David Gillon

 We've had so much going on with my mother that I was completely unaware the eclipse was imminent until Sunday afternoon - far too late to order eclipse viewing glasses.

So I spent part of this afternoon knocking up a pinhole projector from a couple of sheets of cardboard (courtesy of last night's pizza). I also tried to produce a boxed one (box liberated from the last few cans of beer at its bottom), but with less success.

It's been our hottest day of the year (32C), but was starting to cool to more reasonable temperatures as my sister and I settled down in her garden, which is handily west-facing. And just as it ticked around to 18:05, scheduled start of the eclipse here in Durham, the sun disappeared behind a cloud.

*headdesk*

Fortunately it reappeared after about 10 minutes and settled into a pattern of alternating about ten minutes obscured, and 10 minutes in the clear. It was annoying not to be able to look at it directly, but the pinhole projector worked rather well, and I even got the box one working, though using it required holding either your head or one or both arms at awkward angles.

It was a very pleasant couple of hours, though less reaction from the local birdlife than I expected - we had a large number of gulls milling about about a quarter of an hour in, but no roosting - and we would have known if that was happening as we have a couple of hundred starlings habitually roosting in the tree two doors up, and about fifty in the tree two doors down.

Once we'd gotten to maximum, I settled back just to enjoy the light and not concentrate so much on the solar disk, and after a few minutes started reading on my phone about what other people were seeing across Europe, then about twenty minutes past maximum I glanced up, and had to look again and call for my sister to look, because there was a segment of vertical rainbow peaking through the clouds. It was only a small segment*, but I'm pretty sure I was looking at enough to have seen the arc if it had been a conventional rainbow.

So Eclipse Plus - two optical phenomena at the same time!

And it was a good job I looked up when I did, because it only lasted a couple of minutes.

* About the size of the first joint of my thumb at arms length, about 15 degrees behind the sun's position in the sky, and aligned with red towards the sun, violet away - the red was very intense, the blue-indigo-violet very pale.

 We're having a heatwave, so of course I've come down with a cold. *headdesk*

(Friday was horrible, yesterday moderately horrible, today mostly boring, expecting to be mostly back to normal tomorrow)

It'll be nice to open the curtains again, they've basically been shut all week to keep the incoming heat limited and keep the temperature down in the house for Poppy-dog, who is not a fan of hot weather. My sister's been having to take her out for walks at 6AM in the morning, or 11:30 at night just to find reasonable temperatures (we're currently at sunrise at 4:30AM, sunset at 10PM).

I guess the question now is what are July and August going to be like?

We'd arranged to go through to Morpeth and meet Les, the one UK resident cousin we see regularly (he'd come through to visit about once a year with his other aunt, my mother's sister-in-law) and head into Blyth for the funeral with him. Which was a nice straightforward trip until about a mile from his new house when we needed to get off the A1 and my sister's car's satnav went berserk and tried to drive us through a cattery. Fortunately we were close enough that I could see which roads we needed to take on the screen. Apparently she had exactly the same problem last time she went to Morpeth - but that was on a course five years ago, and you would have hoped it would be fixed by now!

It should have been a straightforward trip into Blyth, but a traffic jam led to Les treating us to a quick tour of the dodgier back streets of Ashington. We finally came into Blyth from the North, with a five second view of the North Sea through the dunes as we passed over the mouth of the Wansbeck, with my sister and I looking for the sights we recognised - mostly St Cuthbert's, where my paternal grandmother was housekeeper to the parish priest for many years. There's massive changes since we were there regularly, with Bates Pit opposite the cemetery,  and where many of our relatives, including both grandfathers, once worked, now replaced by light industry and housing.

Nice short non-religious service, though the chapel in the crematorium is a little bizarrely laid out, with the coffin lying at right angles and almost off to the side of the congregation. OTOH probably not as bizarre as when my sister was there during COVID for my uncle's funeral and there were nine seats equally spaced around the chapel. And then a bunch of hugging cousins and telling them "My god, you look like your dad used to!"

An unexpected bonus was one of the cousins had been working through their family photos and had a gorgeous shot of my mother for us. It's black and white, clearly a studio shot, she's probably aged about 15 (the age she started dating my dad), and she looks beautiful. I've seen it before, but my sister hadn't, and the copy I've seen is only wallet sized. And apparently there are a few others he'll scan and send on to us.

The trip back was a lot more straightforward, we knew where we were going this time, but my plan for spending the rest of the afternoon reading turned into sleeping the afternoon away. I know I had a conversation with my sister part way through, but I have no idea what it was about. 

 ... has been dominated by buying the Humble Bundle with all 90 books from Shadowrun 4th Edition (Shadowrun is the RPG premised on cyberpunk meets the rebirth of magic - William Gibson wasn't impressed). A lot of them are in the 20-30 page range, but the larger background and adventure books run 140-220 pages of A4, and some of them have really been impressing me with the depth of background development (I suppose it helps that Shadowrun had had about 20 years of development at the point they were written).

Ghost Cartels is a campaign sourcebook involving a South American cartel managing to release a new drug worldwide while obfuscating the source of the drug from law enforcement. The first 50-odd pages are a sort of found-footage assemblage of leaks and intercepts and official documents telling the story as assembled by a group of interested Shadowrunners - thieves, hackers, assassins, mercenaries and spies - who are the game's common framing mechanism for this kind of thing as they watch from the sidelines and watch for jobs that might come their way. But 50+ pages of sustained found-footage storytelling is by far the longest I've seen them do and they really levelled up. The rest of the book lays out the adventure scenarios behind that story, as a group of shadowrunners are hired for black-ops and executive protection, starting with them working for a street level gang, but then being passed up the chain until they're working for the heads of the cartel as they stage a world tour to bring local distributors on board. Death on the Reik for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying is sometimes claimed as the greatest roleplaying campaign ever. I own Death on the Reik, and I'm not sure this isn't better.

War! This one is a campaign guide to insurgency, counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare in a Siege of Sarajevo type situation, and someone really, really knows their subject. (I loved the bit about a crate of socks potentially being the most valuable thing you can hijack in a jungle warfare scenario). 

I'm actually going to have to go back and re-read the first stuff I read, because I've clearly been missing half the story arcs that are buried within them.

Non-Shadowrun reading:

Tribals, Battles and Darings: The Genesis of the Modern Destroyer, Alexander Clarke.

I've had my eye on this for a while, and jumped on it when I realised that the Kindle edition was on offer at £1.29, not the £12.99 I thought I'd read. But, aargh, what a frustrating read. It's got a good first half dealing with the Tribal Class destroyers and their individual histories in WWII (though I kind of want to dive in with an editorial knife and completely re-order it), but then goes completely to pot dealing with the Battle and Daring Class destroyers that followed them, and a couple of pages on the Weapons class are outright wrong, their reduced length isn't inexplicable, it's because they were deliberately designed to be built in shipyards that didn't have the physical space to build a Battle.

Moonlight's Ambassador

Dawn's Envoy, T A White

Aka the Aileen Travers series, books 3 and 4. I started the series assuming from the titles that reluctant vampire Aileen would end up doing some sort of ambassadorial role between the different races in fantasy Columbus, but Aileen is temperamentally much better suited to punching someone in the face for annoying her. Especially if it's hulking vampire enforcer Liam, or at least she would be if he wasn't too fast for her to land a punch. Moonlight has a nicely non-obvious mystery as Aileen's bestie, and newest werewolf on the block, Caroline is implicated in a series of attacks on werewolves and vampires, while Dawn is rather more straightforward as the High Fey arrive in town intent on a wild hunt, and guess who's front of the queue for being hunted.
























e

 Given President Bonespurs is whinging about the European nations, and the UK in particular, not queueing up to join the war he started without consulting them*, I thought I'd look up the precise wording of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.

"Article 5

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked"

Mutual defence against an armed attack on a NATO power in Europe or North America, does not give Trump the right to drag NATO into an offensive war he started in the Gulf, without consulting them, no matter what he might think. 

This is why NATO never got involved in Vietnam, and why Kennedy and Nixon didn't throw a tantrum over it.

Meanwhile there's a pretty good argument Pete Hegseth committed a war crime at his press conference on Friday, which takes a truly special level of stupidity.

Hegseth: "no mercy, no quarter!"*.

Hague Convention of 1907, Regulations: Art. 23: "In addition to the prohibitions provided by special Conventions, it is especially forbidden

....

(d) To declare that no quarter will be given;"

As a former officer Hegseth should know that, and if he doesn't, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, standing next to him, definitely should.

* He may have forgotten accusing all the Coalition powers of staying away from the front lines of Afghanistan just a couple of months ago, but the other NATO nations haven't. As you sow, etc

** At least Hegseth stopped short of yelling "Deus Vult!", but it's still some Crusader-level shit and you can bet the Gulf powers noticed.

Beast Business, Ilona Andrews

The Amazon description says this a novella, but it's actually a shortish novella, a related short story, a short vignette, together with several short stories that were previously on their website. Everything's from their Hidden Legacy world, and if it fits into the existing pattern will be the primer for a trilogy focusing on the third Baylor daughter, Arabella, finding a partner. OTOH, Arabella really only makes a guest appearance in the novella and it instead revolves around a couple of secondary characters from the preceding two trilogies.

Diana Harrison, Prime of House Harrison, needs illusionist prime Augustus Montgomery, Prime of House Montgomery, and owner of massive PI company MII, for an urgent recovery operation. House Harrison's thing is animal magic, and someone has stolen a unique tiger cub from them. They have 24 hours to recover it because it needs its mother's milk, which means Diana needs Augustus personally, and she's coming along whether he likes it or not. But they both have their secrets, including the true nature of their magics, and they're going to have to cooperate closer than Augustus prefers. Shenanigans ensue.

The Masquerades of Spring, Ben Aaronovitch

It's the Roaring Twenties and Augustus Berrycloth-Young is enjoying the high life in New York, ably aided by his American valet Beauregard, and his friend Lucy, who can be trusted to know where all the best Jazz in Harlem can be found. Into Gussie's pleasant idyll comes a reminder that he is a keeper of the sacred flame of the Society of the Wise, in the form of the Folly's top magical troubleshooter, Thomas Nightingale. Nightingale is on a mission, pursuing the origin of an enchanted, possibly cursed, trumpet, and he's absolutely sure Gussie is the man to help him track it down.

I'd say this was meant to be a Jeeves and Wooster homage, Nightingale even introduces Gussie as 'Bertram Wilberforce' at one point, but Beauregard really doesn't get much to do. Instead it's Nightingale, Gussie, Lucy and the mysterious Cocoa against an escalating array of music agents, bent cops, and political operators, all complicated by Gussie trying not to let Nightingale know that he and Lucy - Lucien Biggs - are a couple. But never let it be said that a Berrycloth-Young failed to rise to the occasion!

IOW it's a very atypical Rivers of London novella, but Gussie makes for a thoroughly entertaining narrator.

The Vampire and the Case of the Wayward Werewolf
The Vampire and the Case of the Secretive Siren 
The Vampire and the Case of the Baleful Banshee, Heather G Harris and Jilleen Dolbeare

Think Due South meets Northern Exposure, with the out-of-place protagonist role played by a London partygirl, rather than a Mountie or a doctor.

A fortnight ago Elizabeth Barrington - Bunny to her friends - was a partygirl about town, then she woke up dead and decided a century of servitude to the king of the vampires just wasn't going to happen. Now she's the newest recruit to the police force of the small Alaskan magical town of Portlock, bringing the total strength of the force up to three - Bunny, Gunnar the Nomo (chief of police), and Sidnee, a friendly siren. Bunny was theoretically hired as an admin assistant, but Sidnee mostly mans the office, and one man, even a man-mountain and alleged demi-god like Gunnar, can't manage 24 hour coverage on his own, so pretty soon Bunny, and Fluffy the rather too intelligent Alsatian, are neck deep in a complicated murder case, variously aided and hindered by the town's political movers and shakers, including smooth vampire Connor Mackenzie, rough-and-ready polar bear shifter Stan Ahmaogak, and human hunter Thomas Patkotak.

Book 2 has Bunny being formally sworn in as Officer Bunny, but she's barely had time to get used to that when an encounter with a new drug almost takes out Gunnar, turning Officer Bunny into acting-Nomo Bunny, and leaving her with a drug crisis to take care of, with the competing help of Connor and Stan. Gunnar's back for book 3, but Sidnee's definitely out of sorts, there's an arsonist about town, and there's an escalating series of thefts which threatens to bring down Portlock's protective shield, and there's definitely something dangerous out there in the wilds, waiting for its chance to feed. 

3 down, 9 to go.
 

So she popped out (post Traitors final) to get replacements and then we set about trying to get the thing to reboot.

Cue an hour in her freezing garage arguing about how to interpret Hive's guidance on how to get the thermostat and the boiler to talk to each other again if they aren't speaking. (And it's not just that we were mis-interpreting them, they were seriously crap, for instance a how to reconnect video that showed you there were three different models of thermostat, but then only went through the process for one model, that didn't work in remotely the same way as the model we had).

At midnight, after an hour's trying, I announced I was freezing and I was going back into the warm to read up on the system. 10 minutes later I walked into the hall, held down the reset button on the 'Hive Hub', which is sort of a mini-router, for 10 seconds and the system promptly reconnected itself.

*headdesk*

 My sister and I sat down together to watch the 1st episode of the second season of Patience - autistic criminal records clerk helps the murder team in York catch criminals. Neither of us had watched the first season.

Not bad, the autism seems mostly well handled - the self-help group seemed designed for humour though. The plot had perhaps a little too much reliance on weird science - revolving around someone with Rh-Null blood caught up in fringe medical stuff, though the vampirism red-herring was nicely handled. The second episode has infrasound as a murder weapon, and probably overplayed hyperacusis as a superpower, though it did also spend a lot of time showing how much of a problem it is for Patience.

But immediately the first episode finished, my sister turned to me and exclaimed: "She's exactly like you!"

I didn't answer that until the next day, because I was completely freaked out by how exactly like me she is.