Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard

Cuba Libre by Elmore Leonard

I picked this up at Powell's City of Books a couple of weeks ago. I was looking for something I could read. I browsed the Science Fiction section for a while, but nothing grabbed me, so I figured I'd pick up a couple of Murder Mysteries from authors I knew. Elmore Leonard usually writes pretty good, hard-boiled murder mysteries. A bunch of shows were based on his books. These four I remember clearly:

• 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
• Jackie Brown (1997)
• Get Shorty (1995)
• TV series Justified (2010—2015)

Morro Castle Havana

Cuba Libre isn't one of them. It's more of a historical adventure story. It opens in 1898 right after the USS Maine got blown up, which triggers the Spanish-American War. It's pretty great. We have heroes, villains, a pretty girl, guns and a sprinkling of factoids that make it seem very real.

Characters:

• Ben Tyler - our hero
• Charlie Burke - Ben's partner
• Roland 'Rollie' Boudreaux - sugar plantation owner, polo player
• Amelia Brown - our girl and Rollie's mistress
• Victor Fuentes - Rollie's factotum
• Novis Crowe - Rollie's bodyguard
• Palenzuela - Havana Chief of Police
• Rudy Calvo - investigator for Palenzuela
• Lorraine - Amelia's friend and the Chief's mistress
• Neely Tucker - reporter page 12
• Paulina Gonzales
• Gomez
• Osma - former slave and slave hunter
• Dr. Henriques - San Lazaro hospital for lepers page 330
• Mary Lou Jones - San Lazaro hospital for lepers page 330
• Tavalera - evil Guardia leader
• Isabela Catolica page 236
• Islero - insurgent general

A number of historical figures are mentioned:

• John J. Crittenden - American patriot
• Clara Barton - founded American Red Cross page 89
• Winston Churchill - junior British military officer page 85
• Evangelina Cisneros - Cuban imprisoned by Spanish authorities page 89
• Charles Crocker - railroad tycoon page 12 (Crooker)
• Richard Harding Davis - reporter page 12
• Frederick Funston - American artillerist page 297
• Calixto García - Cuban General page 85
• Máximo Gómez - Cuban General page 85
• William Randolph Hearst - Newspaper mogul page 87
• Julia Ward Howe - author and social activist page 89
• Fitzhugh Lee - American Army General page 87
• Narcisco Lopez - Cuban patriot
• Charles Dwight Sigsbee - Captain of the USS Maine page 85
• Valeriano Weyler - Spanish General page 87

Here's some pics of stuff that got mentioned:

USS Terror, page 190

Spanish cruiser Vizcaya

The Sims-Dudley Dynamite Gun
Uses compressed air to fire explosive rounds

Chapter 17, page 260, the cowboy and the marine set off to collect a debt from the owner of a sugar cane plantation. Naturally there are guns involved:

Minute of Mae: Spanish Mauser 1893
C&Rsenal

Minute of Mae: U.S. Krag–Jørgensen 1898
C&Rsenal

Minute of Mae: S&W No.3 Russian 3rd Model
C&Rsenal

Page 301. In 1898, trains and horses were the primary means of transportation. Sometimes you carried your horses on a train, which meant you had to raise the horse four feet off of the ground to get into the stock car.  For that you need a ramp:

Soviet Union, South.- Horses being loaded into a train." August 1942

Havana Cuba 1898

Cuba

I was able to find most of the places mentioned in the book. I marked them on a Google Map. The Cluster of blue markers are around Havana, the green ones are around Matanzas and yellow ones have to do with the war.

I wrote a couple of pages of notes about Cuba Straits, a murder mystery set in Cuba. Page 1 here. Page 2 here. And then there's all my other posts about Cuba.

Spectre

When you Accidentally Compromise every CPU on Earth
Daniel Boctor

What he's talking about here is virtual lockpicking. There is something about locks that attracts a certain kind of person, a person who says 'Hah! You think you can keep me out? I will show you. Nothing can keep me out. Your security is worthless!' The Lock Picking Lawyer comes to mind. They are people who like solving puzzles. I like solving puzzles, but I only enjoy working on puzzles that I can solve in short order, like five minutes. Oh, I might spend a couple of hours on a jigsaw puzzle, but that's about my limit.

I sometimes think about wading into computer security, but that is going to take a lot more time, and where's the payoff? Even if you manage to break into a computer system, are you even going to find anything valuable? And valuable to who? And would you trust anyone who sanctions breaking into someone else's computer system? Psychopaths could find ways to entice computer security experts into breaking into other's computers with enticements and challenges, but do you really want to be doing business with psychopaths? Get paid in cash and never tell them where you are. They'll sell you down the river in a heartbeat.

The crux of Spectre is that it can 'trick' the CPU into accessing memory belonging to another process because it is only a 'speculative' access. Another interesting bit is that apparently you can time how long it takes to access a single memory location. A simple way would be by setting a timer before reading memory and reading the timer afterwards, but that would mean locking out interrupts for the duration, and I'm pretty sure nobody but the operating system gets to lockout interrupts. Given that CPUs have gotten a zillion times more complex since I last fiddled with interrupts, there's probably several other ways to do it.

Thermoelectric Generators

Candle-Powered LED Lantern: an Exercise in Conversion Efficiency
Our Own Devices

I was surprised to see the long list of thermoelectric devices (4:54 mark).

The Candle-Powered LED Lantern is available from Amazon:

Candle-Powered LED Lantern

Amazon also has a much cheaper, but similar, device.

I made a Russian type kerosene radio
Syam Nath

qrp.gr has a long page all about the history of thermoelectric generators.

You want electric power in the Arctic? No problem for the Soviets:

The Soviet Union's Deadly Abandoned Nuclear Generators
Andy Mcloone

Update a couple hours later fixed first video.

Blast from the Past

Hyperion: The Fully Reusable SSTO!
Hazegrayart

Hyperion was an idea from 1966. The video is a recent creation.

Golly gee, that looks familiar. A comment clued me in:

When Worlds Collide (1951)- Leaving earth
Razor Shark

I saw this movie when I was a kid and it made a huge impression on me. Didn't see it when it came out, that was the year I was born. Must have been a later release, maybe when the Apollo project was ramping up.

F-15

McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle at Luke AFB

Luke Air Force Base is on the west side of Phoenix, Arizona.

Life and Death

Vikings Season 1 Trailer
Rewatch Again

We've been watching Vikings and while it is a gory bloodfest, it's given me a few things to think about.

Early on Ragnar's 'tribe' makes a pilgrimage to Uppsala where they have a drug and alcohol fueled orgy. Then there is a religious ceremony where they sacrifice (slaughter) a bunch (several dozen) animals and also a group of humans. Now my immediate reaction is that this is barbaric, which is understandable, after all they are heathen / pagan savages, not god-fearing Christians and it is barbaric. Then I think about it a bit and now I wonder if maybe the sacrifice victims were just feeling suicidal and this gave them a socially acceptable means of ending their lives. Now, by our standards they were living pretty miserable lives up there in cold, rocky Norway where farming was a pretty precarious business. You can see how someone whose life has been pretty miserable might get discouraged and take the opportunity to exit this life and join their gods. Shoot, we've got it a heck of a lot better than they did and we have people committing suicide.

Many episodes later there is a scene where they are getting ready for a battle and Bjorn says 'life is on the edge between life and death' or words to that effect. I'm reminded of stories from soldiers about how they never feel more alive than when they are engaged in real combat - where their lives are at serious risk. There was a scene in a movie (Proof of Life) where a couple of guys who know what they are doing break in on meeting between the principal and a group who is angling to be the negotiator in a hostage situation. The two guys come into the meeting armed with assault rifles and run the erstwhile negotiators off. No shots are fired, but now we know that these two guys know what they are going. The face-off is all over and one says to the other 'that was some fun, eh?'

So now I'm thinking that Vikings went on these raids sheerly for the thrill of combat. Sure, they might capture some slaves, and haul off some loot, but I think the slaves were just to pay for the expedition, and the loot, well, they just buried it so they would have plenty of loot in Valhalla. Were they just adrenaline junkies?

Earlier today I was reading Bayou Renaissance Man and he's talking about people who cannot perform the simplest jobs. Whether it is stupidity, or being unwilling or unable to pay attention, the job doesn't get done and sometimes they just make a mess. 

Capitalism depends on people being able to work together towards one goal. Typically, you need one person leading the charge, directing the people. You don't want more than one, too many chefs spoil the soup and all that. If you have a bunch of people who will apply themselves to the leader's goal and can follow directions, you have a chance of reaching your goal.

Now I'm thinking you get a leader who wants to make war on the neighbors, he could make use of the same kind of people to wage an effective war. If there is business going on, the competent people might not be interested in going to war. However, there are always going to be people who are not going to be good employees but who might be thrilled by the prospect of going to war.

Different kinds of people, with different temperaments and different motivations.

Heard a rumor today that someone in Colombia is offering tourist packages to suicidal Japanese. The idea is that life in Japan is too safe and boring, whereas life in Colombia can be fraught with danger.

Lots of people commit suicide. Most I suspect are due to depression. Some may be due to chronic pain. Some drug overdoses are accidental by people suffering chronic pain.

When I was suffering from depression Stu recommended getting a motorcycle and going for a ride. In retrospect I think it was fine advice. I should have taken it. I managed to escape my depression but it took a long time. A couple of years anyway. Maybe ten. I dunno.

Anti-Bike

World's First SCREW-BIKE
James Burton

This is kind of amazing. Amazing that it works, amazing that someone would expend the effort to build this thing. All that 3-D printing must have taken thousands of hours. And all that effort went into building a machine whose sole purpose is to demonstrate that it could be done. Got to give him credit that he was able to make it all work.