Dumb witness

I may have mentioned, this year I’ve been finishing the dozen Agatha Christie novels I hadn’t previously read from beginning to end.

The current one is Dumb Witness (1937), a.k.a. Poirot Loses a Client. The hero – apart from Poirot – is a little Scottish terrier named Bob. (Hastings narrates.)

“I don’t know why dogs always go for postmen, I’m sure,” continued our guide.

“It’s a matter of reasoning,” said Poirot. “The dog, he argues from reason. He is intelligent; he makes his deductions according to his point of view. There are people who may enter a house and there are people who may not – that a dog soon learns. Eh bien, who is the person who most persistently tries to gain admission, rattling on the door twice or three times a day – and who is never by any chance admitted? The postman. Clearly, then, an undesirable guest from the point of view of the master of the house. He is always sent about his business, but he persistently returns and tries again. Then a dog’s duty is clear, to aid in driving this undesirable man away, and to bite him if possible. A most reasonable proceeding.”

He beamed on Bob.

“A most intelligent person, I fancy.”

Sometimes, I want to hug Poirot.

A Veterans Day pup

Monday’s and Tuesday’s schooling began two hours late, due to snow. Karin delayed her Monday work to sit with Samuel in her heated car while he waited for the bus. Good thing, because otherwise I’d’ve stood by the curb with Samuel and Daniel and Abel, thirty minutes longer than usual, not knowing whether the bus would come at all. (The bus-tracking app was out of order.)

(Time was, people’d wait for buses in the cold, not having apps to reassure them. Ours is a softer time.)

Tuesday – yesterday – was Veterans Day, so Karin didn’t go to work. She put Samuel on the bus again. When he came home, he was carrying a drawing he’d made of a “Veterans Day pup”:

Daniel and Abel played in the snow. Mormon missionaries stood by our yard and invited our family to church. They were so winsome, I hated to say no. I should’ve invited them to church.

They knocked on doors on our street, then drove away in a Texas-plated ute (my preferred term for that car) (pun not intended).

Reading report

Our first snowfall. Mary is polling the eight siblings and spouses – five of whom work for the schools – as to whether tomorrow’s school hours will be (a) normal, (b) truncated, or (c) canceled. My money is on (a). Not that money has been pooled. The prize is bragging rights.

UPDATE: It’s (b). I won’t have to go out early to put Samuel on the bus.

(I’ll have to drag Samuel and the other children down the snowy block two hours later, since Karin will’ve gone to work and I can’t leave Daniel and Abel at home.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My reading year is half over and I’ve completed just one-third of the intended total. I’ll have to devote the rest of the year to kiddie novels.

Eve Titus’s Basil of Baker Street, a.k.a. The Great Mouse Detective, will be my second “mouse” book of the year.

Later, I may attempt the “Watership Down” series, which is about rabbits.

(It’s time someone wrote a capybara epic. Or does one already exist?)

I also have begun reading the eight-novel “Adrian Mole” series: hugely popular in Britain, neglected in the USA, unknown to me until some months ago. The first book is very proto-Dog-in-Night-Time (there’s even a hapless cur). Except, the narrator isn’t neurodifferent, he’s just an ordinary, awful thirteen-year-old boy. He’s not literally a mole or any sort of vermin. The book also has things in common with Mike Leigh’s movies, and (I suppose) with What Maisie Knew.

I also must read two Agatha Christies/​Mary Westmacotts per month; and I’m chipping away at my second Ed McBain police procedural, Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (a title which, surprisingly enough, is meant to be taken literally).

As for the group’s reading, six weeks have been allocated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and associated texts. I also continue to read Austen and Trollope. In short, everything I’m reading, except the rather acid Mansfield Park, has broad, crowdpleasing, page-turning appeal; all the fiction, anyway.

Birthday bots

From the New York Times:

“Seattle Reign’s Laura Harvey Says ChatGPT Inspired NWSL [National Women’s Soccer League] Tactics: ‘It Said Play a Back Five, So I Did’”

Arise, analog sportsmen! Defeat your tablet-toting foes! Remember Clint Eastwood! (You know, from Trouble with the Curve.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

From the Division of Alumni Affairs and Development (at Cornell):

Make a birthday wish, John-Paul! The Clocktower would chime just for you if it could! On your special day, we’re sending you heartfelt wishes from the Hill. Here’s to another amazing year ahead!

*Update your info*

*Stay connected*

I got this more circumspect greeting, too:

We would like to wish you a Happy Birthday from the employees at the South Bend Clinic Pharmacy.

Sadly, I received no messages from fast food restaurants urging me to claim birthday rewards. (Those, I appreciate.)

What the bots didn’t know was that I’d been waiting for this birthday all my life. When I was very young, my favorite number was four. I liked forty-four even better. (Liking something better than one’s favorite thing is a heady concept, like infinity plus one.) I wanted to weigh forty-four pounds; and when I did, I stayed at that weight as long as I could. I couldn’t wait to turn forty-four years old.

Well, yesterday, I did. My dream has come true.

Body-text fonts, pt. 45: New Caledonia

In this month’s font’s sample, Robert Graves discusses memoir-writing:

It’s the line about people reading about food and drink that gets me. I’ve noticed, perusing Madame’s excellent blog, that my pulse quickens at the gastronomic bits.

C. S. Lewis:

There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips.

As a teenager, I used to find this passage in Mere Christianity very funny; twenty-five years later, looking at pictures of food is precisely what half the world does.

(Madame, understand, I’m not criticizing your food photos. There’s obscenity, and there’s art. Your photos are on the respectable half of the divide.)

Madame has a second blog – a Substack where she posts excerpts of her memoirs. A word of advice, Madame. Put in all you can about food and drink, and murders, and ghosts or spirits, and the Prince of Wales (not unmanageable for a Canadian) … and tidbits about your children, whom I knew in high school. (I liked the detail about giving birth one room over from the woman who kept screaming, Que me haga cesaria.) My parents dredged up an old chestnut about me just last night. My mom led a Bible study at a church in Esmeraldas. She entrusted me to some youths who lost track of me. Neighbors found me outside the church. Most of my body had been buried in a mudslide. (This was during the Niño of 1982.) I’d heard this story before, except for the detail about my having been submerged in mud. (I thought I’d just gotten dirty.) Bear in mind, this was a Downtown Esmeraldas mudslide, so it would have contained garbage, sewage, etc. And I could have drowned. We’re always just on the other side of death; that fact is more obvious in some places than in others. Robert Graves’s tone may sound frivolous, but it’s a sweetener; his subject is the First World War.