Silicon Valley Redneck

Going Postal: the movie

Finally got around to seeing it.

It's a pretty good movie.  As an adaptation of the book, well, there are a lot of changes, some of which work and help keep the film moving along and at a reasonable length, while others really don't.

Naturally, I'll list my quibbles here.  You want the good stuff, buy your own copy and watch it.

The prisoner being called by his proper name prior to his execution: I don't really see any good reason for this, and it messes with the scam.

Sgt. Angua: just plain wrong.  Look, everybody knows there's a werewolf in the Watch, but everybody also knows that it's Cpl. Nobbs, OK?  How's that work if Angua goes around looking and acting blatantly lupine, never mind changing forms in public with witnesses around?  And why would she use the wolf to apprehend a famously nonviolent confidence trickster?

Divine intervention: I suppose it needed streamlining, and the bit with the sausages is good, but having the miracle unambiguously attributable to Offler seems to lose something, and not just the opportunity to introduce Anoia.

The challenge: really, having the message supplied by a third party works much better.  Having Moist choose it?  Not good at all.

Losing the cat and the cockatoo is, I guess, no big deal; they were kind of nonessential characters.  But if the little doggie is missing from the sequel, I'll be annoyed.

And what was the name "Gladys" doing on the Golem Trust chalkboard, when the Gladys subplot had been edited out?

Raising Steam

The last of the Discworld books: I've started reading it.

I'd seen remarks to the effect that it wasn't very good, and that Sir PTerry had maybe not been all that involved with the actual writing of it - a surmise that I'm finding highly likely.

The characters are there... but the style is all wrong.  It's written in they style of a children's book, for children who haven't read the last few books and need each character carefully introduced.

The story, so far, seems plausible in a Discworld context, but things are happening much too early; the Patrician is getting involved at least one book too soon - after all, how long was the Clacks running before he felt the need to revive the Post Office?  And why would there be an ancient Epebian prophecy about steam, and why would the Patrician worry about it anyway?

The troll lawyer is just plain wrong: name, composition, context, manner of speech, everything.

So, yeah: I'm thinking rough outline, turned into a novel by a not-very-good ghostwriter who hadn't actually read the other novels in the main series.  Fanfic would be better: a fan would take the trouble to get the details right.

Update: I'm about a third of the way through.  It's slow going.  The style isn't getting any better.

I looked back at the Amazon reviews, and I find it difficult to believe that one of the reviewers got 80 pages in before realizing it wasn't a genuine Pratchett.  For me, the style was jarring right from the beginning, and within the first few pages I'd figured out that it wasn't just an opening bobble but a completely different writing style.

Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had sketched the concept for one last painting, and his eleven-year-old niece had completed it.  In glitter pen.

And this got many five-star reviews?  Did any of those reviewers actually read it?  Never mind having read any of the real Discworld series; just considered on its own, how could this mess possibly rate five stars?

More: This is painful.  Whoever actually wrote it had no feel at all for the Discworld nor its familiar denizens.  The naming conventions are wrong (no troll should be named Thunderbolt unless he's made of meteorite, and Aeron isn't a dwarf name, it's a furniture name).  The characters...

Well, let's just say the author seems to inhabit an academic environment in which everyone has Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Really, Harry King getting all weepy?  Everyone emoting all over the place?  Faugh.

Further, the story is excessively dialog-driven.  This might be OK, except that the author totally sucks at writing dialog.  In most of the real Discworld books, I can hear the characters speaking.  In this mess?  No.  People just don't talk like that.  Not even in movies.  These characters don't jump off the page, they sort of drip off it.  And the less said about the attempts at writing dialect the better.

New, not-so-improved Mythbusters

Hmph.  Too much don't-try-this-at-home, let-the-experts-do-everything.

And: not enough math, and especially not enough understanding.

Consider: rock launched by lawnmower.  Compare to bullet fired from .357 Magnum.  Lab session with rocks and lawnmower: good; got to gather data.  Range time with .357: lame; good numbers for .357 muzzle velocity for various loads are readily available.

But then: having velocity numbers, do they figure in the masses of the projectiles and calculate momentum and energy?  They do not.  They blather on about energy, yes, but then insist on comparing energy using a ballistic pendulum... an instrument for measuring momentum, not energy.  Oh, and the term "force" also gets bandied about, meaninglessly.

C'mon, Splodey Channel: this is supposed to be educational, right?  Not just "look how fun this is, and don't any of you in the audience even think about having this much fun"?

If it's educational, can't we have some proper physics, with math and explanations?  And correct usage of the terms?

Additionally: if you fire a gun at a ballistic pendulum with the intention of measuring the momentum of the bullet, it may be appropriate to set it back far enough to be out of muzzle-blast range.  Too close, and it's not just the bullet pushing on the pendulum.  That setup looked awfully close.

Update: Wrong, wrong, wrong!  It looks like the bullet embedded itself in the ballistic pendulum, as it should, but the rock didn't.  If the projectile bounces off the target, it transfers extra momentum.  Also, for a proper comparison, the mass of the pendulum needs to be large compared to that of the projectile, which I'm not so sure was the case here.

Further: in the actual-lawnmower experiment, having a dense pile of rocks will give suboptimal results by overloading the mower.  Better to whack one rock at a time.

Another entertainment-couple breakup

Seems Kermit and Piggy are parting ways.

Shows how well I keep up on celebrity gossip; I never realized they were officially a couple to begin with.

And the story says nothing of their offspring.  How will the young halfbreed turn out?

Five Armies in a Bottle

Finally got around to seeing part 3 of the recent extendo-epic production of The Hobbit (notes on part 1 and part 2).

The things that don't make sense are, predictably enough, carried over, and even amplified.

Come the battle, we have the various Dwarves, Elves, Men, and Orcs, and the occasional Warg, plus Deus ex Machina Airlines, and the Orcs brought along siege-Trolls in broad daylight, and there are graboids or possibly sandworms, and flappy things that I think wandered in from The Empire Strikes Back, unless they're from an episode of Doctor Who.  Why not a legion of Ents armed with anti-tank weapons?  (Yeah, I know: one thing you will never see is moby trees with RPGs.)

And so the special-effects extravaganza wraps up.  Now, can we please have a decently-funded version done straight?  One of these decades?

The Desolation of Tolkien

Just saw part 2 of the movie named after The Hobbit.

Gah.

Much that should have been off-stage was on-stage.

Far more that shouldn't have been there at all was on-stage.

Way too much gratuitous nonstop action.  Also, way too much blatant foreshadowing of things that ought to have been revealed at their proper times.  Do we really need Chekhov's Arrow?  (And why has a special-purpose anti-dragon weapon survived the intervening generations?  Wasn't it enough for Bard to have a regular bow and his lucky arrow, plus the information relayed by the thrush?)

The bit with the barrels... well, it went from "Dwarves would have suffocated" to "barrels would just have tipped over, unless Bilbo somehow managed to install ballast in the closed ends while neither we nor the Elves were watching."  And this silly little part of the the plot was warped beyond recognition; was this just to have the running Elf/Orc battle?

The character of Lake-town was likewise changed beyond recognition.

And the business with the forges under Erebor?  Looks like one of George Lucas's hallucinations, and makes as little sense.  (Wait... has Bard been transformed into Han Solo?  That might explain why Lake-town had to change so drastically.)  Also, how do Bilbo, and later the Dwarves, keep sliding down the pile of gold but end up back at the level of the side tunnel?

At this point, the setup for the next part of the story has been hopelessly messed up, though important parts of it obviously have to happen because of all the foreshadowings.

And what's with the Elf/Dwarf romance, anyway?  (Also, what's with athelas?  I thought it was just a weed, unless there was a king handy.  Could any lowly sylvan-Elf just walk into Gondor, heal someone using athelas, and be known as the rightful king?)

At least Beorn hadn't been replaced by that freaky old Time Lord, but his character and the manner of his introduction were changed wildly.

Really, the proper story could have been told in full in half the time, and made a lot more sense.  But I guess that would have made the trilogy a mere sesquilogy, and who ever heard of such a thing?

In the middle of the earth in the land of the Shire...

Finally got around to watching part 1 of The Hobbit last night, on a Netflik*.

Um.

Thing about making LOTR first... it creates the temptation to make the movie of the cute little children's** book even more epic, to drag in characters who weren't in the book, and to mess up the plot by throwing in a lengthy future-flashback introduction that tells the audience things that should properly be revealed as the story progresses.

So here we have a vast, intensely violent cinema epic which takes the title of the cute little standalone book, but which borrows extensively from LOTR and The Silmarillion, and adds material that, in the books, was only tangentially mentioned.

It's all excuses for doing Big Cinematic Stuff.  And you've got to have the pod racer drawn by hedgehogs***!

Oh, well.  The fifteen birds got out of their five fir trees, and I guess some other night we'll see what happens next.  But wait!  The thrush already knocked!  Does that mean they missed their chance?  Tune in next year!  Same hobbit time - same hobbit station!

Afterthought: Hoods.  I'm sure the dwarves were meant to be wearing hoods.  Did they take them off at the border of the Shire to avoid drawing the attention of neighborhood watchhobbitses?

Also: I thought there was something wrong with the business of big spiders just moving into Mirkwood, and Mirkwood just starting to be called that.  Looking at the actual printed-type book, and the copy of Thror's Map reproduced therein, what do I find?  "West lies Mirkwood the Great -- there are Spiders."  So, at the time the map was drawn, then?

Even more:  The movie hobbits don't seem to dress in proper bright colors, do they?  And, while it seemed mildly wrong for the Elrond of LOTR to look so much like Agent Smith, the Elrond of The Hobbit should definitely look more like a traditional merry eternally-young elf and less like a nasty creepy old dude.  What's more, the dwarves are meant to have colorful garb and colorful beards, and look more like garden gnomes and less like cut-down Scotsmen****.

I guess next time there's an idle evening available, I'll see how Beorn is handled -- or if he's gone Bombadil-knows-where and been replaced by that mockery of Radagast.

 

* Spellcheck thinks I mean "Linnet".

** Spellcheck suggests "Nichiren's".

*** I may be turning their skins into squirrels, here, but you get the idea.

**** But not pictsies, either.

Owwwwww.

Not so productive the past few days, on account of I tried to lift something heavy at an awkward angle and was reminded of the reason for "lift with your legs, not your back!"

Can't spend much time at my desk, at least not in a position to be doing real work.

Getting in and out of a car is problematic (this particular injury makes raising my right leg painful).

It gets better and worse, and this morning is Worse.  But I gotta go forth and launder.

Spent a chunk of yesterday watching Zombies of the Stratosphere, because Leonard Nimoy (I hadn't realized he was in it, playing Second Martian Invader, until Alex Pournelle pointed it out on Facebook).  I'd seen it once before, on Creature Feature, when I was a kid, and basically remembered nothing except Commando Cody (who wasn't even in it; the guy in the flying suit was inexplicably changed).  It's... fantastically cheesy.  Pretty much nothing makes sense.  Random amusement: when the Martian rocket ship makes a hard landing, all the seats fall over.  As in, not in any way attached to the floor.  Oh, and at the end the Martians are suddenly called "zombies" and apparently no longer have a homeworld or anything, perhaps because it was 30 seconds to closing credits and the titular zombies had yet to put in an appearance.

Hey, is anyone distributing collections of Universal serials on USB sticks?

Late yesterday, I did manage to get productive on the toaster front, and actually wrapped up a small cluster of open issues before close of month.

This morning: breakfast, naproxen, laundry.  And the parents' dog will want walkies, oy.

A triangular strawberry-flavored coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side

Would, of course, be a Fruit Ningi.

The latest manifestations of Angry Birds having become quite unplayable, and Pinky having had such fun playing Real-Life Fruit Ninja on the teevee, I decided to try switching phone games for those all-important sanity breaks.

And, yeah: Fruit Ninja is fun.  Also maybe good for the brain, in moderation.

It's made more difficult by the presence of a playful kitty who believes in the importance of jostle training.

But... I kinda wonder what platform the developers play on.

'Cause I've got a practically-new Droidd Maxxxx, and, if it's not in airplane mode, the game is slow, jerky, and nigh-impossible.

In airplane mode, it's fine.  That's how I normally play games anyway (on account of Angry Birds having been unplayable since forever if there's a network connection for fetching the ads).

But, really, guys: surely you expect the average user to have his phone's connectivity on, no?  There are various notices to encourage playing whilst connected, so this must be the intended case.  And yet, the availability of a network connection bogs the program down something fierce.  (Were it a uniform slowdown, it'd make the game easier.  As it's highly variable, and game play involves projecting trajectories, it makes the game hopeless.)

I follow the funny papers, but not the Comics, so...

... I was only vaguely aware, e.g., that somewhere along the line Thor (he of the big red beard) had gotten shaved and bleached, and Mjölnir* had gotten transformed from a half-hammer, half-boomerang battle weapon into a smith's metal-bashing implement.

And now, it seems, Thor has, as they said back in the 60s, "gone to Sweden."

Or maybe he didn't go to Sweden and she came back.  After all, deities can pretty much assume any form they feel like, right?  (Though it's mostly tricksters and philanderers who actually do that sort of thing, and it's usually temporary.)

Apparently, though, this is part of a trend whereby, instead of creating a brand-new superhero with a character appropriate to the person inside the suit, the franchise owners kill off or otherwise retire an existing superhero, and have some new diversically-correct person inherit the costume, role, and character, even though the character was written for someone else entirely.

It's what happens to the process of creative destruction when it's commanded from on high, and the parties responsible are incapable of the "creative" part.  If they were creative, they could create new characters, phase them in, and allow the old ones to head off to Commander Goodbye's Superhero Retirement Home.

(And, yes, it bothers me that Frank Gorshin's "Riddler" was once played by John Astin.  Astin deserved his own supervillain character on that show, dang it!)

 

* The spelling checker thinks I mean "Miniskirt."  Noooooooooo!

Truly, there is no new thing under the Klieg lights.

Feature film, coming Real Soon Now, We Promise: The Man From U.N.C.L.E.!

I've been using the old teevee show to occupy my useless time lately, since someone had a post on potential weaponization of toy airplanes, I mentioned that The Avengers had done that way back when, and someone reminded me that TMFU had also done it once.

Man!  That show has epically bad gun handling!  As in, muzzle discipline and trigger discipline are both less than zero.  And apparently no one on either side has ever had a lesson in basic prisoner-guarding.

The plots are seriously formulaic; the key to the crisis of the week is always some pretty young thing who needs seducing, and you can spot the plot twists a mile away.  (Yes, even in the episodes I never saw before, not just the ones I saw 25 years ago and forgot.)

Then there's the premise.  Let's see, now: Thrush has resources comparable to U.N.C.L.E., which apparently has the backing of many major governments.  U.N.C.L.E. and Thrush both have comprehensive files on each other's secret agents.  Somehow, though, they don't have {arrest | shoot}-on-sight lists, and there's a stable level of low-grade warfare between them.

And Ilya is apparently meant to be a Georgian with a Russian accent* who spent his childhood in Kyiv, except when he's a Gypsy or something.  And the bad guys keep calling him an American.

So the great blockbuster of any-year-now will be based on this totally lame (but entertainingly lame) show.  Think it'll preserve the charming lameness of the original, or just crank up the lameness and lose the charm?

P. S.: Napoleon shot first!

Further: What's the point of having a cool secret headquarters when your enemies know where it is?

And: I just watched "The Double Affair".  The premise requires that Thrush know more about a tippy-top-secret U.N.C.L.E. mission than just about anyone at U.N.C.L.E., which would point to security being seriously bass-ackwards.  And, within the secret mission itself, The August Affair, with all the security pageantry?  No part of that makes any sense whatsoever.  It's comprehensively and fractally nonsensical.

* Georgian is just like Russian, only you say "ялл"** a lot, right?  So the accent should be the same?

** Properly speaking, the я should have an acute accent over it, but I can't find the Unicode for that.

If Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming had a love-child...

Joy discovered Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Netflix.

All rather entertaining, so long as one keeps one's mind firmly turned off.  Sort of a gritty, action-packed-with-extra-subplots take on the traditional English teatime mystery.

Start thinking, and, well:

Sometimes the culprit (or one of them, anyway) is instantly obvious based on dramatic convention and blatant clues.

Many plot devices make no sense at all.  That cornet-mute dart gun is absurd (as in: would not work, for multiple reasons), and, in any case, what happened to the dart?  And: given two lads whose only resemblance is the striped coats they both wear, how is it that one can impersonate the other in jail without anyone noticing that his hair isn't even the right color?

Then there are failures of elimination.  If a hefty murder victim's body is found strung up high above ground level, with no lifting equipment in evidence, and your prime suspects are a skinny dweeb and a little girl, there's something seriously wrong - and no one thinks to mention this.

And, reflecting on the social aspects: Phryne Fisher is the very epitome of a skybox socialist, a wealthy member of the aristocracy who user her wealth and power to indulge her every whim without risk of legal consequences, while conveniently espousing every political cause popular with Progressive scriptwriters of 85 years hence.

Oh, well.  At least she's in Melbourne, so there's enough excess population to have a person or two murdered in her presence* every week.  Miss Marple's murder a week would have wiped out her little village in no time.

* Morse's Law: There's always a 50:50 chance that the man who found the body did the deed.

How could they miss this one?

Seems there's a plan afoot for a sort of BBC Disneyland, in which visitors will be able to experience scenes from favorite shows, or some such.

There are various suggestions presented, and yet somehow The Rimmer Experience is not one of them!

Clearly a failure of imagination

A couple of days ago, I was skimming an article about an experiment intended to determine whether the Universe is merely a hologram, and tried to conjure up "What you mean, merely a hologram?" in, of course, Arnold J. Rimmer's voice.

Somehow, though, the voice I came up with was Sheldon Cooper.

So...

Apparently there hasn't been a Red Dwarf crossover episode of The Big Bang Theory, though Sheldon has a complete set of Red Dwarf on DVD.

This must not stand!

Try this on for size: a sort of reverse-Back To Reality.

We need Wil Wheaton, obviously.  In his Wesley-with-a-beard guise, he slips the regulars a dose of an experimental telepathy drug, causing a group hallucination*.  As they'd just (finally) binge-watched Sheldon's complete set of Red Dwarf, or at least some portion thereof**, they find themselves in an all-new episode....

Sheldon must be Rimmer; he's a perfect match.  This makes Leonard Lister.

Howard has to be the Cat, given how hard he tries.

This leaves Raj as Kryten.  Can you imagine Raj being Kryten?  The personality, the selective mutism: he'll do.

Penny must be Kochanski - the original version, not the parallel-universe one nor Rachael.  This fits perfectly with Leonard being Lister.

 

I'll leave the story-within-a-story to your imagination.  What, you think I'll do everything for you?

 

* Alternatively, they could be tired and slightly drunk, and under the influence of one of his infamous suggestions that such a drug exists.

** Actually, they should only have watched the first few seasons.  Mustn't get far enough along to meet New Kochanski, or it gets confusing.

OK, quick book review

A Sword Into Darkness, by Thomas Mays.

Finished reading it this morning.

Before breakfast.  Which offers some clue as to how hooked I was.

I'd only bought it because ESR's review was intriguing.  Besides, 'twas cheap on Kindle; what had I to lose, apart from four bucks and a bit of my time?

The action commences a decade hence, with a crackpot's warning: the aliens are coming!  And they'll be here in only 33 years!  We need to take action!

It progresses from there in a manner logically consistent with the author's assumptions about the world of the next few decades and with the needs of the storyline.  And the storyline?  Worthy of Doc Smith, only a lot better grounded in plausibility.

Following the tale across the decades from the points of view of view of a few key characters is conventional, but it works.  And, since none of the characters is privy to key information, they're kept guessing almost as much as the reader.  Some of them are larger than life, but none are superhuman.

The mainstream tech of the day is a conservative extrapolation.  The advanced tech, driven by the demands of a fanatical wealthy industrialist:, is fantastic, but not absurd.  Imagine throwing money at many of the things that show promise now; keeping it up for several years, weeding out the losers; and merging the winners.  Plus one necessary MacGuffin.

There's just the right level of predictability: at various points, Clever People Like Me* will have a very good idea (though not a certainty) what just really happened.  But these don't dominate the book.

The aliens' motive for their great journey?  No spoilers here.  It's not one I would have thought of.  Heinlein might have, or George O. Smith.  For that matter, it would have been perfect for early-1970s Doctor Who, and yet somehow the writers never came up with this one.  And yet: once having been revealed, it makes sense.

Some little items are Nivenesque, one explicitly so**.  I expect there are other lurking tributes that I didn't catch.

And that last little twist at the end, well: it opens up vast possibilities.  As ESR suggests: sequel hook, for good or ill.

 

Now for the quibbles.

The book could have used better editing and proofreading.  There are various homophone errors scattered around; a glaringly wrong word choice (I'm not sure what the right word would have been; the expression Mays was reaching for may not actually exist in English); and a distance of 100 nautical miles is a mere 100 kilometers a couple of pages later.  There's also a subplot that I didn't see wrapped up; though there were pretty good hints dropped, I think the resolution disappeared in all the excitement of first contact.

There's a lot of NAVSPEAK in various places; this presumably conveys information compactly to readers with naval backgrounds, but it leaves civilian readers running to Google.

And the energy budgets... well, I'll assume Mays did the math and then swept it under the rug as a story-killer.  It's not as egregious as the Honorverse, let alone the Skylark series, and being wildly optimistic about energy sources is a necessary convention of the genre.

The world of the future looks rather too much like that of today, in my opinion; for one so cynical, Mays seems to be taking the optimistic view that the next few decades will see slow decline on the political and economic fronts, rather than accelerating decline and catastrophic upheaval.  Well... I hope he's right.

There seem to have been some changes to South Bay geography.  A shipbuilding company in Santa Clara?  Dang on-line map doesn't show city boundaries, but: would the ship be launched in Salt Pond A8?

 

Overall, if you're looking for a well-constructed Ripping Yarn that's imaginative and won't insult your intelligence, this is a good read, and Mays is now firmly on my "watch for his next book" list.

Oh, and if the list of quibbles seems longer than the good part?  It's because I can't write much more good stuff about the book without great honkin' spoilers.  And the book deserves not to be spoiled.

 

(Next time I find myself with book-devouring time, I should read Peter Grant's latest.  Time to be checking out more of the new authors.  'Cause Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein are all dead, and Niven's not writing that much anymore.)

 

* Who Talk Loudly In Restaurants.

** Amazingly, one of the characters is a scientist who read sci-fi novels as a kid.  This falls somewhere in the not-so-fine line between the world of that Alien prequel (a large group of smart humans, in the not-too-distant future, none of whom have seen Alien) and that of Fallen Angels (no explanations; if you haven't read it...).

Alien invasion! Why?

OK, so that novel I'm reading: it's A Sword Into Darkness.

Opening premise: an alien spaceship is on the way, and they didn't call ahead.  Their intentions are presumably inimical (else they would have sent radio signals first), and we have only 33 years to respond!

Apparently the aliens' motivations will be revealed later in the book, and will be plausible for their level of technology and the trouble and expense involved in launching such a mission.

But meanwhile, what can I think of?

Well, obviously, they could have discovered that their sun was getting all wibbly-wobbly, and their solar system would soon become uninhabitable.  Having decades to respond, they have time for more than "toss some random baby in a tiny probe and send him off to Earth", and embark on a Strangelovian project of packing their top politicians, mad scientists, and supermodels into an interstellar life-pod.  (Shades of the Golgafrincham "B" Ark!)

Or - and this was inspired by one of the homophone errors that got past the proofreader of this book - it could be some corporation sending a vast shipload of its assets out-system to avoid home-system taxes.

No?  So how about this one: their total civilizational debt has grown to the point where it makes sense to send a hugely expensive expedition across the expanses of space to peddle their government bonds here.

What about: they departed around... oh, never mind.  1937.  I was going to suggest that they were pissed off when I Love Lucy went off the air.  Or My Favorite Martian.  What popular radio show was cancelled in 1916?  (Gotta allow 20 years for the next episode to fail to reach them, and a year for them to build and launch their invasion fleet.)

They're finally getting around to checking on their colony here, left during their long-ago Age of Exploration?

(I understand there are space battles yet to come, so none of the explanations I'm coming up with really fit.  Whatever.  It's fun coming up with them.)

Sometimes, casting the lead role is easy

Seems a local theater company is doing a production of Harvey.

Dunno who's playing the title role, but there's no reason they couldn't use Claude Rains, right?

The effects on technology on adventure stories

You read any adventure yarns set more'n a few years ago, and you start noticing plot aspects that Just Wouldn't Work Today.  Like, no end of situations that only arise because people don't have cellphones.

Well, currently on my Kindle is a tale that involves a terrifyingly difficult effort to reach an inaccessible plateau somewhere in South America.  And I keep wondering: why couldn't someone, back when the expedition was organized, have pulled out his Magic Elf Box and looked up "Zeppelin Rentals"?

Because Zeppelins were a thing in 1912, right?

Update: still on the same book, though now they've just decided to ignore for the moment the impossible task of getting back down from the jungly plateau.  Because, obviously, they can't fabricate a thousand-foot-long rope from indigenous materials.  I guess there'll be some clever solution later on, possibly involving blue clay.  Either that, or they die up there and some later expedition retrieves the narrator's notes.

Now, here's a silly thought

In The Compleat Enchanter (as in other such multiverses), when Harold Shea is transported to a world where some particular form of magic works, any technology he takes along with him becomes inoperative.

What if...

What if that's because Shea is a psychologist, and our world's technology is, to him, magic?

If, say, a metallurgist were transported to one of these magical worlds, would stainless steel work for him?  Would matches work for a chemist?

Story possibilities!  (OK, so maybe it's been done and I haven't encountered it.)

Hm.  Engineering student at university, who's read enough sci-fi to know better, gets involved with eldritch redhead who turns out to be Shea's granddaughter... that idea's been floating around the back of my head for years, and this could add an interesting twist: tech transported across worlds works if and only if it's not magic to the person trying to use it.  Could have implications for a wizard transported to our world: only the spells he truly understands are portable.

...Now I need to find time to re-read those stories and see if this notion fits....

"Murder by Anglophilia"

A phrase for the ages from Richard's Poor Almanac!

And just what is the murder rate in Miss Marple's quiet little village, anyway?