Marple: The Herb of Death

/ Alex Good / 12 Comments

A very slight story but nonetheless effective, and one that plays fair with the reader. I mean, it helps if you have Christie’s (and Miss Marple’s) encyclopedic knowledge of toxins, but you might twig to what’s going on without it. And once again the matter of gender age gaps plays a big part. No doubt this is a reflection of the time, when it would be assumed that a man of means would marry a woman young enough to be his daughter, but if Miss Marple and Christie are right that human nature is a constant everywhere and at all times, then we’re getting on too high a horse if we complain about it. This is what Miss Marple’s remembered story from the village and Mr. Badger marrying his young housekeeper alerts her (and us) to. “Don’t tell me it’s absurd for a man of sixty to fall in love with a girl of twenty. It happens every day. . . . These things become a madness sometimes.” Indeed they do.

As a postscript, I’ll add that it’s in this story that someone finally explains the meaning of SA to Miss M. I’d mentioned before how it’s never spelled out, but that I figured it must refer to sex appeal. And so it does. Or, as Miss Marple puts it, “What in my day they used to call ‘having the come hither in your eye.’”

Marple index

Thor: First Thunder

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

Thor: First Thunder

I’ll start off by saying that Thor has never been a favourite superhero of mine. Being a god and all I find him pretty dull and very full of himself. I also really don’t like the way Marvel renders his speech here and in other contemporary Thor titles. The Asgard lettering looks too flowery and it’s not at all necessary.

Since I’m on a negative roll here I’ll also say I’ve given up on all the reboots and multiverses these characters now exist in. For what it’s worth, this is basically an origin story, showing how Dr. Donald Blake came to bond with the spirit of Thor, and their subsequent rocky relationship. As such it sticks pretty close to the canonical Thor backstory, at least as I understand it. But again I question the necessity.

That said, it looks great. Tan Eng Huat’s artwork hits all the right action notes, and while the plotting here was nothing special (Radioactive Man just sort of pops up before being tossed away in a whirlwind) I thought Bryan J. L. Glass made something out of the whole Christian parallel, with Odin (God the Father) sending Thor to Earth (or Midgard) and giving him a human form where he can atone for his sins if not for humanity’s. Some of the big fights were also well imagined, from the statuary of New York (the lions in front of the Public Library, the bull of Wall Street) coming to life to the Fantastic Four being defeated in what I thought was a dark and gruesome style. I expect a bit more out of Loki, who’s once again presented as Marvel’s Joker, down to his inverted pyramid face, fancy suit, and full pages of HAHAHAHAHAHA!s. But then Loki has never been a big favourite of mine either. He keeps having these great plans for taking over the world and ends up getting spanked like the naughty boy I guess he basically is.

So I didn’t go in expecting much but I was really happy with what they did with it. Given the foundation that’s laid, I’d even look for more.

Graphicalex

Something skunky this way comes

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

I hope you appreciate this Wildlife instalment. There are a lot of these guys around, but they are very camera shy and tend to keep odd hours, so getting a good picture is difficult. Once this one heard the shutter on my phone camera he turned around and trundled off in the other direction.

TCF: Bad Blood

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
By John Carreyrou

The crime:

In 2003, at the age of 19, Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes started Theranos, a company that sought to revolutionize blood testing by creating a machine capable of doing a number of different blood tests using only a small amount (a fingerprick) of blood. Theranos attracted large amounts of investment capital and at its height had a valuation of $9 billion, making Holmes herself both a media star and “the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States” (according to Forbes magazine). The blood-testing machines, however, never worked as advertised, and when the truth came out Theranos went bankrupt. Both Holmes and her second in command, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were convicted of fraud, sentenced to prison, and subjected to massive fines.

The book:

I think it’s a testament to the power of financial crime stories that they’re all the same but are still interesting. Enron, Bernie Madoff, FTX. The particulars vary, but every scam is driven by greed. People kill for all sorts of reasons (including greed), but they swindle others and commit fraud for money. And the people who get suckered are lured on by their dreams of avarice. That’s all there is to it.

I keep coming back to the Bre-X story (which I doubt many people have any memory of now, even though it was the basis for a movie) because it was one of the oldest cons in the book – the salted gold mine – and it basically represents the archetype for most frauds. Enron and Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and Theranos were all salted gold mines. People saw the shine of easy money and were struck by the fear of missing out. But in every case it was fake.

Should they have known it was too good to be true? I’m not sure that old admonition works in a lottery or casino economy like ours. Sometimes investments that seem too good to be true really do strike the jackpot. It’s all so random. That said, Holmes was making some very specific claims about what the Theranos testing devices could do that anyone with a medical background should have been able to see through quite easily. That her all-star board was made up primarily of very old men whose eminence had nothing to do with scientific knowledge wasn’t that surprising, or the fact that they did nothing to call any of Holmes’s claims into question. If there’s one thing that that the history of financial crime in our time proves it’s that corporate boards can be expected to do absolutely nothing in the face of even the most egregious misbehaviour. They’re just window dressing.

The more interesting question then is how many people knew Holmes’s pitch was fake but were just happy to make a killing on it, figuring they’d be able to get out in time and leave someone else holding the bag. My own sense is that most of the people taken in really were blinded at the thought of a ginormous pot of gold at the end of the Theranos rainbow. John Carreyrou, who was the first to break the story in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, makes it out that investors were “bewitched by Holmes’s mixture of charm, intelligence, and charisma.” Which may be true, up to a point. But I think most people seduce themselves in such matters. They fervently want to believe, and that desire is their undoing more than any spell cast by the con.

These were, after all, the gold rush days of Silicon Valley, and fortunes were being minted overnight by companies whose business models made far less sense. “Every startup founder in the Valley wanted to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and every VC [venture capitalist] wanted a seat on the next rocket ship to riches.” And the thing is, the idea for a fast and convenient method of blood testing was a good one, and since the demise of Theranos other companies have made progress working in the same direction. Holmes, however, had no experience in the field and there were red flags all over the place signaling that her device was humbug. There were also expert voices that raised doubts, but they were rigorously suppressed by the corporate thought police. Legal legend David Boies and his law firm come across as some of the real villains of the piece, perhaps because Carreyrou’s own interactions with them were so strained. Theranos was incredibly secretive and paranoid about bad press, and this wasn’t because they were trying to protect valuable intellectual property. What this resulted in was a lot of legal “hardball” which played very ugly indeed. If you were wondering why whistleblowers need protection, this could be a case study. The fact is, nobody wants to stop a money train.

Given all of what I’ve said about how typical a story of financial fraud Theranos was, it’s worth asking what made it so noteworthy. The key factor is the figure of Elizabeth Holmes. As a young, attractive, “female Steve Jobs” you have to think that if she hadn’t created herself (meaning that persona, complete with the black turtleneck and fake deep voice) then the media or the culture more generally would have had to invent her. She was what the age demanded even more than it demanded a portable, instant blood-test kit, and she was just as wonky a product when brought to market.

Carreyrou makes a convincing case that Holmes made a mistake in taking as her model for a startup the “fake it ‘til you make it” model of the tech giants and not the more disciplined approach of a medical company. But since she didn’t seem to have much affinity for either tech or medicine I think it was easy for her to get confused. In any event, tech was the “rocket ship to riches.” Beyond that, she was able to borrow the specious Silicon Valley rhetoric of wanting to change the world and improve everyone’s life through technology that has long been a hallmark of tech startups. And once again, this rhetoric was exposed as a sham. I find it amazing there are people, and among them even critics of the tech giants, who continue to echo this nonsense. There are people who still think that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook or Twitter/X are going to make the world a better place, or have ever had that as their goal. This is just sad and deluded. Elizabeth Holmes, like all the tech nerd-bros who came before and after her, wanted to be rich and powerful and that’s all there was to it.

But there are things about Holmes that are harder to explain. Chief among these is her mysterious relationship with Sunny Balwani. I say mysterious both because she attempted to keep the fact that they were living together hidden from everyone the entire time Theranos was in operation, and also because I just can’t figure it out.

What did she see in him? They seem to have first met when she was a student and he was a guy who had made a lot of money when a software company he’d been president of was acquired at the height of the dot-com bubble. Five months later the bubble burst and the company eventually went bankrupt. “His timing was perfect,” Carreyrou drily notes.

Holmes was young, stylish, smart, and capable of being charming. Balwani was nearly twenty years older, two inches shorter (he was about 5’5”), “portly,” “lacking in the most basic grace and manners,” not at all good-looking, and as for style . . .

The way Sunny dressed was . . . meant to telegraph affluence, though not necessarily taste. He wore white designer shirts with puffy sleeves, acid-washed jeans, and blue Gucci loafers. His shirts’ top three buttons were always undone, causing his chest hair to spill out and revealing a thin gold chain around his neck. A pungent scent of cologne emanated from him at all times. Combined with the flashy cars, the overall impression was of someone heading out to a night-club rather than to the office.

And it got worse. Balwani was born in Pakistan, which apparently helped shape his abrasive and authoritarian management style. While most people seemed to like working for Holmes, Balwani was a presence that few could endure. When he wasn’t firing employees for petty infractions he was “boastful and patronizing,” “haughty and demeaning . . . barking orders and dressing people down.” Like a lot of blowhards who have risen to positions of prominence on the basis of nothing more than blind luck, this arrogance was probably defensive. Theranos employees soon found ways to manage his moods, “as it dawned on them that they were dealing with an erratic man-child of limited intellect and even more limited attention span.” They even played practical jokes on him that exploited his ignorance of chemistry and engineering. If he hadn’t been placed in a position of responsibility everyone would have just considered him an obnoxious jerk and tried to steer clear of him.

Which brings us back to the question of what Holmes saw in him. Even Carreyrou is left shaking his head.

One school of thought is that she became captive to Balwani’s nefarious influence. Under this theory, Balwani was Holmes’s Svengali and molded her – the innocent ingénue with big dreams – into the precocious young female startup founder that the Valley craved and that he was too old, too male, and too Indian to play himself. There’s no question that Balwani was a bad influence. But to place all the blame on his shoulders is not only too convenient, it’s inaccurate. Employees who saw the two interact up close describe a partnership in which Holmes, even if she was almost twenty years younger, had the last say. Moreover, Balwani didn’t join Theranos until late 2009. By then, Holmes had already been misleading pharmaceutical companies for years about the readiness of her technology. And with actions that ranged from blackmailing her chief financial officer to suing employees, she had displayed a pattern of ruthlessness at odds with the portrait of a well-intentioned young woman manipulated by an older man.

Yet why were they still living together up until the end? Again: what did she see in him? Something here doesn’t add up.

Bad Blood is one of those slightly frustrating true crime books that on the one hand stands as definitive, being both well written and giving the perspective of a journalist who became closely involved in the events leading up to the company’s unraveling, but that, in the usual rush to be timely, came out several years before the Theranos trials brought some closure to the story. Still, it remains the best if not the fullest account of what happened, and Carreyrou’s assessment of what went wrong strikes me as right on target.

Noted in passing:

When Theranos’s corporate HQ (what had previously been Facebook’s building) was being given a makeover Holmes wanted motivational quotes painted in black on the white walls. These were the usual guff from people like Michael Jordan and Theodore Roosevelt. But pride of place went to a quote that she fell in love with “from Yoda in Star Wars” (actually The Empire Strikes Back): “Do or do not. There is no try.” She had this “painted in huge capital letters in the building’s entrance.”

As far as red flags go, I think this might have been enough for me to hold off investing any money in the company. I mean, really. Yoda?

One of the more surprising names on the list of Theranos marks was Rupert Murdoch (yes, another old guy). Indeed, after putting $125 million into the company he was its biggest investor. But after everything went smash and the lawsuits were gearing up, he seems not to have been too distressed.

Most of the other investors opted against litigation, settling instead for a grant of extra shares in exchange for a promise not to sue. One notable exception was Rupert Murdoch. The media mogul sold his stock back to Theranos for one dollar so he could claim a big tax write-off on his other earnings. With a fortune estimated at $12 billion, Murdoch could afford to lose more than $100 million on a bad investment.

This is what the game looks like when you’re a billionaire. Even when you lose you win.

Takeaways:

I think Holmes was basically blind with greed and ambition, but the way she shut herself off from any criticism or nay-saying really spelled her doom. I think it was super-investor Warren Buffett who said that he likes to keep someone on the payroll who will disagree with every position he takes and decision he makes, because otherwise he would just be surrounded by yes-men. One of Holmes’s friends became worried that in “her relentless drive to be a successful startup founder, she had built a bubble around herself that was cutting her off from reality.” At one point Holmes even told an all-hands meeting that she was “building a religion” and that “if there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave.”

As I’ve said before, the bubble is a danger for anyone who achieves a position of relative wealth and power. The state of being insulated from negativity is something I think a lot of people dream of. It’s very seductive, but the results can be fatal.

True Crime Files

The Empty Man: Manifestation

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

The Empty Man: Manifestation

Manifestation is the third and final (so far) volume in Cullen Bunn’s Empty Man series, with Jesús Hervás again providing the raw and scratchy artwork and questions still flying every which way as to what’s going on.

We begin with a nod to Kubrick’s 2001 and a caveman finding a pillar or monolith of blood and bone. Where are we? When are we? I suppose this is the dawn of man, and more particularly the dawn of human consciousness, a point at which the Empty Man came into existence. Or so, I think, Agent Langford explains when he shows up back in our dimension, carrying shotguns and with cancerous tumors spilling out of his guts.

Any idea of the meaning of all this is going to have to be found in Langford’s account of his trip to the Empty Man’s world, but I found this just as mystifying as the rest of the story. My own interpretation is that the virus is the physical expression of malignant narcissism, with the Empty Man looking to create peace and unity among all the peoples of the world but only on his/its own terms. Its need to project itself by way of various media platforms is sort of like the amplifier effect of social media. The way people worship it as a god reflects our own cults of celebrity.

Well, that’s a stretch but it’s my story and I’m sticking to it. As I say, it’s left pretty vague. We can’t even be sure if this is the end of the story, as we leave things with the Kerry family (who are relegated to the role of luggage in this volume) locked and loaded, ready to go after the cult in a cosmic horror “holy war.” The apocalypse beckons. But as for what has happened to Jensen, again I have no idea. Apotheosis? And the creepy kids? Are they better now? I guess we’re supposed to stay tuned.

I don’t know how much of the mystery here was deliberate and how much was Bunn just not being sure what it was he was trying to say. But I’m inclined to think it was more the latter, as looking back on the series as a whole it really is a mess. There are some interesting ideas raised, I think, but they’re covered in a whole lot of psycho-spiritual stuff that doesn’t gel. Being left to guess what the point of it was after three books was disappointing.

Graphicalex

Marple: The Moving Finger

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

In my notes on the first two Miss Marple novels, The Murder at the Vicarage and The Body in the Library, I’ve mentioned how Miss Marple herself remains a secondary figure, knitting in the background and not playing a significant role in the plot or really doing much of anything until the big reveal at the end. Well, that gets doubled-down on here, as The Moving Finger is a 164-page novel in the edition I was reading and Miss Marple doesn’t appear, indeed isn’t mentioned, until page 117. At which point she promptly solves the case, explaining everything in the denouement. She works fast!

But then, as she points out at the beginning of her wrap-up, this was an easy case: “Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple. This one was. Quite sane and straightforward – and quite understandable – in an unpleasant way, of course.” There are all the usual distractions – a long list of suspects, a complicated timeline – but what it comes down to, again, is the question of motive. I didn’t figure out exactly how the killer did it, or pick up all the breadcrumbs of clues that Miss Marple did, but I had a strong hunch whodunit that turned out to be correct.

Things kick off with amateur pilot Jerry Burton recovering from a crash in the sleepy country village of Lymstock with his sister Joanna. They’ve rented a house with the too-cozy name of Little Furze and settled in for some quiet convalescence. Unfortunately, as soon as they arrive Lymstock starts suffering from a plague of poison-pen letters, including some addressed to Jerry and Joanna. It seems Lymstock has its very own proto-troll. You know why people write nasty anonymous letters, or insult people on comment threads? It’s because “they’ve got a screw loose. It satisfies some urge, I suppose. If you’ve been snubbed, or ignored, or frustrated, and your life’s pretty drab and empty, I suppose you get a sense of power from stabbing in the dark at people who are happy and enjoying themselves.”

Then one of the addressees dies of an apparent suicide and her serving girl is later murdered in a particularly (for Christie) horrific way: knocked unconscious with a blow to the back of the head and then having a kitchen skewer thrust in the base of her skull. That’s mean! We all know poison is the weapon of choice for cozy killers.

If you were familiar with the plot of The A.B.C. Murders, which came out six years earlier, you’d be able to guess what was going on with the letters, though you’d be no closer to identifying the killer. I won’t add more about that, but only sum up by saying that while the mystery here isn’t first-rate, the book is a good read (and one of Christie’s own favourites) just because the characters are so enjoyable. When Jerry falls for the village tomboy Megan (spunky enough to defend Goneril and Regan against their mean dad, and young enough to almost be Jerry’s daughter) it plays very much like a modern rom-com, especially when he literally whisks her off her feet and takes her to London to dress her up. You can’t help but be reminded of the clichéd scenes in the teen rom-coms where the guy takes the girl’s glasses off and reveals her to be a princess. Even her “freckles are so earnest and Scottish.” I was puzzled, however, at one of the descriptions of Megan in frumpy mode: “She slouched out of the room. She was untidily dressed as usual and there were potatoes in both heels.” Does this mean she actually had potatoes in her shoes, which I’ve heard is a method used to stretch out shoes that are too small or uncomfortably tight, or is it a figure of speech for something else? I suspect I’m missing another archaic Britishism.

In any event, it doesn’t take long for Jerry to fall head-over-heels in love when he realizes that Megan is, indeed, a keeper.

What a nice child she was, I thought. So pleased with everything, so unquestioning, accepting all my suggestions without fuss or bother.

Grab hold of that young woman and don’t let her go, Jerry!

Even a backwater like Lymstock is dominated by certain roles and conventions. It’s assumed, for example, that the letter writer must be a woman of high social position. Don’t ask why. But the one gay man might qualify because he’s “got an abnormally female streak in his character.” Which is as close as Christie is going to come here to calling someone gay. And as for being of high social position, that sort of goes without saying in a world where the lower classes are all but invisible. Jerry at one point is surprised to hear the house servant mention the name of the Daily Woman (capitalized): “For a fortnight now, I had been conscious of a middle-aged woman with wisps of grey hair, usually on her knees retreating crablike from bathroom and stairs and passage when I appeared.” They’d better retreat! What if you were to trip over them?

So Lymstock is a cozy place, aside from the odd skewer to the brain stem. And I’ll confess I find something endearing about relationships based on companionship rather than sexual attraction being presented as the ideal. In fact, you can usually tell who the good people are in a Christie book by the nature of their relationships. Companionship, not far removed from the brother-sister pairings we have a couple of instances of here, is the goal, and spells a happy life. Anything more physical is likely to be dangerous. SA (sex appeal) is always a red flag.

In the best romantic tradition the ending wraps things up with all the good people marrying off, ensuring a future of domestic tranquility, but there is a truly shocking bit at the end I didn’t know what to make of. The old lady that Jerry had been renting Little Furze from says to him on the final page: “I really do think, don’t you, that everything turned out for the best?” (the emphasis on best is in the original). He considers this, and keep in mind that Mrs. Symmington is the woman who was poisoned and Agnes the serving girl who gets her brain skewered:

Just for a fleeting moment I thought of Mrs. Symmington and Agnes Woddell in their graves in the churchyard and wondered if they would agree, and then I remembered that Agnes’s boy hadn’t been very fond of her and that Mrs. Symmington hadn’t been very nice to Megan and, what the hell? we’ve all got to die sometime! And I agree with happy Miss Emily that everything was for the best in the best of possible worlds.

What with the echo of Candide I’m sure the intent here was black comedy, Christie poking fun at the idea of murder mysteries having happy endings. But it was still kind of shocking. The moral of the story seems to be that if you want to live a cozy life there are a lot of bad things you’re just going to have to ignore or at least find your peace with.

Marple index

Simpsons Comics Unchained

/ Alex Good / 13 Comments

Simpsons Comics Unchained

I first read Matt Groening when I was in university in the late 1980s and his strip “Life in Hell” was appearing in one of the alt-entertainment weeklies. It was the only thing worth reading in that rag. Everyone thought it was really funny. It was just after this, however, that The Simpsons took off and Groening became mainstream, the name behind a franchise.

I don’t begrudge him any of his success, as the TV show The Simpsons, at least in the early days, was really very funny. I haven’t seen it in twenty years, but I hope it’s still going strong. And the comics are good too. The question I had reading Unchained is whether Groening himself has anything much to do with them. And the reason I ask is because his name is on every credits page, even though he’s always given a joke title like “Reformed Nerd,” “Cue Card Boy,” or “Lard Lad’s Best Customer.” I had to wonder if there was some legal reason for that. Because he wasn’t writing or drawing or colouring, I think all he’d normally get a credit for is as publisher, or for “characters created by” (just as every Batman comic even today has to credit Bob Kane for creating Batman). So I just don’t know.

In any event, this is a selection of stories taken from the pages of The Simpsons comic, specifically issues #36-#42. There’s not much in the way of connective tissue, though many of the stories deal with members of the family getting in trouble with the law. So that fits with the jailbreak theme of the cover. Overall it’s a typical Simpsons effort, with a gag in nearly every panel, and sometimes several, and with even more hidden in with the fine print (which in one instance I honestly couldn’t read without a magnifying glass because I guess I’m getting too old for this stuff). Some pieces land better than others. I thought the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory spoof got away from them and the Jabberwocky send-up didn’t work. The story where Homer and the Comic Book Guy go to court was one of the better ones, in part because comic nerd-dom has always been close to the heart of the franchise.

I don’t think the line-up here is as good as that found in the Colossal Compendiums or the Treehouse of Horrors comics. I felt these stories were more like B-sides than the best of the best. But it was enjoyable enough while it lasted.

Graphicalex

Time Lapse: Basement IV

/ Alex Good / 14 Comments

Drywall up. Were those guys ever fast! And, much to my surprise, they did a good job too. Meanwhile, mudding was a process that took nearly a week because of how long it took to dry. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)