Silent but deadlies

Here's more on auto industry fears about silent hybrid and electric autos that sneak up on you unheard.

And what about us deaf pedestrians? Isn't anybody looking out for us? We can't hear noisy gas-powered cars -- how do you expect us to know when a silent-but-deadly hybrid is almost upon us?

I know what you're going to say: What difference does it make?

And our response is: Hearing folks, get over yourselves. Use the old Mark One Eyeball on that otherwise useless swivel known as your head. That's what we deaf folks do, and it works for us.

When was the last time you heard about a car hitting a deaf pedestrian? Come on, have you ever?

As for blind pedestrians, the National Highway Safety people say that in 2008 the United States suffered 4,700 pedestrian deaths . . . of which 5 were unsighted people. (Not one was killed by a Prius.) Where's the fire?

Finally, for hearing pedestrians, there's the horn button, which has purposes other than allowing drivers to vent their road rage.

In my humble but irascible opinion, soundmakers for silent cars are nothing more than transparent attempts to relieve drivers of their responsibility to stay alert, yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks and keeping a weather eye out for jaywalkers.

Far more lives would be saved if cell phones behind the wheel were banned -- and the ban enforced with substantial fines.

The Nobels and American education

That education of the masses in the United States is in deep, deep trouble is undeniable, and something must be done about it pretty soon before everybody starts dropping out of school and becoming a knuckle-walking right-winger. (Just kidding, Republican friends.)

Still, American education does allow cream to rise to the top. This year, nine of the 12 Nobel Prize winners are U.S.-born and U.S.-educated. That should count for something, if only to show that our educational system is still able to serve very smart people -- and perhaps it can be fixed for the rest of us.

Here's where to stash the vic

Tangled cedar logs on the rocky shore of Lake Superior in Michigan's Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park. (Photo by David Braithwaite)

One of the vital tasks for a mystery writer who bases his settings on reality is to locate good places to hide dead bodies.

In the past I've been able to tramp all over Ontonagon County, the area in the west of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that serves as the basis for my fictional Porcupine County, and find splendid sites to stash stiffs.

But now I'm a gimpy geezer and my mobility is limited. My days of strenuous hiking through the deep wilderness lie in the distant past. What to do, then?

Trust to serendipity.

Last summer the Lady Friend took long power walks west on the Lake Superior shore for exercise, and on one of them she met a retired psychologist named Barbara Braithwaite, who with her husband Dave lives in a house on the beach.

Dave is a park ranger retired from a long career in the nearby Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park -- the Wolverine Mountains in my novels. He is also an accomplished wildlife photographer (his pictures of loons make me gnash my teeth in envy). And, marvel of marvels, he likes to help out mystery writers.

I told Dave of my problem: A serial killer stalks a deer hunter through the snowy December woods to the lake shore, drops him with a single shot, and secretes the body where searchers are unlikely to find it until the spring thaw. I needed a good place for that, not so much to render the setting believable to the expert reader but to be able to describe it in detail. (I'm not that imaginative.)

Dave came up with the perfect site -- deep inside a tangle of cedar logs, piled up as a windbreak by backpacking campers, in the trees hard by a rock outcropping that lines the shore between the mouths of the wild Big Carp and Little Carp Rivers. And he had taken a photograph of it.

Did I say perfect? Before and after the winter freeze, the wild lake would send high waves crashing through the logs, sluicing away clues that would help forensics investigators determine cause of death and deepening the mystery for Sheriff Steve Martinez.

Dave had also photographed the two-bunk wilderness cabin at Mirror Lake in the park's interior, a suitable place for my serial killer to lie in wait until the victim ambled past. The park trusts hunters who rent its cabins to close them up every November 30, and they aren't visited again until February when the rangers snowmobile in to shovel the deep snow off the roofs.

This is all I need to get me off the dime and back to work on Hang Fire. Thanks, Dave.


The two-bunk cabin at Mirror Lake deep in the interior of the Porkies at the end of January. (Photo by David Braithwaite)

'The Lost Symbol' is found . . . wanting

If you are looking for a reason not to buy Dan Brown's latest, The Lost Symbol, all you need to do is read Maureen Dowd's devastating pan in this weekend's New York Times Book Review.

Brown's previous knuckle-dragging potboiler, The Da Vinci Code, persuaded me that he is the reincarnation of another blockbuster-bestselling author, Robert James Waller, the fellow who wrote The Bridges of Madison County (1992) and later spilled several more drums of the literary equivalent of methyl-ethyl bad shit.

Of course Mr. Brown, like Mr. Waller in his day, is keeping the long-ailing book publishing industry alive. Argh.

Electrifying news from Israel

See here.

If this pans out, maybe the Interstate System could power half the United States. Or maybe it's too good to be true . . .

(With thanks to Lew Golan for the heads-up.)

THURSDAY: The Israeli idea, or something like it, is also being promoted in the U.S. See here.

On another matter, the other evening I saw a television documentary (or maybe it was a commercial) on a subject I've forgotten; its most notable feature was a buxom young woman in the background wearing a tight white T-shirt emblazoned "SAVE THE MEMORIES." What was that all about, besides being an enticing pun?

Schott's Vocab, the New York Times blog on language, has the answer.

Arches and Canyonlands

Delicate Arch in Arches National Park (National Park Service photo).

Last week's PBS-Ken Burns series on the U.S. national parks, interminable as it sometimes seemed, has fired up the Lady Friend and me for another trip to see the nation's natural glories.

By Amtrak, of course. We're both rail buffs, and whenever we need to go somewhere and time isn't pressing, we'll take the train.

The two most obvious candidates for a train trip from Chicago to a national park are Glacier Park in Montana (via the Empire Builder over the old Great Northern's High Line) and the Grand Canyon (aboard the Southwest Chief along the old Santa Fe main to Los Angeles). We've done the former three times, the latter once.

So where to go? How about Rocky Mountain National Park (just north of Granby, Colorado, on the route of the California Zephyr over the old Denver & Rio Grande Western line to Salt Lake City)? That would be doable, but the Rockies, grand as they are, have become overly familiar to us. We need something new and different.

Aha! Just off the beaten path are the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks in southeastern Utah, where the naturalist-writer Edward Abbey was once a park ranger and gathered notes for his celebrated Desert Solitaire. We've never seen the world-renowned high desert rock formations of the region, reputed to be heaven for the amateur photographer.

A little research reveals that we could take the California Zephyr (in sleeper, of course) to Denver and through the Rockies to Grand Junction, Colorado, where we'd stay overnight and rent a car for the two-hour road trip southwest along the Colorado River to Moab, Utah. We'd use a bed-and-breakfast in Moab as a base for day trips to the Arches and Canyonlands, driving in, parking, and hiking to the sights.

I'm a short-range hiker (two miles or less) owing to arthritic joints, but both parks feature several easy trails for gimpy geezers like me.

And so I've set to planning the journey, a task that's almost as much fun as actually taking the trip. More later.

Vooks

Can you imagine pulling out your iPod Touch and perusing a novel that, in certain chapters, includes embedded X-rated video passages? Just think of it. You're reading a hot bodice-ripper when, suddenly, the two characters portrayed on the "jacket" magically appear in a window on the screen of your reading device. Before your eyes they hungrily strip off each other's clothes and, grappling in a passionate clinch, fall onto the fourposter . . .

The "vook" -- a hybrid e-book enhanced by video -- is now appearing on the literary stage. According to this story in the New York Times, some authors are delighted by the possibilities of a new means of multi-media storytelling -- and some are appalled.

In my view, this hardly means the death of the printed book -- Mark Twain and Henry James will live forever between covers -- but it does suggest that our reading habits are changing faster than we had imagined.

Many of us are now absorbing most of our text on Kindles or iPods, but that is just a shift from one reading medium to another, from words on a device made of ink and paper to words on a device made of plastic and electronics. With the vook, is the the textual experience itself now changing, engaging a different part of our brains?

Maybe the idea is not so radical as one might think.

We've long had illustrated books in which paintings or photographs enhance the reader's understanding of the text. We've long had moving pictures, simply a different storytelling medium. Now the two familiar media are being melded, in many cases also with sound.

I do think the vook is one big new wave of the literary future, and can hardly wait to "read" one. Here are the first few offerings.