Title: Somebody Else

Author: Reggie Nadelson

Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Faber and Faber

Copyright: 2003

ISBN: 0571217524

Pages: 274

Keywords: mystery

Reading period: 16–28 August, 2008

Betsy Thornhill had a face lift. It worked so well that she now passes for her mid-thirties, instead of 51. After decades in London, she moves back to Manhattan a few months after 9/11. Within days, a man who came on to her is dead, and she's the main suspect.

I didn't like this book or Betsy. I couldn't believe that all the male characters would throw themselves at her—she looks great, but her personality and confidence are lacking. Implausibly, Betsy fails to think about her estranged daughter, Franny, for 160 pages, despite the strain of being a murder suspect and despite the importance of Franny for the rest of the book.

Don't bother.

In Damn Right We're Angry, Paul Waldman lets loose with a long list of why progressives are justifiably angry with what's happened to the US over the last few years:

We’re angry because of what has happened to our country, because of how we’ve been treated, and because of the innumerable crimes the conservatives have committed. We’re angry at the president, we’re angry at the Congress, we’re angry at the news media. And we have every right to be.

Yes, we’re angry at George W. Bush. We’re not angry at him because of who he sleeps with, and we’re not angry at him because we think he represents some socio-cultural movement we didn’t like 40 years ago, or because he hung out with a different crowd than we did in high school. We’re angry at him because of what he’s done.

... 

Yes, we’re angry about Iraq, and we may be for the rest of our lives. ...

We’re angry that when we talk about ending this monstrous war, the soulless hypocrites who are glad to send more and more men and women to be scarred and maimed and killed in Iraq have the gall to accuse us of not “supporting the troops.” We’re angry that people whose actions exhibit nothing but contempt for freedom and liberty and justice, who wouldn’t know real patriotism if it came up and smacked them across the face, pin a little flag on their lapel and say that we’re the ones who hate America.

... 

We’re angry that America may now be the only country in the world in which torture is an officially sanctioned policy, proclaimed proudly in public. ...

And we’re angry that Bush has made our nation so hated around the world. We’re angry that the next time a Democrat gets elected, most of their time will be spent cleaning up the god-awful mess Bush has made of everything.

We’re angry that we and our children and our grandchildren will have to keep paying off the nation’s debt, which now stands at nearly $9 trillion. We’re angry because every other industrialized country in the world has a single-payer health care system that works, and we pay more for ours than any of them, yet we have 45 million people with no health insurance. We’re angry that the insurance companies have convinced their obedient servants in Congress that the Rube Goldberg perpetual paperwork machine we have now is somehow “the best health care in the world” and preferable to a system in which you go to your doctor, get treated and go home, without having to fill out 10 forms and get down on your knees before the gods of the HMO bureaucracy to get a partial repayment minus your deductible and your co-pay.

We’re angry that the federal government is brimming with people fundamentally opposed to the mission of the agencies over which they preside, the anti-environmentalists who run the Interior department, the mining company lobbyists in charge of mine safety and the union-busters in charge of worker safety.

Read it for yourself.

In the past few weeks, I've received not one but two letters from Christine Gregoire, the governor of Washington State, looking for support in re-electing her. The thing is, is that she's running in 2008, not 2006.

I threw away the first one. On the second one, I wrote something like this and mailed it back:

If this had come in December, I have been willing to support you. But not six weeks from a high-stakes election. What the hell are you thinking? Don't bother me again before 2008.

Sheer idiocy. Why would anyone send her money at the moment, instead of making donations towards the mid-term elections?

I got an email earlier today from one of my relatives who has ties to South Africa, which read:

Last week a 3 year old girl (in South Africa ) was beaten and raped. She is still alive. The man responsible was released on bail yesterday. He is walking the streets. If you are too busy to read this then just sign your name and forward this on. The Government is planning to close the child protection unit and this is a petition against it. This is a very important petition. It is an essential part of the justice system for children. You may have already heard that there's a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. The younger the virgin, the more potent the cure. This has led to an epidemic of rapes by infected males, with the correspondent infection of innocent kids. Many have died in these cruel rapes. Recently in Cape Town, a 9-month-old baby was raped by 6 men. Please think about that for a moment. The child abuse situation is now reaching catastrophic proportions and if we don't do something, then who will?

Kindly add your name to the bottom of the list and please pass this on to as many people as you know. If you are signature no.: 120 please forward the mail-list to childprotectpca@saps.org.za

Please don't be complacent, do something about the kids of South Africa. You can make a difference. That child is fighting for life. This is just 1of the million cases of child abuse, so please pledge your support and help keep CPU (CHILD PROTECTION UNIT) open. Please give your support to the petition and ensure that it goes to as many people as possible. Please don't just leave it, make a difference. In order to write your name copy this messege and paste it in a new mail (compose). Or click on forward and add your name to the list and send it on to others.

Again, if you are number 120 please send this to childprotectpca@saps.org.za

[Lots of forwards stripped, as well as 97 signatures from South Africa, India, Nepal, the UK, and Australia.]

My immediate reaction was that this has to be a hoax. It has all the hallmarks:

• Alarmist subject matter

• Unsubstantiated assertions (but see note below)

• Pass this letter on to everyone you know

• No dates, no end dates

• No provenance

Admittedly, many well-meaning but incompetently written petitions share the same problems.

Here's what I wrote back to everyone whose email address I could mine out of what I had been sent:

Stop! It's a hoax. Do NOT uncritically believe everything you get in email.

First thing you should do when you get a chain letter urging you to send email to everyone you know, is to Google around to see if it's horseshit. Nine times out of ten it will be.

The first link that shows up when you google for "childprotectpca chain letter" is this:

http://www.joewein.net/hoax/hoax-saps-child-protection-unit.htm

Which led me to the South African Police Service:

http://www.saps.gov.za/_dynamicModules/internetSite/faqBuild.asp?myURL=242

Snopes.com is the go-to site for all Internet hoaxes. Here's what they have to say about this one:

http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/petition/babyrape.htm

If you read any of these links, read this one. Then look around the Snopes website and get a feel for some of the crap that's out there.

Now, please go and forward THIS email to everyone you forwarded the previous email to, and also send this email to everyone who sent you the chain letter in the first place. Stamp it out before it spreads any further.

(Note: Snopes indicates that some of the rape stories mentioned in this letter are true. A nine-month-old girl really was raped, though it turns out that it wasn't the six men who were initially arrested, but the ex-boyfriend of the mother.)

I later followed up with the somewhat softer:

Let me just add this.

Hoax chain letters are a bad thing because some twit thinks it's fun to cause trouble and spread lies. This one has been circulating for four years. I'm sure it will still be turning up in four years' time.

About their only redeeming feature is that they get good-natured, if naive, people such as yourselves to do a little something in an attempt to make the world a better place. If these hoax letters actually achieved something constructive, I wouldn't mind nearly so much.

I've shot down a few chain letters before. Every single time, Snopes has already written up an extensive page about it.

Christy at FireDogLake has written a post about this year's hurricane season, which officially started on June 1st.

New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf is still a disaster area: watch the video linked to above. Disaster preparedness is far from where it should be. The levee improvements are inadequate. Reconstruction is mired in bureaucracy and stalled in incompetence. The money promised has not materialized. Only one-third of New Orleans residents have returned.

Christy links to a report put together by Nancy Pelosi, detailing the incompetence and cronyism of the Republicans, both in the immediate response and in the long-term followup.

• Up to $1 billion dollars in waste and fraud for housing contractors and payments made by the government, mainly to contractors from outside the Gulf Region.

• The SBA has rejected more than 60% of small business loan applications in the wake of Katrina. Of those that have been approved, only 4% of funds have been disbursed to small business owners at this point. (Oh yeah, I got yer business friendly environment here. What was that Republican talking point that small business is the backbone of American jobs and communities?)

• Less than 2% of all Federal aid that has gone to the Gulf Coast has been used for education expenditures.

• The Rubber Stamp Republican Congress still refuses to ease Medicare restrictions for children in the Gulf Coast region, despite the fact that there is a substantial health care crisis for children in the region, stemming from infections and other issues arising from prolonged exposure to pathogens from flood waters, stress, and other factors. (1/3 of all children living in FEMA trailer parks have been found to have a chronic illness.)

• 40,000 families are still waiting for some sort of housing assistance, meanwhile there are 10,000 FEMA trailers still parked in the mud, just sitting there unused.

• Contractors with a political connection to the Bush Administration were paid up to 15 times the actual cost of jobs contracted.

I mentioned last week that my parents have no aptitude for computers.

My father emailed me with a list of computer woes; notably, he was getting messages about no firewall. There was no way I was going to get to the bottom of the issue just by email or talking to him on the phone. It's 5,000 miles from Seattle to Dublin, so I can't drop by to take a look at the computer in person--much as my parents would like to have me visit.

I had tried using the built-in Windows Remote Assistance to troubleshoot issues on their laptop a couple of years ago, while they were on a protracted stay in Cape Town. I had solved the problem, but that had been fairly painful for me. The primary problem was the horrible sluggishness of the connection: they were on a slow dialup connection and the latency is something fierce. Another problem was the fragility of my control: if I dismissed a dialog by hitting Escape, I stopped controlling the remote desktop, and as a longtime vi user, I have certain deeply ingrained reflexes that are hard to overcome.

I decided to try out Joel Spolsky's Copilot. The Copilot service builds on TightVNC. The helper and the person being helped both make outbound connections to a Copilot server, which proxies the virtual session, neatly avoiding all kinds of NAT issues that can arise when you try to make a direct connection through a firewall. It's also supposedly easy to configure, requiring only a visit to the Copilot website and typing in an email address or a 12-digit number, before downloading a half-megabyte executable. It wasn't too painful to talk my father through making the connection, though the first time that he did it, he "lost" the binary and had to download it again. We initially tried the two-minute trial version, but that wasn't nearly enough time to do anything, so I shelled out the $10 for a day pass.

In Dublin, as in Cape Town, he dials up to the Internet on a 56K modem, and that once again proved to be the primary source of pain for me. It seemed a little less sluggish than I remembered Remote Assistance being, but I wasn't about to subject myself to trying that out too. The experience varied between tolerable and infuriating, but there's only so much that can be done at a little over 3Kbps.

The second reason the experience was so painful was that I ended up needing to repair the eTrust installation, and to download a full set of antivirus signatures, and I simply couldn't do it. The eTrust FTP site kept dropping the connection, and the full signature package takes over 20 minutes to download. I blame the FTP server, as I was VPN'd in to his laptop the whole time, so his Internet connection was obviously working. I eventually gave up at 4AM PDT, in utter frustration.

Verdict. Copilot works fairly well, although it can be painful over a dialup connection. I would have killed for a file-transfer facility so that I could send files directly between his computer and mine. $10 for a day pass isn't cheap, but he gets to pay it in future! I use Terminal Server and Virtual PC regularly: both of them provide ways to press all of the Windows keys (Terminal Server, Virtual PC); Copilot doesn't.

I sometimes joke that I must be adopted because my parents have no aptitude for computers. I could make a similar joke about writing. Many of my immediate family, despite decent educations, seem to be incapable of writing a simple English sentence, much less a coherent paragraph.

One relative writes emails that are bereft of punctuation: neither a comma nor a full stop (period) is to be found. Capital letters occur, but too randomly for my liking. And everything is linked into one paragraph, no matter how long or disjointed. Yet, I've received adequately punctuated handwritten letters and postcards from him. I attribute his email slovenliness to a combination of laziness and hunt-and-peck typing. Whatever the cause, it reflects poorly on him.

John Scalzi has some Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don't Want to Work at Writing. Here's the summary:

0. Speak what you write ... If what you're writing is hard to speak, what makes you think it's going to be easy to read? It won't be. ...

1. Punctuate, damn you: For God's sake, is it really so hard to know where to put a comma? ...

2. With sentences, shorter is better than longer.

3. Learn to friggin' spell.

4. Don't use words you don't really know.

5. Grammar matters, but not as much as anal grammar Nazis think it does.

6. Front-load your point.

7. Try to write well every single time you write.

8. Read people who write well.

9. When in doubt, simplify.

10. Speak what you write.

Go read the whole thing.

I found some useful links in the comments that follow Scalzi's Tips:

• One Simple Rules: Use the Active Voice

• Commas, Commas, and More Commas, for when you've mastered the preceding rules.

And here's a few tips of my own:

• One thought per paragraph. Run-on paragraphs offend me and annoy me. If a paragraph has more than four sentences, it's probably too long.

• Pick up something that was written by a competent writer who you enjoy and analyze a page. Why did they choose to break sentences where they did? Why are the commas placed where they are? Do the paragraph breaks make sense? What about the word choice? Did it clearly and succinctly convey their ideas, their tone? (Hell, just analyze this post.)

• Think before you write. Before you dive in headlong, what is it you're trying to convey? This doesn't have to take you very long. A few seconds before a short email is enough.

• Reread what you wrote, before you send it off. Revising mistakes is so easy on a computer that you have no excuse for not bothering.

This isn't enough to turn you into a professional writer, but it will make a marked improvement in what you write.

Harold Pinter's speech on accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.'

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

I cannot look at a 16-digit credit card number and tell whether I've mistyped it or not. And neither can anyone else. I can, however, easily examine four separate four-digit numbers and spot typos.

1341329913245890 or 1341 3299 1324 5890? The choice is obvious. Yet most websites will not accept anything but the 16-digit string. It's a trivial matter to strip the spaces and normalize the credit card number, and it speaks to the incompetence of many website developers that they don't do this. The cognitive burden should be pushed onto the programmer, not the user.

On a related note, Irish people write phone numbers as a seven-digit string. I can't parse 6274986 at a glance either, but I can parse the US-style form, 627-4986.

Last Wednesday night, Emma emailed a dozen of our friends, inviting them to join us for Thanksgiving dinner. One reply arrived the next morning. Then nothing.

By Sunday evening, I had grown exasperated enough to send out a snarky followup:

The courtesy of a belated reply would be appreciated. So far, we've got exactly one RSVP.

It served its purpose. Replies cascaded in. Most, alas, said "no"; they had other plans.

Would that this were an isolated incident. Time and again, I've issued invitations that were not responded to. A simple "yes" or "no" is ideal. A "maybe" is acceptable too, especially if you follow up with a "yes" or a "no".

RSVP is not a meaningless formality. It's a vital planning aid. I need to know ahead of time whether to expect three or thirteen for a dinner party. It's rude and thoughtless to leave me hanging in limbo. If I assume that everyone who's been invited will show up, and cater accordingly, and many of them don't come, I've gone to needless expense and effort. If I guess that only half those invited will turn up, and I underestimate, then I'm embarrassed by not being able to feed my guests properly.

It's almost as big a sin for you to say "yes", then fail to show, without a word of warning.

When the stakes are low, such as a large drinks party, the lack of RSVPs is a minor matter. For a major production, it's inconsiderate at best.