Book Review: Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II
Elyse Graham
Ecco Books
Copyright 2024 by the author

You could, if you want, blame Secretary of State Henry Stimson. In 1929, he’s alleged to have stuck his nose in the air and said “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail”, and then shut down most of the United States’ foreign intelligence apparatus. So we were caught flat-footed when the Japanese attacked twelve years later.

Now it was up to William Donovan, the newly appointed head of the OSS, to put together his agency from scratch. The “Research and Development” side would be easy – just get a bunch of technical people to design and build all the secret devices of spycraft. But for the “Research and Analysis” department, which would collect and study the mountains of data needed by the US Military, you needed people with highly specialized training.

So that’s why a Yale English professor found himself at a “secure location”, learning how to silently kill someone with a knife, and how to deal with being interrogated by the enemy. Oh, by the way, you’d only need to hold up under capture and interrogation for 48 hours. Not because by that time they’d be done with you, or that you could expect to be rescued by then, but because that’s how long it should take for your contacts to forget they ever knew you and “vanish”….

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Pond in a Jar – 9 1/2

Finally got around to taking a photo (as promised in the last update, which is why this isn’t getting a whole number). It’s at the original size, by the way – no resizing, trimming, or color adjustments.

You can see the worm thing just above the shadow of the cable on the lower left. And the brownish spot a little left of center is one of the teeny snails. There’s new(ish) growth on the right, and plenty more at the top (most of which is just out of the image). You can also see a lot of leaves and stems turning brown and decaying, returning nutrients back to the muck.

One thing about the worm – I swear it pops up in slightly different places every now and then. I’d try and track it if I cared enough. By the way, I’ve had no luck identifying it. The only search results I get for “freshwater worms” (or similar terms) are parasites for fish – with more than enough icky photos…. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, let me know….

Photo after the jump:

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A “Town Ball” All Star Game – 3

And here’s where it all went kablooey.

I ran through the simulation, and things were going nicely. However, I completely forgot that if the home team is still leading after the visitors have had their six innings, there’s no reason at all to play the bottom of the inning (other than satisfying the gamblers), and so you won’t get to see some of the All Stars take their chances against the other league’s best pitcher.

I suppose that one could play the bottom half of the inning anyway, and then give the visitors one last crack at it. Send the home team’s best closer out to the mound, and then the visitors can send up whoever they want, in whatever order they want, to score as many runs as they can given the standard three outs. Should they actually take the lead, then the home team gets to do the same thing in the bottom of the “extra inning”. Continue as needed.

Or perhaps the format could be that the Visitors bat until they score a run (with commercial breaks and pitching changes after every five batters), then the Home Team comes to bat and hits until they take the lead (same thing about breaks every five batters), then the Visitors get to bat, etc. – but that sounds too much like a weekend softball league game.

At this point, I’ve put WAY more effort into the thing than was called for. If you want to play with the idea and run some simulated games, go right ahead.

And if you really want me to post the record of the game, just ask….

A “Town Ball” All Star Game – 2

Yeah, yeah, I get it – you want more than seven or eight All Star pitchers. But let’s be honest – most pitchers are just average, and no one (other than their specific fans or stat nerds) really wants to see a “set up man” in an All Star Game. I’d wager most casual fans can’t even name one. So the pitchers will be the top five or six starters, with a couple of closers of note.

As far as the players that will actually be out there on defense, we’ll leave that to fan voting. We’ll keep the rule that each team must have at least one representative. Maybe we’ll leave that up to the actual players on the team, or some sort of local poll. Or just the player with the highest WAR; it’s no big deal. The rest of the batting side of the roster can be filled out by the team’s manager, choosing from runners-up in the fan voting – with a decided bias to the big name stars. At least we won’t have to worry about having too many players at the same position – the starters voted in by the fans will be expected to be out there for all six innings.

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A “Town Ball” All Star Game – 1

This past summer I was among those musing about alternative formats to the standard All Star Game in Major League Baseball. Noting that the superstar players always tend to be taken out after an inning or three – which meant that when the game was on the line in the later innings, you had second or even third tier players coming up in the most dramatic moments. I posited a sort of “town ball” format to be used in the later innings. This would give an incentive to keeping players in longer, if you actually wanted to win the game.

Thinking on it some more, I wondered what it might be like if you just went with the town ball format for the entire game.

There would be some major changes to the format…..

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Book Review: Every Living Thing

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
Jason Roberts
Random House
Copyright 2024 by the author

The Scientific Revolution kept rolling on. The Copernican Revolution changed how we look at the universe. Isaac Newton crystallized several lines of inquiry into modern physics. Now it was time to tackle the life sciences.

Two geniuses would set things in motion by taking on the huge task of organizing and classifying living things. In Sweden, Carl Linnaeus was set on becoming a doctor, but he found the field of botany more fascinating. In France, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the self-styled Comte de Buffon, used a lucky inheritance to indulge his passion for “natural history”. A brief work in statistics (“Buffon’s Needle”) got him noticed, and soon he was picked to be the “superintendent” of the Royal Garden* in Paris, where he was given the task of cataloging the massive collections.

Roberts treats these two contemporaries with a dual biography, showing how they approached the matter of the abundance and variety of life from two different directions.

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Pond in a Jar – 9

I have to admit it’s really ugly, and I want to dump it and start anew. I even have a jar / bottle being prepared as a replacement. That little plant that sprouted back in the fall of 2023 is pretty much out of control – it’s grown up and out above the water surface. There are stems and dangling rootlets all over the place, Unfortunately, quite a few leaves are turning brown. Yuck. At least most of the green fuzzy stuff is gone.

It’s not something you really want on your desk or windowsill.

But then the light hits it just right, and you see that the darned thing still has plenty of life in it.

There are dozens of teeny swimming things. The big snail seems to have gotten bigger, and there are even a few tiny snails creeping around. And most interestingly, there’s a tiny worm in the muck at the bottom. About a half inch long and a pale green in color, it is most definitely a worm. It waves back and forth independently of any movement of the Jar, and can hide back in the muck when I tap the glass. I’d never have noticed it if it wasn’t right next to the side.

Looks like I’ve got a nice little ecosystem going in there. Hopefully it will look better in the spring.

No photos this time; my phone’s camera isn’t good enough to take decent close ups of the interesting stuff. Maybe in the next update.

Sorry Everybody

Way back in ancient history (20 years ago), George W. Bush was able to win re-election as president. College student James Zetlen was a bit stunned and surprised by this; like many others he could see that Bush was a political naif who was being controlled by Darth Cheney and Emperor Rove. He decided he needed to apologize to the rest of the world. He created a website – SorryEverybody.com – where he posted a photo of himself w/ apology sign, and encouraged people to send in their own photos and apologies. He was overwhelmed with responses and submissions, and got some international press coverage.

Just a few of the hundreds….

It was a cathartic way for people to share their feelings and anxieties about the next four years.

Now that we have an exponentially worse president moving back into the “People’s House”, I’m not seeing anything similar. Not even any talk of performative protests like the “pink pussycat hat” demonstrations of eight years ago.

I suspect I know why.

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Welcome to 2025

In the past, I’ve used the first post of the year to go over the stats from the previous year. But after eleven full years of doing this, things haven’t really changed. I post about the same number of essays, get no significant increase in the number of visits or views, and the same old posts top the “Most Visited” list. And I always make a comment that I’m surprised that I’ve been able to post fairly regularly, and that I’m still going with this thing.

This year, I feel like doing something a bit different.

In the next few months, expect to see a usual post on the Baseball Hall of Fame results, and another “fantasy” game where I play with the Deadball rules. I’ve got five book and one movie reviews lined up, and I’ll probably do another post or two on my Pond in a Jar.

With luck, that will carry me through to the point where I can blather on about a vacation.

But – I’m also starting to feel that this is more of a chore than anything. Look, eleven years and well over 500 posts is a pretty good run for a silly little personal blog that I do for free. Maybe if it brought in some money I’d be more “inspired” to keep it going. If I do decide to pack it in, I will let you know. And I’ll keep the site up for another year at least – those 80 book reviews and 70 movie reviews are still good, right?

By the way, if you care, 2024 saw 57 posts, over 4000 visitors, and over 5000 page views….