Pun Salad

• Not much today, sorry. But I wanted to share the cute Christmas card I got from the Reason Foundation. [Click thereon for a glorious full size version, should you need to enhance the fine print on Santa's list.]

  

  Aw, they shouldn't have.

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• Gee, Gerard, don't hold back. Tell us what you really think. Gerard Baker kind of let loose on President Wheezy in his print WSJ column yesterday: Biden Emerges as Progressive Government’s Mr. Bad Example. Key paragraph:

  It’s not too harsh a judgment to say that this is a man who has risen to the top of American public life without a trace of accomplishment. When you’ve been in national politics for almost 50 years, you ought to have achieved something, if only by accident. But this journeyman politician, when he wasn’t getting almost all the big issues wrong, was largely a bystander. He is now a husk of a leader, a dangerously debilitated figure, who oscillates between displays of vacuous incoherence and weird, angry outbursts, like a confused old man at the wrong bus stop.

  Whoa. Whoa. And it goes on:

  Meanwhile, a heartbeat and a spine-chilling cackle away from the presidency, is another living rebuke to the idea that government is virtuous and wise. Vice President Kamala Harris has demonstrated, evidently to the alarm of much of her own staff, that she is simply another of Mr. Biden’s many mistakes—perhaps the biggest one yet. It is a dismaying state of affairs that we must all pray nightly for the continued health of an inept president to avert the calamity of a worse one.

  All so true, of course. But I was still kind of surprised to see it so bluntly expressed in the WSJ.

I read Caroline B. Cooney's Before She Was Helen a few months back and liked it quite a bit. (It was nominated for an Edgar Award, after all.) I said that Ms. Cooney "has a real knack for suspense and humor", and this book confirms that. I like her style, she seems like (to a first approximation) a female Elmore Leonard.

Two protagonists here, Freddy and Laura. They both have relatives in Middletown Memory Care, described on page one as "an institution that was not in fact caring for memories." Instead, it's caring for Alzheimer's patients; Freddy's grandmother is one, and Laura's aunt is another.

Freddy, as it happens, is a pothead, and an artist working in glass. He loves to make beads and bongs. He's also gotten roped into a money-laundering scheme with a guy nicknamed "The Leper", who threatens bodily harm unless Freddy maintains his part. Freddy can't go to the cops due to other relatively minor illegalities he's into, most notably, Social Security fraud; he's living mostly off his late mother's checks. At some point he acquires a dog named "Snaps" (see cover), so-named due to his love of biting people.

In comparison, Laura's relatively normal: just her proclivity toward hoarding large musical instruments. She has an odd proclivity for "smashed brass": bugles, tubas, what have you, "looking as if an elephant had stepped on it."

An additional complication crops up: somebody's murdered one of the more helpless patients at Middletown Memory Care. There are a lot of suspects, and any likely witnesses are in the throes of dementia.

Ms. Cooney does a great job with an intricate plot, and draws her characters with depth and sympathy. I'm a sucker for books that draw you in, keeping you interested in what happens. This has that quality in spades.