Hecate

The Lonely Hour by Christopher Fowler. It's a tad darker than the previous Bryant & May tales. And Running Against The Devil by Rick Wilson. How to prevent Trump grabbing four more years and subsequently establishing a Trumpian dynasty, while hopefully enabling the dems to avoid self immolation by facilitating a Trump victory .

Thoroughly enjoying burning through Project Blue Book. It's everything that The X-Files reboot should have been. Also attempting to catch up with Supernatural before the final season, but the Metatron and angel war storylines are a bit of a hard slog.

Harry's also going to get a few million a year from the Duchy of Cornwall. I'm surprised they lasted this long in the UK. Given what Harry went through after Diana was killed, his relationship with the media was always going to be cool at best, and Morgan, Vine and the rest of the fetid, attention-seeking, click-baiting, narcissistic, amoral arseholes have behaved as appallingly as expected now that their newspapers' promises to be nice to Diana's sons are a distant memory. Can't blame him for wanting to try to protect his wife and child from all that. No that it'll work. They'll move to Canada and be Instagam-friendly, Gwyneth-adjacent influencers and mingle with the rest of the rich and privileged now that they're free of most royal responsibilities. And no doubt the press will pursue and poke at them just as fiercely.

You can have a reformed werewolf sidekick as long as it's within your rules of your universe and doesn't stray too far from your genre. Break those rules and readers/viewers will thud out of their willing suspension of disbelief quicker than you can say 'you've got to be kidding me!' For instance, establish your supernatural universe and have your PI be a warlock in an otherwise mundane and realistic 1980s Sheffield, just don't then set Rackhams on The Moor and have Atkinsons on Fargate. Don't have your scientist work in a proper lab (and so with proper lab rules and expectations), then have it lit by mood lighting and stocked with random bottles, flasks and cylinders of brightly coloured liquids. Look at this nonsense: Another example: I read a tale a while back about a police detective in Edinburgh which was all a bit Frost, a bit Morse, a bit Dalziel and Pascoe. Until the last few pages when it turned out that A DEMON DID IT! You've got to be fecking kidding me!' Thud. I love a good supernatural detective/crime/PI story (Dresden, Merrily Watkins et al), just don't spring one on me in chapter 58 when I think I've been reading Rebus-lite.

Thank you! ❤️ (Blimey, look at all those new emojis. 🐈 🌈 🎈)

The 95 was Walkly - Intake/Elm Tree via West St, Commercial Street, Duke Street and City Road. Here's the 95 chugging up Duke Street in 1967 and 1965. The top of Duke Street is still just about recognisable in the 1965 image, but the snapshot of a 1967 Sheffield is long gone. I last caught the 95 some time in the early 90s, when it was diverted all over the place (coming up from the city via Pond Street and Shrewsbury Road, as I recall) to accommodate the tram works. I hear it's no longer running, which is rather a shame.

You might as well ask why a little old knitter lady runs rings around the police in St Mary Mead; why forensic pathologists, anthropologists and psychologists are risking life and limb to solve crimes too cunning for dim-witted detectives in every crime thriller written in the 90s; why it takes about half a day to turn around DNA tests in said thrillers; or why Charlie Parker might, or perhaps might not, be part fallen angel in John Connolly's excellent private detective series. The Grantchester books and, I presume, the TV programme, are cosy, silly nonsense that you buy into and happily suspend your disbelief because you like the fictional world the author created. They're not meant to be a documentary on 50s police procedure.

Thanks! Time's rattling by at an alarming rate.

I think it's time to say hello again to Alan B'Stard:

Merry Christmas, from Chiron Beta Prime!

... it's cold and there's nothing to do.

Good luck with that. He'll be impeached in the House, with all Republicans and a handful of Democrats voting against, but the chance of a supermajority in the Senate is about the same as aliens blowing up the White House on election day. He, Fox News and Vlad on Facebook et al will use the failure to convict to fire up his base and off we all go merrily into the 2020 vote. I fear the Dems will pick Warren, or someone similarly appealing to the echo chamber social media bubbles, ignoring that in the vastly important battleground purple states a lefty Dem is about as welcome as the tertiary syphilis working its way through Trump's tiny brain. Trump will get his due only when he's voted out. And for that the Dems need to battle not just Trump himself on election day, but their own inability to do the sensible thing, voter suppression, gerrymandering, election interference, and the fetid cesspit of lies and propaganda propagated by the Trump campaign and related malignant cultists and greedy, cynical opportunists. I predict four more years of an unfettered Trump, unless his health takes him out first, and then we'll have Pence. In which case those with a supernatural inclination might get some joy from imagining Trump burning on the everlasting bonfire, or fertilizing daffodils, for the rest of us.

A Warning by Anonymous. Nothing new about the fetid malignant narcissist, with added Republican finger-wagging. Read Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward instead for a similar perspective (though there's a lot of Bannon), or Russian Roulette by David Corn and Michael Isikoff if you want the Russia story (and Collusion by Luke Harding). Just started Crime in Progress: The Secret History of the Trump-Russia Investigation by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. Looking forward to seeing who gets the definitive Ukraine account. Also Hall of Mirrors by Christopher Fowler, and The Black Tower by PD James.

Mood:

A little bit of politics... Additionally: