Category Archives: The Morgue

Hackers in the Hospital

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Innocent-looking bedside computer!(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

Innocent-looking bedside computer!(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

Seven years after the Vice President Dick Cheney’s cardiac defibrillator was disconnected from the net to protect him from a wireless attack, hospitals have done little-to-nothing about the security problems in a myriad of medical equipment and devices, according to a recent Wired article by Kim Zetter. Worse, they seem unaware of the risks.

The defibrillator problem resurfaced in a 2012 episode of Homeland, but the thriller-writing community has yet to explore the full horror of this catastrophe in waiting. The problem? All the old familiars: hard-coded passwords, simple easily-guessed passwords, problem notification features that can be turned off, and lack of authentication systems. With equipment networked to provide medical records with test and x-ray results, placing false information in the record is comparatively easy. Even if equipment and devices aren’t themselves connected to the internet, the easily hacked internal systems they are connected to may be externally accessible—and certainly internally accessible if one employee responds to a phishing attack.

Additional examples of potentially lethal equipment hacks include: changes to morphine or other drug dosages delivered to patients via drug infusion pumps; adjustments to temperature settings on refrigerators that store blood and drugs; and alterations in electronic medical records.

It might be difficult to target specific patients with such rogue equipment and documentation changes, at present, but “random attacks causing collateral damage would be fairly easy to pull off,” the article reports. Some devices, unique to an individual, such as the implantable defibrillators, are targetable now.

Medical thrillers using these vulnerabilities as plot devices might do an inadvertent public service by sensitizing hospitals and the public to the risks.

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And on Your Bookshelf Are . . . ?

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booksTo write better, read more, advises blogger Mike Hanski, who provides an intriguing infographic showing the bookshelves of prominent people. Is your reading taste more like that of Marilyn Manson or Vladimir Putin? Margaret Thatcher or Bill Clinton? Now you can find out! (Apologies that I cannot show the infographic directly. It becomes too narrow on the page.)

Scanning the fictive shelves of these celebs, I see I’ve generally read 1-2 books on each, but have the most reading in common with Stephen King and Ernest Hemingway (5-6 books each). Two books that appear on multiple shelves are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the Bible. There’s food for thought.

Hanski includes this quote from King: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” And how to cobble together that reading time is explored here.

Hanski makes a strong case for why reading is so important to writers—for both building skills and inspiration.“Can you imagine a musician who does not listen to music?” he asks.

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Have an iOS 7.1 Device?

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Stan Douglas, Circa 1948

Stan Douglas’s exquisitely rendered mystery (photo: docubase.mit.edu)

If you do, you can explore an art project/mystery tale entered in this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Circa 1948 is a 3-D film noir-inspired multimedia project by Canadian Stan Douglas, who set the work—which was meticulously rendered, not photographed—in two post-war Vancouver neighborhoods. The project lets the viewer to pursue the narrative, where “you’re sort of always in the middle.” Unlike a game, there is no externally defined goal; it’s an exploration of the case of a woman falsely accused of murdering her husband. A mystery, like life. It’s getting ***** on the iTunes app store.

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Is “Social Reading” an Oxymoron?

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Christo, New York City

The Gates (photo: the author)

It isn’t enough that people are discovering new ways—and new apps—to facilitate their digital reading, they are starting to explore the messy potential of “social reading,” fundamentally changing what for centuries has been a solitary endeavor—and pleasure.

The variations on this theme are nicely summarized in a taxonomy of social reading activities compiled by Bob Stein here. They range from the post-read book discussions on sites like GoodReads to ebooks with dynamic margins, where you can share annotations, comments, and questions, right alongside the text—commentary-as-you-go. You can see this last in action with a real-life example from a university English class.

Stein is a founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, which aims to influence the shift of printed page to networked screen in a positive direction. (If you check out some of the more obscure links on the Institute’s website the accompanying photo will make sense.)

Some of Stein’s examples in the taxonomy sound kind of interesting, others intrusive. I can imagine feeling differently about how much social interaction I would enjoy and appreciate, depending on the book in question, not to mention the insightfulness of the commentators. For example, I’m sure I’d have benefited from external conversation and commentary while reading Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers. But I wouldn’t have wanted any external voices intruding on my enjoyment of Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk.

In a weird way, the experience reminds me of reading a used book, in which the thrill of discovery is steadily devalued by the coffee stains and greasy crumb-prints of the person who’s been there before. Possibly—no, probably—a someone who is smarter and more perceptive than I.

While some book-scene observers may believe reading is inherently anti-social, it would seem the future of social reading, though still in formation, has appeal as a way for people to, as The Huffington Post says, “start book groups without even leaving their couches.” Which doesn’t sound very social to me.

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Best Mysteries and Thrillers

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book cover

(photo: catalog.lambertvillelibrary.org)

How many of the “best” in mysteries and thrillers have you read? I’ve read about 30 of the Amazon 100 best list, though if I could count the movie versions the number would rise to about 42. No double-counting for both reading From Russia with Love and falling for Sean Connery. Especially note how the cover for Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase could be mistaken for a “Carolyn Keene,” represented in the Amazon list by The Secret of the Old Clock, my very first Nancy Drew.

The compilers seemed to go for the first in a series, like the first Jason Bourne or the first Inspector Gamache, perhaps thinking that a strong beginning will lead people to subsequent books in the series.

We’ve read the statistics about how Americans are reading fewer books. But they still love mysteries and thrillers. Some people are drawn to reading because they can identify with the characters and others because of “that excitement of trying to discover that unknown world,” said author Azar Nafisi. That might be a foreign country, a foreign planet, a foreign psyche. Mystery and thriller readers get both. A protagonist they can identify with and a journey through that foreign world (of crime, of spies).

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Personal Branding Pitfalls

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branding

(photo: farm7.static.flickr Derek Gavey)

Say you’re a Hollywood icon, but business has been a little slow. You need a new brand, an new image. Business cards! Italian designer Behancē has ideas for you! From Nemo’s Sushi Bar, to Rosemary’s Babysitting, they can repackage your celluloid skills into whole new career paths, suggests a Wired article by Angela Watercutter. (Her name itself could be a brand, in whole.)

Branding, like any other good idea taken to extremes, lends itself to parody, and no branch of it more so than the dubious activity of personal branding, with “people turning themselves into web superstars in their niches.” The pro-branding author of this hilarious web post provides personal branding stories for seven individuals. The post confirms that I’m out of the branding zeitgeist because, regrettably, I have never heard of any of them (have you??). Take, for example, Erika Napolitano, about whom the blogger says, “Anybody that refers to her followers as ‘bitches’ deserves my immediate respect.” It’s great to see Americans haven’t lost their ability to laugh at themselves. At least I hope that’s what’s going on.

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Kristen Scott Thomas Week

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Kristin Scott Thomas, movies, Bel Ami, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Kristin Scott Thomas at Cannes (photo: en. wikipedia)

Two KST movies this week—one really awful and one quite fun, and aided considerably by the comparison. Bel Ami (trailer) came to attention via a Netflix preview, with many attributes to recommend it: cast (KST, Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci, and Robert Pattinson), 1880’s Parisian costume drama, based on Guy de Maupassant’s second novel. What could go wrong? So much, really. Not a whit of humor in the whole movie, though there certainly were laughable moments. Not all 130-year-old plots are suitable to modern audiences, and this one is not. Worst was putting Pattinson up as the lover of the three women. His character had nothing to recommend him—he was a journalist who couldn’t write, he was acknowledged by one and all as not very bright, and Pattinson, striking his match against these three strong performers, created no fire. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 28%.

The second movie, missed in the theaters, was Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (trailer), directed by Lasse Hallstrom, and based on a well-received satiric novel by Paul Torday. This has true comedic moments, with every character admitting the unlikelihood of the premise, judging it only “theoretically possible.” Here is a romance of equals, with Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt in the leads, ably supported by Amr Waked. KST plays the press secretary to the British prime minister with gleeful imperiousness. Filmed in Morocco (possibly near their film capital, Ouzazarte, near the southern Atlas Mountains, where I have visited) and glossing over the hydrology challenges of a country with no year-round fresh water, our heroes pluckily plunge ahead to a satisfying, if foreseeable, conclusion. Not enlightening, but entertaining, and never takes itself too seriously. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 67%.

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Hollywood Directors’ WWII Mission

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Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi Party

1934 Nazi Party Congress, Nuremberg (photo: wikimedia.org)

The wartime experiences of five major film directors are recounted in the Mark Harris book, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, which has garnered impressive reviews. The book describes the military contributions of five directors near the top of their careers: Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, George Stevens, and John Huston. David Denby gives a nice summary of Harris’s book in the March 17 New Yorker.

(The pre-war activities of Tinseltown’s studios were pretty bad, according to two widely discussed books last year. The studios held back on films attacking fascism or condemning persecution of the Jews, in order to continue doing business in Germany, according to Ben Urwand in The Collaboration. As a result, “Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at the time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good,” said Dave Kehr in a NYT review of  Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.)

Capra was put in charge of Why We Fight, a series of training films for U.S. recruits, at the request of Gen. George C. Marshall. Capra saw this assignment as a democratic response to Leni Riefenstahl’s inspiring propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, depicting the 1934 Nazi party congress and the aims and ideals of the Third Reich.

The five directors approached their assignments differently, but in every case with impressive results. George Stevens’s documentary approach to recording the post-war liberation of Dachau became two films used at the first Nuremberg Trial.

What the directors produced upon their return home was irrevocably colored and deepened by these experiences, including Ford’s They Were Expendable, as Denby says, “a film suffused with an elegiac melancholy that is unique in American movies”; William Wyler’s The Best Years of our Lives; and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, in its way, the answer to Marshall’s challenge: a vision of a way of life “for which Americans would have gone to war,” says Denby.

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Lay on, Macduff!

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Macbeth, Sargent

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargent (photo: farm2.staticflickr.com)

Word is out that Norwegian thriller writer Jo Nesbø, who writes a mystery series featuring brilliant and unorthodox Oslo police detective Harry Hole, is developing a crime noir, prose retelling of Macbeth. It’s part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project in which noted writers—including Pulitzer-winner Anne Tyler, noted Canadian author Margaret Atwood, and Man Booker prize-winner Howard Jacobson–are reinventing Shakespeare plays “for modern readers.”

It will be hard for Nesbø to top mystery writer David Hewson and Shakespeare scholar A.J. Hartley’s Macbeth: A Novel, which I have endlessly encouraged my friends and readers to immerse themselves in—especially the initial, audiobook version narrated by Alan Cumming. As a person who has listened to several hundred audio books, I can attest that this is one of the Very Best. You’ll never feel the same about Macbeth or those three witches, hereafter.

(The painting of actor Ellen Terry portraying Lady Macbeth is by one of my most revered artists, John Singer Sargent, who painted my favorite painting of all time, at London’s Tate Gallery.)

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Finding Vivian Maier

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Vivian Maier, street photography, Rolleiflex, camera

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Another Netflix possibility, if it’s not playing in your local theater, Finding Vivian Maier, (trailer) is the story of the prolific photo-documentarian whose work came within a hair’s breadth of being lost forever.

According to a Wired story by Doug Bierend, the dedication of the filmmaker, John Maloof, in bringing her story to the public is a tale of equal parts dogged detection and appreciation of the joys of street photography.

A five-star rating from Rotten Tomatoes: 97% of critics liked it! If it’s as good as the documentary of legendary street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, it will be a gem!

Many of Maier’s works can be seen on the Artsy website’s Vivian Maier page.

UPDATE 10-22-14: Good rundown of the increasingly complex copyright claims and counterclaims swirling around Maier’s work in this Jillian Steinhauer article. I wonder how many of the men now vying for rights to her work would have given a nanny with the photography bug the time of day when she was alive?

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