I'm a lasagna boy!

Innocent Blood

The story in Innocent Blood is gripping and ultimately very sad. One of P D James's few non-formula mystery novels, it begins with a mystery that uncovers a murder already solved and suggests a murder yet to happen; although the actors are all laid out for the reader to see, the tension and thrill build throughout the story.

The sad ending is marred by one of James's typical mentions of sexual peccadillos, but this is overall one of her most impressive works. Although I always enjoy reading the Dalgliesh mysteries (less so the Cordelia Grey stories), they have stock characters and hackneyed concepts that always come down to class or ideological struggles; James's characters are all too often hidebound, predictable, and stiff in their expression. She describes rather than invokes them, which leads to a very prescriptive sort of book: she shoves much of the character detail down our throats, leaving little for interpretation (side note: this edition of Innocent Blood includes a Readers' Guide, with all of two questions. James really does not leave much to the imagination, which is an odd sort of rigidity for a mystery novelist).

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

In this relatively early (1926, a few years after the début of Hercule Poirot and his mustaches in The Mysterious Affair at Styles) novel, Agatha Christie subverts the still-young detective genre with a tour-de-force. She relies on none of the formulaic pieces of conversation that pollute her later books; few of the archetypes, although the bluff military type, Hector Blunt, makes an appearance, as does the secretly-down-on-her-luck young woman in the character of Flora Ackroyd; and none of the infuriating plucked-from-the-air contrivances that mar the later Poirot books. Almost all the clues are apparent, the single piece being a telegram that Poirot dispatches in a way that is invisible to the reader. Re-reading this novel, Agatha Christie's formidable reputation becomes real. I place this next to the A B C Murders and the weird Cards On The Table as her foremost mysteries.

In which we work around

This script is a work-around for Apple Bugs 5296510 and 5296576, which have not
yet been fixed by Apple. This problem only affects certain models of MacBook Pro.
This script downgrades the Apple AirPort drivers and firmware distributed with
Mac OS X 10.4.10 to the ones distributed in 10.4.9

Your model identifier is MacBookPro2,2

You are running Mac OS X, version 10.4.10, build 8R2218



Performing task: check

  You have 4 of 4 parts reverted to 10.4.9

  You have 4 of 4 parts present

  Currently loaded 802.11 and AirPort drivers:

        com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family (153.2)

        com.apple.driver.AirPortAtheros (223.47.4)

  Your WiFi stuff:

      Wireless Card Type: AirPort Extreme  (0x168C, 0x87)

      Wireless Card Locale: USA

      Wireless Card Firmware Version: 1.0.47

      Wireless Channel: 44

See this and this for a little background. The script (output only shown above) was developed by a colleague, and he will release it once wider testing bears out my excited assurances that the dam' thing works!