Sunday Sundries, 201

1. AOTW: Nothing too egregious this week, and the following qualifies, perhaps, for a new award, the Infancy of an AOTW. At the grocery store--both this week and last--a husband and wife (not the same pair each week) stood in front of the yogurt cooler and debated endlessly about which variety they should buy. Meanwhile, their cart and their ample bodies were denying yogurt-access to everyone else in the store. I know, I know: This hardly seems significant--and, in fact, it suggests that the AOTW was not those Yogurt People inspecting the yogurt options but the person inspecting the inspectors of the yogurt options. Close call ...

2. I finished three books this week, two of which were among those I pick at each night in bed (a chapter here, a chapter there). They are the first two I mention below ...

     - As readers here know, I am slowly making my way through the Jack Taylor novels by Irish writer Ken Bruen. I first heard of Taylor via the eponymous TV series we streamed, then began reading (and enjoying) the books, books which are darker and bloodier than the TV series. Taylor is an ex-cop (booted off the force in Galway, Ireland, for alcoholism, an issue that dogs him throughout the books); now he's a sort of unofficial P.I., and throughout the novels he suffers enormous physical damage. In a recent one I read, the Bad Guys cut off two of his fingers.

Okay, the one I finished this week was Headstone (2011), a novel about a bunch of creep-os in Galway who are going around murdering people for the fun of it. Taylor is on their list. Mistake.

Taylor is a big reader (that's fun to see/read about!), has issues with the officials in the Catholic Church, hangs with some pretty rough company, is on the outs with the cops, has few (no?) friends. Not above behaving like a vigilante.

I've started his next one--Purgatory--and am already in its clutches.

     - The second book I finished was What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, 2018, by Adam Becker. Okay, I am not a scientist; I never took a physics course. But I try. I always have some kind of science book "going" in my pile. And this one was great, outlining the history of--and the personalities involved in--quantum physics, that odd realm we (well, not I) are still trying to figure out. (Those of you who saw the two Ant-Man films know that "quantum" has entered the common vocabulary--at least in some small degree--at least in superhero films.)

I understood a lot of the book (a tribute to the author!), and other parts? Well, maybe I could lie and say I'm saving them to re-read later? Anyway, want to know what's going on? This is a very good book to read--a good start on a long and twisting path through a tangled wood.

     - The third book--Behind the Scenes at the Museum, 1995, by Kate Atkinson--her first novel. Here's a confession: I'd never heard of her until I read a little notice in the New York Times not all that long ago (July 31--link to it), a notice about a scheduled series of readings by significant authors. I'd heard of all the others. Decided, in shame, I'd read her first book, ordered it, read it, fell in love with it. And so I know I'm going to be reading all of her books in the upcoming months.

This is a multi-generational story--but nothing about it is ordinary. It does not begin in the past and advance to the present. It begins, in fact, in such a cool way: an early narrator is a fertilized human egg. (Think about that for a while!) The chimes sound at midnight, and the narrator says

I'm begun on the first stroke and finished on the last when my father rolls off my mother and is plunged into a dreamless sleep, thanks to the five pints of John Smith's Better Bitter he has drunk in the Punch Bowl with his friends, Walter and Bernard Belling. At the moment at which I am moved from nothingness into being my mother was pretending to be asleep--as she often does at such moments (11).

How can you not continue reading such a story?

This is a family that--like all other families--experiences moments of horror: unexpected deaths, failures of various sorts, betrayals.

And the great thing for me? I was surprised on virtually every page, and Surprise rates very highly on my Reader Meter--very highly. Can't wait to read her later novels ... I've ordered the next ...

3. We were sad this week to finish the most recent available-to-stream season of Death in Paradise, a very formulaic U.K. cop show--but the delight is in the formula: an "impossible" murder (who could have done it? how could it have been done?), detecting, and then the lead cop (played by three different actors now as the seasons have progressed) gets The Insight, so he sends the others to "round up the suspects," and we learn how it was done--and by whom. I never get tired of it. Can't say why. It's just, I don't know, ... fun?

4. We're still chugging along with Elementary and have been streaming the latest season via CBS-All Access. Still enjoying it (some form of Sherlock Holmes is better than no form of him).

5. Final Word--A word I liked this week from one of my various online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from dictionary.com  I knew what this word meant (duh)--but nice to see where it came from--and when ...

dreamboat [DREEM-boht] noun

1. Slang. a highly attractive or desirable person.

2. Slang. anything considered as highly desirable of its kind: His new car is a dreamboat.

QUOTES: Hunter was a studio player at Warner Brothers: a blond, blue-eyed dreamboat, whom the studio was selling—quite successfully—as the quintessential boy next door.

-- Michael Schulman, "Tab Hunter's Secrets," The New Yorker, October 16, 2015

ORIGIN: If you associate dreamboat, a.k.a. heartthrob, with the movies that Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney made in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, you are correct on the date of origin and datedness of the word. Guy Lombardo, the Canadian-American bandleader (1902-1977), popularized dreamboat in his song “When My Dream Boat Comes Home” (1936).