Herewith several articles that I’ve read lately for which I’m not going to write individual posts.

• Bruce Schneier has railed for years against security theater, ostensible security measures that have little real effect, but are performed to be seen as doing something — airline security being the most wretched example. Patrick Smith wrote a good piece on airport security follies at the NYT airline blog. We should all be protesting loudly at this nonsense, but no-one does because of the fear of ending up on a no-fly list.

• Also in the NYT, Harold McGee wrote a par­tic­u­lar­ly in­ter­est­ing article on the hidden ingredient in cooking, heat.

  That’s the basic challenge: We’re often aiming a …continue.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin led an expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage, connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Canadian Arctic. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were never heard from again. Later rescuers found some notes in a cairn, indicating that the ships had been trapped for a year and a half in the ice, and the crews had finally abandoned ship, making for the south.

Dan Simmons builds a tale of horror from all the known historical facts: the frigid dangers of an …continue.

Via Hullabaloo, a de­scrip­tion of wa­ter­board­ing from someone who tried it on himself:

It took me ten minutes to recover my senses once I tried this. I was shuddering in a corner, convinced I narrowly escaped killing myself.

Here’s what happened:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vacuum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water pe­ri­od­i­cal­ly by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to …continue.

Gideon Oliver, the forensic an­thro­pol­o­gist saddled with the un­for­tu­nate nickname of the "Skeleton Detective" by the press, is on vacation in the Scilly Isles, with his wife Julie. She’s par­tic­i­pat­ing in a small biennial colloquium organized by an eccentric Russian mil­lion­aire.

Naturally, he happens upon a bone fragment, which leads him to a dis­mem­bered corpse, who turns out to be an attendee of the previous colloquium.

The main characters are likeable and, despite the somewhat gruesome de­scrip­tions of skeletons and post­mortems, it’s an enjoyable, well-plotted whodunnit.

Days before Christmas 1321, a glovemaker is murdered in the cathedral town of Exeter. Sir Baldwin and his friend, Simon Puttock, are asked to in­ves­ti­gate by the Dean of the Cathedral.

Jecks juggles a complex plot with a large cast of characters, and manages to keep them distinct and in­ter­est­ing, while describing the in­ter­sec­tion of cathedral and town life and Christmas rituals in medieval England.

DCI Jack Spratt runs the Nursery Crimes Division of the Reading, Berks police. In­ves­tiga­tive reporter Goldilocks is found dead, after last being seen at the three bears’ house. The Gin­ger­bread­man, a 7-foot psy­cho­path­ic cake, is rampaging around, randomly killing people. Punch and Judy have moved in next door: when they’re not beating each other up, they’re very good marriage coun­sel­lors. And enormous cucumbers are exploding under mysterious cir­cum­stances.

An extremely bizarre story, replete with puns, nursery rhymes, literary allusions, and shaggy dog stories.

En­ter­tain­ing, if silly.

Female sex slaves, Ukrainian oligarchs, an obsessive silver thief, white-collar criminals facing jail time, virus writers, self-de­struc­tive surgeons, and the Madrid bombers, are just some of the stories in this collection of non-fiction writing on crime and criminals, published in various magazines in 2005.

The book is bracketed by two pieces by James Ellroy. In the foreword, he argues that "true-crime writing offers a less ki­neti­cized and more sobering set of thrills [than crime fic­tion]—chiefly couched in human revelation". In the concluding essay, …continue.

Another book featuring Serge A. Storms, the almost-likable serial killer and amateur historian of Florida.

Serge, his coke-addict, stripper girlfriend, Sharon, and his stoner sidekick, Coleman, rent a house on Trig­ger­fish Lane, Tampa. Their landlord is trying to drive out the few remaining homeowners on the block, so that he can bulldoze it for condos.

It’s quite the neigh­bor­hood. a former mil­lion­aire who likes to test-drive expensive cars; the psychotic Little League coach with a pit bull; the student party house; the South American death squad guy in hiding; and Jim Davenport, a business …continue.

Lee Donne agrees to housesit for her absent-minded grand­fa­ther. Soon, someone is trying to scare her out of the house in Eugene, Oregon. Buried deep in the house, she discovers why: old photos of young men lynching a black man. One of those men is now running for President as a third-party candidate.

Lee goes on the run and takes her story to a newspaper. She decides to hide in plain sight, à la The Purloined Letter, and heads to New Orleans, posing as a newspaper pho­tog­ra­ph­er.

Fairly en­ter­tain­ing and in­tel­li­gent thriller.

Last week, we watched the TV adaptation of Hogfather, which got me to re-read the book. The book is a lot funnier. Pratchett’s written de­scrip­tions don’t translate very well to the screen.

The Hogfather is the Discworld‘s equivalent of Santa Claus: a large, jolly fat man who delivers presents to children on the longest night of the year. The Auditors, celestial bu­reau­crats who take a dim view of the messiness of human existence, decide to have the Hogfather killed. Death takes it upon himself to deliver the presents to children instead, while setting his grand­daugh­ter …continue.