Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 116

Scott Adams’s favorite tweets

Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert cartoons and a popular blog, recently shared a list of his tweets that were the most popular. Here’s a partial list:

I wish I were dumber so I could be more certain about my opinions. It looks fun. (41)

I would hate to live in a world that rewards ignorance. What? Uh-oh. (with photo of graph of book sales)(26)

Outragists are the new awful: (link to my blog article) (29)

While no one was paying attention, weather reports became accurate and the news became fiction. Did not see that coming. (26)

I knew a guy with passion to be a pro golfer and the brain to be a great accountant. He followed his passion. He’s homeless now. (25)

If you can’t construct a coherent argument for the other side, you probably don’t understand your own opinion. (23)

Outragism: The act of generating outrage by quoting famous people out of context. #outragism (23)

Dear calendar makers: Put the weekEND at the END of the row. Sunday is not the start of the week.(with photo of revised calendar layout)  #Google #Apple (20)

Guys: If you ask a woman on a date and she says “possibly,” act optimistic and immediately make other plans. #datingadvice (16)

Salesman: These mattresses are hand-made! Me: Can you show me the good ones made by robots? #robots (16)

World’s shortest IQ test: “What percentage of your reality do you understand?” Grading: The higher the percentage the lower the IQ. (18)

My blog post about science’s biggest failure is melting the http://Dilbert.com servers with traffic. Hits a nerve. (Link to article) (18)

Best skill combination ever: web graphic design and web analytics. Learn those things and own the world. (16)

Fancy hotel has personalized products in bath. Not the first time I have seen my name and “douche” on same page. (photo of gel douche) (14)

My most popular tweets are the ones that insult dumb people. Everyone is confident I am talking about other people who have it coming. (12)

Here’s the link to his blog: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/110543090261/twitter-is-my-laboratory



Maybe you should be following him instead of me. Or both of us.

Discount code

Did you miss the freebie yesterday and Friday for Held for Ransom? You can still get the ebook at a discount: Go to Smashwords.com and use discount code YL69L for 20% off. (http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/97514). Good only until Feb. 15.

Still Life by Louise Penny

Still Life by Louise Penny


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Still Life is the first Inspector Gamache mystery, a very popular series among mystery readers. This series is set in Quebec but is written in English, although French expressions are used occasionally and the malaise that separates the francophones from the anglophones is depicted at times.

The strength of this book is the detailed descriptions of Quebec village life and its people, a geographic and sociological location with which most English-language mystery readers have little familiarity. The characters are fully developed and very diverse. The main character, Gamache, is likeable.

The plot line is very much like Agatha Christie’s novels. It fits in the Clue game genre, that is, the possible suspects are limited to a small set of people, in this case the inhabitants of the tiny village of Three Pines. You know from early on that it is one of the characters you are reading about, and the author populates this set with enough characters and motive to keep you guessing.

The milieu (see, I took French in high school, too) kept me interested enough to finish the book, and I can honestly say I enjoyed it, but the dénouement left me unsatisfied. The murderer is revealed, of course, but I found the resolution to be all-too-random. It could just as easily have been someone else. It was almost as if the author got to the end and decided it was time to solve the mystery, then drew a name out of a hat and devised an explanation for why and how it was done. A good mystery either contains enough clues to let the astute reader figure out the ending solve it, or a surprise ending that delights you in its unexpectedness. This did neither. I was perhaps a bit put off a bit by the way Gamache treated his new associate Nichol. She was actually quite realistic and more likely to solve a real case with her approach than Gamache would.

So if you’re a fan of ambiance and interesting characters and locales, try a Gamache book. If you prefer a plot-driven mystery with plenty of sleuthing, this may not be the best choice for you.





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Held for Ransom – free

Held for Ransom (Kindle edition) will be free this Friday and Saturday. Spread the word. If you’ve only read the geocaching-themed books, this is your chance to see how Cliff got started, before geocaching existed, to learn about his strengths and frailties, his insecurity. It’s also a very realistic view of what a real kidnapping case is like. You could learn something that could save your life in the unlikely event you became the victim of one.

50-year high school reunion coming up

I graduated from high school fifty years ago this June. We’re having a reunion later in the year. I started to write our 50th reunion, but it isn’t, since we’ve only had a few reunions. So I’m calling it our 50-year reunion. I am a word fanatic, after all. Below is a photo of me along with several of my classmates. I’ll let you guess who is who.

Superbowl Snobbery

I’m not a big pro sports fan, but I enjoy a good football game, and yesterday’s Superbowl certainly met that description. I noticed something during the game that I’ve seen before while watching pro football. The announcers mentioned during the game that Richard Sherman of the Seahawks went to Stanford. They also mentioned that another player, one whose name I’ve forgotten (there are others on both teams), had also gone to Stanford. Yet at no time did they mention that either Marshawn Lynch or Shane Vereen, the two star running backs for the opposing teams, had gone to the University of California, Berkeley (Cal). Both played much more of a role in the game than Sherman or the other Stanford player.

The comments were elitist at best, and possibly even racist. The implication was that these players weren’t just dumb jocks as you might expect because, hey, they went to Stanford. There may even have been an unintentional hint that it was surprising because they were black “speed” players in “non-cerebral” positions, i.e. anywhere besides quarterback, I suppose. However, this racist tinge may not have been behind it, since Lynch and Vereen are black, too. I think the announcers or copy writers simply had a perception that an athlete has to be unusually smart to go to Stanford, which makes the mention of their school noteworthy, whereas the others went to Cal, which is “only” a public university, and we all know any dumb jock can get into Cal, right?

Wrong! Wrong on both counts. As anyone who has ever followed college football knows, the top football schools, public or private, let in a ton (literally) of players on athletic scholarships who are nowhere near capable of entering the school on their grades or test scores. Plenty of semi-literate morons have gone to “elite” private schools to play football. O.J. Simpson is a notable example at USC, and don’t get me started on Notre Dame. On the other hand, all the top athletic schools have examples of highly intelligent athletes, of all races. I am reminded of Kareem Abdul Jabbar, a UCLA graduate and probably the best basketball player of all time, who spoke at my son’s graduation. Jabbar was by far the best graduation speaker I’ve ever heard – articulate, witty, poised, with perfect grammar and a large vocabulary. For those acronym-challenged, UCLA is part of the public University of California system, like Cal.

True, Stanford has a lower admission rate than Cal now, making it harder to get into. In fact, it’s harder to get into than any university in the country, including the Ivy League, but that doesn’t make it tops academically. Cal still has more Nobel Laureates than Stanford and is extremely selective in admissions with only a 17% admission rate, and that’s with a statutory requirement that the university system must accept the top 10% of each high school’s graduates if they apply. In other words, if your child graduates in the top 10% of his or her California high school class, the university must admit him or her (although not necessarily the campus of first choice). So, announcers, how about some equal time for Cal if you’re going to mention schools.

I’ve never met Sherman, Lynch, or Vereen or even heard them interviewed. I don’t know how smart, dumb, or educated they are and it doesn’t matter to me. They’re all great football players who made for good entertainment from time to time. They do their jobs just fine. The television announcers? Well, I’m not so impressed with their intelligence. Thank God for the mute button.

Anagrams on the News

ROMNEY IS NO MORE = YE SENIOR MORMON

SUPER BOWL = ELBOW SPUR

BIBI AND BARRY = BIRDBRAIN BAY

 MARSHAWN = WHAMS, RAN

Ciphers, War, Natural Selection, funny story

This article has it all – ciphers, war, natural selection, and humor. The ultimate justice of it all appeals to Cliff Knowles and me.

Cipher in a bullet

A bonnie young lassie, a Scot

A bonnie young lassie, a Scot,

Her bust was more shapely than not.

The rest of her torso

It was even more so.

Her outfit, she wore hot ‘n’ taut.

~ original Limerick

Murder by the Book by Rex Stout

Murder by the Book by Rex Stout


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

No one can legitimately call himself a fan of murder mysteries without being familiar with Nero Wolfe. The Wolfe books harken back to the days of the potboilers when detectives were dicks, the gorgeous women were dames with good front sections, and there was none of this folderol about character development and conflicted emotions or troubled personal relationships. The plots, and to some extent Wolfe himself, are Sherlockian. Wolfe, brusque, iconoclastic, and famous for his deductive powers, sits his seventh of a ton in his New York penthouse and waits for cases to come to him. And come they do, in this case, with a client coming to hire him to solve the murder of his daughter. More murders ensue.

The Wolfe stories are narrated by Archie Goodwin, the Dr. Watson equivalent, who is Wolfe’s right-hand man. Archie is a smart-alecky young fellow, quick with his wit, his fists, and the ladies. Almost all of the action in the story is really Archie’s, with Wolfe making only rare appearances to exhort Archie to “bring me something” and on rare occasions, to dole out a begrudging “satisfactory.” The rest of the time Wolfe can be found in his plant rooms tending to his orchids or dining on one of the delicacies prepared by his chef, Fritz.

Wolfe’s relationship with the police is prickly at best, very much like that of Holmes with Scotland Yard. Cliché it may be, but the mystery is not fully resolved until Wolfe calls all parties to his penthouse for the big reveal, which, of course, only he has deduced.

I’ve read a couple of Nero Wolfe books in the past, probably more than a decade ago, and their formulaic nature deters me from reading them with any frequency, but it’s a good formula and I thoroughly enjoyed this one.





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