Putting my feet up

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Not every word I pull a blank on is some obscure, archaic, or technical term that I feel no shame in not knowing. Sometimes I’m baffled by a fairly common or everyday word that I’ve just never heard before. Ignorance may be embarrassing to admit, but we can’t grow our vocabulary through shame. In that spirit . . .

I was recently re-reading Ross Macdonald’s first Lew Archer novel. The Moving Target, and in the final pages came across a description of a young lady sitting in a living room, “hugging her legs on a hassock beside the fireplace.”

Hassock? I was reaching for a dictionary.

Here’s what I learned. The word “hassock” has its origin in the Old English hasec, which means a clump of grass. And in some dictionaries it still has that secondary meaning. Which is apparently the same as “tussock,” another word I never use though one I have at least heard of.

From being a clump of grass the use of hassock was transferred to something soft to either sit or kneel upon. Specifically, it was used to describe the cushioned rest that you kneel on when praying in church. These are also called “kneelers.” I’ve never heard them referred to as hassocks, but then I don’t spend a lot of time in church.

More commonly though, a hassock is a large thick cushion used either as a seat or for resting your feet on. This is how it is used in The Moving Target. I would just call it a footstool or ottoman, and have never heard the word hassock before. At leat that I can remember. I’d read The Moving Target before but I guess I just skipped over it.

If you go online you will find that there is a distinction that’s made between ottomans and hassocks. Here’s how one website put it: “Ottomans are versatile and multifunctional, working as footrests, extra seating, coffee tables, or storage. They often have a flat, sturdy surface, perfect for holding items. Hassocks, on the other hand, are all about simplicity and comfort. They’re smaller, often cushioned all around, and mainly used as footrests.”

The key distinction is that ottomans have storage space while hassocks do not. This surprised me, as I wouldn’t have thought of ottomans as storing anything. I just thought they were cushioned footrests. Like hassocks. Except hassock is a word I’ve never used.

From my readings I think it’s clear that the word hassock isn’t used a lot by anyone anymore, and no longer serves much of a function since ottoman and footstool or footrest basically mean the same thing now.

Words, words, words

Chew Volume Four: Flambé

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Chew Volume Four: Flambé

Are things coming together, or breaking further apart? I’m not sure. The previous Chew volume, Just Desserts, ended with strange letters in flames being written in the sky, presumably by aliens. In this book a couple of people seem to have a vision of what the letters mean, but one of them is a voresoph – someone capable of superhuman mental feats after consuming vast quantities of food (so the more he eats, the smarter he gets) – and he basically eats himself to death, while the other is the mysterious Mason Savoy, and at this point in the story nobody knows what he’s up to.

Some old characters are back doing their thing, like Poyo the killer cockerel, the busty lethal ladies of the USDA, and the murderous Vampire, while we’re finding out more about others, such as the fact that Tony’s sister, Toni, as well as his daughter Olive, are cibopaths as well. One very fringe figure comes back from an earlier comic, reborn as the high priestess of a chicken cult, while other characters that were fairly central (Tony’s girlfriend Amelia Mintz and Ray Jack Montero, the guy who was trying to make frogs taste like chicken) are MIA.

In short, more weirdness. But I liked it and respected that it felt like Layman and Guillory were still stretching the limits of what they could do with all this.

Graphicalex

Ghostyards

/ Alex Good / 9 Comments

Halloween is coming up this week. These inflatable lawn decorations seem to be all the rage.  I did a post on one of the more excessive last year. Here are a couple of others I saw yesterday morning. I like the pirate ship with the skeletons overboard. (You can click on the pics to make them bigger.)

Mad’s Al Jaffee Spews Out More Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Mad’s Al Jaffee Spews Out More Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions

The title is quite the mouthful, but it was a follow-up to a previous volume of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. Al Jaffee explains the background in an introductory interview with Nick Meglin:

NM: Is this book a sequel to “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions”?

AJ: No, it’s a sequel to the Bible!

NM: Was the first book a success?

AJ: No, it was a failure! They always do sequels of failures!

NM: Was it difficult coming up with entirely new situations and gags?

AJ: No, it was easier! It’s always easier after you’ve done it all and there’s nothing else to write about!

That should give you some idea of the sort of humour that’s on tap. And surprisingly it works. You’d think such a simple idea, repeated over and over again, would get tired pretty quickly, but Jaffee mixes things up well. For example, he includes mini-stories told in the form of a series of snappy answers to stupid questions, one of which is even done in rhyme, with a “smart aleck Hippie” getting blown up by some hardhat workers.

Now personally I don’t like snappy answers to any questions when I encounter them in the real world or online. I think it’s just people trying to be smart and usually succeeding only in being rude. But I didn’t mind the insults here, plus there were also some “stinging comebacks to snappy answers” and other jabs at the snapsters along the way (including what happens to the aforementioned hippie). So it was all fun in Mad’s typical early ‘70s style. A style that’s maintained right down to the plugs and the book’s dedication:

To the people at Mad who made it possible, and the people at the Internal Revenue Service who made it necessary!

Graphicalex

Holmes: The Crooked Man

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

When it comes to mystery and detective fiction I’ll confess I subscribe to the “fair play” doctrine. This is the principle, which some authors make expressly, that the reader gets all the same clues as the detective. What this avoids is a situation where the detective just pulls a rabbit out of a hat at the end, explaining the mystery by way of some evidence that we haven’t been told about. Sure you can still have a great mystery that doesn’t play by these rules, but I appreciate it when the author sets a fair challenge.

Sherlock Holmes seems to have felt the same way, as we learn when he upbraids Watson at the beginning of “The Crooked Man.” It’s a point he makes just after remarking on how Watson has had a busy day. Watson doesn’t know how he managed to deduce this and so Holmes explains:

“I have the advantage of knowing your habits, my dear Watson,” said he. “When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy enough to justify the hansom.”

“Excellent!” I cried.

“Elementary,” said he. “It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbor, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction. The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader.”

That said, the effect here is again at least mostly meretricious, as Holmes basically just walks back the events of the night Colonel Barclay dies until he comes to their source in the titular crooked man, who quickly spills the beans. There are red herrings, like the footprints made by a small animal, but little in the way of clues. Even the use of the name “David” is an allusion that ties into an exotic backstory that Holmes had no way of knowing anything about until Harry Wood told him what happened back in India during the days of the Mutiny.

As a bonus, Holmes never says “Elementary, my dear Watson” anywhere in the canon. What he says in the passage quoted above is as close as he ever comes to that famous line. That kind of thing happens more than you might think. Bogart, for example, never says “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca.

Holmes index

Daredevil: Know Fear

/ Alex Good / 22 Comments

Daredevil: Know Fear

This volume is the beginning of a Daredevil story arc written by Chip Zdarsky and illustrated by Marco Checchetto. It’s a bit of a “born again” theme, again, but it’s an odd sort of a launch because Daredevil is coming back to life from a near fatal collision (the “Death of Daredevil”) only to get the crap kicked out of him by nearly every bad guy he meets and then being argued into retirement by Spider-Man

The overall tenor is quite dark. Wilson Fisk is mayor of New York City in this timeline, and you know he’s up to no good. Daredevil himself is a diminished thing. He hasn’t fully recovered from his last near-death experience, has a few days’ worth of stubble growing under his mask, and has trouble even taking out street thugs, much less bona fide supervillains. Even the tough-as-nails Chicago cop Cole North can beat him up in a fist fight. On different occasions he has to be bailed out by superpals like Luke Cage and Iron Fist, or the Punisher (who often pops up at such moments). At one point he’s shot, but (you’ll never guess) it’s only in the shoulder, so he can keep going by taking pain meds. On top of all this he’s starting to wonder if he’s maybe doing more harm than good, especially when he accidentally kills a perp. This leads to lots of tortured reflections and flashbacks to his Catholic upbringing, and his eventual decision to get out of superheroing altogether. He’s not only the man without fear now, but a man without a real purpose in life.

When I say the tenor is dark this is what I mean. It’s Batman dark, and that’s the main feeling I got reading it. Matt Murdock is feeling some Bruce Wayne-level angst, and being the Red Knight is the cross his therapy bears. There isn’t a whole lot of story going on either, as it’s mostly character- and world-building. Which is normally not something I’d go in for, but I thought Zdarsky did a good job with it and I came away wanting to read more. You know DD just has to get back up, dust himself off, and start all over again.

Graphicalex

Where the sidewalk ends

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Those living in this country know well that Canada’s roads have two seasons: Winter and Under Construction. This doesn’t affect me very much, but as a hardcore flâneur I do get put out by signs like these, all encountered in a single walk downtown I took this week. They put a cramp in my style!

TCF: Sniper

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Sniper: Inside the Hunt for the Killers Who Terrorized the Nation
By Sari Horwitz and Michael E. Ruane

The crime:

For a period of three weeks in October 2002 a pair of men – John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo (the latter aged 17 at the time) – terrorized the Washington D.C. metropolitan area by killing 10 people and injuring several more in a series of random sniper attacks. Prior to the sniper outbreak they had committed a number of other deadly attacks across the U.S. After their conviction on multiple counts of murder Muhammad was executed by lethal injection and Malvo sentenced to life in prison.

The book:

I think the word “terrorized” in the title is particularly apt. While it’s hard to think of Muhammad and Malvo as domestic terrorists since they didn’t seem to have any political agenda, they really did scare the hell out of people living around D.C. in these weeks. Sudden death might strike anyone randomly, even out-of-doors in public areas like parking lots and gas stations. Where was anyone safe? Only staying at home with the doors locked and the curtains drawn.

I say this off the top because for all the horror of these crimes, there was also something comic about the snipers’ reign of terror. I even found myself laughing at their failed attempts to take credit for the murders and so get the attention of the media. They were the biggest news story in the country and tried on multiple occasions to open lines of communication to the public and the police but couldn’t get anywhere. No one would believe they were the snipers. Wandering from pay phone to pay phone, they called the tip line, the FBI (four times), and CNN, all in vain. “Frustrated at their inability to be taken seriously,” they felt that the only thing they could do was escalate.

This must have really made them angry. Unlike terrorists looking to draw attention to a cause, Muhammad and Malvo were just into playing God. They even instructed the police to “Call me God.” They liked to exercise absolute control over the lives of others. And they couldn’t get anyone to take their calls!

This desire to play God is all the motive I can come up with. Muhammad was the prototype of the violent, bitter loser whose life had reached a breaking point. Things may have kicked off with his trying to kill his second ex-wife, who he was in a custody battle with, and then spiraled out of control after that. As one ATF agent speculated in the early days of the investigation, “the shooter was one very angry guy, on some kind of personal mission.” For his part, Malvo made some claims to having a larger political agenda and dying for “the revolution,” but this was only after he’d been caught, and much of what he had to say simply didn’t make any sense. For example, declaring that he hated white people but killing people of various races.

Profilers weren’t of much use. Even the ones who took to the airwaves:

The consensus of TV profilers was that the person responsible for these shooting was most likely a white man with a military background, familiarity with firearms, and a grievance. Detectives chuckled that it was the same profile the experts always seemed to produce, no matter what the case. One retired FBI profiler, Gregg McCrary, could see no real motive. “You’re down to the thrill of the kill,” he said. “Playing God. Having the power over these individuals. Life and death. That’s real heady, a real rush. He’s on a high now.”

Does any of this bring us closer to understanding the odd relationship between the two? Muhammad presented Malvo as his son, and friends who saw them together thought their interactions were very much a “father-and-son deal.” In jail Malvo would also insist that he be called John Lee Muhammad and be referred to as Muhammad’s kid. People considered him to be “enchanted” or under a “spell.” Was there more to their relationship than this? At trial, Malvo’s attorney took the line that Malvo had been groomed, even “sissified” by the older man, “just as surely as a potter molds clay.” But while there was speculation about a sexual relationship this was hotly denied (“We Jamaicans don’t play that”) and one could even wonder about how dominant a figure Muhammad was. It’s still unclear, for example, who did the shooting, though I think the common understanding is that Malvo was the usual trigger man as he was a better shot. It’s also the case that Malvo was the one who made the phone calls to the media. Was this a case of folie à deux, or shared psychopathy? Obviously it was to some extent, but I’m still unsure of the actual dynamics. And it’s unlikely we’ll ever know more.

(As an aside, it’s mentioned at one point that the police were having difficulty fitting the killings into one of the “five standard motives for homicide.” I wasn’t aware of these, but they’re listed as greed, power, revenge, hate, and escape. These seem too general to be very helpful to me. I would have thought there’d be quite a bit of overlap, for example, between power, revenge, and hate.)

Adding to the mystery of motive is the fact that this was a very odd murder spree. I can’t think of any other cases quite like it. Subsequently there were a pair of serial sniper attacks in 2003 (in Ohio and West Virginia), but they weren’t really comparable. There had been four victims in total in those two cases, and both times the sniper worked alone. And of course Charles Whitman had killed more than a dozen people when he shot up the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, but that had been a single event. The D.C. snipers were something different.

That uniqueness, and the terror that I started off talking about, is one reason why their rampage is still remembered today. At least I remember it well. Talking to a couple of friends (both older than me) while I was reading this book, however, I was surprised that neither of them had any recollection of the attacks at all. To be sure, many crime stories attract an enormous amount of media attention at the time, and over the course of a trial, only to be completely forgotten a few months, or even weeks later. How many people remember Scott Peterson, Casey Anthony, or Jodi Arias today? Only true crime junkies. But I would have thought this case on another level.

The book itself is adequate, or even better than that, being written by a pair of Washington Post reporters who covered the story. In a just-the-facts manner the bullet path for each killing is described precisely, which is a surprisingly effective approach. The opening killing of James D. Martin sets the tone:

The bullet struck Martin square in the back, slicing through his suit jacket and dress shirt and leaving a tiny hole in his skin one-eighth of an inch wide, smaller than the head of a plastic push pin. It cut through vertebra T7, below his shoulder blades, and severed his spinal cord, instantly paralyzing his lower body. Slowing down, it tore a slightly upward path, perforating his aorta, the main trunk of his cardiovascular system; the pulmonary artery to his lungs; and the pericardium, the membrane surrounding his heart. There was little deflection en route and almost no fragmentation as the bullet burst through his sternum, making a hole three-quarters of an inch by one-half inch shaped like a piece of broken glass. Later, at the autopsy, the medical examiners would find on his neck a tiny shard of gray metal that looked like lead.

Martin began to fall as soon as his spinal cord was cut. The catastrophic drop in blood pressure cause by his other wounds would have then led to swift unconsciousness. The brain carries only about a ten-second reserve of oxygen. A witness heard him moan and saw him crumple onto his left side, losing his glasses. He struck his face on the blacktop, gashing his nose and forehead.

If the keynote for these killings was terror or fear, it’s moments like these that underline their horror. I think it’s explicit without being exploitive, and authenticates the violence in a way that really brings it home.

Noted in passing:

When Muhammad was finally apprehended his wallet contained “a phone card, Muhammad’s Washington State driver’s license, three fake ID cards, and $32 in Canadian money.”

I guess he had the Canadian money because he’d been living for a while close to the Canadian border, but it’s never mentioned in this book if Muhammad ever visited Canada and he certainly hadn’t been there recently. According to Malvo’s testimony the two had planned to escape to Canada at some point so maybe there was a reason for it, though $32 wouldn’t have taken them far.

But why do people keep thinking they can escape to Canada anyway? What do they think Canada is? I mentioned this before in my review of Let’s Kill Mom but the killer kids in that book lived in Texas and weren’t too bright so you could perhaps forgive them for thinking Canada was a sort of Cuba with snow. Muhammad should have known better, and probably did.

Takeaways:

It’s best to ignore attention-seekers, and narcissists in general. But be ready for when they blow up.

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