the ubiquitous jack

It seems that every book -- at least the mystery, action thriller, and horror books -- set in Victorian England absolutely must include Jack the Ripper. (Yes, there are a couple of exceptions, but it's a pretty strong trend.)

One unfortunate result is that Victorian historical fiction is almost always set in the last decade or two of the century, when in fact Her Majesty's reign stretched back for twice that long before. What with the industrial revolution on the rise, and trains, the telegraph, and artificial lighting being brand new, the mid 19th century was a happenin' time.

C'mon, authors, there were people in England between Jane Austen and 1888. Some of them must have interesting stories.

WARP: The Reluctant Assassin

First of all, let me say that Eoin Colfer's W.A.R.P.: The Reluctant Assassin is a great read. The author shows his usual mastery of plot and character and evokes general late Victorian London in intriguing, lifelike detail.

I say "general" because he chose to assign the past part of the story an exact year -- 1898 -- a date which doesn't line up with some of the elements. This isn't a minor gaffe, like another book I read awhile back that describes people wearing the latest miracle dye color, mauve, half a decade before mauve was first synthesized.

In this book, an invention stolen from the future and prematurely introduced into the past, the "Farspeak," has more than passing significance. In real history, while the telephone wasn't common in 1898, it had been patented in 1876. Even more egregious, the Old Nichol rookery, an especially bad part of the Bethnal Green slum, is a location crucial to the plot. Bethnal Green was razed in an urban renewal project in 1891, and rebuilt to sturdier and cleaner standards over the next decade.

So why did the author insist on 1898? I suspect it was to realistically accommodate a cameo appearance by Jack the Ripper in the backstory.

Still, the book is definitely worth reading.

a panopticon with some shuttered windows

One of the many problems of the new reality of "ubiquitous" surveillance -- whether it be by the government, businesses, or just nosy people, is how much it leaves out. To the privacy-minded, this might sound like a strength, but in a world where people are judged by the results of such surveillance, it's a glaring weakness.

A recent NPR story discusses the amount of personal information that can be gleaned just by looking at the overall patterns of an email account, even without looking at the content of the emails. Actually, all email can expose is the person's email life. For those who use different emails -- some unconnected to a real name -- for different groups of friends, family, businesses, etc., the method is likely to leave significant holes. Ditto for tracking by social media. For those old fashioned enough to do much of their communicating face to face, or (horrors!) by traditional mail, the hole is bigger still.

curious omission

Try to read ninth volume of The Catholic Encyclopedia at Archive.org, and you come up against the message, "The item is not available due to issues with the item's content." Huh?  What topic from "Laprade"  through "Mass" could be so offensive? Or secret?

It shouldn't be a copyright issue. The entire encyclopedia is in the public domain because of age; this volume was published in 1910. Volume 8 and Volume 10 are both available with no problem.

Of course, the block probably is probably just due to a technical glitch, but imagining some kind of conspiracy is more fun ...

summer reading

'Tis that time of year again -- the summer reading program for children and teens has begun. This year the children's librarians have issued a challenge to the rest of the staff: match the kids by reading 20 children's books over the summer. The idea, of course, is to increase everyone's familiarity with the juvenile collection. This is gonna be fun ...

winter reading program

The Adult Winter Reading Program at my public library is drawing to a close. The core of it is to read eight books from January through March. Officially, anything and everything goes, but I usually restrict myself to counting only YA-length or longer, non-how-to books that I haven't read before.

Here's a rough analysis of what I read:
Traditional paper fiction from the library -- 2
Traditional paper nonfiction from the library -- 2
Traditional paper fiction from my own collection -- 1
Traditional paper nonfiction from my own collection -- 2
Ebooks (fiction) from the library -- 0
Ebooks (nonfiction) from the library -- 0
Ebooks (fiction, free (all hail Project Gutenberg!) ) from my own collection -- 1
Ebooks (nonfiction) from my own collection -- 0

What didn't show up:
several comic books (purchased), some from the library, some my own
a traditional paper fiction book of my own, an old favorite I re-read
a traditional paper nonfiction book of my own I'm in the middle of reading
4 traditional paper language books I'm in the middle of using
3 language books and 2 language audiobooks, borrowed electronically from the library
a fiction ebook (purchased), an old favorite I'm re-reading
2 non-fiction ebooks (free) I'm in the middle of reading

What does this show that would be of use to libraries? Merely that, as of 2013, some digital-immigrant readers are feeding their habit from a variety of sources, public and private, print and electronic.

trust no one

Just narrowly avoided getting sucked into clicking on an evilware link.

No, I was not taking any foolish chances. This thing was embedded in a tweet from a personally known, real-life-friend's real account, the icon of which is a clear picture of that person's real face. The message was not out of character. In fact, it was spot-on in character. I'm aware that links to "a picture of you" is usually a red alert for a scam, but this was from an avid (and quite good, by the way) photographer with a penchant for taking silly candid shots and then teasing friends about them.

Out of habit, I checked the condensed URL with a website which expands shortened ones. It looked weird, and just as I was about to send a message to my friend asking about it, my friend announced that the account had been compromised.

Trojans have gone from the equivalent of a mass-mailout letter bomb, to a letter bomb in an envelope with a friend's printed return address label,  to one with a friend's return address in that friend's handwriting, and a personal in-joke from your junior high school years in the letter.

Sometimes the appropriate response to living in a crazy world is madness, so go ahead and be paranoid. Check every link, no matter who it seems to be from. There are several tools that check the safety of URLS or give the full names of shortened ones. Below are a couple:

Sucuri SiteCheck (free website lookup, but with advertising of company products)

URL X-ray (free)