Minute Cryptic - 25 August, 2025
“Forger’s initial on map - it shows treasure spot! Buried gold is fake…” (4)
🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣
I scored: 2 under par
I find this kind of horrifying: Denmark’s state-run postal service will no longer deliver letters. And I can see Britain’s Royal Mail going to same way.
It feels like we’d be cut off, in kind of a way. I mean I don’t know when I last sent a letter, but still.
I mean, Christmas cards!
📗 Books 2025, 18: Glory Road, by Robert A Heinlein
I had a sudden hankering to reread this old Heinlein book (even older than me, it turns out, being first published in 1963). I read it as a kid, from the library, and if I ever bought a copy it isn’t accessible now.
I searched my local library’s catalogue. No joy. But the excellent World of Books duly had an old copy or two, and one was soon here.
It is almost exactly as I remembered it, which is to say it’s a tale of derring-do, sword-and-sorcery adventure, where the sorcery is sufficiently-advanced technology. We don’t learn anything about how it works, and it doesn’t matter. It’s just a fun story, very much of its time.
The first-person male protagonist is one of those highly-capable men beloved of that era’s male American SF writers. But he is relatively lacking in self-confidence at times, which is surprisingly refreshing for the type. The female lead is mostly great, and considerably more capable than the guy, even if he doesn’t exactly realise it.
Anyway, loads of fun, and I’m glad to have read it again after all these years.
The Naked Gun, 2025 - ★★★½
Remakes can be just as much fun as the original, it turns out. I note I gave that four stars, which seems high, but you know how it is: we award these things in the moment.
Anyway this new version updates the old without losing any of its zany charm and laugh-out-loudness. Well worth a couple of hours of your time.
The Ballad of Wallis Island, 2025 - ★★★★½
I forgot to write about this when we saw it a couple of weeks back. I went in knowing nothing about it but the basic setup: rich guy invites faded, formerly popular, folk duo to his island for a private gig.
I didn't even know it was a British film. The above description gives kind of Glass Onion vibes when you tell it to people, but this is nothing like that. It's much more gentle and charming and sad yet happy.
The music's great too. Highly recommended.
📗 Books 2025, 17: Theophilus North, by Thornton Wilder
The roaring twenties, told from the seventies, and read in the… unroaring twenties? Much better than that famout novel set in the twenties.
I read Doc Searls’s piece, How about ASO, for Attention Surfeit Order?. I was sure I had used that expression, or one like it, on my blog. A quick search led me to a 2006 post about attention in various senses, which has ‘Attention surfeit disorder?’ as a subheading. The amusing part was that in that subsection, I referenced Doc Searls.
Continually making decisions is cognitively taxing. That’s why we gravitate to morality systems like religion, the Free Software Foundation, and CAMRA.
That line amused me in The Vegan Morality Policy by Terence Eden.
Obviously my last books post should have had ‘Cracked’ not ‘Carcked’ in the title. Fixed now, but visible forever in the URL.
The New York Times Connections is getting harder. Or I’m getting worse at it. That’s two Saturdays in a row I haven’t got any rows. I only do it at weekends, and not always then, but still.
What the hell is a ‘brad’? And ‘spike’? Come on. (I’d say more, but spoilers, you know.)