Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 228

History, unburied

From the NY Post: Mysterious ancient civilization left signs across vast desert

[A]n international team of experts currently surveying the area [in Saudi Arabia] has found thousands of archaeological sites that feature everything from mysterious triangular constructions to ancient tombs….Cliffs dotted across the landscape feature ancient petroglyphs of people and animals that are thought to be thousands of years old. One of the most important sites is the Mada’in Salih – which features 111 ancient tombs that are carved into rock that are so impressive they are registered as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

I guess people have known about this for a while, if some of the tombs are registered with UNESCO. But I hadn’t heard of this area. Click through if you would like to check out the brief article and the pictures.

This linked article from CNN has a lot more, and more pictures too. Very much worth a look.

The most commonly found structures in Al-Ula are cairns — piles of stones that mark graves, sometimes surrounded by low circular or square drystone walls — which are older than anyone expected.

“We don’t have verified dates yet, but it looks as if some may date to at least 4,000 BC,” says Foote, adding that some may even stretch back to the Neolithic period (10,000 to 4,500 BC). “It’s very exciting because it shows that the history of occupation of the area goes back much further than was known.”

Archaeologists are using drones to survey vast areas from the air, thus finding sites on which to focus their attention. Very cool.

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Who is your favorite character of all time?

This is a question asked by Jill Zeller at Book View Cafe. Who is your favorite character of all time? Who is, at least, in your top ten?

Click through if you have time and check out Zeller’s choices. From her choices, I would probably overlap for Temeraire. Not sure I would have picked any of the others. I would imagine that given the enormous world of books and disparate reader tastes, no one is going to overlap all that much. Especially in a truly impossible task like this.

When I saw this question, I immediately thought of mostly characters I first met pretty recently, say in the past ten years. But when I try to think back to my teen years or before, I can think of some strong contenders there as well. Narrowing wonderful characters down to a top ten … I don’t know, it’s probably impossible.

Here are a handful of contenders, though, in roughly the order in which I thought of them:

1) Tremaine from The Fall of Ile-Rien

2) Maia from The Goblin Emperor

I bet no one is surprised by these, right?

3) Sarah from A Little Princess

4) Hazel from Watership Down

There, what about those? I bet mostly you didn’t see those coming.

5) Cassandra from The Touchstone Trilogy. Also Kaoren Ruuol. Also practically every lead character in all of Andrea K Höst’s books. I’m doing a lot of re-reading this year and now, after this post, all her books are calling my name. Again.

6) Morgan and Raederle in The Riddlemaster trilogy.

7) in the Shadow Campaigns series. He was not the most compelling protagonist for me — That was Winter, so sure, her too. But Marcus was the most admirable character in the series.

8) Number Ten Ox in Bridge of Birds and the others in that trilogy. Also Master Li.

You see I’m going back and forth in time as I pick characters. I can’t help it. First it seems unfair to focus just on more recent books, but then ridiculous to try to ignore books and series published recently in order to emphasize early reads. In trying to do both, I’m probably unfairly ignoring books published about twenty years ago.

Also, you have probably noticed that once I started adding more than one character per slot in this top ten list, it was hard to stop.

I’m feeling a bit paralyzed since I only have two more slots to go and a near-infinity of potential choices.

9) Rowan from The Steerswoman series. Also Bel, the Outskirter. Also Will and his rediscovery of the scientific method as applied to explosives.

Now I’m REALLY feeling paralyzed. Umm … er … I DON’T KNOW, FINE:

10) Lady Tehre from the Griffin Mage trilogy.

Science-y protagonists in fantasy settings are hard to beat, for me.

Okay, who’s a fabulous character I should absolutely have remembered?

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Snake oil is still a thing

Apparently even in this modern age one can still earn a living as a snake-oil salesman.

Check out this person selling “hot dog water.”

The tent selling unfiltered “Hot Dog Water” — literally a bottle of water with a wiener floating inside — for $37.99 a pop included some promising, if not dubious, claims. Such as helping consumers not only lose weight but also increase brain function, look younger and improve overall vitality. ‘

Really, why stop there? Probably this water will also cure baldness, repel mosquitoes and ticks, and make your hair shiny.

Sales of the water were brisk at the Sunday festival, according to Bevans, whose booth also offered accessories, such as Hot Dog Water lip balm and Hot Dog Water breath spray.

I shall charitably assume that all buyers thought $37.99 was a fair price for a joke gift. Even that is hard to get my mind around, but it beats believing they all think it will improve their brain function and overall vitality.

Actually, it’s not quite snake oil, as apparently the purveyors of the hot dog water — I can barely bring myself to even type that phrase — were not serious:

...The fine print at the bottom of his sign, which suggested he was conducting a piece of performance art, of sorts: “Hot Dog Water in its absurdity hopes to encourage critical thinking related to product marketing and the significant role it can play in our purchasing choices,” it read.

Does that make the brisk sales better or worse?

Sales of modern snake oil are something to marvel at, but with far too much potential to end in tragedy:

Helen, 50, had shunned mainstream cancer treatment. Her grieving family says the “bright and successful” woman had fallen under the influence of a self-described healer and hypnotherapist who told her not to undergo surgery. Instead he allegedly prescribed an aggressive and painful treatment called black salve, which ate away at her flesh, leaving her swollen and in pain.

Desperation sometimes makes even intelligent people follow snake oil claims right off a terrible cliff. I hope anyone who just blew $38 on “hot dog water” because they were actually that credulous will have learned enough of a lesson to be a lot more skeptical when it really counts.

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The almost-right word

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

— Mark Twain

Recently I stopped reading a book by a new-to-me author because (a) I wasn’t caught right off by the opening, and (b) the author used the word “ineptness.”

“Ineptness.” You know, we actually have a word for that characteristic. The word the author was looking for was “ineptitude.” Making up “ineptness” implies an inadequate vocabulary or suggests the author has no real feel for the English language. Not that I never forget the word I’m looking for, that certainly does happen, but I hope I generally know there IS the right word in my brain somewhere even if I can’t quite fish it out into the open at that particular moment.

This is different, but you know what you see all the time this decade (probably longer)? People keep using “addicting” when they mean “addictive” and “deceiving” when they mean “deceptive” and so on.

Here is a correct sentence using deceiving: “He got in trouble for deceiving his clients about the sound financial foundation of his business.”

Here is a correct sentence using deceptive: “He got in trouble because he was deceptive. He lied to his clients about the sound financial …”

We have BOTH a gerund form / past participle form AND an adjective form of lots of words. When what a writer is looking for is an adjective form, why, there it is! There is no need to press the -ing form into awkward service. Though this kind of thing is not on my top-ten pet peeve list, I guess, I do wish people would stop doing that.

Incorrect, or at least unnecessarily awkward: “Were you out last night, by any chance?” he asked with deceiving casualness.

Especially awkward since we do actually have a word for “casualness.” Several words (and phrases), each of which may very well suit the scene better than “casualness.”

“Were you out last night, by any chance?” he asked with deceptive nonchalance.

“Were you out last night, by any chance?” he asked with deceptive lack of concern.

“Were you out last night, by any chance?” he asked with deceptive indifference.

It’s not that you can’t, or even shouldn’t, use “casualness.” I guess it could be a perfect choice for some sentences, though at the moment I can’t frame a sentence that would benefit from a -ness form when we have perfectly good words like complacence and incuriosity and heaven knows what else sitting right there.

There’s my quibble for the week. Perhaps I will start a new feature: Grammar Quibble Friday.

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Medicine of the (near) future, I hope

Here’s a neat little item about a complicated therapy involving gene therapy to reverse some kinds of paralysis.

The animals regained use of their front paws after the gene therapy had been switched on for two months.

Dr Emily Burnside, one of the researchers, said: “The rats were able to accurately reach and grasp sugar pellets.

“We also found a dramatic increase in activity in the spinal cord of the rats, suggesting that new connections had been made in the networks of nerve cells.”

The researchers hope their approach will work for people injured in car crashes or falls.

Prof Elizabeth Bradbury told the BBC: “We find this really exciting, recovery of this type of function, because for spinal injured patients their highest priority is to get their hand function back.

Here’s another that could potentially help lots of people:

[U]nlike other tissues of the body, enamel cannot regenerate once it is lost, which can lead to pain and tooth loss. These problems affect more than 50 per cent of the world’s population and so finding ways to recreate enamel has long been a major need in dentistry.

The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that this new approach can create materials with remarkable precision and order that look and behave like dental enamel.

Finally, not a futuristic story, but here’s a feel-good story I bet you wouldn’t see coming:

The city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.

“My dearest Ulmus,” the message began.

“As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You’re such an attractive tree.”

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The things people think of

Via The Passive Voice blog, this odd story composed of first lines from other stories:

“First Impressions” consists entirely of first sentences from 268 short stories published in The New Yorker over the past 20 years, from 1997 to 2017, all of which are cited below. After collecting every first sentence, I found they fell into a number of patterns, some surprising, others obvious: points of view, different tenses, genre fiction like western and military, stories set in smalltown America, stories set in Montana (oddly there were a lot), etc. I then arranged these patterns into a sequence of vignettes, a short story in its own right….

The author of “First Impressions” … I suppose “author” is the correct term … is Tom Comitta. Here are the first two paragraphs of the story:

The above is not my real name—the fellow it belongs to gave me his permission to sign it to this story. This is the truth, whichever way you look at it. I’m not a bad guy.

Approaching eighty, I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know but not intimately. My memory is proglottidean, like the tapeworm, but unlike the tapeworm it has no head, it wanders in a maze, and any point may be the beginning or the end of its journey.

What do you think? I think some stories have interesting first lines. I like the “My memory is proglottidean” one. On the other hand, for me, the first paragraph does not actually work for me. My impression is not of a coherent paragraph that establishes, or even hints at, the protagonist’s voice. My actual impression is of three random sentences jumbled together for no reason, which I expect is precisely the impression Comitta did not want to give. Your mileage may differ, however.

Does “First Impressions” succeed as a story? As an artistic examination of the concept of “story”? For me the answer is … not really. Sorry! If I hadn’t known how Comitta built the story, I think I would still have found too many of the sentences oddly placed and most of the paragraphs incoherent. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I just can’t forget how the story was formed well enough to read it properly.

Click through and read the whole story if you wish, and let me know what you think of it.

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Somnivexillology

…The study of flags that appear in dreams.

Really. Or at least maybe? The first several pages of Google hits imply that this term is used solely on a Reddit thread. Is a word used only on Reddit a real word?

Maybe the word “somnivexillology” is cool enough that it should exist even if it doesn’t really? Maybe we should all take a stab at working “somnivexillology” into casual conversations today. Maybe we can give it some oomph.

Whether the word exists or not, the concept does. Here is a site explaining what flags supposedly symbolize in dreams.

Carrying a red flag represents a female around you who is not who she seems. You need to look deeper to find the truth. A white flag represents a pure woman or it can also symbolize jealousy. Are your or someone around you consumed with jealousy? Are you innocent of how others perceive you?

A colorful flag can stand for corruption. A black flag can mean trouble coming from a woman or a man of wisdom. A yellow flag can warn of a medical outbreak like the flu. And, a green flag can mean you are going to travel by car, train, or bus across the country….

Uh huh.

There are a lot of sites that discuss the symbolism of flags in dreams, it turns out. Who knew? Maybe if I took an hour or two to post a comment on each of these sites using the word “somnivexillology” I could get this word into usage in one day. Alas, we’ll never know, because I am too lazy to try it.

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Where on Pangaea are you?

Just found this site which allows you to answer the burning questions: Where would you be right now if you were suddenly transported waaaay back in time to the period when the continents were arranged in the Pangaea supercontinent?

Looks like my house would appear — poof! — inside a terrible, huge desert that swept through the interior of the supercontinent. Guess I better hope my house doesn’t get transported back in time to Pangaea.

This was quite some time ago, and I am sorry to say that even outside the desert regions, you’d be lucky to find anything more exciting than algae.

Here is a related video that starts at the current day, back up to the older Pangaea, and then moves forward in time to the future Pangaea. Lots of neat stuff happens, but in particular I think it’s neat watching India slam into Asia and build the Himalayas, and then in the future I like watching Australia wrap around and crash into Asia as well. Of course perhaps your fancy will be captured by some other aspect of continental drift. Pretty neat watching Antarctica shift around, for example.

Here is a great slideshow from the BBC showing “The great 25 turning points in Earth’s history.” I personally find the “snowball Earth” phenomenon the scariest turning point(s). It’s alarming thinking that really we don’t know why the Earth froze over or — an important detail — why it thawed out again.

Anyway — where would you wind up if your house were suddenly transported back to where it would have been 240 million years ago?

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What would you have died of?

Recently on Twitter:

Int’l House of Bathos (@ambernoelle)Let us now praise modern medicine: dear macabre Twitter, how would you for fairly certain have died by now without it? Cause of death, go.

Guaranteed to produce many reasons to appreciate modern medicine!

I said: “Prematurity. My twin and I would probably have died within a few days of birth.” (And our survival isn’t even due to modern-modern medicine, either, since that was half a century ago. There are LOTS of VERY premature babies saved today that would have died for sure fifty years ago.)

Other answers, in case you are curious:

Sepsis from infection

MRSA from biting nails (really!)

MRSA from shaving legs (!!!!@!?!!)

Rh antibodies

Blood clots

Athsma

Leukemia

Rabies (!)

Congenital heart defect

Flu

Endometriosis

Major allergic reaction to cinnamon

Cobra bite

… Isn’t this fascinating? Anybody see the cobra bite coming? Or rabies? If you took 100 people at random in the county where you live, I wonder how many would be dead without modern medicine? Three cheers for the germ theory of disease plus all the other medical developments since, oh, the 1850s or so.

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Recent Reading: Beverly Connor mysteries

So, I recently finished reading all of Beverly Connor’s Diane Fallon mysteries, so I guess this year is officially Beverly Connor Year for me.

The Diane Fallon series includes:

One Grave too Many

Dead Guilty

Dead Secret

Dead Past

Dead Hunt

Scattered Graves

Dust to Dust

The Night Killer

One Grave Less

Prior to reading this series, earlier this spring I read her Lindsay Chamberlain mysteries, a series which includes:

A Rumor of Bones

Questionable Remains

Dressed to Die

Skeleton Crew

Airtight Case

The vast majority of the books on my TBR pile got there because of a recommendation from someone here or from one of the handful of book bloggers I follow, but I read all these after happening across the second of the Lindsay Chamberlain series at a library book sale, so it only goes to show that random chance still occasionally plays an important role in my reading life.

These two series are similar, which is fine since obviously I was in the mood to read a lot of similar murder mysteries. Both series have a mature woman as the protagonist. Both are based in Georgia, though many of Lindsay’s books take place elsewhere as she travels a good deal. In all the books, forensics is very important and lots of science is worked into the stories, but not so much that the reader feels like they’ve picked up a textbook by mistake.

What you can expect from all the books in both series:

a) A real mystery. I almost never figured much out early. I was almost always baffled by what was going on. There was one important exception I can think of, but in general the mystery-qua-mystery is excellent. Occasionally a deus ex moment gives the good guys a bit of a boost, but generally this is not too egregious (in one book, a little more egregious). Specific plot elements made me prefer one book or another, or did not appeal to me as much in one book or another, but I don’t think there are any real low points in either series. All the books are good in both.

b) Cool forensics, plus either cool crime lab stuff or else cool archeology stuff. Occasionally both. Really enjoyed all these elements. Also, now I know how I would dispose of a body if I really wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be found. [Feed it to pigs. Apparently pigs will eat the whole thing, including the bones. I wouldn’t have guessed that. I know hyenas can crush and eat big bones, but pigs? But now I know. Plus, pigs are probably easier to keep than hyenas if you don’t want your neighbors to be suspicious.]

c) Lots of action. In every book, you can expect the protagonist and perhaps others to be involved in one exciting situation after another. Neither protagonist is stupid about danger . . . at least not very stupid about danger . . . but, damn. If it were me, I would load up with two guns, two flashlights, and two Dobermans. One of anything probably wouldn’t be enough.

d) Protagonists who are competent, but not too unbelievably super-competent. What I like best is that when Lindsay or Diane fights off an attacker or gets away from a kidnapper or whatever, this is not because they are so very special. It’s because they fight really hard and keep fighting till they get away. If their attacker shouts, “I just want to talk!” or “I’m not going to hurt you!” they keep fighting. I appreciate this very much. I have no patience whatsoever for a protagonist, especially a female protagonist, who, when attacked, dithers and wrings her hands and practically has the word “victim” painted on her back.

e) Basically competent and well-developed secondary characters. I don’t much care for the sort of mystery where the archaeologist (or whoever) solves the mystery because the police are too stupid to solve anything. The protagonist shouldn’t shine only because most of the secondary characters are ridiculously incompetent. That doesn’t happen here. Sure, the police may be out of their depth with some of the science, but they’re generally pretty competent. Also, I especially like Diane’s boyfriend/fiancé Frank, who several times solves a particular sort of intellectual problem because he’s better than Diane at that kind of thing. I also really like Lindsay’s eventual boss, who wasn’t quite what I was expecting (in a good way).

I should add that one exception to the generally high level of competence is the tendency of most characters to say, “Of course, this could just be a coincidence.” Uh huh. Sure. A coincidence. The example I thought was stupidest was when someone suggested, apparently seriously, that perhaps Murderer A threw away his boots and Murderer B happened to pick them up and wear them at a completely unconnected crime scene. Rather than laughing hysterically, the other characters actually thought this might have actually explain why the same boot print was found at both scenes. Uh huh. Sure.

f) A bit less of an epilogue than you might want. For example, one book ends with the discovery of a gruesome crime that is never mentioned in the next book. Worse, at the end of one book a secondary character was kidnapped and really scared, though not hurt. There is no emotional fallout whatsoever from this situation in the next book; in fact the incident is never mentioned again and might as well never have happened. I was pretty startled by this, as Connor is generally better than that with continuity. It was disappointing to me, as I was quite interested in how the character would handle that. In another case, the protagonist suffers from major slander and sues a tv station that spreads the lies about her. I would have loved to see the outcome of that lawsuit just for my own satisfaction because the tv station’s behavior was truly outrageous.

What you can expect from the actual writing:

a) Unfortunately, Beverly Connor and I obviously have a philosophical disagreement about the use of the past perfect. I think it should be used where appropriate. Connor thinks it should be used only when absolutely necessary and sometimes not then. That final clause is the problem: because of what appears a reflexive avoidance of the past perfect, sometimes her use of the simple past tense produces sentences that are awkward or even a little bit confusing.

I’ve seen this kind of writing before, of course, especially in genre fiction written since, I guess, about the late nineties. Obviously some authors, copy editors, and editors are used to this style and like it. That’s too bad, as the avoidance of the past perfect produces writing that is objectively not as smooth or clear. Here is a discussion that provides great examples of the simple past and past perfect, illustrating how these verb tenses can be used effectively in flashbacks. In fiction, we often use a ton of flashbacks to work in backstory, both in fairly extensive passages and in short one- or two-sentence passages. This is the situation where the past perfect is most useful and helpful in improving sentence and narrative clarity.

Also, Connor just has a few other writing quirks that bother me. She uses “may have” when she ought to use “might have,” for example. Here is a discussion of the difference. I get that this is trivial, but remember I read all nine of the Diane Fallon books in quick succession. That means about the fifth or sixth time I saw “may have” in a sentence where “might have” would have been better, I got sensitized to it, so I noticed it for the rest of the series.

b) Otherwise, I think Connor’s writing is solid and straightforward. She has a lot of brief transitions that are boring (Then they ate pizza and went to bed. The next morning …) but, as noted, this kind of thing is brief. Before you know it, you’re on into the next interesting scene, so you never have time to get bored. At least, that was my experience.

Connor’s dialogue is generally pretty good and sometimes very good – I’ve noticed before that good dialogue is important to carry me past writing quirks that would otherwise stop me from enjoying a book. Connor also writes good exposition, which for me also serves this purpose. Someone less interested in the science embedded in these books might not find that to be the case.

c) Wow, absolutely masterful use of cliffhanger chapter breaks. This was especially noticeable in One Grave Less, which is a crossover between the Diane F and Lindsay C series. Because the chapters mainly alternate between the two protagonists, Connor is able to leave each character in a crisis when she switches to the other. This is very much the kind of book that can keep you up all night.

What’s coming up from Connor:

Both series are continuing, to my surprise. Because of that crossover, and because of an important plot development in that book, I figured at least the Diane Fallon series was going to end there. Nope. Though that book provides a natural endpoint, from Beverly Connor’s blog, I see that the next Diane Fallon series is going to continue. The next book is going to be called Blood Evidence. She’s also going on with the Lindsay Chamberlain series; the next book for that one will be called Kill Site.

Well, that’s excellent. I will definitely go on with both series.

Connor is also working on a fantasy novel called Song of Stones. That will be interesting. I wonder how much her extensive mystery background will inform that fantasy novel? Maybe it will be a mystery with a fantasy setting? Historical or contemporary or secondary-world fantasy, I wonder?

In the meantime, she and her husband have co-written a couple of stand-alone mysteries. Maybe I’ll try those, because I’m definitely not bored with these mysteries yet.

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