Original Sin

Posted on May 26, 2025 by smellincoffee

It was fairly obvious to critics of the Biden administration that the president was in cognitive decline and increasingly unfit to hold office, despite the barrage of Sharp as a Tack! statements emanating from DC’s faithful handmaidens, the corporate press. I picked this up not to learn what anyone who wasn’t rallying around the flag already knew, but to learn how culpable Biden was in the charade: was he the one insisting on running despite his increasing lapses, or was he cruelly used by the Democratic honchos or his wife? Was Biden threatened with Amendment 25 after the sad spectacle that was the Trump-Biden debate? Also on the table, at least for me: if Biden was incapable of running things, who was doing the running? As with the existence of a secret cabal of White House staffers who were interfering with Trump’s first term in office, the idea of unelected officials running government makes me — and should make any American — want to round up some tar and feathers. The book manages to be both sympathetic and critical of Biden, and places the blame squarely on his, his wife’s, and his inner circle’s shoulders, based on a series of interviews with un-named contributors. The result is something like Fire and Fury: interesting, informative to a degree, but ultimately a bit suspect.

The last ten years have not been kind to Biden: the death of his eldest son and heir-apparent in May 2015 rapidly aged him, and is blamed by his closest staffers for accelerating his cognitive decline — decline already evident in 2017 tapes, obvious during the 2020 election, and a growing cause for concern among those having to edit video during the nation’s first phoned-in election. These gave plenty of fodder for Republicans to mock, just as the Democrats used Dubya’s.penchant for malaprops against him. While it’s true that isolated clips could be collected and promoted to render a biased message, with Biden, his moments of confusion were increasingly a serious problem. The abnormal conditions of the 2020 elections, with campaigning being more virtual, helped mitigate the effect these moments would have on his campaign, and the effects a physical campaign might have on him.The cognitive stalls were not just a problem not just from an optics point of view, but for an operational point of view: Biden started stumbling through caucus meetings, forgetting to push for the legislation he was there to promote, and this was done under the full view of Peloisi, the then-leader of the Democratic party. Worse: while Dubya’s gaffes were at worst amusing, Biden tended to do things like openly call China’s dictator Xi a dictator, or declare that yep, DC was all-in on war to defend Taiwan: this necessitated DC dispatching officials to China to perform the necessary mea culpa’s. (I use Dubya and not Trump as my counter-example because Donnie’s threats to annex Greenland or turn Canada into the “51st state” are on another level than gaffe.) In office, Biden surrounded himself with a small coterie of close aides who called themselves the Politburo, meaning he was sheltered and cocooned even more than most presidents are. By 2022, the White House’s operations were actively reworking themselves around Biden’s cognitive limitations: reduced windows of when he might attend events, speeches being shortened and simplified, appearances being limited. This would only increase until that emperor-has-no-clothes moment where Biden’s mental fraility made itself undeniably obvious on the world’s stage, debating with Trump and getting into side arguments about golf handicaps. The debate night was, of course, the end for Biden, sending the DNC into panic mod and resulting in him being pressured to drop out and cede his place to Harris. The rest is history.

As much as I disliked Biden’s policies in office, his increasing mental limitations made me wonder, in 2023-2024, how much he was actually responsible for them and how much whoever was running things was. Original Sin is revealing and showing how influential the Politburo was, scripting interviews and even cabinet meetings. This same group was part of a reality distortion field: while the Bidens had a habit of ignoring ugly facts and pushing forward in faith — not letting negativity cause hesitation — the politburo were around Biden so much that his yearly decline became inwardly normalized. They became used to arranging the operations of the office to take his increasing infirmity in mind. It was outsiders who would get a view of how his function had declined and come away staggered — and evidently, it was outsiders like Biden’s political critics who could see the obvious. Were the DNC not watching the videos of Biden mentally shutting down, of having to have every single thing he did on stage written down on a card for him, etc?

This book is informative, but I don’t think it tells anywhere near the full story. There’s no mention of the autopen, for instance, and no accounting for the hostility Biden exhibited towards the DNC leadership after he was pressured into resigning. The Biden depicted here is sad and reluctant to make the decision, but he does so after funding dries up and the party leadership tells him he has to step down for the greater good. At least one person who is named in the book is now saying that the quote attributed to him was entirely fabricated. The book strikes me as a gentle scapegoating: it wasn’t the party who erred in not acting more forcefully, it was sad ol’ Joe who just didn’t realize it was time to go, and who was irresponsibly abetted in that by advisors who loved him too much for his own good.

Quotes:

“The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye,” Orwell went on. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
Here is what was in front of our noses.

The president was fond of using the formal family motto, of giving “my word as a Biden,” but they had another, more private saying: “Never call a fat person fat.” It wasn’t just about politesse; it was about ignoring ugly facts. “Don’t say mean truths” is how someone close to the family put it.
“The Bidens’ greatest strength is living in their own reality,” this person told us. “And Biden himself is gifted at creating it: Beau isn’t going to die. Hunter’s sobriety is stable. Joe always tells the truth. Joe cares more about his family than his own ambition. They stick to the narrative and repeat it.”

From 2020 until 2024, all of this resulted in an almost spiritual refusal to
admit that Biden was declining.

He’s nearly eighty, he knows what he wants, and we know how to handle him—that was the message sent internally.
All of these factors led to a uniquely small and loyal inner circle. Some felt that the insularity was the Politburo’s way of protecting its influence. “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” said one person familiar with the internal dynamic.

“Before Beau died, he was one hundred percent sharper,” said one senior Biden White House official. “Beau’s death wrecked him. Part of him died that never came back after Beau died. Was he the same guy he was in 2009? Of course not.”

Some cabinet secretaries felt that, in fact, Biden relied on the cards more
heavily when reporters were absent. […]

“The cabinet meetings were terrible and at times uncomfortable—and
they were from the beginning,” Cabinet Secretary Number One told us. “I
don’t recall a great cabinet meeting in terms of his presence. They were so
scripted.”
[…]
Cabinet Secretary Number Two said they hated “the scripts” for the cabinet meetings. “You want people to tell you the truth and have a real dialogue, and those meetings were not that.”

It was a situation unique in the history of the republic: Two candidates who both claimed to be running again for the sake of protecting the country from the other also had very real reason to run for the purpose of protecting themselves.

Even mentioning Biden’s age in the lead of a brief story on his COVID infection resulted in a White House official screaming at Shear, demanding that The Times remove his age because it wasn’t “relevant.”

“Access dropped off considerably in 2024, and I didn’t interact with him as much,” said Cabinet Secretary Number One. “I didn’t get an explanation.” Instead, the secretary would brief other senior White House aides, who then briefed the president. Cabinet Secretary Number One thought it strange and asked if it was a way of filtering out particular information so that his closest aides could brief him in the way they preferred.
“Yes, the president is ‘making the decisions,’ but if the inner circle is shaping them in such a way, is it really a decision? Are they leading him to something?” Cabinet Secretary Number One wondered.

One cabinet secretary believed that Biden’s limitations had given his aides more power to steer the administration. “If you had a twenty-years- younger Joe Biden, I think he would have been more on top of the issues and what was going on,” the cabinet secretary said.

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Biden turned to Trump, mouth agape, a painful moment of split screen.
It wasn’t even twenty-two minutes into the ninety-minute debate.

Senior Democrats who had done work for Biden in 2024 later told us that they had watched the debate and wondered: Just who the hell is running the country?

After the interview, Harris was visibly angry with Cooper. He had been asking the questions the nation had been wondering, but she took it personally.
This ———- doesn’t treat me like the damn vice president of the United States, she said to colleagues. I thought we were better than that. (Is she aware of how big a nothingburger the VP slot is? A VP is only as big as their boss lets them and their will directs them to be. Dick Cheney was a sinister grey eminence, Pence and Harris were guys-in-back)

Hur told them that all he felt was sad. How could anyone look at Joe Biden at that debate and not feel bad?

Writing from a hotel room in Portugal, Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman said the performance had made him weep. “I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime,” he wrote, “precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election.”
He “clearly is not any longer” up to the job, Friedman concluded.

“We can’t get out there and say, ‘Four more years,’ ” Kuster remarked. “I don’t know if we can say, ‘Four more months.’ ”

“Do you think Kamala can win?” Biden asked.
“I don’t know if she can win,” Schumer said. “I just know that you cannot.”

The image of Trump bloodied but standing defiant, fist in the air, after a bullet grazed his ear would be one of the most memorable of the year. Looking at that photo, Biden campaign aides couldn’t help but think of how this would help Trump politically. “[—-!]” more than a few said.

“Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” Hostin followed up.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said, in perhaps the worst moment of her short campaign.

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Coming to Palestine

Posted on May 24, 2025 by smellincoffee

Given the current horrors going on in Gaza, and that Israel/Palestine is largely a blind spot for me, I figured this was worth a look, especially given that I haven’t read anything on the subject since Peace not Apartheid (2007!) and a lot of blood has flowed under the bridge since then. The book is published by the Libertarian Institute, many of whose books I’ve read, and Sheldon Richman is an author that Scott Horton frequently praises.

Coming to Palestine is largely a collection of essays with an Israel-Palestine connection: most were published at the Institute itself, but some are book reviews, and the book reviews can date back to the 1990s. All are sharply critical of Zionism and the State of Israel. As an atheist and an arch-libertarian, Richman has no regard for the idea of a Jewish community at all, let alone one with historic ties to the area and an especial tie to the city of Jerusalem. His critique (beyond detailing chronic human rights abuses) is moored entirely in individualism and property rights: individual Palestinians owned land, and individual Palestinians were wrongfully robbed of it. Although this makes the general scope of the work predictable — Israel is always the bad guy — the volume is not a dozen essays arguing the same thing. Some offer histories of Zionism and Israel’s expansions; some explore Israel’s bipartisan command of US policy, and so on. There are essays on how many conflicts in the Middle East owe to Great Britain and France’s arbitrary line-drawing after the Ottoman Empire fell, for instance, and an essay on how he came to his present beliefs, followed by another condemning the expansion of “anti-semitism” to mean “any critique of the State of Israel”.

I have never looked into the process why which Israel became a nation, so there was quite a bit to learn here, especially early (19th century) settlement and the hostile reaction of Reform rabbis to the idea of an Israel recreated by man rather than God. Richman argues that while settlers did “buy” land in what became Israel, they did so through absentee landlords who had no connection to the property beyond legal title, and who cared nothing for the farmers that the new owners would displace. (That it was legal title, though, would seem to undercut Richman’s pure-property-rights approach.) Other expansion has more the more straightforward pointy-stick approach.

This was an interesting if very partisan collection, one I’d rather evaluate with more knowledge of the subject matter. I did some fact-checking along the way, enough to realize Richman’s views were charged, let’s say. He announced that Israel, Britain, and France attacked Egypt, failing to mention the context of Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal twelve years before the 99-year concession was due to expire, an act viewed by Britain and France as a direct violation of the treaty governing its custody. Unfortunately for Gazans, things have only gotten worse since this book’s publication, as the obscene evil of October 7 has led to an absolute orgy of violence since then, Israel appearing intent on creating a desert and calling it peace. One interesting oversight here was the lack of commentary on Netanyahu’s history of indirectly supporting Hamas for his own cynical reasons. Richman definitely doesn’t like Bibi, and I know Scott Horton is familiar with the topic, so it’s odd that that subject wasn’t addressed, this being a Libertarian Institute publication.

Coming to Palestine is quite partisan, but makes me want to learn more about the subject matter, if only to better evaluate this book. It’s informative, albeit biased, but I don’t think any level of bias can mitigate the fact that the state of Israel has acted horribly towards its neighbors, and has an adverse effect on DC’s foreign policy– whether that consists of enraging the Arabs against DC and America, or making it advocate things like “Erase Gaza and replace it with a resort managed by the president”.

Quotes:


Bush officials had demanded an election in Gaza, then regretted it when they saw the results. Indeed, Bush critic Sen. Hillary Clinton commented after the balloting, “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” (Ooh, she said the quiet part out loud.)

Some justify this unstinting and unique support [3 billion dollars per year in military aid] for Israel on grounds that Israel is an American “strategic asset,” and Israeli leaders cynically talk in those terms. But this makes no sense. For one thing, as many American political and military leaders have acknowledged since 9/11, rather than being an asset, Israel has been a liability. A big reason for the Muslim terrorism directed at Americans is precisely the unconditional U.S. military assistance to, not to mention the diplomatic support of, Israel.

Posted in history, Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews, World Affairs | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

WWW Wednesday

Posted on May 21, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Memories from the Microphone, a history of baseball broadcasting.

WHAT are you reading now? I’ve been nibbling at a few books this week, but am most committed to Provoked, a history of DC/NATO vs Russia since Gorbachev. I’ve read Scott Horton’s previous works and even helped in his crowd-funded one. It’s dense, though, and crammed with footnotes. (I am 13% in and am at footnote ONE THOUSAND AND THIRTY.) Kindle claims it’s over 2000 pages: the print version is closer to 700. I think the pace will quicken once I escape the Clinton administration and all of the bloodletting in Yugoslavia. The Kindle shelf:

Red Storm Rising is a library ebook that just became available. It’s dated at this point — Cold War fiction — but Red Metal supposedly took inspiration from it. Generation Kill is one I’m looking at because I enjoy scenes from the show (specifically, the scenes with Sgt Major Sixta — po-lice that moostache!). I also know little about Iraq War II save for the debacle it turned in to.

WHAT are you reading next? Ace in the Hole, once I’ve got some more nonfiction under my belt. I will not tolerate fiction beating out nonfiction again! I’m also hoping to get a hold of Original Sin, on the Biden cognitive coverup, as I’m specifically interested in knowing if Biden himself wanted to run in his condition or if he was pressured into it by the Dem establishment of his wife. With the sudden announcement that he has aggressive cancer on the eve of the book’s publication, I’m especially interested in it.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Audiobook Number Crunching

Posted on May 20, 2025 by smellincoffee

Audiobooks have become a regular part of my reading life in recent years, prompted by one of those free trials that resulted in me discovering how a strong narrator can transform a book. Since then I’ve been and on/off again subscriber, unsubscribing after more than two credits accumulate. I have over sixty titles in my audible library, and for some reason I decided to put them all in a spreadsheet so I could ponder the data. Some observations:

(1) 54% of my listened-to titles have been from Audible’s subscription library, compared to 46% being outright purchases. That surprised me, but it also counts “Audible originals”, which are often shorter than a conventional audiobook, especially the Christmas themed ones. (I’ve listened to several different versions of “A Christmas Carol”) The number of subscription titles would be even higher had I actually begun listening to everything I’ve “added to library”. I also noticed that a lot of the titles I’ve listened to, or started listening to, have since been removed from the subscription library, like the Great Courses History of Japan.

(2) To no one’s surprise, the most frequent narrator was Wil Wheaton, with Roger Clark second. If we were going by hours-listened-to, Wheaton would be even further ahead because some of the Clark titles have been rather short, like How to Tell a Joke. That is, unless we count my listening to Roger Clark in Red Dead Redemption 2….

(3) John Scalzi is the most common author, with Rhett C. Bruno & Jaime Castle a distant second. That tracks fairly well with Wheaton & Clark, because I’m experiencing Scalzi’s book on Audible for the Wheaton delivery. There are a few titles I’ve tried just because of the narration: that’s how I got into the Black Badge series and subsequently got into Rhett C. Bruno as an author. How could I resist Arthur Morgan narrating the story of an undead cowboy bounty hunting werewolves?

(4) There are ten authors who did their own audiobook recordings: Stephen Fry, Michael Malice, and Richard Nixon among them. (The Nixon one, In the Arena, was an abridged version of the real book.)

(5) Science fiction is the clear genre leader for the moment, with baseball closing in on its heels. (Baseball has already gotten a lead on Wil Wheaton-narrated books, which is impressive given that Wheaton is the reason I got into Audible to begin with.)

(6) While Star Trek is not a huge presence on the list, with only one title, its castmembers are: Wheaton, Patrick Stewart, Leonard Nimoy, Kate Mulgrew, Brent Spiner, and Zachary Quinto all feature as narrators, and two books had larger casts that included other Trek actors like Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, etc. (The lone Star Trek title is Spock vs Q, featuring Nimoy and de Lancie, and yes, it’s fun.)

(7) Nonfiction enjoys a 60/40 lead somehow, despite all the Scalzi. Gotta be the baseball.

Posted in General | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Top Ten Book Featuring Travel

Posted on May 20, 2025 by smellincoffee

And as usual, by top ten I mean “the first ten that occurred to me”. But first, the customary tease:

The U.S. military is also a “self-licking ice cream cone,” as American GIs called it in Vietnam, dedicated to its own perpetuation at any cost, and conveniently, continually creating the disasters which are said to require their next intervention. PROVOKED, Scott Horton.

(1) The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye, Rachel Joyce. An aging man receives news that someone from his past is dying, and as he begins a walk to the post office to deliver a letter to her, he stumbles into a walking journey across the whole of England.

(2) A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s humorous account of trying the Appalachian Trail, at least the most notable parts of it.

(3) The Hobbit | Lord of the Rings. Like it’s possible to mention books with travel that doesn’t include LOTR?

(4) Hey, Mom, Can I Ride my Bike Across America? John Siegel Boettner

(5) Every single Rick Riordan book can be summarized thusly: MAIN CHARACTER and their TWO FRIENDS must DO AN EPIC ROAD TRIP to stop CHAOS MONSTER from destroying the universe on the SOLSTICE/EQUINOX.

(6) Cities of Gold. A horseback journey across the southwest, retracing Coronado’s path looking for “El Dorado”. The author, Douglas Preston, later penned a sequel in which he is joined by his wife and stepdaughter on another horseback trip to learn about the Navajo.

(7) A Walk Across America, Peter Jenkins. A visit to 1970s America.

(8) Revolutionary Ride, Lois Pryce. A British lass experiences Rouhani-era Iran on a motorbike. Related: Neither East nor West, a 1970s travelogue, had the same premise.

(9) Country Driving, a tour of China’s hinterlands.

(10) Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck. Steinbeck takes a RV trip with his dog through 1962 America and is distressed to find it increasingly plastic and homogenous.

Posted in General | Tagged , | 16 Comments

Memories from the Microphone

Posted on May 19, 2025 by smellincoffee

Memories from the Microphone is a history of baseball broadcasting that begins with primitive radio and follows broadcasting into the maturation of radio and television networks. In this, it’s also a partial history of how radio and television developed as media, from local stations and personalities to big networks and corporate deals. It’s roughly, but not strictly, chronological. Smith’s approach is to highlight a few announcers in a given decade, but follow their history well beyond the chapter’s titled limits, so we’re constantly getting stories from across three decades in any given chapter, but moving steadily forward on average. I listened to the audioversion, read by Barry Abrams, and enjoyed it on the whole — though as with most baseball books, I prefer the earlier content to the more contemporary.

Memories is interesting as a baseball history because while the sport’s stars definitely feature, the stars here are the radio announcers and later TV personalities. (The exception is when some ballplayers transition into being announcers, the biggest example being Dizzy Dean.) The early chapters were especially fascinating to me because they involved a lot of ‘announcing by wire’: radio broadcasters would receive news updates via telegraphy, and then use that information to pretend they were announcing the game live. Presumably some listeners knew that their Birmingham radio station certainly wasn’t broadcasting from say, Fenway Park, but some announcers would create sound effects to try to create the sense that they were. Because telegraphy could be interrupted, at least one station made a habit of broadcasting from an inning behind to mitigate that risk. Ronald Reagan, when left hanging during a broadcast, decided to ad-lib, creating fictitious foul balls and field interruptions for six minutes until updates started pouring back in. In these early chapters we also get a sense of radio as an emerging medium, as announcers realized that they were not simply dispensers of facts, but had to be performers: some created excitable vocal styles, inventing words like BLAMMO! to capture and hold the audience’s attention. Others would invent a persona to inhabit while they were alive: Dizzy Dean flanderized himself to a degree, laying on his Arkansas hick-ness as thick as molasses and creating folksy mispronunciations and expressions to charm the listening audience. (When questioned about his syntax, he replied: “They’re taxing that, too?!”) Once, purely to demonstrate this, he announced in his normal voice for a few minutes, then said “That’s enough of that” and “slud” back into his radio persona. Dean would also sing on mic, using the “Wabash Cannonball: to liven up dead air. He wasn’t the only singing announcer, but in the narrator’s voice he’s definitely the most memorable.

For some reason, I thought this would incorporate recordings from across the 20th century. It doesn’t, but narrator Barry Abrams does impersonations of some of baseball’s more impassioned voices, including one of a young Ronald Reagan from the 1930s announcing games. His voice was easy to listen to, and I enjoyed the variety: there are enough interviews and reenactments peppered in so that it never sounded dull. The only blip, audio-wise, is that as with all other Audible productions, the narrators read everything, including things that interrupt the flow of the narrative. This is most egregious in Ready Player One, when Wheaton was forced to read out scoreboards line-by-line, but here it mostly takes shape in parenthetical remarks, which are especially disruptive when Abrams is in the middle of an excited impersonation/reenactment. The remarks are never given in the same voice as the announcement, so what happens is deliveries like this: THE GIANTS WIN! THE GIANTS WIN THE NL (National League) PENNANT! It’s emotion, emotion, then a screeching halt into flat voice, then suddenly whiplash as we go back into emotion. This wasn’t chronic, but it was regular enough to be annoying.

This was a fun approach to the history of baseball that also served up some broadcasting history as well. Although the constant chronological mixing called for better editing, I didn’t find it as bothersome in the hearing as print readers did. It may be a consequence of growing up listening to southern storytellers, who often stagger drunkenly through timelines and sometimes into different stories altogether as the spirit moves. Although Abrams also did the audio for Smith’s The Presidents and the Pastime, a study of American presidents and baseball (something that pops up here a time or two, with Reagan, FDR, and JFK), I’m going to get the print edition of that to see if there’s a marked difference in how strong the narration is.

Related:
Baseball Forever!, a collection of 50 radio highlights across the decades, taken from one man’s private collection that began in the 1940s. I listened to it last year and was able to connect some of the recordings to Abrams’ recreations here.
Hello, Everybody! The Dawn of American Radio, Anthony Rudel

Posted in General, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Assault by Fire, plus a DNF

Posted on May 17, 2025 by smellincoffee

As a kid, my friends and I often pretended to be soldiers and play-acted in the woods and fields as we might were we actually being attacked. We crawled on our bellies through the grass, took cover behind trees, looked for places snipers might be, and threw pinecone grenades at imaginary foes. Assault by Fire reminds me of that, not because it involves characters having fantasies, but it seems like the result of someone thinking, “Hey, what if Russians were attacking my neck of the woods? How would I fight them?” The novel is by a veteran, Rip Rawlings, who has advised author Mark Greaney on military matters, and I’m thinking he should have gotten Mark to advise him on plot matters because this novel struggles. It opens with a sneak-attack by the Russians, who have decided to invade the continental United States. Why? Because a supercomputer told them they could get away with it, evidently. A combination of the US having the majority of its active forces deployed near Iran to forestall their invading Iraq (????) and a president who seized all “assault weapons” leaves the homeland weak and we’re told that the US is being outright annexed. (?!) After this rather dramatic opening, we dive right into West Virginia’s valleys: the drama and story are all hyperlocal, which is positively jarring given the earth-shaking opening. We’re not talking about forts and metropolises here, but small towns with inexplicably arrogant mayors and lazy police chiefs one can just see giving heavy sighs and hitching up their pants to trundle after these armed nogoodniks. Every part of the novel that’s not direct military tactics made me groan and wince. Here’s some dialogue:

“This is it?” said Major Quico, careful to keep his voice low so Kolikoff
wouldn’t hear him. “It just looks like Russia . . . I mean, where are the
discos and the girls?”
“They are not here at the airport, you idiot,” said Major Pavel.
“But where is the Statue of Liberty?” asked Major Drugov.
“Idiot!” said Pavel. “That is in Boston.”

Look, this isn’t Red Alert 2. An author can’t just make Russians this stupid and have them work as serious antagonists. It’s a bit like watching a Wile E. Coyote vs the Roadrunner cartoon: it doesn’t matter how menacing Wiley appears to be, you know he’s going to do something stupid like charge into a brick wall or walk off a cliff with a dumb look on his face. I mean…disco? Really? What’s next, cocaine and go-go boots? This was Rip Rawlings’ debut novel, and I hope he continues developing his craft: there were some pluses like the practical tactics and some characters, but the worldbuilding and tension were way off.

Similarly, I picked up a P.T. Deutermann novel for the first time. I’ve heard rave reviews about his WW2 naval fiction, but when I began The Second Sun and saw that Deutermann has (1) Franklin Roosevelt dead, (2) Hitler dead (3) and the European war over in MARCH 1945, I put it down and returned to one of my ebooks. Maybe he meant to type May 1945. I’ve heard nothing but good about Deutermann, so I’ll probably give him another shot.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Red Metal

Posted on May 15, 2025 by smellincoffee

Something wicked this way comes. In Taiwan, the pro-China candidate has been assassinated, ostensibly by militants who want to protect the current anti-China candidate from not being reelected. China is threatening war and loading troopships as a reprisal. The Russians are playing war games in Iran, and suddenly all of Europe’s communications infrastructure — including NATO’s — has gone dark. And now there are Russians running amok in Eastern Europe! What on Earth is going on here? The reader begins Red Metal a few steps ahead of NATO, as the Russian viewpoint chapters have already told us the plan: the attack into Europe is a raid to destroy DC’s “Africa Command” in Stuttgart and slow western response to the main thrust of the Russian assault: the seizure of an area of Kenya with enormous rare-earth mineral deposits, an area Russian corporate interests had formerly owned but been forced to turn over to Kenyan authorities. However cleverly planned the assault, though, once action is engaged and the fog of war descends, there’s no telling what may happen. Red Metal is the first modern military/technical thriller I’ve read in perhaps twenty years, and I picked it up out of curiosity given the current state of eastern Europe. I found it unexpectedly absorbing, clipping through a hundred pages a day despite the sheer amount of technical detail and subsequent googling. The constant flux of action helped considerably, but so did the characterization.

The Russians have, on paper, a great plan of coordinated assaults. But, as both von Molkte and Evander Holyfield noted, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Who can predict their actions? The theme of War and Peace finds an interesting echo here: while the Russian general might seek to impose his will on the world and redraw it to his liking, moving both Allied and Russian parts to achieve that end, in the end the cumulative actions of the game pieces themselves have an unpredictable and rippling affect. Say a French diplomat decides to disregard precaution and stay put, reporting on troop numbers instead of retreating for shelter with the rest of his office — or that a young militia woman who’s the Polish equivalent of a National Guard weekend warrior might choose to fight instead of run. Or an American sub captain, knowing she’s wholly outnumbered, seeing a brief window of opportunity to “shoot her shot”. I’m not studied up on modern warfare at all — not the infantry equipment, the motorized vehicles, the missiles, the jets. My most ‘modern’ military references are from..um, In the Army Now, and I somehow doubt a Pauly Shore movie is terribly accurate. (Though, interestingly, it also involved Kenya.) I can’t therefore comment on how accurate the technical aspects of this are, though given that it’s coauthored by a Lieutenant Colonel I’m happy assuming they’re on point. What I can say works is the characterization here, as we alternate between a series of Allied and Russian characters and witness the unfolding action directly. Some of the characters I was very much rooting for, and this being a war they don’t all survive — and some survive but in broken bodies. Most of the characters are likable to a degree, but especially the Polish woman whose refusal to give up when her unit had been crushed turned her into a propaganda hero. She’s oblivious to this, absorbed by the fight, but it gives her a sense of authority that other characters recognize, and so she becomes the nucleus of a never-say-die group of partisans. She will stop at nothing to continue the attack on Russians within Poland, including pressing a wounded American pilot into helping her use America air units to pull off an ambush.

Although this book is dated today in terms of some geopolitical aspects (Russia doesn’t appear to be wanting for rare earth minerals), and technology has presumably marched on from this period where the Russians were still using some cold war equipment, but the big actors remain the same — as do their desires. China is still fixated on taking over Taiwan — surely there’s a parable written somewhere about a mighty creature that ruins itself by obsessing over something it could let go? — and Russia is…well Russia, jealous of its place in the world and willing to fight to regain its former status as a world power to be reckoned with. It appears that Greaney has been literal-ghostwriting Tom Clancy novels the last few years or so, and I’m curious as to what kind of plots he’s spinning up. As far as Rip Rawlings, he’s struck out on his own with a book that sounds like a modern Red Dawn, so I may give that shot.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

WWW Wednesday + Books that Became Film/Shows

Posted on May 14, 2025 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Fenway 1912, a history of Fenway Park’s first year in action as the Red Sox had a really good year, facing off the New York Giants in a World Series .

WHAT are you reading now? I’m two three hundred pages into Red Metal, a modern military/technical thriller in which Russia ‘s desire for rare-earth minerals begins the first major war in Europe in a generation while Red China threatens to invade Taiwan. An easy ceasefire in Europe is defied by some Zielinski fella. Ah, the wacky plot lines these authors can come up with.

WHAT are you reading next? Black Badge #3, Ace in the Hole, just dropped, so I’ve picked that up and will either read it on Kindle Unlimited or listen to Arthur Morgan read it — or both, as I’ve done with the previous two. (Bascially I listen to the Audible version until I get so interested in the story I need to find out what happens, then switch to KU.) The Black Badge series features an undead outlaw who has been saved from death/hell in return for doing missions for the White Throne, destroying creatures like werewolves, vampires, and lawyers roaming the wild west. It’s an interesting genre — western and dark fantasy. Alternatively, there’s also It’s a Beautiful Day for Baseball, a social history of baseball in the 1960s.

Here, just listen to Roger Clark /Arthur Morgan introducing the series:

Most folks who see a demon beast like the Yeti tuck tail and run, hopin’ someone else will deal with it. Problem is….I’m that someone. Nothin’s ever easy for a Black Badge.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is books we loved that became movies or TV series.

(1) A Series of Unfortunate Events deserves pride of place: it’s one of my favorite movies to watch & rewatch, and it led me to devouring the entire book series in 2009 and then watching the Netflix adaptation years later.

Fun fact: my Netflix user icon is Klaus Baudelaire.

(2) Harry Potter: these books were coming out as I grew up, and the movies were still being released into my early twenties. While I didn’t get into Potterdom until 2007, it quickly became one of my favorite series/fandoms. I’m mildly interested in the series that’s currently being developed: it’s hard to think anyone can hold a candle to actors like Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith.

(3) Foundation, one of those golden-age SF stories (a collection of five stories, rather) that I frequently go back to, became an AppleTV series. I started watching it but couldn’t get into it.

(4) Roswell High (Roswell). You know, for this year’s Blast from the Past I may have to revisit this series like I did California Diaries last year. Roswell High is a SF/teen drama series about several aliens-in-disguise teenagers whose identities are partially exposed after one, Max, saves the life of a girl he loves. I loved this series in middle school and was dismayed when the covers began reflecting random teenagers from some TV show: it had been adapted! Although the WB show was not an especially faithful adaptation of the books, I grew to enjoy it on its merits as something distinct. They still did Alex dirty, though. The same is not true of the more recent Roswell, New Mexico show: I saw one episode of it and decided, “That’s enough of that”.

(5) Joe Pickett. Ooh, I haven’t done a reads-to-reels post for this, I now realize. The Amazon series Joe Pickett adapts several of CJ Box’s Saddlestring game warden stories to the silver screen, and does it in a creative way that accommodates the fact that every single Box book advances the timeline by one year. Plotlines from multiple books are woven in together in way that I thought worked quite well. Casting was…interesting. The sheriff and McClanahan were well chosen, especially McClanahan: his actor plays the swaggering bumpkin to perfection. My high school experience was littered with Skoal-chewing good ol’ boys like him. The biggest casting and characterization error for me was “Nate”: despite being consistently described as a cold Pole with a long blonde ponytail, they basically cast someone for Geronimo (one of Nate’s allies from later in the series) and called him Nate. He doesn’t read like the character at all, especially when he uses Mary-Beth in a hostage crisis to get away from the cops.

(6) The Brave Cowboy. This was turned into a movie called Lonely Are the Brave, and it’s arguably better than the book in some minor ways. This is a story about conscience and the state — and the plight of individuals against armed modernity.

(7) The Martian, Andy Weir. This curious mix of science fiction, survivalism, and absurd humor was one of my favorite books in its release yet, and I enjoyed the movie perfectly.

(8) Saxon Stories / The Last Kingdom. Bernard Cornwell’s Uhtred books have provided some of my favorite reading over the years, bringing Cornwell’s distinctive humor and gift for narration to plots brimming with medieval detail and politics. The series — which I only bothered with the first season of — was distinctly underwhelming in comparison, lacking that strong narrative voice. It probably didn’t help that I’d seen the History Channel’s Vikings before, and before Ragnar died, that show was awesome.

(9) Ready Player One. No movie could ever do justice to RPO, which — if you’re an eighties baby or kid — was a fantastic tribute to the era’s pop culture and tech. I enjoyed the movie well enough, though, especially the Shining allusions.

(10) The Circle. The Dave Eggers book was brilliant satire of our social media age. The movie was…well, it has Emma Watson doing an American accent, so that was fun. The movie’s ending completely missed the point of the book, though.

I forgot Tom Hanks was in this, but his casting was genius. I mean, if you want to have an evil company that disguises itself as virtuous normalcy, Tom Hanks is your best bet.
Posted in General | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Fenway 1912

Posted on May 13, 2025 by smellincoffee

Fenway Park in Boston is the oldest continually operating major-league ballpark in the United States, and has developed into a character or an attraction in its own right for that reason.  Fenway has not lasted as long as it has by being change-resistant,  Glenn Stouts offers: instead, it has continually altered itself so much so that  save for the outside ticket-office facade, the Fenway of 1912 would be unrecognizable to  current-day fans.   Fenway 1912   is a history of the ballpark’s creation, its hurried opening for the 1912 baseball season, and of that year Red Sox team’s storied World Series bid.  

The season was marked by two exciting events: the rise of Smokey Joe Wood, who  became a record-setting pitcher and was regarded as the best in baseball after his pitching duel with Walter Johnson; and of course, the World Series run, which was split between Fenway and the New York Giants’ Polo Grounds.  Both events forced park changes:   the pitching duel attracted so many spectators that they filled the seats, the grass, and then began spilling into the field itself, even encroaching upon the field of play before policemen intervened. (They took over the dugouts, leaving the players to sit on the field like schoolboys waiting for their turn at bat!)   It is thought that some 40,000 people were present at that game, something remarkable when the reader realizes that modern Fenway can accommodate that number, but only after a century of finding ways to add more seats – like seating people on top of the Green Monster, the legendary left-field wall.  More wooden bleaches were added for subsequent games and the World Series, but even so the ballpark was so jammed that the Red Sox’  unofficial fanclub, the Royal Rooters, were  denied places to sit after arriving late – despite having tickets- –   and nearly created a brawl.(Not surprisingly, the Red Sox’ other World Series games in the 1910s often happened at the larger  Braves Field.)  The world series itself was exciting, marked by a game declared a tie – it became too dark to see – and several shifts in momentum between the Red Sox and Giants as it wore on.  The alterations changed  the overall shape of the field, creating more quirks and substantially altering several plays. 

Stout ends the book with a brief history of Fenway since, and points out that Fenway did not become The Fenway,  a park with significant sentimental power over its Fenway faithful, until the 1970s or so. This was around the same time that the left field wall became known as  the Green Monster. Perhaps the destruction of places like Ebbetts Field and the Polo Grounds in the 1960s prompted more attention on Fenway’s historic status?   Whatever the reason, Fenway survives — even though its seats are the most expensive in the MLB.

Although it has become a cliché to make the claim that Fenway Park is still recognizable today as the same park that opened in 1912, that is true only in the most limited sense. If a contemporary Red Sox fan were somehow sent back in time and deposited in Fenway Park on April 9, 1912, it is unlikely that any but the most knowledgeable rooter would recognize it at all. For while Fenway Park still occupies the same basic footprint today as it did in 1912, virtually every other notable structure and feature of the ballpark has been removed, recast, renovated, or otherwise changed.

Fenway has survived not because it has been preserved in the original, but because it has not been preserved, because until quite recently it was never treated as special enough to preserve, and because the ball club has rarely hesitated to make practical changes to extend its useful life.

At the reception at the bride’s home the guests were entertained by the Red Sox Quartet, a barbershop singing group made up of Buck O’Brien, first baseman Hugh Bradley, and pitchers Marty McHale and minor leaguer Bill Lyons, who were filling in for occasional tenor Larry Gardner, already back home to Vermont. Later that fall the quartet played the New England vaudeville circuit, including B. F. Keith’s theater in Boston, where a receptive reviewer noted that “if they wish to foreswear baseball as a livelihood there is a rosy career awaiting them as singers.”

As Wood toed the rubber Cobb danced off first, feinting toward second again and again. A flustered Wood threw to first base over and over, a little harder each time, getting more distracted and angrier by the second. When Cobb finally took off Wood was so disconcerted that he never even threw the ball but watched helplessly as Cobb took second unimpeded.

Just before the ticket office opened at 9:00 a.m., the line stretched some twenty blocks—nearly two miles—down Eighth Avenue to 155th Street, then down Broadway to 145th, then on Edgecombe to 138th Street.

Nearly three hundred baseball writers were ensconced at the Hotel Imperial. Over the past twenty-four hours they had discovered that in order to get an interview, as the New York Tribune reported, “some of the long green has to be flashed.” The going rate was $2 a word. Even Christy Mathewson refused to part his lips unless paid to do so. It was cheaper for the writers to make the quotes up, and many did.

When the gates opened shortly after noon the crowd spilled into the Polo Grounds in a flood. News that war had broken out in the Balkans drew only disinterested shrugs—fans were far more concerned about the impending war between the Red Sox and Giants than a conflict halfway around the world.

Boston’s best hope for vanquishing the Giants and winning the World’s Series came down to only one man, Joe Wood. If Wood could pitch in October the way he had pitched from April through September, it did not matter at all who the Giants pitched opposite him, or even who Wood faced. Wood, at his best, was the best. It was that simple.

As the players hurriedly dressed and rushed to South Station to catch the Gilt Edge Express to New York, the two clubs, both exhausted but one also exhilarated and the other exasperated, were spent. They had just played three games in which every pitch in every inning had mattered and in which the fortunes of both teams had swung back and forth so many times that fans had nearly gotten whiplash just from watching.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment