LB's Rambles

Too Many Annoying Friends?

Am I the only one who finds this a bit hard to swallow? Or is it an April Fool's joke one day early? Erik Sass at The Social Graf blog has a post today called "Women Find Facebook Friends Annoying."  In it, he cites a survey of 400 women taken by a site called Eversave which claims that 84% of women Facebook users - presumably among those 400 women - find some aspect of their friends' behavior on Facebook to be "annoying."

How so? Well, the survey apparently cites behavior such as posting too many routine posts, promotes causes too frequently or inappropriately, post political views that strike the recipients as irrelevant or with which they disagree - the list goes on; it's quite long and comprehensive.

Now I have a fair number of friends on Facebook. Not everything they post is a gem (nor is everying I post!). But I don't really find them "annoying," no matter how much eye-rolling I may do. And I must add, if a "friend" annoys you on Facebook, it's easy to unfriend.

Is it just me? Take a look at the article and let me know if you're surprised, or hurt, or annoyed. Whatever. Or, as I said, maybe it's all an April Fool's joke. Now that would be annoying.

"The Circular Staircase"

On the Classic Mysteries podcast this week, you'll find a review of a mystery that started a genre, more than a century ago. "The Circular Staircase," by Mary Roberts Rinehart, was published in 1908. It is considered the first book to use a narrative device referred to as "Had I But Known." The narrator drops not-too-subtle hints to readers about events yet to come in the book, along the lines of "Had I but known the evil lurking behind that innocent-looking door, I would never have entered the house." Rinehart used the device to help build the reader's sympathy for the narrator and other characters. In her hands, it was a useful tool; less so for later and lesser writers.

You can listen to the full podcast review here. "The Circular Staircase" is the story of an older woman who rents a country house for the summer - and discovers it's a living nightmare, with nightly intruders, a couple of murders, secret passages, and even rumors of the hidden spoils of a bank embezzlement. It's a good thriller in its own right. This was Rinehart's first book, and she continued to grow in popularity, becoming one of the most popular woman authors in the first half of the twentieth century. It's still a great deal of fun, more than a hundred years after it was written.

Energy, Life, Death - and Marketing

When you think about energy safety, how do the various forms of energy line up in your head? What comes to mind? Nuclear? Oil? Coal? Seth Godin looks at some numbers from a marketing/PR viewpoint - and comes up with some information and opinions that may surprise you...

Hat tip: Instapundit

"Death in the Stocks"

Georgette Heyer may be best known as the author of many Regency romance novels, but she also wrote a dozen mysteries during the Golden Age years and beyond, most of them excellent examples of the traditional British mystery.

"Death in the Stocks" was first published in 1935. IKt's both a good mystery and a very funny book, and it's the subject of this week's Classic Mysteries podcast review, which you can listen to here.

The body of a murdered man, a weekend resident of a small English village, is discovered locked in the stocks on the village green. He turns out to be a fairly nasty individual who is cordially loathed by his relatives. Police suspect that he may have been killed by one of two young relatives - but find themselves stymied when the suspects begin trying rather desperately to mislead the detectives and hide clues. The police are not amused, but the reader is likely to be. Heyer was not above skewering the conventions of detective fiction, and she does so quite successfully here.

If you enjoy reading books on your Kindle, by the way, this book is available in a Kindle edition..

I Really Love Stupidity

Let's start with a basic assumption: spammers are stupid. We see new evidence of their stupidity daily. I just got a piece of email spam which is - at least - a promising new angle. According to this dreck, a State Department office has awarded me...a green card!

Yes, friends, I guess I'm no longer an illegal alien, a status which might have been hard to reconcile with my native-born US citizenship anyway. All I have to do is...you guessed it...pay some processing fees.

Ingenious? Not so much. Maybe there's more here than meets the eye, but it's hard to tell, because the author of this dubious letter has some serious issues with basic English:

This e-mail ballot visa- lottery- program was innovated ON JAN by- USAFIS, This is the 2nd edition of the program and its designed to be held every year, the aims and objectives of the program is to give free- visa's to citizens of developing countries around the world who wishes to travel to U.S and start a new life and work.

There's a lot more of this semi-literate nonsense, and the English continues to deteriorate. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be participating anytime soon. Stupid spammers. That's redundant. I know.

Good for Apple!

Amid all the dispiriting and painful news coming out of Japan, it's worth reading the story of what Apple has been doing for people through its stores and offices there. Blogger Kevin Rose has published a pretty remarkable email from an Apple store worker. I'm not an Apple fanboy or an Apple worker - but I think the company and the people involved deserve a lot of credit for the decisions they have taken and the actions they have performed to help themselves and everybody around them, beginning on the day of the gigantic earthquake and continuing ever since.

Hat tip: Instapundit

"All-Time Favorite Detective Stories"

On the Classic Mysteries podcast this week, you'll find a review of the anthology "All-Time Favorite Detective Stories," edited by Rochelle Kronzek. The stories were selected in 1950 by a panel of mystery critics and authors, with the list of twelve stories being published in the July, 1950, edition of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

It's a terrific collection. The group apparently voted for Thomas Burke's "The Hands of Mr. Ottermole" as the best mystery short story ever written. I suspect that it's not as well known today as it might have been in 1950, but it's a terrific story. The anthology also has stories featuring a number of classic detectives, including Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, The Thinking Machine and more.

If such a list were put together today, I'm sure that there would be a lot of changes when compared to the stories in "All-Time Favorite Detective Stories." But these stories are well-worth reading, and they give readers a pretty good idea about which writers and which detectives were considered to be among the greatest, as of the middle of the last century.

"Case with Four Clowns"

Another Golden Age classic is reviewed today on the Classic Mysteries podcast: "Case with Four Clowns," by Leo Bruce, first published in 1939. You can listen to the full review here.

"Case with Four Clowns" features Sergeant Beef - now a former police detective - who is often underestimated by his employers and his friends. This is a mistake, for the sergeant is a remarkably sharp observer, and he can generally cut through the obscurities which surround a given murder case to find out what really happened.

In this case, Sergeant Beef is warned that a member of a small traveling circus troupe is going to be murdered - but he can not learn who is to be the intended victim or, for that matter, the intended murderer. So he joins up with the circus, only to find a surprising variety of potential killers and victims. It's a fairly clued, tightly written, funny plot, and the members of the circus troupe are really quite well drawn. "Case with Four Clowns" has been out of print almost since the day it was first published, but Academy Chicago publishers has reissued it. If you enjoy tradition mysteries, with a fair amount of humor, you'll like this one.