Reading Is Fun-damental, and Good For You, Too

by Susan Santangelo

Two weeks ago, Parade Magazine published an article titled, "Sunny Side Up." The sub-head was, "Do you know how to be happy? Take this quiz to find out." Ten questions followed, and Number 5 really grabbed me. "If you're sad, which of the following is most likely to cheer you up? A: Watching reruns of your favorite sitcom; B: Reading a novel; C: Tuning in to the news.

The answer -- drum roll, please -- was B. The article went on to say that people who read often are happier than those who watch TV, according to researchers at the University of Maryland. Even if the novel's plot is depressing.

How about that!

Who Invented the Airplane?

Ask any Brazilian, and you'll be told that this guy did. Alberto Santos-Dumont.was the sixth of eight children, born to a wealthy coffee planter in the state of São Paulo. And, although there is still debate as to whether the Wright Brothers or Santos Dumont should be credited with designing the first heavier-than-air craft, all the experts agree that Alberto designed, built, and flew the first practical dirigibles.  In so doing, became the first person to demonstrate that controlled and routine flight was possible.  And what a routine his was!

In those days, before air traffic control, Santos Dumont used to putter around Paris in his contraptions, gliding along the boulevards at rooftop level and mooring them to convenient hitching posts while he dined, or enjoyed coffee on a terrace, or attended polo matches in the Bois de Boulogne.

On October 19, 1901 a flight he made around the Eiffel Tower emerged in a photograph. That image catapulted him into international prominence.  Young men of fashion began adopting his high collars and the singed Panama hats of which he was so fond. 

Caricatures of him began appearing in magazines throughout the world.

On one occasion he allowed an American lady, Aida de Acosta, to fly his Airship Number Nine while he pedaled along below, on a bicycle, calling out instructions. That was in 1904, six months before the Wright Brothers first powered flight at Kitty Hawk. Aida’s exploit, a round-trip flight between a polo match at Bagatelle and Neuilly St. James lasted one-and-a-half hours. She later recalled that Santos-Dumont enthusiastically called her “la première aero-chauffeuse du monde!" ("the first woman aero-driver in the world!"). 

Her parents were less ecstatic. In fact, they were downright appalled. Aida was only twenty at the time, and they were certain no man would consider marrying a woman who’d done any such thing. They did everything they could to hush it up.

In 1904, during a dinner at Maxim's Restaurant, Santos Dumont complained to his friend Louis Cartier about the difficulty of checking his pocket watch while in flight. He needed, he said, an alternative that would allow him to keep both hands on the controls.

Cartier’s solution was a watch with a leather band, and a small buckle, to be worn on the wrist.  Cartier later expanded the line, still produces it, and you can buy a simple one for as little as seven or eight thousand dollars. It’s still called the Santos Dumont.

But was Alberto Santos Dumont really the man who invented the airplane? Well, that comes down to how you define an airplane.  If you define it as “a powered heavier-than-air machine taking off from an ordinary airstrip with a non-detachable landing gear and under its own power” then he undoubtedly was.

The Wright Brothers flew their early contraption farther, longer, and sooner. But the Flyer, as they called it, had to be launched with a catapult.

Santos Dumont’s 14 Bis, didn’t require one. And his was the first aircraft that fulfilled all of the above specifications. In 1918, (some sources report 1916) Santos Dumont returned to Brazil where he remained for the rest of his life.

In July of 1932, a constitutional revolution broke out and the federal government moved to surpress it. Santos Dumont was reputed to have seen a flight of bombers flying over his home in the seaside resort of Guarujá.

Driven into despair about the destructive use to which aviation was being put, and feeling guilty about his role as a pioneer of flight, he committed suicide by hanging himself.

He never married.

But, at the time of his death, a framed photo of Aida was found on his desk – beside a vase of flowers.

Posted by Leighton Gage

A Little Humor, a Little Romance, A Little Murder

A guest blog by Marja McGraw

I write two mystery series: The Sandi Webster Mysteries and The Bogey Man Mysteries. My logo is “a little humor, a little romance, A Little Murder!” It suits my books. They’re lighter with a little humor, and while there is some romance, there are no sex scenes. They aren’t necessary to my stories, and I’m old school – I’ve always felt like anticipation and imagination are much sexier that reading about it with the details all laid out for me.

Some books have sex thrown in just for shock value. It doesn’t progress the story at all. I’ve also read stories where this element was pertinent to the story. In addition, there are books that don’t have any sex and they’re as entertaining as any story can be. I believe that the anticipation of what’s to come can be very titillating, especially when you fill in the blanks yourself. Think about it. John Doe whispered something in Jane Smith’s ear, and smiling, followed her through a door, pulling it closed behind him. Do you want someone to tell you what happened behind that door? Or would you rather dream up your own scenario? Hmm. All kinds of possibilities there.

I have a friend, Shirley Kennedy, who wanted to write contemporary romances. Well, she wrote a good book and submitted it to a publisher. The publisher was interested, but only if she’d add sexual content. So Shirley sat down in front of her computer and started adding sex scenes. It turned out there was a problem. She suddenly realized that as she wrote this graphic, sensual scene, she couldn’t bring herself to look at the computer screen. She looked up, to the right, to the left, and out the window – anywhere except at the screen. She’d been asked to write something that she wasn’t comfortable with. When she told me this story, I laughed. I could picture the whole thing in my mind. Still wanting to write romances, she changed from Contemporary to Regency romances, where she didn’t have to include sex scenes. By the way, Shirley is a terrific writer and now writes other types of romance stories, too.

The thing is, when I laughed at this story and pictured it in my mind, the woman sitting in front of the computer unexpectedly turned into me. Talk about surprising yourself! I write mysteries, and the stories I write don’t involve graphic sexual encounters. They’re about mysteries and solving crimes. They center around the characters and their growth, and they include some humor.

I won’t knock any author who writes graphic material, because there is a market for it – and some of it is extremely well-written. I simply prefer something entertaining and mysterious. I won’t even try to change any minds here. However, I will add that a young woman approached me after reading my first book and told me two things. First, she said that she never, ever reads anything that doesn’t contain graphic sex. Secondly, she said that it was two weeks after she read the book before she realized there wasn’t any sex in it. Draw your own conclusions.
Take a chance and try reading Bogey Nights – A Bogey Man Mystery, which was released in March of 2011. It will entertain you, even without sexual content.

Jean, thank you for inviting me today. I’ve enjoyed my visit.

Website: http://www.marjamcgraw.com/
Blog: http://blog.marjamcgraw.com/
Buy Link: Amazon http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Marja+McGraw&x=0&y=0

Oak Tree Press http://oaktreebooks.com/Shop%20OTP.htm
Available through your favorite bookstore

Literary Friendships

By Jaden Terrell

I thought I'd share with you an email I got today from Lee Lofland's Writer's Police Academy. Lee's been sending out a lot of interesting and informative posts, and today's was especially notable to me. It's about 11 famous--and infamous--literary friendships. You can read it here.

Some of the famous friendships are J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Percy Bysse Shelly and Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Some of the friendships endured, while others fell prey to personal or professional jealousy. All have something valuable to teach.

When it comes to literary friendships, I've been blessed. Not only have I met many kind and generous online friends (like those of you at Murderous Musings, DorothyL, and Murder Must Advertise), but I've had the long-time support of the Quill and Dagger Writer's Guild. Then there are the friends I've met through Sisters in Crime, SEMWA, MWA and the Music City Romance Writers. Maybe it's the genre--stories I've heard from writers in other genres lead me to think mystery and thriller writers are an exceptionally friendly and supportive bunch, and I've met very few exceptions to this rule.

This is good, because writing is a tough field. Not in the same way being a crab fisherman is tough, but tough in the sense that the opportunities for rejection are limitless. Rejections from agents, poor sales, bad reviews...even if you've written the best book in the history of the world, someone, somewhere will hate it. Don't believe me? Go to Amazon.com and check out the one-star reviews for The Diary of Anne Frank, A Separate Peace, To Kill a Mockingbird, and even the Bible.

This makes the friendship and encouragement of other writers doubly important. It's easy to get caught up in the write-promote-write-promote treadmill and forget to thank all the writers who have helped and continue to help along the way. So, to all of my online and offline writing friends, thanks for everything.

The Dog Days of Summer

by Carola Dunn

As you all know, of course, this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere is known as the Dog Days of Summer. The Ancient Romans--following the Greek idiom, as usual--named the hottest part of the year for the brilliant star, Canis Major, or Sirius, which rose with the sun at that season. Because of the Precession of the Equinoxes (don't ask me what that means; I've never understood it), Sirius no longer rises with the sun in early August, but what the heck...

So, it's the Dog Days. According to a 19th century writer, it's the time "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, Quinto raged in anger, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies." Quinto? Who's he and where does he come into the story?

But talking of dogs and phrensies, it's the time of year when long, lovely evenings invite us outside. In my case, I join friends on the school field behind my house, just to sit on the grass and talk. Oh, friends and dogs, the latter at times definitely phrensied.


This is Maka. She's feeling a bit phrensied because a pair of dogs she doesn't know very well have arrived on the field. She's seeking safety in my lap.

This is a selection of the hordes. Last night we had 11 dogs out there. I find it safest to sit, so I can't be knocked down when they all decide to chase each other. They just run right over me instead. My Trillian is the magnificent tail left front.

And here's a phrensie of love, a big sloppy kiss from Oli. He's Trill's best friend and comes to stay when his mom and dad go away. He loves my books, too:

And so does Maka:


I've never caught Trillian reading my books, though.

Brewing a Controversy

One paragraph in Bill Kirton's post the other day really resonated with me. It went like this:

"I’m wary of creative writing courses. I’m sure there are some brilliant ones, but there are also plenty which indoctrinate their graduates into parroting stuff about shifting points of view, not starting paragraphs with ‘And…’ and all sorts of other things that have little to do with creativity."

I've never taken a course in creative writing, so that part didn't concern me. What did was the part about parroting stuff about shifting points of view, etc. I admit I'm not much of an editor. I read from the viewpoint of a reader. I was a copyreader on a newspaper at one time, so I notice grammar and spelling. But if the story is well told and interesting, so that I can easily understand what's happening, that's a good enough brew for me.

Switching points of view is only a problem to me if it's unclear whose head I'm in. If I'm getting the thoughts of one guy now and another a couple of paragraphs later, I'm getting more into the characters and have no problem following the story.

Reading over some early manuscripts from my fiction writing career, ones that were accepted by agents and got favorable comments from editors (though no sale for one reason or another), I noticed I had yet to be indoctrinated on the blasphemy of point-of-view switching. Yet is was obvious who was speaking and thinking.

Bill's mention of starting a paragraph with "And" is one of many other such non-no's that I disregard. I think where we notice such things is in a story that has a lot of other faults, including protagonists we don't care for, wordiness, lack of a cohesive plot, etc. Some authors user words in a way that makes the writing sing like a ballad. Those are a treat to read. But if the story is competently written and intriguing, I'm just as happy with it.

Okay, let the purists throw me in the witch's cauldron. It wouldn't be the first brew I've ever spoiled (or should I say spoilt?).

Visit me at Mystery Mania

Fraud, Waste, Abuse & Misconduct

by Ben Small

You may have noticed the report issued by the BATFE and Eric Holder a year or so ago that most of the assault weapons captured in Mexico during the cartel wars were smuggled in from the United States.

The report was fraudulent. Not only untrue -- very few weapons captured in Mexico are turned over to the United States for tracking -- but now we learn that the Justice Department and BATFE were actively engaged in assisting gun smuggling throughout the Southwest and into Mexico. Even over the strong objections of their own agents.

The BATFE also made a public announcement last year, carried in newspapers, radio and television that they'd arrested and shut down some gun dealers in Texas and Arizona who'd run 2500 or more assault weapons into Mexico. Yes, the same guys who had contacted the ATF, told them they thought these guns were being smuggled, and were told to let them go.

Needless to say, when charges are dismissed, Justice and the BATFE rarely issue press announcements.

The man pictured above is Kenneth Melson, Acting Director of the BATFE. Melson admits he was instructed to supervise Operation Gunrunner's Fast and Furious program, the operation to smuggle these weapons thought a good idea by the Justice Department. Some BATFE agents who complained against the program were threatened or disciplined.

Now Melson says the Justice Department is stonewalling its own Inspector General investigation into Fast and Furious and that of Congress, which has been investigating the program ever since news of it popped after the murder of Border Agent Brian Terry. At least one of those rifles was used in the fusillade Agent Terry faced.

The official explanation for Operation Gunrunner's Fast and Furious program is that the BATFE and Justice wanted to track these firearms into dirty cartel hands. But they installed no transponders into the stocks, no GPS, no tracking device or mechanism whatsoever, and in fact, no tracking occurred... until Agent Terry's death. Ever since, these weapons have been showing up at Southwestern and Mexican crime scenes. Agents complained, and after Agent Terry's murder, some went public.

Suddenly BATFE and DOJ had a media relations problem.

Could there have been a different agenda, a political one, say, to drum up support for new gun ban laws? Consider that both Eric Holder and Barack Obama are adamant gun-banners, who if they had their way would strip our Second Amendment rights entirely. But these two have had a hard time finding support for their programs, especially after over sixty Democratic Congress members -- including Gabriel Giffords, a gun owner herself -- wrote a letter just after Obama was elected saying they fully support Second Amendment rights. But there's another player here, a treaty up for adoption in the Democratically controlled Senate. The U.N. Small Arms Treaty. Adoption of that treaty would mean an easier road for gun control legislation -- a treaty obligation.

There's also the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing and Trafficking of Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives and Other Related Materials, currently languishing in Congress.

The question naturally arises: Was Operation Gunrunner's Fast and Furious program a political set-up for additional gun control measures? For the life of me, I can't think of any other purpose, given the lack of any tracking at all and the certain knowledge on the part of our leaders, hopefully, that BATFE had no means of tracking them. You don't make decisions knowing they will cost lives without asking about stuff like that.

The fact that the Acting Director of the BATFE, an agency already regarded as the lowest branch of the Justice Department (especially after Ruby Ridge and Waco fiascoes), is pointing his finger at Daddy makes one demand to know who at Justice approved this program. It had a budget of some $25 million. Melson says that number came from DOJ; the money came from DOJ.

Funny thing is, Eric Holder said recently he learned what BATFE was doing on Fast and Furious in March, but he mentioned the program two years ago.

So what is the truth? Who knew about this program and when? These were criminal acts ordered by the BATFE and DOJ, acts that caused how many deaths? Will anyone ever be put under the criminal scope for this? Will anyone be disciplined? Were any MMS officials who forged and submitted false inspection reports on the Horizon oil rig ever criminally punished? They committed fraud and lied to public officials. Look hard; you won't find it. Was anyone even demoted, suspended or fired. Again, you won't find it.

So now, the DOJ, part of the administration that candidate Barack Obama said would be the most transparent ever, is stonewalling any investigation of Operation Gunrunner's Fast and Furious operation.

I went to the Justice Department's Inspector General's website, its hotline especially, where citizens are encouraged to report government waste, fraud, abuse or misconduct either by filling in their form or via email. I tried both relative to Fast and Furious. The form wouldn't let me get past my name and address, and the email address wasn't in service. Don't believe me? You try it.

We need a Special Prosecutor. I doubt anything less will ever answer these questions.