Now This Is Messed Up

This, from the San Francisco Chronicle:

A coffin over 130 years old was found beneath the front porch (of a Ms. Karner) in San Fran recently. It contained the body of a little girl. Authorities figure it's the body of a girl who had been buried with many other people in cemeteries all over the city, but who had been moved in the 1930s to create room for city expansion, or urban sprawl, or overpopulation. Whatever. The point is: this little girl's coffin was left behind and not moved with everyone else in the 1930s. So just put it where all the other bodies had been moved in the 30s, right?

Not so fast:

That nearly century-old mistake presented a big problem in the present for Karner, who told KPIX that she was left without an option by the city for what she could do provide Miranda a final resting place. The city wouldn't claim the remains, because Miranda was properly buried, but it also wouldn't let her rebury the casket, because Karner could not present a death certificate. The result was that Miranda just remained in limbo in the backyard.

"It put us in this position of having this individual in our backyard and feeling awful as a mom knowing this is a small child," she said.

Lucky, Miranda's story is finding its resolution. Garden of Innocence, an organization that facilitates "dignified burials for abandoned and unidentified children," has offered to rebury her casket this summer.

Me, again. (Sorry for the type change, but I can't seem to fix it.) So, two things:

1. The city won't claim the remains because she'd been properly buried? Didn't it claim the remains of the hundreds of bodies moved in the 1930s? Or, why doesn't an enlightened city administrator (If there is one; we lack one here in my neck of the woods.) just use a little common sense, cut through the red tape, and bury the poor girl with her ancestors? Is that too much to ask?!?

2. So we live in a world where we need a charitable organization that pays for "dignified burials for abandoned and unidentified children"?!? Why are these children abandoned and unidentified? People just drop off or leave behind bodies of dead children? Are you @#$% me? And why isn't the city paying for such a thing as well?

Now that's messed up.

A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin

Photo: The book's hardcover edition, from its Wikipedia page.

A gripping continuation of the saga, and--if possible--a bit more  gritty and ghoulish than its predecessors.  (The title refers to the incredible number of mutilated and rotting bodies laying and hanging and floating all over the land.)  But it still envelops you in its web of world-building.
 
Martin continues to embed us in this world, and does so here by focusing more on some of the more minor characters of the other books, as well as a couple of new ones, while also furthering the paths of Cersei, Jaime, Sam, Sansa and Arya.  Brienne of Tarth gets a larger stage than ever before, as does Sandor Clegane, who she killed in the show, but not yet (if at all) in the books.  He reappears with a woman (maybe) under a grey cloak, who may, or may not, be a character somehow brought back from the dead.  You'll have to decide, but I have my doubts--though, in truth, I don't really know what I'm doubting.

Sansa and Arya hide under assumed names--names that they take to heart a bit too much for me at first, to the extent that the chapters are entitled with their adopted names, to the amazement and confusion of all.  The girls even call themselves these fake names in their thoughts, which got to be a little creepy.  You get used to it, but they became just a smidge too Sybil for me.  And it was a little jarring, and a tiny bit confusing, what with all the names already for the reader to deal with.  But I stayed the course.

Gone from the narrative are Tyrien, Jon Snow, and Stannis.  They're around, just not in the book.  The same cannot be said for the Onion Knight, Stannis's Hand (or, for that matter, for Jaime's hand; sorry), who apparently gets killed off-, off-, off-stage.  Just a quick quip from one of the characters--easy to miss in these 900+ pages.  But characters have the tendency to not die, and not just like Beric Dondarrion, who has died, and not, six times now.  But characters also tend to just re-appear, not dead, though other characters, and sometimes the reader, thought they were.  So, again, I have my doubts.

Speaking of Beric Dondarrion, I had to look up his last name to finish one of the sentences above.  I don't mind telling you, there's a large city of names being thrown at you by now in this series, so if you find yourself pausing for a moment after reading about a character, and thinking, "Wait.  Who the hell is this again?", don't feel bad.  What can you expect with literally dozens of names, and two newly fake names, and a handful of new characters, all being thrown at you at the same time?  Don't stop reading because you forgot, for example, Beric's last name.  Keep with it.

The reader will be rewarded at the end, if the reader, like me, was wondering how one of the characters could get away with so much for so long.  Maybe the tide has turned on that.  Speaking of the tides, there's a new group of people to deal with who pray to the god of the sea, a religion founded on the baptismal drowning of its believers.  Sort of.  Anyway, they need a new king, and they get one, kind of.  This takes a long time to happen, and is a bit interesting, and a bit not, at the same time.  This is perhaps my only complaint here.

But the 900+ pages whisked by--no small feat, that.  The book is good enough to throw all this at you, which would be annoying from most books and book series, but is not here.  It has now become addicting, to the extent that I find myself occasionally thinking and speaking like its characters.  I don't look forward to seeing something now, for example.  Now I yearn to set my eyes upon it.  It's become such an addiction that I was dismayed to find that I do not have the fifth in the series, A Dance with Dragons.  I'll have to pick it up soon, once the temps warm up enough outside so that I don't have to worry about my breathe immediately freezing and falling like dead weight upon my foot.  (It's one degree out right now, with a -20 wind chill.  It's so cold I'm losing a fortune in heating, but I'm so glad to be comfy and warm that I don't care.)

Perfect weather for this book, as it's often cold and wet and miserable for all its characters, internally and externally.  Makes me want to drink some warm or hot wine, or maybe some dreamwine, and build a fire until the wind and cold subside.  See?  You get engrossed in that world.  Or, maybe I've read too much and not slept enough.

Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

Photo: Book's cover, from its Wikipedia page.  Great cover!

Very specifically-written account of the murders committed by Dr. Marcel Petoit, of which there may have been 27, or 150, or anything in between, by David King.  In Nazi-occupied Paris, he would advertize his services as a Resistance-fighter, as a man who could get Jews and others out of the country, to Argentina and to freedom.  His orders were to not tell anyone.  To carry as much money as possible, sewn into their clothes.  To remove all identifying tags.  To pack all of their most valuable belongings into two suitcases and to bring them on the day they were to get away.  He'd have them meet him at an address, at an apartment condo affixed with a gas chamber, a scope that allowed him to see the suffering from the gas, or from the poison he might've injected them with.  He became very rich.

The book shows a lot of the Paris of the time, from existentialists Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir (it was cool to hear about them; I studied them while getting my philosophy degree, but I didn't get to learn a lot about their daily lives), to the daily struggles of everyone else at the time, to the way the police department worked in its tug of war with the Nazis in power, to many other things.  Petoit's crimes over so long proved the maxim of the best way to get away with something huge and terrible: To do so in the wide open, because nobody will believe it, and those who do will willfully ignore it.

It covers the trial, which was a farce of the highest order.  In a French trial, the judge, the accused, the prosecution, and any lawyer of any of the other civil defendants can all ask a question, interrupt, and say anything at any time.  So can the judge, and any of the assistant judges he has next to him.  So can any member of the jury.  This, as you may imagine, would create a chaos that I still have trouble understanding.  How anything is proven, or disproven, and judged upon is a mystery.  But Petoit was found guilty, and guillotined.  His last moments exhibit a perhaps-psychotic calm that is also beyond belief.

The subject matter saves the book, in a way, because the author displays a very dry, matter-of-fact writing style that could bore had the subject been more pedestrian.  I had no trouble putting it down, though I did want to continue.  A better job could perhaps be done with all this, though I do understand, perhaps, that the author may have felt such an approach was necessary in order to make sense and order out of all the chaos.  I have not read any of his other work, so I can't say if this is just his style, or not.

Worth a read, though Petoit's manic behavior, and his apparent ability to impress so many very well-educated and otherwise hard to impress people, may turn the reader off a little.  A Jekyll-and-Hyde person, Petoit was both a celebrated and altruistic doctor, and a mass-murderer, serial-killer-for-profit, and perhaps fifty other types of person, all at the same time, and was in and out of institutions frequently.  It was also clear that he worked for the Gestapo, and that he may have started this killing spree getting rid of other Gestapo workers--and then started killing everyone, including Jews desperate to get out of France.

Sickening, yet compulsively readable.

Star Trek Into Darkness

Photo: One of the many movie posters, from its Wikipedia page

I'd been apprehensive about seeing this movie because the first re-boot hadn't overly impressed me.  In fact, I don't actually remember too much of it.  I remember that I'd thought it was okay, but nothing great, nothing memorable.  I'd also thought it was a tiny bit blasphemous, but actual Trekkies were much more concerned about that than I.  I don't remember the Uhura/Spock relationship from the show or from any of the other movies.  Was that created just in the re-boot?  Someone needs to tell me.  As unemotional as Spock had been in the show and in the movies, I couldn't (and still can't) see him in any kind of romantic relationship.  But, whatever.  That's minor, too.  The biggest thing was how bleh I felt about the first one.  Not something I wanted to waste about $23 for two tickets.

But I was wrong.  This time the movie was very well written, very well directed--and just very well-done.  I won't get too much involved in the plot, since such things are secondary in movies like this, anyway.  But the special effects are outstanding.  The acting is good--which you couldn't really say from any of the other films, besides maybe Patrick Stewart, who cannot act badly.  The best actor in this movie plays the bad guy, if you will, and I won't tell you who the character is--and the reviews shouldn't have, either.  (His smile is one of the creepiest in recent memory, and the way he made it a perfect V-formation is super-weird.)  I will tell you, though, that you should see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (that sort of gives it away, doesn't it), or you won't get how great the writing and mirror-image homages are for the last twenty minutes or so of the film.  Many people sitting around me got most of them--including an homage to the famous scene of Shatner / Kirk completely losing his sh*t and having a conniption as he screams, "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!"  This got a huge laugh.  (Those around me thought the movie was much funnier than I did, though I will say that it was pleasantly amusing, even if I never actually laughed out loud like many of them did.)  Remember that these are homages done in reverse here, which was done so well that I didn't even think until much later about how catastrophically bad it could have backfired on the moviemakers (mostly J.J. Abrams) had it not worked.  But it did work, and really, really well.

Having said all this, I have to close by saying that I am more than a bit bothered by the extreme mayhem and death in this movie--all of which was almost blissfully ignored by the main characters.  There was a (rather dim-witted) security guard sucked into space, though he was just doing his job.  Rather innocent dimwits like this guy are often saved in movies like this, by being warned of a problem, or conveniently knocked out, or whatever.  There were a million ways this guy could've been saved.  But there were also hundreds, if not thousands (or maybe even tens of thousands, depending on how populated this very over-populated city and world was) of people who died when hundreds of buildings were destroyed at the end by a crashing spaceship that plowed through an entire metropolis, much like how the Enterprise plowed through the land in one of the Next Generation movies, before the Nexus killed everyone on the planet (for a short time, in an alternate universe).  Anyway, such ignored killing and mayhem makes the whole thing like a silly comic book, which this movie was very seriously trying not to be.  This series is taking itself very seriously, indeed--even with the lines some in the audience found very funny.

So go see this movie, and see it in the theatre because this is certainly a big-screen flick, and marvel at all of the things that I did, and have a (mostly) good time like I did.  And feel free to comment if all of the ignored death and mayhem didn't bother you.  (It's the ignoring of the thousands of deaths that bothered me the most, not that it happened.)  But see Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan to fully appreciate the last twenty minutes or so--and, if possible, take a look at the episode of the series that all the polls say the audience liked the most, "The Trouble with Tribbles."