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Happy Day of the Moon
Mondays, am I right? Turns out, not only is the start of the conventional work week*, but it’s also the day of the Moon. Literally. Monday is derived from the Old English Mōnandæg. Mōna means Moon in that language. Wikipedia states that it was a translation of the Latin “dies lunae,” day of Luna, the Latin name for Earth’s constant companion in the celestial dance. This Monday I was up early, as is my elderly cat Mittens’s wont, since he loves his “pill treats,” and wants them as soon as the sky begins to lighten. After taking care of him, I took my telescope outside for some morning Moon viewing.…
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Some favorite mystery shows
Living in the current golden age of digital streaming, we mystery lovers have a lot of wonderful mystery shows we can watch, old and new. Here are a few of my favorites, in no particular order. Midsomer Murders. I love this delightful cozy featuring police as the main characters, set in the fictional English County of Midsomer. Twenty-two season and counting of light-hearted, sometimes outlandish, and always enjoyable mystery spinning. Only Murders In the Building. This fable-like series on Hulu blew me away when it premiered last year. The trio of sleuths have fantastic chemistry, balancing in the wacky oldsters in Martin Short and Steve Martin, and Selena Gomez’s twenty-something…
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Summer is in full swing
The temperature reached 98F here in Portland yesterday afternoon. Not nearly as scorching as Austin and other places in Texas have faced these past few days, and much “cooler” then when we were in fiery grip of the heat dome last summer. Today is cooler, closer to the range of what I can consider perfect summer weather for Oregon. We’re currently at 86F. I spent time today out in my “zero gravity” chair in the backyard, shaded from the sun by a lilac tree, and working on A Shush Before Dying. The forecast calls for even cooler temperatures over the next week. But I have no doubt that scorching heat…
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A Moon shot
I’m working on a longer post about my love for stargazing, but after being up to late stargazing lately, coupled with Mittens waking me up too early for his pill “treats”, today ended up being more of a slog than I’d imagined, so I thought I’d share an image from last night’s twilight viewing of Luna, taken through a refractor telescope. The purple border on the right edge of the Moon is caused by something called “chromatic aberration,” which is an artifact of the two lenses of this particular scope and its short focal length. Still the terminator, on the lefthand edge of the lunar image here, is sharp. The…
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Feeding My Mystery Muse
After returning from a visit with a friend yesterday, I watched two more classic Perry Mason episodes, and marveled again at the storytelling and dialogue, and the skilled way a mystery was laid out and solved in under an hour. The series is very much a product of its time, and yet feels fresh and modern in many ways. Good conflict is timeless, and Perry’s never-ending quest to help those in need is as relevant today as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. I’m also reading James Scott Bell’s entertaining “Neo-Pulp” mystery collection, Trouble is My Beat, featuring pulp writer and Hollywood studio troubleshooter Bill Armbrewster. It’s a cracking…
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Happy Caturday
Enjoying a fun, lazy Saturday afternoon here. I think our cat Mittens is enjoying it most of all. He’s nearly sixteen and loves his comfy spots. Hope you are having a wonderful weekend as well.
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A Puzzling Mystery, Part II
Like a mystery novel, the mystery of how I became an avid jigsaw puzzler in 2020 is more straight-forward than why. In 2019, I wouldn’t have tried a jigsaw puzzle. I’d watched my wife do them years earlier, and it just didn’t appeal to me. What changed? The lockdown in the Spring and Summer of 2020 had an unanticipated silver lining: a pause. That pause of staying at home gave me and others the opportunity to slow down. I think I’d actually be interested in puzzling all along, but had been intimidated by it. I had enjoyed fast moving video game “puzzlers” like Tetris Attacks, Columns, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean…
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Not Perry Mason
I grew up watching the classic Perry Mason television, starring Raymond Burr and a host of talented character actors. For many years, it ran at lunch time on our local independent station, Channel 12. My mother was a huge fan. I was young enough that, while I appreciated the peril the accused seemed to be in, I didn’t really understand the storylines all that well. Fast forward to last year and LeAnn and I decided to start watching it on Paramount+. We were both hooked right from the start. So much so that I picked up the complete set on DVD, since it includes two seasons and several other episodes…