Hollywood’s Role in Cybersecurity

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Television and movies may have a role in juicing Americans’ current tepid interest regarding cybersecurity. “When it comes to cybersecurity, getting the public to listen isn’t just a public service, it’s a necessity,” says the online security newsletter The Cipher Brief. A recent summit of its Cyber Initiatives Group included a top US cybersecurity expert and a Hollywood producer with a CIA background to explore this topic.

Why the urgency? Last month, big chunks of the nation’s health care system were booted offline in a pair of ransomware attacks, disrupting health care for millions. In the past few years, there’s been a steady stream of attacks on municipalities, hospitals, and pieces of our basic infrastructure, which Wired magazine calls a “ransomware epidemic.” We’ve read about dangers hackers pose to the electric grid, energy pipelines, water supplies, and many other essentials of daily life. These attacks may seem abstract—that is, until they affect us personally and then, possibly, catastrophically.

As the online organization cyberforpeople believes, “Basic security literacy is absent for the majority of digital citizens,” which is why its mission is to raise cyber literacy—making security issues “much more approachable and understandable by everyone.

The idea of a cybersecurity-Hollywood connection is not new; the site’s list of the eight best cybersecurity movies dates back to 1983’s War Games. Another cybersecurity site, SecureBlitz, has not only a more Hollywood-friendly name, but a list of 25 “best movies,” hardly any of which I’ve seen and I’m interested in this stuff!

If you saw the 2023 Netflix movie, Leave the World Behind, said CypherBrief panelist Col. Candice Frost (Ret.), you saw yet another dimension of cybersecurity. It’s an apocalyptic vision that goes beyond the risks of hacking to explore the impact of actual electronic warfare, driven by capabilities she says are already available.

While it may be desirable to take this issue on as a creative challenge, Hollywood corporations already are active in the cybersecurity arena, when it comes to protecting their own intellectual property and digital assets. They learned from SONY Picture’s bitter experience in a notorious 2014 hacking incident most probably engineered by North Korea.

Also on the CyberBrief program was former CIA analyst and director of Global Intelligence and Risk Analysis for The Walt Disney Company, Rodney Faraon. He believes entertainment media can be a strong driver of the national dialogue. If we want to create a culture that prioritizes information security, “then we have to actually be part of the popular culture.”

The goal here should be two-fold: supporting more authentic scripts focused on cybersecurity, and increasing attention to the information security risks that are part of everyday life, which can be woven into the background of other stories. Such a contextual approach gradually builds wider understanding of this complex and fast-changing issue.

You Are What You Eat

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A recent vacation—a Food & Wine tour of Provence—created a hiatus in the blog posts here, but the trip wasn’t without nuggets of interest to people who like to cook and eat!

The trip included two cooking lessons, one out in the country with an entertaining chef named Yvan Cadiou, who has lived in many countries and picked up tastes and tricks from each of them. Quite a showman, with some television programs in his background. His class was fun and demonstrated a fresh and delicious take on familiar recipes—gazpacho with a melon rather than tomato base, for one. Everyone had the chance to do a little something toward the meal and all were rewarded with a memorable dinner.

The second cooking class took place during a morning, in Avignon’s 160-year-old Les Halles market (pictured), and was conducted by an American chef, John, who’s lived in France for decades. John seemed to know everyone working in the market and was constantly interrupted by their warm greetings. It seemed a very French experience. Cheeses, smoked meats, beautiful cuts of meat, sparkling fresh fish, fragrant breads, irresistible pastry, chocolates, the freshest fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices.

Chef John, being from California, felt it incumbent on him to point out shortcomings in the US food regulatory apparatus. For example, he showed us the labels for French fish and seafood. In the Avignon market, the labels provide the common name of the fish in big letters, then the precise species name, since some fish of different species have the same common name. Then exactly where and when it was caught, farm-raised or wild-caught? I can find out some of this by inquiring at my local seafood market, but it isn’t labelled in a consistent way. This cuts down on fraudulent labeling, an occasional scandal in the US. You think you’re buying one thing, but you’re really getting something else (probably less expensive).

He also said our “free-range eggs” aren’t necessarily so. Buried in the US regulations is the definition of what can be called “free-range,” he said—about an hour a day outside confinement—often an 8.5 x 11” cage—that’s right, the dimensions of a sheet of paper. Here’s a handy article. My grocery store carries eggs that are pasture-raised and certified humane. (Yay!) The yolks are several shades deeper than typical store-bought eggs.

What he said about vanilla would curl your hair. McCormick pure vanilla, the company website says, does come from vanilla beans. (Doesn’t the picture of a vanilla orchid on the box prove it?) Although a very small amount of vanilla in the US comes from “nonplant vanilla flavoring,” as Wikipedia delicately puts it (scroll way down), the thought of beaver glands is enough to start you reading labels with care.

Oh, and our innkeeper made fresh croissants every morning!

Bon apétit!

Photo: Avignon’s Les Halles market by Bradley Griffin; creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

The Innocents by Bridget Walsh

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This is the second in the entertaining historical mystery series Bridget Walsh launched last year with The Tumbling Girl. The stories are set in a somewhat seedy Victorian England music hall called the Variety Palace.

The Innocents takes its title from a mass-casualty event that occurred at Christmastime fourteen years before the main story. In a different theater, subsequently closed, a sold-out audience of children had been promised presents after the show. Actors on stage threw the treats toward the audience in the stalls. Seeing they would never get any of the presents, the children seated upstairs in the balconies and galleries rushed downstairs only to find that the doors into the main auditorium bolted shut against them. In the massive pileup of small bodies, pushing and shoving, many children were injured and one hundred eighty-three suffocated. No one was ever held to account for the tragedy—a bitter pill in the hearts of a great many families.

Minnie Ward, protagonist of the earlier novel and this one, is a skit-writer for the Variety Palace. She is temporarily in charge of the Palace while her boss, Edward Tansford (Tansie) recovers from the tragic events recounted in the earlier book. (While author Walsh makes frequent reference to those events, it isn’t necessary to have read the earlier novel in order to follow the story in this one.) Minnie is again teamed up with former policeman, now private detective, Albert Easterbook. You can’t help but believe that, if the series goes on long enough, those two will finally capitulate to their obvious mutual attraction, but so far Minnie is holding fast. Well, wavering.

Now it’s 1877, and the theater world has experienced a series of recent murders. They hit close to home when one of the Palace’s performers reports his brother missing and asks for Minnie’s help. When Minnie and Albert discover the missing man’s body in his dressing room, the realization gradually takes hold that all of the dead were connected in some way to the Christmastime tragedy. What’s more, all the deaths involved some form of suffocation. With so many people and families affected by the children’s deaths, it’s a challenge for Minnie and Albert to figure out where to begin their investigations.

Tansie reemerges, ready to take the helm of the Palace again but soon distracted again—this time by the disappearance of his monkey, who, he believes, has been snatched by a nefarious character who runs dog fights. Here Walsh gives you a peek at not just the talented and sometimes tony denizens and patrons of the Victorian theater world, but also a look at a decidedly seamy side of London life. Her vivid descriptions of these distinctive settings and the picturesque people they attract add considerably to the charm of the whole narrative.

Of course Albert worries about Minnie’s safety and of course she takes chances she shouldn’t, but in the fast pace of events here, you don’t have time to dwell on her occasional lapses of good sense. Nor do you lose confidence in the basic goodness of the main characters. Flaws and all, they are eminently likeable (even the monkey, who hides in the theater’s rafters and pees on the audience below).

Meanwhile, other complications have arisen. There’s plenty of plot here, engaging characters, a  colorful setting, and a fast pace. If you like to lose yourself in another era with a solid historical mystery, this is one you may really enjoy!

Weekend Movie? Challengers?

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Luca Guadagnino’s new film Challengers has been getting good reviews (trailer). The cast is super: Josh O’Connor, Mike Feist, and Zendaya are the leads. And, if you’re as obsessed with tennis as they are, you may enjoy it more than I did.

The film cuts back and forth from the present, with three aging tennis prodigies. Patrick Zweig (O’Connor) is scruffy and down on his luck or likes to pretend he is—sleeping in his car, cadging meals. Art Donaldson (Faist) is near the top of his game, but faltering, more due to shaky confidence than lack of a serve. Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a former teen tennis star herself, sidelined by a career-ending injury, is Donaldson’s coach—and wife.

The men were best friends from childhood, inseparable, and “complete each other’s sentences” close. They met Duncan about a decade earlier, both starstruck by her beauty and tennis skills. Then the real competition begins. Over the next decade they play her back and forth like a, well, like a tennis ball, and even though she married Donaldson, it’s just possible Zweig still holds first place in her heart.

The movie cuts between scenes set in the current day, when the men are playing a second-rate match in New Rochelle that both are desperate to win. Zweig needs the cash; and Donaldson needs the win to qualify for the US Open. But what they’re really playing for is Duncan. I get that, but these characters aren’t so interesting as to hold my attention for two hours.

All three of them are master manipulators, but at least O’Connor can take the edge off with his sly smile. You see their practices, their various matchups over the years, and a lot of this final match. Walking out, my bottom line was “too much tennis.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 88%; audiences 73%.

An Unexpected Gem: A Fire Museum!

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On Saturdays in Allentown, NJ, the New Jersey Fire Museum and Fallen Firefighters Memorial opens to the public. It may sound a tad remote, but if you’re on the NJ Turnpike (unlucky you) approaching exit 7A, you’re only 4.5 miles away!

It’s a volunteer-run facility, and the time investment and thoughtfulness of the volunteers are evident at every turn. The museum building has an interesting collection of esoterica. You find out how fire alarm boxes work. You find out about “fire grenades” (glass bulbs filled with water or carbon tetrachloride thrown at the base of a presumably small fire. They were outlawed in 1954 not only because of hazardous broken glass, but because burning carbon tet produces phosgene, the deadliest WWI gas). You find out why US firefighters’ helmets have such an unusual shape: the long back brim keeps water from running down inside the firefighters’ collar, and the peaked front, often featuring an animal, can be used to break glass), and much more.

The photo above shows a hand-pumper purchased in 1822 by the Crosswicks (NJ) Fire Department for $100. Damaged at a fire, it was rebuilt in 1850 and still being used in 1922—giving the community more than 100 years of service! The horse-drawn fire wagon pictured below is from 1789, the year George Washington became President. (The flowers seem an unusual touch, though early luxury automobiles sometimes offered bud vases, as did the Volkswagen Beetle, with its blumenvasen.)

A barn adjacent to the museum houses a fantastic collection of mostly vintage fire trucks, mostly restored to dramatic beauty (see more here). Lots of red paint. Clearly a labor of love. Kids (adults too, I suppose) can sit in the driver’s seat. Also there’s a gift shop in the museum. If you’re in the market for a stuffed Dalmatian, you’re at the right place. Another reason kids will enjoy this museum? A roomful of fire trucks and related toys.

The memorial component is woven into mission of the organization. The website includes a list of fallen firefighters, noting nine whose Last Alarm was in 2021, 12 in 2020, and a list of 107 whose service dates back more than 200 years. An area is set aside to honor the 343 firefighters and paramedics killed on 9/11. The memorial itself will be on the Museum grounds, when it’s complete.

Let’s Make English More Efficient!

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Here are a few amazing words from an article a friend in Arizona sent. Bill DeMain compiled this list of single words for Mental Floss that express things and feelings that need a whole sentence (or two) to get across in English. See all 38 here, and prepare to wonder at the universality of human experience!

Boketto (Japanese) – when you gaze vacantly into the distance, thinking of nothing. My cats do that a lot.

Tartle (Scots) – that panicky feeling you have when you must introduce someone and their name has flown right out of your head.

Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – that feeling when you’re expecting someone to show up and you keep checking outside to see whether they’ve arrived.

Greng-jai (Thai) – that feeling when someone wants to do something for you, but you know it would be a problem for them, so you don’t want them to do it. (Too many of us aren’t that considerate.)

Gigil (Filipino) – when you have an irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze something, often accompanied by squealing “soooo CUTE!”

Lagom (Swedish) – when something is neither too much or too little, but exactly right. DeMain asked a pertinent question: “Maybe Goldilocks was Swedish?”

Zeg (Georgian) – the day after tomorrow

This word—actually, it’s more than one word—that I could use daily: L’esprit de l’escalier (French) – literally, stairwell wit—a retort that occurs to you only after you and your conversation partner have gone your separate ways. In my case, it could be L’esprit au milieu de la nuit. 3 a.m., maybe.

And here’s one I thought of myself: Repoussé (French) – appropriately, the word came to me in the middle of the night (some random synapse firing) and I made a correct guess about what it means. Repoussé is a metalworking technique in which the artist hammers on the back side of a piece of metal so that the design appears on the front. These amazing battlefield shell casings from a display at the Arizona Copper Art Museum are an example—probably where I encountered this word I didn’t know I knew.

Savage Ridge by Morgan Greene

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Morgan Greene’s new thriller, Savage Ridge, is named for the tiny Northwest US town where the action takes place. Ten years before the now of the story, three teenage best friends—Nicholas Pips, Emmy Nailer, and Peter Sachs—committed murder. (Not a spoiler; you find this out on page one.) Though they were suspects in the crime, an air-tight alibi set them free. For the last decade, they have been deliberately out of touch with each other, scattered across the western United States. Now, within days of each other, they’ve arrived back at their home town, where the ghosts of the past confront them on every street and around every corner. Coincidence? Not a chance.

The story is told in chapters that alternate then and now—the time of the murder and the current day. And they alternate perspectives—mostly those of Nicholas Pips; the long-time sheriff, Barry Poplar; Ellison Saint John, son of the wealthiest man in the valley and brother of the deceased, Sammy Saint John; and Sloane Yo, a private detective Ellison has hired to reexamine the case. Her first assignment—bring all three of them back—is a success.

Sachs has thrived in his new life away from Savage Ridge, Pips has had a mediocre decade, and Nailer is a mess. None of them escapes the guilt they feel about the murder, no matter how much they reassure each other that it was wholly justified. The crime looms over them like the steep hillsides loom over the town, their pine forests jagged sentinels against the sky, ever watching, and darkening the outlook of the people below. Nor are the three friends exactly the same people they were ten years before and, as the story progresses, the absolute trust they once had in each other is increasingly, dangerously, shaky.

Yo’s investigations reveal Sammy was much disliked by his classmates and had zero friends. He was not the golden boy his father and brother pretend he was, but the product of an entitled, autocratic, abusive man. Now, ten years later, the father is dying, and Ellison desperately hopes that, by pinning the crime on his only suspects—Pips, Nailer, and Sachs—he can gain his father’s respect at last. If it isn’t soon, it will be too late.

The story is an interesting kind of psychological thriller, because of the careful construction of the mental states of the three killers. Their reactions, their jockeying with Yo (who circles ever-closer) and with each other create much of the tension.

Savage Ridge is also a fascinating study of small-town life. Everyone knows everyone else, everyone has felt the overweening power of the Saint John family.

For me, this book was a real page-turner. Although you know all along who committed the crime, the why is unstated for a long time. Meanwhile, the characterizations are so strong, I found myself really invested in the fates of all three of the friends, and Sloane Yo, too.

From One White House to Another

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Herbert Hoover is one of only two US Presidents (John F. Kennedy was the other) who declined to accept pay for that job—a rather thankless one in Hoover’s case. His personal fortune and Quaker values made that choice possible. Was he heir to a life of wealth and privilege? Not at all. He was born in 1874 in the two-room Iowa cottage pictured and lived there with his parents and two siblings.

At age 9, Herb became an orphan, and family members took the children in, eventually sending him to an Uncle in Oregon. He traveled there by train, by himself, at age 11. The uncle was a lumberman, but also ran a Quaker school, which must have been a pretty good one, because, besides learning his uncle’s business, Herb was a member of the first class at the then-new Stanford University (now home of the Hoover Institution).

He studied geology, aiming toward a career as a mining engineer, met his to-be wife Lou (the first woman student in Stanford’s geology department), and eventually worked for a British mining company. Sent to Australia, he discovered a sizeable gold mine, which was the foundation of his personal fortune. He and Lou were living in China when the Boxer rebellion broke out, and she remembered sweeping the brass cartridge cases off the front porch every morning.

Hoover made his name in public service by helping Americans stranded in Europe at the start of World War I, then managing famine relief efforts in Europe after the war (and later after World War II). He relied on his own and others’ volunteerism, and a fundamental tenet of his personal philosophy was that, if you ask people to help, they will. Alas, this worked against him after he became President, just before the start of the Great Depression. Too many people were affected. His conviction that government’s role in relieving poverty should be minimal contributed greatly to his unpopularity, and for many years, the good things he accomplished were overlooked.

Hoover had a lifelong interest in the Boys’ Clubs of America, as Lou did with the Girl Scouts’ organization. I was surprised and glad to learn that there was more than I thought to his legacy; it’s a shame that a career of serving others is obscured by the dark shadow of the early 1930s and a financial catastrophe too big for him to manage.

On our recent Midwest trip, we visited West Branch, Iowa (just east of Iowa City), his boyhood home, where his Presidential Library and Museum are located, along with his birthplace cottage, gravesite, and other late-1800s buildings. Not on the beaten path, but well worth a visit.

Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case by Elsa Drucaroff

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Weary of US politics? How about a peek at the way other countries handle political disputes? Argentina, for example. In this historical “true crime” novel by Argentine novelist and literature professor Elsa Drucaroff, translated from the Spanish by Slava Faybysh, fact and fiction overlap, reinforce, and illuminate each other.

In real life, as in the novel, Rodolfo Walsh was a well-known Argentinian writer of detective fiction and an investigative journalist. His career started in the politically tumultuous 1950s and continued for the two succeeding decades. He joined a militant underground group, the Montoneros, allied with the Peronists (“Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”—that Peron family). The Montoneros appointed him their director of intelligence, and he was adept at ferreting out information to aid their cause. These activities and the militance of his daughter Maria Victoria (Vicki) made them regime targets. Walsh was eventually assassinated in 1977, the day after publishing his famously scathing Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta, criticizing its economic policies.

Drucaroff weaves her novel around these facts and a compelling “what if?” What if, using his skills as a writer of detective stories, Walsh investigated the disappearance of his 26-year-old daughter himself? She, along with four men, were involved in a shoot-out with army troops—tanks and helicopter included—but in Drucaroff’s story, he is tantalized by differing reports of the number of bodies removed from the building and whether the woman involved was still alive when she was taken away. He has to track down the facts.

You can see why Walsh might want to shift his interest away from the Montoneros, who are prone to lengthy debates on Marxist principles (I hadn’t heard the phrase “dialectical materialism” in, I don’t know, decades?), and engage in a little practical action.

There’s danger in the air, and Walsh and his key contacts go about their business in increasing peril. In politically fraught stories, peopled by spies and secret police, you can never be absolutely sure which side a character is on, and Drucaroff has some surprises in store.

Drucaroff writes in a particular style, providing limited visual description. To keep the story moving, she places greater reliance on the significance of interactions among characters and their dialog. And move it does. It’s written in short segments—sometimes only a page or two until the point of view changes. From the early political arguments, where the story stalls a bit, to its acceleration with her cinematic cutting back and forth, the pace soon hurtles toward its dramatic climax.

Not a must-read, but an interesting and memorable look at another corner of the world we hear relatively little about.

Cumberbatch or Brett? Brett or Cumberbatch? Or Rathbone?

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This series of posts about the stories in the recent collection, Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885, edited by Richard T. Ryan, published by Belanger Books, began by asking the story authors—and you, our Facebook friends—which is your favorite on-screen Holmes/Watson duo? I learned two things: Holmes fans have clear favorites, and their views are strongly held!

I started recording your votes on a small notepad and was soon using both sides of the sheet.

Garnering the most fans (about a third of the total) was the classic 36-episode Granada television series (1984-1994) starring Jeremy Brett, with equal votes to the Watsons of first David Burke, then Edward Hardwicke. Of course, fans did note Brett’s deteriorating performance as the series wore on, due to a series of psychological and medical problems.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman also garnered quite a few votes for the BBC Sherlock series—about a quarter of the total. People said they liked the modern energy of these productions, but I was disappointed to learn (thank you, gossip trade) that the two actors actually don’t like each other. Cumberbatch is the better known, of course, but, in a complete aside, if you want to see Freeman in one of my favorite short comedic films, The Voorman Problem, I think you’ll enjoy it.

There were almost as many votes for Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as for Cumberbatch and Freeman. Still, fans couldn’t help but scoff at the poor characterization of Watson. I suspect it wasn’t Bruce’s fault; he was probably hewing to the instructions of the director, who may have feared audiences wouldn’t understand how smart Holmes was without a dim Watson for contrast.

From here, we get into small numbers, five percent of the voting or so, but what’s surprising is how many portrayals loom so memorably in our minds! Downey and Law, Miller and Liu (with lots of pushback on this one. A bridge too far for some), Caine and Kingsley (Without a Clue), Ronald Howard and Howard Marion-Crawford (first American series, 1954), Peter Cushing and André Morell (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1959), Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin (Soviet television, 1979-1986). I’ve never seen most of these—or heard of some of them!

And, finally, some respondents thought “on-screen” portrayals was altogether too limiting a construct and proposed Sir Kenneth Macmillan’s performance of both Holmes and Moriarty in the ballet The Great Detective (1953), or the Clive Merrison and Michael Williams BBC Radio versions (1989-1998), and William Gillette, who portrayed Holmes on stage and in a 1916 silent film. And the very favorite depiction for one Holmes fan was the portrayal created in his own book. No one mentioned the various musical versions, probably for good reason.

Contemporary writers, who, in the case of the anthology mentioned, do adhere closely to the canonical conventions, have enthusiastically created adventures to fill in the time gap in which almost none of Conan Doyle’s stories are set and the hundreds of film, television, radio, stage, and other portrayals of these enduring characters show there are many stories still to be had. Or, as Holmes himself said, “One’s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.” And contemporary writers continue to explore those limits. Enjoy!