popplers

If you need me, me and Neil will be hanging out with the dream king

I'm so psyched— tonight, we're going to see Neil Gaiman at MIT. He is the inaugural speaker for The Julius Schwartz Lecture series, presented by MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. The lecture is sold out, but they are apparently recording it for future DVD release.

Brookline Booksmith. Brookline Booksmith. Brookline Booksmith.

On Wednesday, I raced home from work and drove to Brookline for the second time in a week. Unfortunately, there was lots more traffic this time around. The parking gods smiled upon us and we were rewarded with a parking spot directly in front of Finale. By the time we arrived at Booksmith, there were no seats left, and David Rakoff had already started reading. We stood in the back as he read a few selections from Don't Get Too Comfortable, including a very funny piece about the movie Rent. (Powells.com has an excerpt from Love It or Leave It, and vidlit.com has a multimedia piece that is read by Rakoff.) From Love It or Leave It, wherein our protagonist gives up his Canadian citizenship and becomes an American:

There are about fifty of us waiting for our interviews. Many people are in their best clothes. I wonder if I've adversely affected my chances by having opted for comfort in Levi's and sneakers, but so long as the Russian woman in her early forties is across from me, I have nothing to worry about. She wears painted-on acid-wash jeans, white stilettos, and a tight blouse of sheer leopard-print fabric. The sleeves are designed as a series of irregular tatters clinging to her arms, as if she's just come from tearing the hide off of the back of an actual leopard. A really slutty leopard.

My name is called, and Agent Morales brings me back into her office. From her window I can see the Brooklyn Bridge, hazy under a humid sky the color of a soiled shirt collar. Agent Morales's desk is crowded with small plaster figures of cherubic children holding fishing poles, polka-dot-hankie hobo bundles, small wicker picnic baskets, etc. The walls, however, are almost completely bare. Perhaps it's bureau policy, but all of those typical examples of office humor — that in other work environments might get their own piece of paper, perhaps with Garfield or Dilbert saying them — have all been printed onto the same 8½×11 sheet and listed like bullets in a PowerPoint presentation. There are old standbys like "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it sure helps," along with some gags that are new to me: "Chocolate, coffee, men: some things are just better rich" and "I'm out of estrogen and I have a gun!" — the latter which frankly seems to push the envelope for acceptable discourse in a government office.

While we were there, I also picked up a used copy of Fraud and asked him to sign it. (The line was a lot shorter than at the John Hodgman reading a week ago. We were at Jae's Grill by 8:30, enjoying sushi, pad thai, and a seafood mixed grill topped with a mango salsa-type thing.) More lit fun— Wellesley Booksmith is sponsoring an "Unfortunate Event" on October 16: a double-bill with Lemony Snicket (author) and Brett Helquist (illustrator) in Natick.

Hodgmania!

Our adventure this evening begins in Brookline, a non-fictional town in Massachusetts where John Hodgman grew up. Brookline Booksmith hosts a nifty writers & readers series, featuring authors such as David Rakoff, Annie Liebovitz, Erik Larson, Andy Summers, and, today, the wonderful Mr. Hodgman. It is a beautiful autumn day in New England, and we arrive early. Our punctuality is rewarded with exceedingly good seats. We are in the second row; the first row is reserved for guests of John Hodgman, including his wife, children, and father.

As the multitalented Jonathan Coulton performs what passes for a sound check in these parts, I reach for my camera. The battery is fully charged; I took care of that last night. I check the settings and am about to disable the flash, when I notice (to my horror) that the camera screen is displaying this blinking message: Insert CF card. Nooooo! So, I have no pictures of the event, due to my own stupidity. But rest assured, if I had taken photographs, they would have been fantastic. Through the magic of teh intarw3b, I offer you someone else's photos of the same event. (And also that person's blog posting.)

It was a thoroughly enlightening evening. I learned many things that I never knew before, including the following:

• Before John Hodgman found him and tamed him (and taught him to play the guitar and speak English), Jonathan Coulton was a feral mountain man prowling the wilderness of southern Connecticut.
  
• John Hodgman and Jonathan Coulton were going to produce a Ken Burns-style documentary on Hobo Matters. JoCo would provide the music; the video portion would consist of an extremely slow pan back and forth over a single photograph of a hobo, with Hodgman narrating.
  
• The song Big Rock Candy Mountain was used by hoboes to recruit children into the hobo life for their own nefarious purposes. Also, hobo signs don't always mean what you think they might.
  
• A damp towel can be used as a prism for the purposes of burning holes in paper; or, how silhouettes were created.
  
• Jonathan Coulton has written a song entitled Skullcrusher Mountain, which tells the story of an evil mastermind and his lady love, and genetic experiments gone horribly wrong. I couldn't stop thinking of The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend.
  
• There are so many people in Brookline who want to own a signed copy of The Areas of My Expertise that you will have sufficient time to go out to dinner and return to the bookstore afterward, and John Hodgman will still be signing books.
  
• All joking aside, John Hodgman was patient and personable, and extremely kind. He stayed for a very long time and signed everyone's books, and took the time to pose for photos (for those who were smart enough to bring all of the necessary parts for their cameras). He shook hands and smiled genuinely, and was an all-around nice guy.
  
• The Finale in Brookline is just as decadent and wonderful (and expensive!) as the Finale near the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. (I forgot to name-drop network: fellow alum Paul Conforti ('92) is co-founder. The Rensselaer alumni rag had a nice article in the summer 2006 issue, entitled More Than Just Desserts.)

That is all.

I lost on Jeopardy, baby

September is a great month for Jeopardy! fans. Bob Harris' Prisoner of Trebekistan debuted on the 5th. The Palm ebooks site has an excerpt from chapter 1 of Trebekistan.

I'm standing at the centermost of the three contestant podiums, which are wider and deeper than they look on TV. My feet are teetering on a wooden box, creating the illusion of height for the camera. To a viewer at home, the game board is as near as the screen. But here, it's a faraway wall, the opposite side of a river-blue stage.

Though glowing with color from remote-controlled spotlights, the room is remarkably quiet and still. The black plastic buzzer feels cold in my hand.

I can't see my opponents while we're playing the game, but I can feel their movements, the bodily cues of who's winning and losing: the small changes in posture, the shuffling of feet, the tensing of shoulders. With every response, our voices betray our excitement or calm, confusion or certainty, eagerness or dread. Choices of category and clue reveal personal strengths and confidence. Sometimes, I can even sense someone's breath being held very slightly when they realize—faster than me, far too often—that they know the next response.

Ken Jennings' Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs just came out on Tuesday. (You can read the first chapter of Brainiac on Ken's web site.)

Earl is my old college roommate, and though he's a remarkable six-foot-nine in height, he's one of those giants who hope that by holding their head and shoulders at just the right dejected angle, they may somehow—if not disappear completely—at least give the appearance of being only six-foot-four or six-foot-five. He blinks into the setting sun through the shock of floppy brown hair hanging over his face, a face that bears the perpetually disappointed look of an English foxhound or a Cubs fan.

As I pump gas, we re-enact the ritual of all road-trippers since the days of Jack Kerouac, and try to figure out how we're going to divvy up the trip's costs. Unlike our beatnik freeway forefathers, however, Earl and I are both computer programmers, and we're driving down to Los Angeles not to hear jazz or harvest lettuce or watch the sun set over the Pacific, but to try to land spots on Jeopardy!, America's most popular and most difficult quiz show. Appropriately, geekily, we are squabbling about the most elegant algorithm to calculate and divide up our expenses.

"How about this?" I offer. "There's two of us, so that vastly improves our chances that one of us will make it on the show, right? And, as we know, that person is guaranteed at least a thousand dollars, even if he finishes in third place. So here's what we do: we split all expenses when we get back, but if one of us makes it on the show, that person pays for the other's share of gas and other expenses from this trip."

Earl's brow furrows, suspicious he's being conned.

Ken's doing a book tour and making the rounds on the talk shows to flog his book, but it looks like he's not hitting the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (NYC is as close as he gets).

July Book Club

Most recently read:

• Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City. I read this while up at Twin Trees. I enjoyed it (apparently far more than Poz did), and it has so many elements that I love: Gilded Age! Serial killer! High society! Incredible feats of engineering! Phenomenal meals! World's Fair! This Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review picks [up] on some of the elements that I suspect Poz found irritating. Excerpts are available at randomhouse.com and amazon.com.
  
• Alison Bechdel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Excellent memoir in graphic novel form from the creator of Dykes to Watch Out For. If you don't mind [mostly minor] spoilers, check out the Powells.com review and the NYT review.
  
• Wendy McClure: I'm Not the New Me. This is the first novel/ memoir from the author of The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan. This would have been a good beach read— entertaining, snarky, and low in calories. The Powells.com review is fairly generic, but the SF Chronicle reviewer really liked it.

Still in the queue:

• Christopher Priest: The Prestige. So far, I've brought this to Philadelphia (business trip), Twin Trees, and the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival. I have yet to actually start reading it. But I'd better get cracking— it's being made into a movie with Christopher Nolan (Memento) directing. They've got quite the cast, including David Bowie as Nikolai Tesla (and Andy Serkis as his assistant).
  
• Erik Larson: Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. Because I love all that Into Thin Air/ Perfect Storm/ disaster shit. Currently on order from Minuteman Library Network.

Book Club

Most recently read:

• Connie Willis: To Say Nothing of the Dog. I think that this is the first time that I've read anything by Connie Willis. She's won a huge number of awards (8 Hugos and 6 Nebulas, at last count), and she's very funny (both as a speaker, and in her writing). This is a time-travel story crossed with a Victorian comedy of manners. Unfortunately, I've never read Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog by Jerome K. Jerome, so I felt like I was missing a lot of the subtext. (Note: Three Men in a Boat is available as a free e-text from gutenberg.org.)
  
• Nalo Hopkinson: Skin Folk. I was lucky enough to hear Nalo Hopkinson read at Torcon, and I like the way she writes. A co-worker gave me this collection of short stories; he told me not to bother returning it— it wasn't his thing. Snake is an incredibly creepy horror story, and Fisherman is wonderful— sexy and lush. Some of the stories didn't satisfy me, but the ones that are good are very good.
  
• Wendy McClure: The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan. I don't know that this really qualifies as a "read." If you're a fan of Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food or if you enjoyed Wendy's original candyboots.com web site, check out her book. As she herself puts it: Once upon a time the world was young and the words "mackerel" and "pudding" existed far, far away from one another.

Currently in the midst of:

• Mark Twain: Roughing It. I started reading this after seeing an article in the Travel section of the New York Times entitled, Mark Twain's Hawai'i. (Note: Roughing It is available as a free e-text from gutenberg.org. The Hawai'i section starts with CHAPTER LXII. Bound for the Sandwich Islands.)
  
• Eoin Colfer: The Arctic Incident. I borrowed the first three Artemis Fowl books from Cheryl a few months ago. I enjoyed the first one, and I've been (slowly) making my way through the second one. They're kids' books, but still quite enjoyable, in large part because the author doesn't write down to his audience. And it's delightful to have a child protagonist who is ruthless and Machiavellian. Who says that kids' books have to be all sweetness and light?

In the queue:

• Wendy McClure: I'm Not the New Me. The first novel from the author of The Amazing Mackerel Pudding Plan.
  
• Christopher Priest: The Prestige. On loan from Poz.
  
• Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City. On loan to Poz.

At cross purposes

In preparation for the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, I started reading Marc Romano's Crossworld. (I finished Kitchen Confidential last week (recommended) and haven't yet returned to Tender at the Bone.)

So far, I like it because I'm interested in the subject matter. (You can read the first chapter over at Powells.com.) But I think that Amazon.com reviewer Steve Koss pretty much nails it:

As for the 500-odd participants in the contest, the author blithely assures us that they are mostly introverts, mostly white, scrupulously honest, unhealthily consumed by puzzling, and just all-around nice people. As human insights go, these are remarkably trite. Romano apparently decided he was far more interesting than anyone else at the contest. We learn about his dating habits, his drinking habits, his use of Ativan to calm himself into a semi-hallucinatory state, and an off-base story about how his puzzling skills helped him acquire "a new bedmate." What should have been a fascinating account of crosswording aficionados ends up being mostly the author's stargazing at New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz and navel-gazing over his own skills.

Varjak Paw

Neil Gaiman mentions in passing that "Dave Mckean is going to be directing S.F. Said's lovely Varjak Paw for Hensons." This makes me incredibly happy. 2+ years ago, I was on a business trip in London and went into a bookstore in search of the latest Pratchett novel. While I was there, I found Varjak Paw on a table and bought it on the strength of the first chapter and illustrations alone. It's a lovely little cat story, with certain Watership Down-ish overtones, but very much its own beast. I can't wait to see what Jim Henson's Creature Shop and Dave McKean can cook up together— if it's half as visually interesting as Mirrormask, I won't be disappointed.

p.s. You can read the first chapter over at Powells.com.

At least you wouldn't have to worry about link rot.

The ultimate in vanity publishing: turn your trivial website into a trivial hardcover book for about $30.

Would the best of popplers be a blank book?

More Books about Buildings and Food

This weekend, I finally started Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. I've read a few chapters, and so far I like it more than Comfort Me with Apples (although that really isn't saying much). Tender at the Bone is a memoir, telling the story of Ruth's childhood culinary influences; I've just reached the part where she is sent to a French-speaking boarding school in Montreal. (It actually preceded Comfort Me with Apples— I just happened to read them out-of-order.)

The same person who loaned me Tender at the Bone also loaned me Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Just now, I opened to a random chapter in the middle of the book, read a few pages, and I am hooked. Bourdain on the three types of line cooks: Artists, Exiles, and Mercenaries (those who "do it for cash and do it well"):

Practicing your craft in expert fashion is noble, honorable, and satisfying. And I'll generally take a stand-up mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day. When I hear 'artist', I think of someone who doesn't think it necessary to show up at work on time. More often than not their efforts, convinced as they are of their own genius, are geared more to giving themselves a hard-on than satisfying the great majority of dinner customers. Personally, I'd prefer to eat food that tastes good and is an honest reflection of its ingredients, than a 3-foot-tall caprice constructed from lemon grass, lawn trimmings, coconuts and red curry. You could lose an eye trying to eat that. When a job applicant starts telling me how Pacific Rim-job cuisine turns him on and inspires him, I see trouble coming. Send me another Mexican dishwasher anytime. I can teach him to cook. I can't teach character. Show up at work on time six months in a row and we'll talk about red curry paste and lemon grass. Until then, I have four words for you: 'Shut the fuck up.'

Son of a Witch

The Gregory Maguire article in today's Globe prompted me to check the Harper Collins website to see if he will be doing any readings in the area. Sadly, the Events/ News page has precious little information. I went to The Concord Bookshop and saw that he will be reading TODAY at 3:00 pm. Gotta run!

[…] "There's very little about politics in fantasy worlds," Maguire said. "I thought this will be my contribution to the genre, if possible. Make it political, make it dirty, make it sexy."

Maguire started writing when he was in sixth grade in Albany, N.Y. The middle child in a family of seven kids, he found escape and privacy in his own writing as well as in more famous literary lands.

Narnia, Neverland, Wonderland, Middle Earth. Maguire explored them all. And like the precocious sixth grade fictional character he also read, Harriet the Spy, Maguire documented all of his adventures in a spiraled loose leaf journal -- which he keeps to this day.

"There are ways in which I feel the most fully alive when I'm actually engaged in the most total fabrication of life," Maguire says of slipping into his world of talking animals and colorful landscapes. […]

Another book that you shouldn't read while traveling

I was originally supposed to leave tomorrow for a quick business trip, but now I'm not going. It's probably for the best, since I'm currently reading Flu: The Story Of The Great Influenza Pandemic. Some years ago, I took Richard Preston's The Hot Zone with me on an airplane. Nothing like reading about hemorrhagic fever while you're breathing in the recycled air of the cabin and wondering about the health of your seatmate.

Flu is a gripping read (no pun intended); it's also scary as hell. The 1918 pandemic isn't something you learn about in history class, and I think it's fascinating. What's surprising to me is the huge local connection— Fort Devens and Boston were two of the first places to show signs. (Fort Devens experienced some 100 deaths per day at the height of the epidemic.)

Gregory Maguire news

I can't seem to locate any information about local readings (it looks like the closest he gets will be Vermont in November). But he is touring, reading from, signing, and otherwise promoting his new book, Son of a Witch. I did find a few interesting nuggets:

• A short-ish Boston Globe interview/ article
  
• Synopsis from his Harper Collins web page
  
• Amusing essay on storytelling and kids: When Wolves Sing Mozart
  
• Wicked: the Musical is touring (Boston in April 2006!).

Anansi Boys

On Friday, we went to Cambridge to hear Neil Gaiman read from Anansi Boys. The reading (not surprisingly) was sold out, but I had bought tickets a few months ago. The signing afterward took quite a long while— I had almost finished reading Anansi Boys by the time our turn came up! It's excellent; you can read an excerpt at neilgaiman.com. (Alas, the event only garnered a one-line entry on Neil's journal, but at least he said that it was fun.)

Also entertaining is this interview with Neil and Joss Whedon (although it's sad that Time can't manage to spell Joss's name correctly in the headline).

Undulating balustrades?

I wish that I could have seen the NECCO Factory before its transformation into a Novartis research facility. (Reading Steve Almond's Candyfreak has only increased my fascination with old candy factories.) That said, the new facility sounds pretty nifty:

For the main entrance, an old loading dock was demolished and an addition built that features a sunken winter garden, seating area, and cafe. Exiting at the other side of the lobby, a once-barren stretch of cement that led to the NECCO power plant was rebuilt into a courtyard landscaped with greenery, sculpted stone benches, and tables. Meanwhile, the old power plant was transformed into an amenities building that features a restaurant with striking ice-green, glass-block flooring and a wavy laminated copper half-wall. It also has an 180-seat auditorium with pear wood acoustical panels and blue suede seats.

Bonus Candyfreak rave: Lake Champlain Chocolates' 5-Star Chocolate Bars: available at a store near you. I want to try the Hazelnut and the Fruit & Nut.

Book review time

Well, sometimes Amazon Recommends gets it right. (Of course, the blurb by Neil Gaiman on the back cover didn't hurt, either.) I ordered Craig Thompson's Blankets through inter-library loan a while ago, but wasn't able to pick it up until Tuesday evening. It was so incredibly good that I tore through it (in spite of having no time to read anything anymore) and finished it on Friday night. It's a wonderfully told, beautifully illustrated tale, poignant and sweet and full of truth.

I had also ordered David Sedaris's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, expecting another Me Talk Pretty One Day. I happened to catch him on NPR a few weekends ago, telling a story about his sister, Lisa. His delivery adds to the telling, and I found myself laughing aloud. Reading these same stories, however, I would come to the end and feel a little sad, or unsettled. The first half of the book concerns his relationships with various family members, and each story left me feeling slightly more depressed than the last. Fortunately, mid-way through, the mood lightened. Sedaris is at his best when he balances the surreal and the mundane, the dysfunction with the love. I'm glad that I stuck it out; the latter half was worth the wait.

Made for each other.

I'm not usually a big books-on-tape kind of person. I read pretty fast, and I've never had a long enough commute that books-on-tape particularly appealed. However, I think I have to make an exception for these. Salon reviewed Tim Curry's audio recordings of the Lemony Snicket books, and I'm sold. You can even listen to an MP3 snippet of A Series of Unfortunate Events #10: The Slippery Slope.

The most the average audiobook has to offer is convenience. You can absorb a book on tape or CD while driving, exercising, cleaning the house or doing anything else that requires your eyes to be occupied elsewhere. And the most the average audiobook consumer can hope for is that the recording won't mess with the book too much. A reader who's stilted or stagey, or -- and this is my own pet peeve -- a male reader who adopts a breathy, high-pitched voice for the dialogue of female characters can make the audio version of a good novel unendurable. If you read quickly, even an acceptably performed audiobook can feel like a frustrating slog. Plus, you can't easily flip forward or back in the text, or skim through long passages of landscape description, the way you can with print.

But an audiobook that actually adds to an author's work? That ideal once seemed as remote and fabulous a creature as the unicorn. Or so I thought, until a friend gave me Tim Curry's performance of Lemony Snicket's "A Series of Unfortunate Events #6: The Ersatz Elevator." […]

For those who are already Snicket fans, don't miss Quidditch.com's Incomplete Guide to Lemony Snicket Allusions. Some of them are awfully danged obvious, but others are interesting.

Night Watch

Finished Terry Pratchett's Night Watch earlier today. I've read many of the Discworld series, but certainly not all of them. Plus, it's been long enough since I've read anything by Pratchett that this one seemed even more enjoyable than usual. Forthwith, the worst pun in the entire novel:

He hated the official uniform, but he represented a bit more than just himself these days. Sam Vimes had been able to turn up for meetings with grubby armor, and even Sir Samuel Vimes could generally contrive to find a way to stay in street uniform at all times, but a duke… well, a duke needed a bit of polish. A duke couldn't have the arse hanging out of his trousers when meeting foreign diplomats. Actually, even plain old Sam Vimes never had the arse hanging out of his trousers, either, but no one would have actually started a war if he had.

The plain old Sam Vimes had fought back. He got rid of most of the plumes and the stupid tights, and ended up with a dress uniform that at least looked as though its owner was male. But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armorers had made a new, gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armor. It was gilt by association.

There. Now it only gets better. Go read it. Hurry along.

Also, I'm quite looking forward to Monstrous Regiment (not yet out in paperback, alas). Haven't tried inter-library loan yet.

Pocket full of kryptonite.

I just read Mike Daisey's amusing pseudo-memoir 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com (which has been released in paperback with the more generic title 21 Dog Years : A Cube Dweller's Tale). It's a very funny book, and I found myself reading passages aloud for Chris to laugh at. Some reviewers have taken him to task for giving an inaccurate portrayal of what really happened at Amazon, but I think they're missing the point. I don't think Daisey is casting himself as a dot-com historian-- he's a humorist. And yes, I am sure that some things that take place in the novel are exaggerated or completely made up, but you can get away with that if you're writing fiction. Amusingly, right now the paperback edition is priced at $9.60 on Amazon.com, while the hardcover is available as a "bargain book" for only $4.99. FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25.

I couldn't believe what I had become, how much I had changed, but it's an old story—one of the oldest. It's the delusion of immortality. When you're young, you think that you'll live forever. Hey, check me out, I'm sixteen and I'm bulletproof. This misconception generally fades around twenty-three, when you wake up in a Dumpster naked, covered in garbage, and you realize: Oh, I'm not immortal; Jaegermeister is my kryptonite.

Mirror, Mirror

Gregory Maguire (author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, among other things) has a new book out. It's called Mirror, Mirror and riffs on the Snow White story-- the poisoned apple is Lucrezia Borgia's handiwork. Maguire is going to be doing a reading at the Concord Bookshop on Saturday, November 1st at 3:00 p.m. Chris and I went to a reading last year at the Maynard Public Library (Lost: A Novel had just been published) and he was quite entertaining.

Sick Puppy

Just finished reading Carl Hiaasen's Sick Puppy, a strange little fable set in present-day Florida. Dirty politics, back-door dealings, rhino horns, litterbugs, Labradors and more…

Palmer Stoat was feeling better. He rubbed a hand across the rhino's bristly plated hide and said, "What a magnificent creature."
Durgess thought: If only I had ten bucks for every time I've heard that line.
Stoat produced two thick cigars and offered one to his faithful guide. "Cohibas," Stoat said, "the genuine article." Theatrically he fired up.
Durgess declined. He grimaced at the acrid comingling of fumes, stogie and rhino piss.
Stoat said, "Tell me something, little bwana."
Oh blow me, Durgess almost said.
"How old you figure this animal to be?"
"I ain't too sure."
Stoat said, "She looks to be in her prime."
"Yeah, she does," said Durgess, thinking: Blind, tame, fat and half-senile— a regular killing machine, all right.