Many bookmarks come with tassels. They just seem to go together.
(Note: I’m ashamed to admit I already featured these two bookmarks in an earlier post. This happens. It’s hard to keep track sometimes of what I’ve already taken pictures of.)
Book: The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall by Eliot A. Cohen
By the time of “The Musgrave Ritual” I thought the Holmes stories were in a definite skid. All the more credit to Doyle then for arresting that and coming up with this little gem.
It’s not a typical Holmes story in that it’s almost entirely narrated by Holmes himself, by way of explaining items that turn up when Watson encourages him to clean their apartment. While being fastidious in most things, Holmes is also a bit of a slob you see. Anyway, this structure is the same as was used in “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” but the results are far more satisfying. This is one of the three or four classic cases in the canon and one that’s always been a personal favourite.
The actual puzzle-solving is nothing special, but it’s well packaged, down to the little catechism that even impressed T. S. Eliot. That blending of popular and high culture was important to what’s come to be called High Modernism. And it cuts both ways. The modern isn’t (always) being diminished in comparison with the classics, and I think Eliot respected the pulp royalism here as a bit of found poetry.
I also liked Holmes’s respect for the treasure-hunting butler Brunton. Faced with the difficult problem of calculating the right spot to dig with a missing variable (the elm tree that had been removed), he is resolved “that if Brunton could do it, I could also.” This isn’t a put-down. Later he will explain how his “methods in such cases” is to put himself in the criminal’s position, after first having gauged their intelligence. And then he, remarkably, states that this didn’t require “any allowance for personal equation, as the astronomers have dubbed it,” since Brunton is a man of “quite first rate” intelligence. In other words, he saw Brunton as an equal. That’s high praise indeed coming from Sherlock.
This was a tough one! As you can see, it took me down to the wire. But I got lucky and landed it on the final guess.
Alright, we’re rolling again with my go-to comic for a good time. This volume contains issues #11-15, with #15 marking the quarter mark for the team of author John Layman and artist Rob Guillory as they had originally planned a 60-comic run.
I think this gives some idea of the forethought that went into the series and explains the way hints keep getting dropped as we go along to characters and events that didn’t seem all that important at the time, or that we might have thought we were finished with. To be sure, I knew that Gardner-Kvashennaya, the arctic observatory that hosted a vampire bloodbath, was going to play a big part in what was to come. Ditto the “Frog Man” Montero (so-called because he breeds frog-chicken hybrids). But I wasn’t expecting the return of the killer rooster Poyo, or the introduction of new characters like a mysterious food taster, Tony’s sister, and all the rest of his family, including his daughter(!) and one very weird ex.
The other thing about planning so far ahead is that it allows Layman and Guillory to play with the arrangement of the narrative blocks. This happens in almost every issue, as we begin with a scene (often the aftermath of some act of violence) that only gets explained later. They know what they’re doing here, as they even make fun of it in issue #12, which begins with the editorial note “The pages got shuffled out of sequence. This is actually page 18.”
Given all this preparation I feel confident that I’m not going to be disappointed in how things turn out. In the meantime, I’ve enjoyed everything so far, down to all of the little background gags you really have to be on your toes to catch (and a few of which I’ve missed). On to the next course!
There were 3,866 investment fraud victims reported in 2024, who collectively suffered a financial loss of $310.6 million, according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre (CAFC). These numbers include all types of investment fraud, not just online scams.
So far in 2025, Maude Blanchette, chair of the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) Investment Fraud Task Force, estimated that there have already been about 3,000 cases reported. The official tally will be released by the CAFC in 2026.
Blanchette said the number of reported cases has levelled off since 2022, but added that scams tend to be severely underreported to begin with. According to the CAFC, just five to 10 per cent of fraud incidents are reported.
“It’s very scary because it means that it is only the tip of the iceberg,” Blanchette said.
I found this news report upsetting for a number of reasons. Assuming only 10 per cent of fraud incidents are being reported, the total annual losses would be over $3 billion. And perhaps double that if 10 per cent is too high. That’s a lot of money, and victims, for one country without a large population.
The thing is, as much as we can shake our heads at the foolishness of people who fall for some of the more obvious scams, I think we are all vulnerable. I even got scammed by one online retailer about fifteen years ago, but it was only for $10 so I didn’t feel too bad. And while most frauds are pretty transparent, I’ve known a couple of people who were fooled by operations that were really quite sophisticated. And with AI these scams are apparently getting even better. The bottom line is: even if you think you’re much too smart to fall for an online fraud, you probably aren’t. You just haven’t been caught yet.
What also bothers me is the inability, or unwillingness, of law enforcement to do much of anything about the problem (I won’t even mention the platforms who are basically accomplices in all this). It’s just too much work for authorities, or too difficult. I knew a lawyer who worked in the field twenty years ago and back then he told me that the police wouldn’t even investigate a complaint that was under $75,000.
I think we should take this kind of thing a lot more seriously, and while there may be jurisdictional issues I don’t see why it should be so hard to crack down on these people. As it is, they all know they can get away with it so it’s a problem that keeps getting worse. And as the numbers indicate, it’s a big problem now.
Nope, I don’t think you’d get away with that cover today. But in 1973 (this is a first edition!) you could. It’s meant as a send-up of tokenism (think wokeness, but fifty years ago). The back cover declares: “Is MAD guilty of tokenism? You bet we are! We’ve always offered our readers token humor, token satire, token good taste! And this book is no different . . . just another token attempt at courageous publishing! So even though the price is only a token of what a good book would cost, you’ll be taken . . . with . . . The Token MAD.”
That token price, by the way, was $1.50. Wouldn’t see that on many covers today either.
This is another grab-bag MAD collection, full of bits and pieces mostly from the 1960s. The movie and TV satires, both illustrated by the great Mort Drucker, are for The Professionals (1966) and I Spy (1965-1968) respectively. For years I didn’t know anything about either of these shows, and by the time I finally saw them it was through the lens of the Mad versions that I knew practically by heart. Alongside recurring features like David Berg’s Lighter Side of . . ., the Don Martin Dept., and Spy vs. Spy (they each win one) there are some great one-offs like “Vanishing Human Types and Their Modern Replacements” (do you remember “the inexpensive handyman”? or are you more familiar with “the specialized service technician”?), “Historical Events as Covered by Modern News Feature Writers” (the Battle of Bunker Hill written up by the sports editor) and “Obituaries for Comic Strip Characters.” I got a real laugh out of this last one, and the obit for “noted man about town Donald Duck,” who was killed in a hunting accident after being mistaken for a wild canvasback. I loved this paragraph especially: “A spirited eccentric, Duck was known for his clever wit, all of which was unintelligible. He countered this, however, with savage bursts of temper which accomplished nothing.” That’s our Donald! And that was MAD!
Princess Leia reads books. Darth Vader reads books. Yoda reads books. Maybe not on screen (at least I don’t remember ever seeing any of them with a book), but they do in this set of magnetic bookmarks.
Book: The Great Movies by Roger Ebert
Or: “Holmes’s First Case.” Which is its single claim to fame. Though young Sherlock wasn’t a detective yet but a student on holidays when a school chum invited him to spend some time at his family estate. While there he stumbles into the usual mess of a blackmail plot involving a shady old acquaintance from the colonies.
I didn’t find any of it very interesting, and Holmes’s great skills at detection aren’t put to much of a test. For example, he picks up on the fact that his chum’s father had known someone with the initials J.A. who he had subsequently tried to forget based on the fact that he had had “J.A.” tattooed on his arm and then tried to erase the tattoo. Clever. And then he solves the easiest code ever by figuring out that he just has to read every third word in an otherwise baffling note. (Experts, by the way, point out that this means the note is in fact written in cipher, not code. There is a difference, albeit not one I’m keen on explaining.)
Basically this is just Holmes narrating the events to Watson and reading a long letter from the father explaining all that was happening in the blackmail scheme, which is something Holmes didn’t figure out on his own. It may have been his first case but it’s also among his most forgettable and well worth skipping.
I was out for a walk a couple of weeks ago when I saw this well-dressed fellow giving me some side-eye. But I don’t think he minded having his picture taken.
This was the final issue of the Old Man Logan series to be written by Jeff Lemire and it has even more of a retrospective feel to it than usual. As things get started Logan has decided he wants to go back in time and to the specific part of the multiverse where the saga began so that he can save Baby Hulk, and maybe his family too. Unfortunately, none of his friends and enemies want to help (he appeals to the Marvel science-and-sorcery brain trusts, from Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch to Black Panther and Doctor Doom), so as a last resort he springs a devil-worshipper named Asmodeus from supervillain prison. Asmodeus says he’ll send Logan back into his past, but –surprise! – he’s actually going to double-cross Logan. I don’t know why Logan would have expected anything less. That struck me as silly.
Anyway, instead of going straight back to the Wasteland, where it all got started, Logan ends up being unstuck in time, forced to “re-enact [his] greatest hits.” His fight with Hulk. The climax of the Phoenix story. As Patch in the streets of Madripoor. He even gets to re-use his famous tag-line about bad guys taking their best shot but now it’s his turn. But eventually he does get back home, only to have to say good-bye to his wife and kids, knowing that he can’t save them.
(An aside: I was a bit put off by Lemire not knowing the difference between a combine and a tractor. When Logan gets back to his farm he’s shown working on what is referred to as “the combine” but which is really just a tractor. A combine is a combination harvester. From the looks of it, I don’t think they’d have any use for a combine in the Wasteland, which is a Western desert landscape like that of the homestead in The Searchers. And I never could figure out what kind of farming the family was doing in that movie. On further reflection though, I thought this made for a fitting vision of our dystopic future, caring for and repairing old machinery that nobody has any use for now anyway.)
As a way of wrapping Lemire’s part of the series up this sort of thing is fine, but it doesn’t stand out as being a great or essential comic on its own. It has the feel of the last episode of some long-running TV show, like Seinfeld, where you just bring everybody back for a cameo before shutting things down. I like the art by Filipe Andrade (the first couple of issues here) and then Eric Nguyen, the latter feeling influenced by Sorrentino’s earlier modeling of the character while also doing its own thing. And the mechanism for the time-skips, a magic amulet, is at least easy to follow, even if there’s no discernible rhyme or reason to how it works. Of course this wasn’t to be the end of the line, as the series would continue. But there’s still a well-deserved sense of an ending.
Alex Good 