Love Mira Noir, also, and I’m sure she knows all about India, but was that a turquoise macaw that they were showing as a “bird of India?” I wasn’t aware turquoise macaws were native to India…. ?

I always learn something reading Rex Stout, as I did reading Red Threads. If you do not know the history of bayeta yarn, you will before you finish this book. Not only are his books entertaining, they are well researched.

OK, I know I read this before – oh, like donkey’s years ago, but I do NOT remember it. Perhaps that is one of the benefits of getting older – the memories go and then all sorts of books can be new and refreshing, right?

For anyone planning to plow into the 600+ pages of this book – an encouragement and a warning (or this might be two encouragements or two warnings for anyone not afraid to take on 600+ pages – who knows?): 1) They say Prime Minister Disraeli got so caught up in reading this book that he cancelled a theater engagement he had been looking forward to because he just couldn’t put it down, so it is definitely worth getting through the 600 pages! 2) Don’t start this if you have to go to work or have a theater engagement or anything that will require you to put it down because you seriously will not want to. One hundred fifty years after publication, it is just as fresh as the day it was written. And another warning—don’t read this if you have any kind of medical condition that makes you susceptible to tension and stress because it just might do you in.

And now I have to tear myself away from this and from this book to get back to the impudence of work interrupting my day.

I can’t decide about this. Some parts of it are good and some parts are just mediocre. I can’t decide if the author is going for comedie noir or just plain noir and I think he should definitely have made up his mind before committing himself to paper. Or perhaps he was going for the former and ended up at the later because he’s not quite a good enough writer. And – OK, I’ll admit I am a snob – but I did have a negative impression from the get-go when the writer had the homicide detective refer to the murder victim as the “corpus delecti,” which any experienced homicide detective would know does NOT refer to the dead body itself but to the “body of the crime” – the whole of the evidence that establishes that a crime has been committed. A corpse may be part of the corpus delecti, but is not the corpus delecti itself unless a detective is just really, really lousy at his job. And – OK, further evidence I am a word snob – I also was put off by his including a network news reporter who had questions about “mutilizations.” Seriously – did nobody proofread the guy?

I give it a hardy—wa wa.

This little CD is entirely fun.

The thing that really confuses me about this book is that Eli Glinn seems to sink to the bottom of the ocean with the meteorite, right? Yet he shows up in another book to get Agent Pendergast out of prison. He’s in a wheelchair and they never explain how he goes from walking in the Ice Limit to being wheelchair-bound in the later books, unless we are supposed to infer that being dragged to the bottom of the ocean by a 250-thousand-pound meteorite did it. But I would think that would make you more dead than crippled, especially in the icy water near Antarctica.

Couldn’t finish listening to it. Not up to k.d. lang’s usually scintillating and excellent standards.

When I first heard about this album, I thought, “Why would Paul Simon want to do an album about Elvis Presley’s house?” A friend informed me the album was about Africa, not Elvis Presley’s house.

I don’t think my friend heard this album. The whole album isn’t about Graceland, but the song that gives its title to the album is definitely about Graceland. Shows how you can’t rely on friends—at least when it comes to music interpretation.

This is a nice little sampler—when you are ready for a Mozart snack, but not necessarily a whole banquet.

I can see why this made it onto the list of Q Magazine’s 50 Worst Albums Ever. Sheesh. What a pretentious piece of crap.