
Life
William's life. And something of those around.
Friday, 13 June 2025
Book review: Macroscope

Monday, 9 June 2025
Book review: Living With Awareness

Notes
Tidying the shed

Fixing the Primavera box

Saturday, 7 June 2025
Book review: Sad Cypress

If you want the plot, Wiki will tell you, so I won't.
I was all in favour of it-were-Roddy-wot-dun-it; he fits the young-man stereotype, though not obviously the pushy cocky type. His enthusiasm for Mary could easily be faked; with Elinor out of the way the dosh would be his. Instead, and nicely I think because it is good to have minor characters pulled up, it was the nurse wot dun it.
Nit-picks, and so on. I think we could have done with less of Elinor woozing around in a daze half wondering if she really had done it. We know she hasn't, because it would be terribly tedious if she had. Peter Lord's car appears unexplained, unless I skimmed to much at the end; presumably he visited, and presumably he dropped the German matchbox; it was kind of him to provide red herrings for Aunt Agatha. But unless Hercule immeadiately recognised these as red herrings, and I saw no sign of that, he would inevitably have asked the good doctor to account for his time that afternoon, and this he did not do; Ag doesn't make him do this, of course, because she knows it is a red herring; and I suppose I should have taken the hint. Poirot knows that Roddy has been back to England earlier than he said because he burgled his house; but it would be natural to consult the immigration records or whatever to confirm that. The torn-off fragment of (m)orphine label is anomalous. Hercule never considers whether it was accidentally left, or deliberately done as a plant to make the poisonning clear. But it has to be an accident, since it is "the wrong label" (my previous motto of "whenever something is torn off there's always a clue there" is true in this case), in which case it is an unexplained accident. As to the poisoning: we're back at the usual trope of "oh she was killed with poison" ignoring niceties of dose and so on. Had Elinor done it, it would have been natural to ask how she knew what a fatal dose was, but no-one does. As it happens "Hopkins" is medical, so does know. "Hopkins" survives because of the emetic, and this brings in the thornless roses, and so it is all terribly cute, but also rather convoluted; more naturally she would just have put the powder in Mary's cup and poured tea for her, which would have worked just as well.
The biggie, though, is the idea of Mary inheriting, then dying, and passing her property onto her aunt. As someone else pointed out elsewhere, as an illegitimate child this would have been difficult; presumably even harder as aunt-of-child; and anyway the evidence that she was Mrs W's child is slender. Not only that, but "Nurse Hopkins", it emerges at the end, has hopped it from the New World with plod hot on her tail, so how is she proposing to turn up to make the claim? This just doesn't seem well thought through. Incidentally, the letter-to-Mary, which we are told to read as though to the child, is clearly written as though to a third party; I saw that but didn't think it through clearly, I merely though: "oh, our Ag has carelessly written it as though to a third party", but I should have known she isn't careless in that way. Oh, and also, as I read the situation at the end of the book: that plot has come to pass. Mary should have inherited. But no-one mentions this, not even Poirot saying quietly "well we'll just forget that shall we?".
Wednesday, 4 June 2025
New Laptop
It is a Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro 360, Intel Core Ultra 7 Processor, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 16" 3K Touch Screen, 1.66 kg, H12.80 x W355.40 x D252.20mm, Super AMOLED, 2880 x 1800. There are a confusing variety of options; I'm not at all sure I needed the "360" bit, which means it folds back like a tablet, but after looking around I concluded this was about the best I could get without spending ages possibly saving a few hundred pounds. This is from John Lewis: I wandered around there - it was where M got whatevre she has - and it was their only product that at all caught my eye. The screen is lovely and survives well against a bright background. And is also touchscreen, though I don't find myself using that much.
Here's the proof that it has no missing pixels yet. It has a combined power-and-fingerprint-sensor that appears to work. Here's it updating the BIOS to P14RHB.
Tuesday, 3 June 2025
Book review: Reflections on a Marine Venus
