t always put back down neatly. Sometimes, like on this street, they fall over. But they will rise again!
Alex Good 