More Evidence that I’m stupid

Today, I went to http://www.maps.com/games/africa.html.  There was a simple game.  There was an outline map of a section of Africa and a list of the names of the countries.  All you had to do was drag the name to the correct country.  I flunked all three sections.  My final score was 190 out of 450.

Like most people, most of my impressions about Africa stems from Tarzan movies. The author of the Tarzan books, Edgar Rice Bourroughs, never went to Africa.

If the USA is going to try rule the world, it’s going to have trouble if its people can’t find the countries in the world.

Bootlegger’s Daughter

Boolegger’s Daughter

Margaret Maron

Mysterious Press, New York

1992

264 pages

This is the first novel in a series.  Margaret Maron had already published eight whodunits when she started this series set in her childhood home of North  Carolina.

Structurally, this is a “cold case” story.  The detective, Deborah Knott, is an attorney in her home of Colleton County,  North Carolina.  She is approached by Gayle Whitehead.  Deborah had been her babysitter many years before.  Gayle’s mother had been killed when Gayle was three month’s old, and Gayle wants Deborah to look into the case.  Deborah agrees.

At the same time,  she decides to run for a county judgeship, basically because the racist nature of the county court system.

The classic detective is a loner.  Deborah Knott is definitely not.  She is the twelfth child, and only daughter of the county’s most notorious bootlegger.  She is junior partner in a small legal practice with two of her relatives.  She lives with an aunt and uncle.  Loneliness for her isn’t a danger,  it’s an accomplishment

So Deborah investigates the murder while running for office.  Each endeavor informs the other.  She gets clues at campaign events, and she picks up endorsements in the course of her investigation.  And she finds, as  “cold case” stories, that things aren’t as they seem to be, and never were.

This is a very good whodunit.  The two endeavors allow for a broad spectrum of scenes and a variety of activities.

Maron is a good writer.  Here she paints a scene of an abandoned gristmill.

“These day, Virginia creeper and honeysuckle fight it out in the dooryard with blackberry brambles and poison ivy.  Hunters and anglers may shelter beneath its rusty tin roof from unexpected thunderstorms, teenage lovers may park in the overgrown lane on warm moonlit nights, but for years the mill has sat alone out there in the woods, tenanted by the coons and foxes that den beneath its stone walls.”

That’s pretty clean and evocative for two sentences.

But.

I wish that just once, a female mystery writer would leave out the scene where the heroine does something stupid, is placed in mortal danger, and is rescued by some man.  It’s trite and not convincing.

These days,  Margaret Maron can start a new Deborah Knott novel confident that it will get on the best seller lists and at least be considered for awards.  This book is one of the reasons why.

Nightly news

I stopped paying attention to the major network’s nightly news some time during the during the Vietnam war and have watched it only sporadically ever since. I’m watching it semi – regularly these days, but I don’t really know why.

I’ve noticed something that amuses me. Most of the commercials for all three network shows are from the pharmaceutical industry and every show has at least one story on the health care industries. And many, but not all, of these stories are “feel good” stories that put the industries in a good light.

If I were a suspicious person, I would think that the health care industries are buying favorable publicity as their prices continue to rise at more than twice the rate of inflation, as they have ever since World War II.

Media Watchers

Every day, I try to check in with the two major media watching websites:Newsbusters.org and Mediamatters.org. Newsbusters is run by the Media Research Group and maintains that the informational media outlets are biased against the Right. Media Matters argues that they are biased against the Right.

Of course, both sites are cripple-shooting. There are so many newspapers, radio stations and tv stations, each producing info on a daily deadline that anyone who took the time could produce anecdotes that show that “the media” is biased against just about every person, country, state, and interest group.

I think the main difference between the two sites is who they think their audience is. Newsbusters assumes that its audience agrees with it. Therefore, it can quip about “phony global warming stories” without justifying the claim.

Media Matters assumes that its audience disagrees with it. Therefore, the bloggers do their homework, and back up every claim. This week, it looked into the claim that the Obama Inauguration cost 4 times as much as Bush’s 2005 inauguration. It pointed out the apples to oranges comparison: Bush inauguration figures don’t include security costs, while the Obama figures do include them. If you compare the private money raised for the two inaugurations, the figures are quite close. Obama spent a little more, but may have even spent less when the figure is adjusted for inflation. Of course, Newsbusters just complains how the media is under reporting the expense of the Obama inauguration.

With this difference in audience, Newsbusters is easily the more readable and entertaining of the sites. Media Matters too often reads like a collection of college term papers.

How curious that when Media Matters hits the news, it is usually characterized as smears and propaganda, and when Newsbusters hits the news, it is cited as a legitimate source.