Untouched by Morning, Poetry review

Untouched by Morning is a second chapbook of poetry by Francis Klein. His first, Podebrady, is also available from Amazon, and I gave it high marks.

The poems in this book have a consistent theme, looking at the lives of those who have completed life. The mind immediately leaps to a comparison with Spoon River Anthology, but these are on the whole more sophisticated thoughts on more thoughtful lives.

I enjoyed these poems exactly because they were insightful, looking at the nexus of life and accomplishment. We are treated, not to superficial reflection, but to the deeper flash of diamond, entering and illuminating.

Recommended.

Gentleman detectives, some recent reading in mystery fiction

I've recently ploughed through several mystery novels by some of the best known writers, Golden Age and modern, examining the evolution of the gentleman detective.

I started by reading two of Georgette Heyer's books, featuring her detectives Inspectors Hemingway and Hannasyde. I started with Heyer because I enjoyed her mystery The Unfinished Clue, which I reviewed previously on my blog.

Death in the Stocks and No Wind of Blame were both enjoyable, but did not rise above casual consumption reading. Heyer writes characters very well, but the plots are tiresome. As in The Unfinished Clue, there is a stock cast, including a solid, no-nonsense young woman who finds most of the clues and, unexpectedly, love. Both of these novels contain a good bit of farce, which detracts from the solving as it grows into a bigger part of the novel. The plots are pedestrian and the actual murders poorly worked out. It is said that Heyer's husband worked on the plots for her. He was an engineer turned barrister, and engineers and barristers are the male leads.

The detectives, Hemingway and Hannasyde, only appear in the last third of the novels. They are poorly developed and forgettable personalities.

Looking for more substantial fare, I read the first two of Dorothy L. Sayers' novels starring Lord Peter Wimsey. These are a blast, and I thought the first one was really excellent.

Sayers cuts to the chase in modern fashion in the first book, Whose Body? The detective is on the scene almost from the first page. He is a strong, witty, and well drawn character. The second son of a duke, Wimsey is young, rich, and fascinated with old books and detection. His valet, Bunter, is a wonderful foil. Written in the middle 20's, the effects of the World War are still vividly present in this novel.

The second Wimsey, Clouds of Witnesses, is less successful. The plot revolves on too many coincidences. Wimsey is shot in the shoulder and suffers a broken collarbone, which goes unspoken for the rest of the novel. Still, fun to read. I look forward to following the path of Wimsey.

Having tried Wimsey, I went on to sample Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn. While Alleyn is also the second son of a noble (an earl, now), he is a Scotland Yard working stiff (Detective Inspector) as well. In his first outing, he solves a standard English country home weekend party murder. He also meets his regular foil, Nigel Bathgate, a young journalist. I found Alleyn less engaging than Wimsey, but will give him a second chance.

Jumping forward, the modern author Elizabeth George has also created a noble detective. He is Thomas Lynley, the Eighth Earl of Asherton. No second son, he is the Earl himself. I think there is a certain title inflation going on here. Lynley is also a Scotland yard DI, paired in most of the books with Detective Sargent Barbara Havers. Havers is of lower class origins, and her awareness of class differences with Lynley crops up regularly.

George's books are both mysteries and soap operas. Through the first four, there is as much emphasis on the personal life of the detective and his friends as there is on the case. This is just a tad wearisome, but I admit I am a sucker for this kind of thing. Each Lynley book has one main and several side murders. Written in the '80's, it is funny to watch the author grapple with rapidly changing technology. Computers are often referred to as 'word processors', as if this were a distinct appliance, for example.

The fourth Lynley book attempts to fill in some of his backstory, at the cost of some tortuous continuity issues. Too much of the book is taken up by the soap opera aspect of the storytelling.

As much as I am enjoying George, Lord Peter Wimsey is by far my favorite character. While he is decidedly eccentric, he is also the most human of these detectives, and the best drawn. I suppose this is saying that Sayers is the best author, as well.

The classic SF detectives are Elijah Bailey and R Daneel Olivaaw. I think the stories by Isaac Asimov featuring this pair, a New York detective and his robot sidekick, are my baseline for all other detectives, even Holmes and Watson. This is just my personal history at work, since I read Asimov earlier than any other detective fiction.

WAMP Step 3: Install MySQL

In the previous installments of this series (here and here), we set up and configured the Apache web server and the PHP scripting engine. Now we will add the database server, MySQL.

SQL databases implement the powerful relational database paradigm, a way of thinking about data that is based in the mathematics of set theory. This makes them (in theory) more powerful and safer than other kinds of databases that preceded them. While relational databases started life on mainframes, MySQL is an example of how the concept can be adapted to desktops. After all, your desktop is probably a more powerful computer than the 'big iron' mainframe of the 1960's!

Installing MySQL

MySQL started as the project of an independent company, which was subsequently acquired by Oracle. A free and open version is still available, called the "community" server.

The MySQL download for the Community Server is at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/. If you just got http://www.mysql.com/downloads/, you'll be offered a Windows installer that includes a whole bunch of additional software and connectors, over 200 MB of stuff! We don't need all of that to test out WordPress, which is the objective of this exercise. Just grab the installer for the Community Server.

Global Warming: a brief background

I'm writing this for an audience that isn't short on science or Google chops. I'll try to supply links where useful.

We're here to discuss global warming, and several levels of skepticism expressed about global warming.

• What is global warming (GW), and does it really exist?
• Is global warming anthropogenic (AGW)? That is to say - are human activities principally responsible for global warming?
• Is global warming catastrophic (CAGW)? Are the changes severe, irreversible and creating misery for humans and other life on the planet?

A basic issue of terminology - the problem we'll be discussing is one of heat, and heat is measured by temperature. However, there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the two ideas.

Podebrady, Poetry by Francis Klein, reviewed by Davd vun Kannon

Podebrady is a slim chapbook of poetry. The poems inside are, at times, a painfully intimate window into the author's heart. But they are also full of wisdom, beautiful words and images, and the painful intimacy is mostly the result of recognizing ourselves waiting in the mirror of these words.

I especially like the The Apple Press, and the last lines of Morning Laundry:

We are replaced by what we love.

We leave the green fields free and fallow. 

Klein is a published poet and an architect with a practice in Montclair, NJ. Podebrady is avaible from Amazon and Finishing Line Press.

Recommended.

Nice Work If You Can Get It - Review

Nice Work If You Can Get It is a frothy bit of Broadway magic. The show features songs by George Gershwin, and a plot loosely (very loosely) based on his 1926 musical, Oh, Kay. Other material from the film Delicious, including the immortal love song Blah, Blah, Blah.

The show stars Matthew Broderick, Kellie O'hara and a great cast. I saw a matinee last Saturday with my wife, my son Daniel, and a friend of his. We all laughed and clapped up a storm.

The thin plot involves Broderick as Jimmy Winter, a dissolute young rich boy who prefers chorus girls to nice girls. But he's marrying a nice girl to secure his inheritance. Until he meets a bootlegging dame, Billie Bendix. Hilarity ensues.

Apres theater dinner at Barbetta was excellent.

WAMP Step 2: Install PHP

As detailed in our previous post, we are building towards a WordPress installation on a desktop PC. In step 1, we successfully installed and tested the Apache web server.

As mentioned last time, some documents that are served by the web server to your web browser are static documents - just files sitting on the hard drive. Other documents are actually queries into a database, where the data has been dressed up and presented as a web page. Still other documents are mostly static, but with some customization by a script running on the server.

To support WordPress, we are going to need both a database and a script engine. A very popular scripting language for web pages is PHP, and that is what WordPress requires. The rest of this post will walk through installing PHP.