Magnum Mania!

ConchRepublican wrote:Finished Song of Kali . . . Dan Simmons always delivers.

Next week Mrs. Conch and I are off to Italy for her birthday celebration. Keeping with my pattern of reading about where I'm visiting, I'm rereading Dan Brown's excellent . . . Angels & Demons. It's our first trip to Italy, we'll be staying in Florence and Rome. The highlight will be visiting the village that my MiL and her siblings were born in back in the day.

Conch, I just read this... wow, sounds like a fantastic trip! If possible, please post pics? Safe travels to you and Mrs. Conch!

Rembrandt's Girl wrote:

ConchRepublican wrote:Finished Song of Kali . . . Dan Simmons always delivers.

Next week Mrs. Conch and I are off to Italy for her birthday celebration. Keeping with my pattern of reading about where I'm visiting, I'm rereading Dan Brown's excellent . . . Angels & Demons. It's our first trip to Italy, we'll be staying in Florence and Rome. The highlight will be visiting the village that my MiL and her siblings were born in back in the day.

Conch, I just read this... wow, sounds like a fantastic trip! If possible, please post pics? Safe travels to you and Mrs. Conch!

Thank you!

For those interested follow flemingo.key on Instagram

My wife and I are reading a series of crime fiction/mystery novels by Lisa Gardner. In one of them entitled Crash and Burn (Copyright 2015) she makes reference to MPI. Two detectives are discussing a case..."This feels more Magnum, P.I. You know. Meet with the undercover investigator in the parking lot of the grocery store to receive the surveillance photos of your cheating spouse. That sort of thing."

This was probably just a perception of MPI or detective shows in general but does anyone know if such a scene actually took place in an episode of MPI??

I don’t recall such a scene actually taking place, but Magnum did take photos like that, so at some point he would’ve had to turn them over to the client. Since he doesn’t have an office, meeting up in a parking lot would be as likely as anything. I don’t think it’s far fetched.

Right now I'm reading "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" by David Grann. I was interested in reading the book because I did a remediation project up in Osage County, around where the murders took place, and I worked with the Osage Nation, since they still own the mineral rights on the land where I was working and needed to pump water into an injection well (and there was an Indian burial ground onsite that we had to be careful of.)

I recently finished "2-second Lean" by Paul Akers, and am now reading "The Bourne Identity" by Robert Ludlum.

Reef monkey wrote:Right now I'm reading "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" by David Grann. I was interested in reading the book because I did a remediation project up in Osage County, around where the murders took place, and I worked with the Osage Nation, since they still own the mineral rights on the land where I was working and needed to pump water into an injection well (and there was an Indian burial ground onsite that we had to be careful of.)

A friend of mine just gave me his copy. It's next on my list. I heard a great review of it on NPR months ago and my friend recommended it highly. The same author wrote The Lost City of Z which was excellent.

Blue Moon. Jack reacher series by Lee Child. I read it in a day. Any fans out there? you should read them. They are fantastic.

I recently started “Midnight in Chernobyl,” by Adam Higginbotham, and it is easily one of the best books I have ever read. I highly recommend it for those of you interested in that disaster.

Limbo wrote:Blue Moon. Jack reacher series by Lee Child. I read it in a day. Any fans out there? you should read them. They are fantastic.

I read a bunch of the Jack Reacher books years ago, haven't read the last few. Lately I haven't been in a reading grove, yet I keep bringing in books to read, not a good combination. :-/

My go to author recently has been John D. MacDonald, I've been trying to catchup on the Travis McGee series, which is very good (and is the inspiration for Jack Reacher).

I also have an interesting little booklet that recently resurfaced E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops".

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/471 ... hine-stops

I believe it has fallen into the public domain and the PDF can be downloaded.

Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide

"In Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, researcher Darmon Richter journeys into the contemporary Exclusion Zone, venturing deeper than any previously published account. While thousands of foreign visitors congregate around a handful of curated sites, beyond the tourist hotspots lies a wild and mysterious land the size of a small country. In the forests of Chernobyl, historic village settlements and Soviet-era utopianism have lain abandoned since the time of the disaster―overshadowed by vast, unearthly megastructures designed to win the Cold War.

"Richter combines photographs of discoveries made during his numerous visits to the Zone with the voices of those who witnessed history―engineers, scientists, police and evacuees. He explores evacuated regions in both Ukraine and Belarus, finding forgotten ghost towns and Soviet monuments lost deep in irradiated forests, gains exclusive access inside the most secure areas of the power plant itself, and joins the “stalkers” of Chernobyl as he sets out on a high-stakes illegal hike to the heart of the Exclusion Zone.

One of the most fascinating books I've ever read. In its 248 pages, the book manages to touch on the historical and even pop cultural aspects of the subject. Well written and beautifully, if starkly, photographed.

When the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster happened on April 26, 1986 I was oddly unmoved by the event for reasons I still cannot explain.

34 years later, in late 2020, I recall there being a Chernobyl craze of sorts. However, I still wasn't especially interested in the topic and watched not a frame of anything on the topic, nor did I read anything related to it until I began obsessing over brutalist architecture and amassing a collection of books on the subject and Soviet history in general (which has fascinated me all my life).

However, as the book itself states, media fascination with Chernobyl is with the event, not with what has transpired afterward. The latter is what fascinates me, though the event with the potential horror of nuclear annihilation is always in the back of my mind. That rabbit hole led me to Chernobyl. I then became fascinated by what happened in Pripyat, Ukraine. Had it not been for a Molchat Doma video for their song "Volny", which features drone footage of the long-ago evacuated Pripyat, my lack of interest in Chernobyl may have continued.

Molchat Doma, "Volny" (Wave):


youtu.be/-6G6AW7oApA

I have been completely fascinated by Chernobyl -- the event, the nuclear power station, and the Exclusion Zone -- since 1986. In the mid-1990s, an excellent photo-journal called Kidd of Speed was released online. A few years ago, I read "Midnight in Chernobyl," one of the best books I have ever read, and today I have that same Stalkers' Guide. One day I want to visit there, and I hope that once the Russia/Ukraine war is over, I will be able to do that.

eagle wrote: ↑Mon Aug 01, 2022 8:14 pm I have been completely fascinated by Chernobyl -- the event, the nuclear power station, and the Exclusion Zone -- since 1986. In the mid-1990s, an excellent photo-journal called Kidd of Speed was released online. A few years ago, I read "Midnight in Chernobyl," one of the best books I have ever read, and today I have that same Stalkers' Guide. One day I want to visit there, and I hope that once the Russia/Ukraine war is over, I will be able to do that.

Belarus fascinates me. There's something about the very look of the place that reminds me of certain things from my (non-nuclear disaster) past.

If only the people of Belarus would rid themselves of their vile dictator...

Pahonu wrote: ↑Sat May 11, 2019 5:08 am

Reef monkey wrote:Right now I'm reading "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" by David Grann. I was interested in reading the book because I did a remediation project up in Osage County, around where the murders took place, and I worked with the Osage Nation, since they still own the mineral rights on the land where I was working and needed to pump water into an injection well (and there was an Indian burial ground onsite that we had to be careful of.)

A friend of mine just gave me his copy. It's next on my list. I heard a great review of it on NPR months ago and my friend recommended it highly. The same author wrote The Lost City of Z which was excellent.

Pahonu,
Since you have doubtless read the book by now, have you seen the movie version of "Killers of the Flower Moon"? And what is your opinion of both?
Just an aside. This writer McCarthy - below - is the reason why so many Lit class students forced to parse and take seriously such profundities are forever turned off of reading -

“Tintin is the protector of the ultimate meaning held irretrievably in reserve; as Derrida would say, he is the avatar of the secret whose possibility guarantees the possibility of literature,
the condition of this secret become visible.
If, as sunflowers know, the secret of philosophy is literature, then what Hergé’s whole oeuvre, in its silent medium, knows but will not allow to be pronounced, is that the secret of literature is Tintin.”
–TOM MCCARTHY

As Bugs Bunny would say - and sunflowers know - "What an embezzle! What an ultramaroon!"

Luther's nephew Dobie wrote: ↑Tue Jan 09, 2024 1:51 am

Pahonu wrote: ↑Sat May 11, 2019 5:08 am

Reef monkey wrote:Right now I'm reading "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI" by David Grann. I was interested in reading the book because I did a remediation project up in Osage County, around where the murders took place, and I worked with the Osage Nation, since they still own the mineral rights on the land where I was working and needed to pump water into an injection well (and there was an Indian burial ground onsite that we had to be careful of.)

A friend of mine just gave me his copy. It's next on my list. I heard a great review of it on NPR months ago and my friend recommended it highly. The same author wrote The Lost City of Z which was excellent.

Pahonu,
Since you have doubtless read the book by now, have you seen the movie version of "Killers of the Flower Moon"? And what is your opinion of both?
Just an aside. This writer McCarthy - below - is the reason why so many Lit class students forced to parse and take seriously such profundities are forever turned off of reading -

“Tintin is the protector of the ultimate meaning held irretrievably in reserve; as Derrida would say, he is the avatar of the secret whose possibility guarantees the possibility of literature,
the condition of this secret become visible.
If, as sunflowers know, the secret of philosophy is literature, then what Hergé’s whole oeuvre, in its silent medium, knows but will not allow to be pronounced, is that the secret of literature is Tintin.”
–TOM MCCARTHY

As Bugs Bunny would say - and sunflowers know - "What an embezzle! What an ultramaroon!"

Hey Dobie,
I did read the book, not long after I got it, and I highly recommend it. To be honest, I haven’t seen the film. The same friend who passed me his copy asked me about going to see it and we both passed when we found out it was nearly four hours! I’m not dismissing the film, but I can’t sit in a theater seat for that long anymore at my age. Sad, but true. When I can record it on DVR in the near future, it will be on my playlist for sure.