Carter Beats the Devil

The one-and-only richardabecker kindly sent me this book some weeks back, and I finally got around to it. Set primarily in 1920's San Francisco, the book takes Carter the Great, the death of President Harding, and a somewhat silly MacGuffin, and mooshes them into a pulpy action-mystery with stage magic, escape artistry, Feds, thugs, pirates and a thousand elephants (well, one or two).
Definitely a fun book, and lots of interesting detail on the stage magic of the day. The MacGuffininess of the MacGuffin and some of the other elements of the uberplot are a little hard to swallow, but if you leap into it with two pulpy fists swinging, err... eyes reading? then that won't bother you too much.
Makes a good fictional counterpart to Hiding the Elephant, which I adored.

(no subject)

Oh, and I kicked ass at the office football pool this week. I picked 13 of 14 games. If the spread made each choice 50/50, then the probability of doing that at random is 0.0854492188%.

LA-area Costume-y peeps

The LA Opera is selling costumes on Saturday:

"Pieces for sale will include everything ranging from complete “merry peasant” and “medieval courtier” costumes to individual pieces such as capes, hats, shoes and fans."

Introduce little kids to Dracula and Lovecraft

I seem to be posting like crazy today, but this one's at least in a good cause. I've updated my DonorsChoose list of projects to aid classrooms:

Check it out.

The "Classic Graphic Novels for Middle School Students" project looks more like they'll sit on a shelf rather than be part of the curriculum, but it would put two copies of "Graphic Classics, Volume 10: Horror Classics Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith" within a few feet of small children!

Other projects put Bram Stoker, HG Wells, or Greek mythology in the classrooms. Art boards for sketching downtown LA, croquet sets for physics... I can satisfy all your giving needs. Or if I can't, you can search the site for projects you like even more.