Ted Lewis was the godfather of British crime fiction—Raymond Chandler, Jim Thomson, and Mario Puzo rolled into a single Brit. There have been plenty of others since, but the entire genre in Britain traces back to Lewis. He’s less well known here in the US than in England, perhaps because English noir is so bound up with the particulars of the landscape, argot, and style. Nevertheless, many Americans will know Mike Hodges’ memorable 1971 film adaptation of Lewis’s 1970 novel “Jack’s Return Home” entitled “Get Carter”, starring Michael Caine (The novel was later re-published in 1990 as “Get Carter to match the movie.”)

Even today, fifty years later, the vicious milieu of Guy Ritchie’s films hearkens directly back to Lewis, much as every movie about the Mafia one way or another must acknowledge Mario Puzo, even if only to reject him.

 

Continue reading “The Blues” →

Photo courtesy of http://liberato.org Ricardo Liberato

I recently saw yet another documentary on building the pyramids. Once again, it was all about the age-old question of how they got all those blocks up there. It’s been a favorite subject of archaeologist and crackpot alike since the return of the scholars who went to Egypt with Napoleon’s army in 1798.

These notes take a quick look at how clearly implausible most of the last couple of hundred years of theories are, and how strange is the persistence of variations on the same clearly unworkable strategy, given that simple solutions that would work are fairly obvious, and examples of a better geometry for solving this type of problem are in front of us almost every day.

One such solution is presented.

Continue reading “Work Like an Egyptian” →