Last Night's Spam

Some of the directed spam I get is so moronic, it angers me. This was sent from a @verizon.com account.

Dear The Grey Lodge Pub

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What am I doing? Facebook, Twitter, daily blog updates, monthly emails. Some idiot from Groupon asked via spamming phone call if I marketed my business. I went off on her. How effing insulting. Do I market my business? Eff you, look at our effing Website and then ask me that question. How about I call you and ask you idiotic questions? Anywho back to iZigg.

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Oh look Dylan just sent me an "Instant Personal Communication"! I wonder what he and Kelly are up to. No wait, it's just spam.

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No thanks.

Why Do So Many Paul McCartney Solo Songs Suck?

I was out somewhere last weekend and Paul McCartney's Jet came on the in background. Click below to refamiliarize yourself, if you dare.



This song quite sucks. Not the over the top WTF suck of Wonderful Christmastime, but sucky none the less. ("WTF suck" - I like that). The song even starts off sucky. "Jet, woo hoo woo woo JET!" - woo that's deep.

And then we get "And Jet, I thought the major was a lady suffragette!", which comes out as was a lady sufferaJETTT!!!! It wouldn't be so bad, but that line appears four times in the song, so just when you forget how damn annoying and insipid it is, it comes back to remind you, and then remind two more times.

The song Jet does have some good qualities, the music and background vocals are really quite good. So it's a mixed bag, which is pretty much the story of McCartney's solo work. For every great song, there is a stinker, often even in the same song. Which annoys me because being a big Beatles fan, I want to be a Paul McCartney solo fan, but I can't because so much of it sucks.

To end up on a positive note, here's a Paul McCartney solo song that is pure gold. I love the trumpets on it. I could listen to this song over and over for hours. With the exception of the somewhat forced title track, Tug of War is a McCartney album with no clunkers. The clunker being Ebony and Ivory, a song that seems good but doesn't hold up to repeated listenings, or maybe even the second listening.

Anyway to end up on a positive note, hit stop on Jet*, if you haven't already, and play Wanderlust.

A little bit of trivia, Wanderlust was the boat on which Paul recorded the album London Town, and on which there was one of Paul's many high profile marijuana busts. Captain says they'll be a bust.

Maybe this gives us a clue, could it be the reefers that make Paul write so many sucky songs? I'd argue that it could be the opposite, that maybe Paul isn't smoking enough. The Beatles, it is told, smoked pot like crazy while recording Rubber Soul, the CD (and English LP) version of which is my favorite Beatles album. Maybe Paul should write and record all future albums in Amsterdam.

* If you were like me, you stopped Jet at the second lady sufferaJET.

South Broad Street Hike

Last week or so, I was at an afternoon ballgame and was meeting Maureen in town later that night for a dinner and play. I had 90 minutes between the game and meeting my wife, I so hiked up Broad Street which would take about an hour, giving me 30 minutes to chill out in Rittenhouse Square.

Street hiking is a hobby of mine that I really enjoy. South Broad is one of Philadelphia's main streets and is the backbone of South Philly. I've been in a car on South Broad quite a few times, but haven't really walked much of it, until a week or so ago.

The best way to see anything is on foot. Click below to see some of what I saw. My various thoughts are in the captions.

Conclusion: South Broad is rather strange. It's very South Philly but has pretty much none of the landmarks that have made South Philly so legendary and cool. It's a neat walk, but most of the other number streets to the east would probably be more interesting.

The pictures, with captions, are here.

Reading the Dame Part4b: The second half of the 1950s

Reading the Dame Part4b: The second half of the 1950s

This a continuation of my series of posts about my project to read all 80 somethin

g Agatha Christie mystery books in order of publication (more or less). As usual, this is not just summaries of Christie’s work but my middle-aged musings inspired by reading (or in so

me cases re-reading) these books.

The other parts of the series:
Reading th Dame Part 1: The 1920s
Reading the Dame Part 2a: The 1930s
Reading the Dame Part 2b: The 1930s continued
Reading the Dame Part 3a: The 1940s
Reading the Dame Part3b: The second half of the 1940s
Reading the Dame Part4a: The first half of the 1950s

There are only 5 books in the segment. She has downshifted to publishing just one book a year, a frequency she will keep up until her death, which still almost 20 years way. For this segment she is between the ages of 65 and 69.

As usual my text for each book will discuss the book itself as well as other observations and memories about the book that are not necessarily related to the story.


1955 Hickory Dickory Death
As I read the first page, I felt I had read this one before. Looking at my note inside the front cover, I see I read it back in May 2005, almost exactly 6 years ago, just a few months before my 40th bir

thday. In May of 2005, Maureen and I were living on Passmore Street. I had been working at the Grey Lodge for 11 years and was still taking the el to/from a part time job two days a week. It’s interesting to think about how some things have changed and others have remained the same for me in these 6 years.

Thinking back after reading just the first two pages, I am recallin

g the story and some of the characters. I recall liking this book. It will be interesting to see how I feel after reading this one again.

This is a neat one. It takes place in a hostel for students, many of them foreign. The characters are very well drawn and the plot is very well woven. Having now read this three times, I still have a high opinion of it. Christie has gotten much nicer in her old age. Whereas in the 1920s, the characters would have mildly offensive stereotypes, here the foreign characters are pretty respectfully done.

She focuses again on young people here as she did 3 years earlier in Murder with Mirrors. The young folks here like to go on hitchhiking trips with nothing more than can be kept in a rucksack. Quite a change from her early works, where everyone traveled with heavy luggage.


1956 Dead Man's Folly
I recall reading this one while in hi

gh school and determining that a folly was a gazebo sort of structure. In this one Poirot is called down to a country estate by mystery writer Mrs. Oliver, a recurring c

haracter. With her woman’s intuition, she suspects something is wrong, and it indeed it is. Mrs. Oliver’s husband has yet to mentioned. All we know is she eats apples, writes mysteries, and changes her hair style a lot. This continues the trend of her reoccurring characters being underdeveloped.

Once again set on an English estate. This estate had been bought by a wealthy man and restored its pre-war glory more or less. The former lady of the estate has been reduced to living in the lodge by the front gate.

Young folks, international students with rucksacks again play a part. The mystery is well constructed and had me guessing right up to the end.


1957 What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!
I am almost through this one with Miss Marple. I have only the last chapter let to read and I still can’t figure it out totally. I have a good hunch as to who the murder is, but no motive for the original murder.

She returns to the English country estate again but with a 1950s high taxation twist. This time, the estate is surrounded by a city that has grown up all around it. It’s semi-dilapidated, with no butler, no house maid, just two village women who came in part time, one ancient gardener, and a spi

nster daughter to act as housekeeper.

Well developed characters and a well constructed ending that had me guessing until the end.


1958 Ordeal by Innocence
A rich woman was murdered. One of her five adopted children was convicted of the crime. He died in jail before he could be cleared of the murder even evidence finally comes out 2 years later. Everything was settled but now everyone is under suspicion again. And with the trail cold, they may all remain suspect forever. Christie remains at the top of her game on this one. . A good number of well developed characters. A plot with a very satisfactory ending. As with many Christie stories there is a happy romantic ending, except in this case three happy romantic endings.

This is neither a Poirot nor a Maple mystery.


1959 Cat Among the Pigeons
I recall reading this one in June of 1982. I was an 8th grader about to graduate, about to put 8 years of St. Jerome’s grade school behind me. It was the final week, classes were done, exams were done. School that week was a leisurely limbo with lots of downtime for reading. Besides my personal memories (which may or may not be accurate), all I remember of this book as I write this before re-reading it is the title and that Poirot is in it.

Now that I’ve read it, turns out I did only remember the title. Maybe I started reading it when I was 13 but got bored and didn’t finish it. At 45, it easily held my attention. As I look back on 40 years of Christie books read over the last 22 months, it’s amazing how many I remember. I would have thought they would start to run into each other.

Christie had mentioned people listening to the radio several times over the years, but this is the first time television gets a mention. She even mentions it twice. I was wondering when this ubiquitous device would become ubiquitous in a Christie story.

I have read 63 of 79 books. Onto the 1960s.

Cool... Like Lee Marvin

Sorry for not posting in a while. I'll try to get back into the writing groove.

This is a picture of Brother Christian, from Abbey of Christ in the Desert. His Abbey started brewing beer about a year ago. Bro. Christian, the face of their brewery operation, was in town for Philly Beer Week last week.

He was at The Grey Lodge Pub for Abbey of Christ in DesSert, when we had all three of their beers on tap and Chef Eric made a trio of beer cakes, each utilizing a different Abbey of Christ beer.

Bro. Christian was in town last year, when we had our first Scoats-less beer event at The Grey Lodge, as Maureen and I were in Austin that week. So while he was familiar with The Grey Lodge, it was my first time meeting him.

He remembered The Grey Lodge and our window wall that opens up, which was open on his first visit and last week too when he was there. He asked me if some of the employees worked here for a while, since he thought he recognized some of them from last year. I told him that most everyone has been here at least a year, and some have been with me for 17 years.

While very friendly and personable and extremely mindful, he was a slightly aloof, not due to pretense, but from not really being fully part of this world, living for the last 30 years in a monastery in New Mexico that's 15 miles down a dirt road.

It didn't take long for me to realize that he was a really cool guy (he even takes a cool picture). The thought "cool like Lee Marvin" came into my brain. Which was surprising as this is not a thought I thought I would ever think. Lee Marvin never really appeared on my radar. I can't even name a single movie he was in. It's not a very common phrase, only producing two Google hits. Bro. Christian's isn't a youthful rebellious cool, but a middle-aged I am who I am, who are you kind of cool.

I mentioned "cool like Lee Marvin" to Maureen the next day. I'm pretty sure it's a thought she never thought before either, but she dug exactly what I meant.

It's easy to know what's cool when you're younger, and it's easy to know what's not cool for a middle aged man. It's rare cool and middle-aged intersect. Lee Marvin may be the answer; whodda thought?

Bonus Story: Buddy Handry told me this one today. Jim Noone was wearing an AC/DC t-shirt. Bro. Christian, who has been in the monastery for 30 years, asked him if that was a band. And I thought I was slightly cool for not knowing who Lady Gaga was.

Reading the Dame Part4a: The first half of the 1950s

This a continuation of my series of posts about my project to read all 80 something Agatha Christie mystery books in order of publication (more or less). As usual, this is not just summaries of Christie’s work (especially as that was just getting repetitive) but my middle-aged musings inspired by reading (or in some cases re-reading) these books.

The other parts of the series:
Reading th Dame Part 1: The 1920s
Reading the Dame Part 2a: The 1930s
Reading the Dame Part 2b: The 1930s continued
Reading the Dame Part 3a: The 1940s
Reading the Dame Part3b: The second half of the 1940s

There are 9 books in the segment. Though several are compilations of short stories, this is still a sort of a productive spell for her, For this segment she is between the ages of 60 and 64.

As usual my text for each book will discuss the book itself as well as other observations about the book that are not necessarily related to the story.

The 9 books in this segment were read between February and April 2011, which seems to be faster than usual rate for me.

1950 A Murder is Announced
In 1950 the bar that would become The Grey Lodge Pub opened its doors for the first time on Labor Day Weekend. The Phillies went to the World Series for the first time in a long time (and wouldn’t return for about 30 years). Television still doesn’t really exist. The world would really start changing soon, but not yet.

England is still experiencing wartime rationing and Christie uses this and the change in village life after WWII to good effect here. I mostly figured out the mystery. A very satisfying read.


1950 Three Blind Mice and Other Stories
A bunch of short stories dating from the late 1940s back to the 20s. Curiously the stories appear to presented in reverse order of publication. There are a few stories with one-off characters, two with Marple, three with Poirot, and one with Satterthwaite. I suspect this will be Satterthwaite’s last appearance.

Hastings is a narrator of one of the Poirots (they go that far back). In that story Hastings narrates “After completing an elaborate outdoor toilet, we set off for Netherall Road”. They were in Poirot’s rooms in London. I know toilet can mean basic washing up and personal hygiene. Knowing all of that I can’t fathom what “an elaborate outdoor toilet” in 1920s London could possibly mean. It seemed to have no bearing on the story and remains a mystery to me. I didn’t even try Googling “outdoor toilet” since I know outhouses would be the only result.

In one of the older stories, Christie comes back to pince-nez. Since 1920 Christie’s characters, if they were noted as wearing glasses, always wore pince-nez. I remember reading Christie as a teen who had barely passed a couple years of high school French deducing pince-nez were earpiece-less glasses that pinched the nose to stay on. By the late 40s Christie had stopped mentioning pince-nez. Before then at least one character per book had worn pince-nez. As of 1950, she has yet mention modern eyeglasses.


1951 They Came to Baghdad
Christie returns to a theme she mined well in the 1920s, a young couple find themselves in the middle of a global domination conspiracy. The difference is Christie sets it up with real mastery and subtlety. The year is 1950, WWII is over and the Cold War has begun. The book sets off with several very well developed characters separately making their way to Baghdad, where the president of the USA is to meet with communist leader. This book really excited me as I started reading it and the pieces of the story were being laid out. After the really great build-up the ending felt a little rushed and anti-climatic. And I am not fully sure that the plot holds up but it is a great read.

Eyeglasses are mentioned here yet one character does wear pince-nez.


1951 The Under Dog and Other Stories
After reading a book set in 1950, I found myself with a collection of Poirot stories written in the 1920s but not published in book form until 1951. It’s good to have Poirot back after several non-Poirot books. Christie’s 1920s upper class bias unwelcomingly appears almost immediately. It has been very interesting to watch Christies snobbery slip away as the years and novels have worn on.


1952 Mrs McGinty's Dead
Poriot is asked by a police inspector friend to look into a closed case of murder in a small village. The inspector isn’t sure he got the right guy and wants to be sure before the execution in three weeks. This is another great and satisfying read. The characters are well developed and the clues are there.

My edition of this book was published in the late 1970s right after Christie’s death. Many of the Christie paperbacks I got from the library then were published at that time and had similar covers. There’s a circle of with Poirot’s head on the front cover at top center. The back cover is black, containing some boilerplate text in white and a blurb about the particular book. At the lower right is a picture of Poirot with “HAVE YOU READ CURTAIN? IT WAS MY LAST CASE...” To this date, I have yet to read Curtain, despite seeing mentioned on the back of all those paperbacks I read in the late 1970s/early 1980s. I have always saved Curtain as the last Poirot book I would read. That day is coming. It won’t be very soon, but it’s coming. Actually the last Marple book (which I also haven’t read yet) was published after the last Poirot book, so Curtain won’t be the last Christie book I’ll read, but it does remain the far off end of the journey. As I write this in April of 2011, after reading 58 Christie books, I am 19 books away from Curtain and 21 books way from goal.

I started this one in Philadelphia and finished it in Munich.


1952 Murder with Mirrors
This one features Miss Marple, who at a friend’s request accepts an arranged invitation from the friend’s sister. All three went to school together some 50 years ago. It takes place on an estate near London that has been turned into a school for juvenile delinquents. This a good story and ending is pretty much as I expected. Once again, strong well developed characters.

Spectacles are mentioned and one character wears pinc-nez. No one vouchesafes.

My copy was published in 1973. It’s very 70s. The front cover has curves and pinks and oranges. The cover has a picture of middle aged guy in a suit, a young blonde nestled with a long haired guy holding a gun, and Miss Marple who appears to be adjusting a thermostat. The long haired guy on the cover seems to be trying to make this book from 1952 seem to be from 1973 and new rather than 20 years old. It was a very strange cover but actually one of the best. Usually the covers are particularly uninspired.

I read this one in Munich and Bamberg Germany.


1953 Funerals are Fatal
As my copy of this book is part of a hard cover triology, trying to travel light, I didn’t pack it for the Germany trip. Leapfrogging over it, to read when I got home. This is a great read. Many characters, all very well drawn, and still stick with me despite have read two other Christie books before writing this summary. A great mix of characters, old and young, rich and less so. Christie also finds some novel ways to use Poirot.


1953 A Pocket Full of Rye
The note inside tells me I read this in July of 2005. Maureen and I also watched a TV movie version in the last few years. With all that, I didn’t remember who did it. Christie is still at the top of her game here. Solid characters, well places clues, and Miss Marple herself is the right balance. I thought the murder was someone else, but was satisfied with the reveal.

My copy is a grey market one that I likely bought in the 1980s at a book store in Center City. The front cover has been ripped off. Rather than make retailers send back unsold copies for credit, the publishers have them mail back just the cover, saving on shipping costs. The retailer was then supposed to dispose of the remainder of the book. However these coverless copies would find their way into stores to be sold 2 or 3 for a dollar.

I read this one in Bamberg and Munich Germany, finishing it up here in Philadelphia.


1954 Destination Unknown
Neither Marple nor Poirot appear in this one, which is a sort of Big Four meets The Man the Brown Suit throwback. Big Four and The Man the Brown Suit are two of Christie’s first novels, written when was in her early 30s. Destination Unknown was written 30 years later. The theme of the well funded global clandestine conspiracy is back though a bit less improbable and less sensational, both of which make for a better read. The global conspiracy is combined with the well described exotic locations of Brown Suit. I definitely want to visit many of the exotic places Christie used a backdrops in many of her books (South Africa, Morocco, Egypt). I wonder how much they have changed in 60 or 90 years and how many of the old hotels still exist. Maybe that’s a future project.

Reading the Dame Part3b: The second half of the 1940s

Reading the Dame Part3b: The second half of the 1940s

This a continuation of my series of posts about my project to read all 80 something Agatha Christie mystery books in order of publication (more or less). As usual, this is not just summaries of Christie’s work but my middle-aged musings inspired by reading (or in some/many cases re-reading) these books.

The other parts of the series:
Reading the Dame Part 1: The 1920s
Reading the Dame Part 2a: The 1930s
Reading the Dame Part 2b: The 1930s continued
Reading the Dame Part 3a: The 1940s

Christie is in her mid 50s at this point. She has slowed down to about 1 novel per year. At this point as a professional author, she was probably limited by her publisher to just one book per year to maximize global sales per novel. Whereas a less popular author could muddy the marketplace a little bit since his/her potential audience would be much smaller. I believe Stephen King ran into this problem in the 1980s.

She also didn’t have to work as hard at this point. In the 20s and 30s, she was writing as much as possible to make money. I wrote this sentence after only reading the first of the six books in this section, it will be interesting to see if this slower pace results in increased quality replacing quantity. The answer turned out to be yes, less quantity did equal higher quality.

It took me two months to read the six books that make up this segment. That’s pretty fast reading on my part. I guess I had a little more downtime with the holidays plus we went to Vegas for 5 nights for Maureen’s 40th birthday (which became six nights). To my knowledge I had only read two of the six previously, which puts me below average. For whatever reason the books from this segment weren’t as available to me when I was younger. Or didn’t interest me enough to check them out of the library.

1945 Sparkling Cyanide
Another WWII era novel with no acknowledgement of the war. Christie again plays around with the structure of what a mystery novel can be with this one. It starts with various people thinking back on a tragic night, sort of a Rashomon thing (or whatever the Shakespeare original that Rashomon is based on, King Lear maybe. If you want to know, you can Google it).

More rich people.

Col. Race reappears for this one. As someone who thought I knew Christie’s work very well, it is interesting to see how major of a character he was, and often he recurred. That said, he is not the most interesting of characters. Sort of cool, but like Poirot somewhat underdrawn. Inspector Kemp replaces the retired Inspector Battle. After finally developing Battle into a real character in Towards Zero, she retires him. It’s as though she liked her detectives to be underdrawn.

The story has a very clever ending. Though I’m not sure it really holds up upon closer thought.


1946 The Hollow
Wow this is Christie really firing on all cylinders. The set-up is much the usual, a doctor, an actress, old money rich people, a country estate. It should be old hat by now, but she finds a lot of freshness. The characters are extremely well developed, their motives are interesting. The ending is rock solid and ties back to the beginning. Very tidy bit of writing. This was another first time read for me, as was Sparkling Cyanid.

The other title this one went by is Murder After Hours, which makes no sense to me in relation to the story.

This is the second book in a row that has an unfaithful husband who ultimately realizes how much he loves his wife. I know Christie’s second husband married his reported longtime mistress after her death. I will definitely need to read a biography about her when I’m finished this project.


1947 The Labours of Hercules
I recall reading this one during a Christmas break when I was in high school. Poirot decides to retire again and to take on a few select cases to end his career. The rub is that he will only accept cases that recreate his mythical namesake’s labors, the Labors of Hercules. It also allows Christie to do that trick she loved where she gets a novel length book from a bunch of loosely connected short stories.

The collection of related short stories format doesn’t make for a tightly woven novel, but Christie does a great job turning the laborious constraint into some clever stories with a modern twist on the ancient lore. Some of the stories are easy to figure out, some are surprise endings.

Drugs play a part in at least two of the stories. Drugs were a frequent theme in Christie’s work from the 1920s. Would seem as though a different generation of English upper class society rediscovered drugs in the 1940s, especially cocaine.


1948 There is a Tide...
According to my note on the inside cover, I read this book in July of 1982, almost 29 years ago. The receipt still inside shows I paid 50 cents for it used from the now long defunct Marlo Books in the Roosevelt Mall.

This book has moved with me 4 times and only has now been read a second time. While I mostly like having a collection of books, it does seem a little silly to have carted this so little used object with me for almost 30 years. I often think about the nature of “stuff” and how much of it now is getting obsolete, in this case with the advent of e-books. I doubt I could get the electronic version of this for 50 cents again, or for free which I did by merely taking it off my book shelf. I expect someday there will be a Netflix of e-books where you pay a monthly subscription and get to have three e-books out at a time. When that day comes, I suspect I will get rid off most of my books, without much angst or sentiment. Just like how I disposed of my LPs when I moved to CDs, and got rid of cassette tapes when I finally got a car with a CD player. My collection of VHS tapes is still taking up space in my house, but I suspect I will get rid of those fairly soon. The conversion of entertainment media from space taking objects to electronic nothingness is very liberating. I embrace it. With everything being available electronically on demand, less is more and better.

I didn’t really recall any of the story after 29 years. This is another stellar work by Christie. Poirot is brought into this one that features rich folks who have their meal ticket cut off. It’s very firmly set at the end of WWII, with the English equivalent of a WAV or WAC returning from war overseas to her farmer fiancee who was exempted from service to keep growing food. Ration books are mentioned.

All of the clues are there, but I didn’t put them together correctly. A very satisfying ending to the mystery even if I didn’t solve it. The romantic ending is a bit shocking though.


1948 The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories
Based by the copyright years listed in the front, this book is a collection short stories that had been published seemingly at a regular clip over 20 years. Unlike other collections of short stories, this one has no overarching theme that lightly connects all the story. This trick of Christie’s really wasn’t all that great and is not missed here. Various mysteries, all very well told, with some that really stick with you after reading them. Poirot appears in the last story, but otherwise the stories all feature one-off characters.

Interestingly none of the stories have real sense of a place in time. Twenty years made no difference in the setting or telling of the tales. This is not a knock, just something I only just realized. Anyway this is Christie in top form, a great read.


1949 Crooked House
This one is also very firmly set at the end of the War. A couple who met overseas while in military service reunite after the war in London and become formally engaged. Ration books are mentioned. Once again the setting is rich folks living in a big house. Christie’s ability to mine this same vein while keeping things interesting and readable is extremely impressive. All new characters for this one; all are very well fleshed out. The ending was a surprise to me. There were at least two glaring clues, and I missed them.


So this ends the 1940s. She was born in 1890, so she spent this decade in her 50s. She published 15 books in those 10 years. Late middle age shows her remaining at the peak of her mental abilities. Writingwise she is at the top of her game.

Now having read all of her World War II era output, her lack of references to the war, with the exception of the Tommy and Tuppance novel early in the war, becomes clearer She had worked as a nurse and pharmacist in London during the war. World War I was hell on the troops, stuck in the muddy trenches as modern war machinery made continued use of long established “military science” a pointless bloodbath. World War II while still horrific for the soldiers, was also very much a homeland war in Europe with civilians bearing the brunt of bombings on a daily basis. It makes sense that Christie living the reality of war day and night would escape in her writing to a time without war.

Onto the 1950s...