I thought I was getting an offbeat crime story about the clever theft of millions of dollar worth of nuts that were stolen from various California farI thought I was getting an offbeat crime story about the clever theft of millions of dollar worth of nuts that were stolen from various California farmers via an elaborate scheme in which the legitimate shipping process was used to swipe truckloads of almonds. What I got instead was 4 hours of irritation.
I’ve noted before that the Audible Originals that I’ve listened to aren’t really audio books, they’re podcasts. Apparently the folks at Audible got my memo because Marc Fennell flatly refers to it as “a podcast for Audible Originals” in his introduction. However, while the structure and style are trying to rip off that Serial style it's still delivered in one big chunk so I’m not sure why that intro was repeated multiple times as if these were episodes delivered week to week. Yeah, it has different chapters, but you could do some kind of break indicating that instead of having Fennell reintroduce himself and the show with the full musical theme several times.
Fennell also comes across as incredibly stupid and/or naïve for repeatedly bringing up how amazed he is that anybody would steal nuts. Then when he learns that some kind of organized crime was involved he’s even more shocked. Which then leads to maybe the most idiotic question I’ve ever heard posed: “Does it surprise you that people would want to steal millions of dollars worth of nuts?”
It shouldn’t surprise anybody to hear that people would want to steal millions of dollars worth of ANYTHING. Particularly when it’s an untraceable commodity that could then be quickly turned around and sold for full market value. News flash - Where there's an illegal buck to be made, then you can usually count on some kind of organized crime figures to try and get in on it.
I suspect that Fennell is playing up the Gee-Whiz!-This-Is-Crazy! factor for the podcast, and he uses being an Australian in America to put some extra mustard on it. It also doesn’t help that he hits that same note repeatedly when doing things like freaking out about the guns that some security guards he interviews carry as he does a whole Wow!-America-Is-Crazy! angle. I live here, Fennell, so I’m well aware of it.
My biggest gripe is that this is a perfect example of false advertising. Out of the 4 hours of this, I think there’s probably less than 45 minutes actually talking about the nut heists in detail. Which is too bad because when that’s the focus it’s an interesting account of a complex criminal scheme. Unfortunately, what Fennell really wanted to do was to use that crime story as a Trojan horse to sneak in an audio essay about how our food is grown, transported, marketed, and sold to us.
It shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody who knows anything about capitalism, but it turns out that the whole thing is dependent on big money interests using a variety of low paid workers while destroying the environment to provide overpriced items for a market they created. As a famous quote goes, "I am shocked, SHOCKED to find out there's gambling going on in here!"
And that’s an important story, but it’s not what I signed up for when I clicked on something that said it was going to be about stealing nuts. At this point in the hellish year of 2020 I really wasn’t in the mood to hear yet another example of how everything is fucked. I got Twitter for that....more
I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing because I like podcasts. In fact, I’ve listened to severalThis isn’t really a book. It’s a podcast.
I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing because I like podcasts. In fact, I’ve listened to several hours of them about the Golden State Killer already. The difference is that those I downloaded for free while I used one of my monthly credits for this Audible Original so I’m feeling a little cheated. Plus, I already had read or heard about 99% of the information in here already so calling it 'the untold story' isn't exactly true either.
In fairness, it’s pretty well done as far as giving an account of GSK, and the story of how cold case detective Paul Holes helped identify him by using genealogical DNA information which ultimately led to the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo is fascinating. I could have lived without the spooky musical cues which reminded me of a trashy tabloid TV show, but with multiple interviews of victims, cops, and others involved in the case it does make for a good summary of the whole complicated story. If you don’t know much about it, and you have a spare Audible credit then you could do a lot worse.
However, if you’ve really want to do deeper dive into this terrifying story then I’d highly recommend starting with the late Michelle McNamara’s brilliant book I'll Be Gone in the Dark. (One of the parts I very much liked was Paul Holes emotionally talking about McNamara as he tells the story of how she came to feel like his investigative partner before her untimely death.) The true crime podcast Casefile also did an in-depth multi-part account of the history of GSK before he was caught that is very informative about his crimes. The HLN podcast Unmasking A Killer came out shortly before GSK was arrested, and then it added several episodes about the arrest and what we learned about DeAngelo after that. A lot of the info I heard there first is repeated here.
So again, this isn’t bad, but if you’ve already spent time following this whole case you won’t find out anything you haven’t read or heard before....more
I was reading something about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing recently, and one thing that caught my eye was that apparently over 400,000 peoI was reading something about the 50th anniversary of the moon landing recently, and one thing that caught my eye was that apparently over 400,000 people worked on various projects related to making that happen. I’d say that out of all them, the contribution of John Houbolt may be the most controversial.
Houbolt was an engineer at NASA who became an advocate for Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. In the early days of trying to get to the moon most everyone thought that the way to do it was to either build an enormous rocket that would make the entire round trip or that a ship would have to be assembled in Earth orbit and then sent to the moon. The thing about LOR was that by taking a light landing craft it would save having to get an enormous amount of weight, mostly fuel, to the moon and back. The problem was that it would mean that two spacecraft would have to rendezvous in lunar orbit, and at a time when nobody had docked in Earth orbit yet that seemed extremely dangerous, maybe even impossible.
So when most of the NASA committees and big wigs were trying to make decisions the idea of LOR was usually quickly crossed off the list. However, Houbolt had done an extensive analysis of the numbers, and to him it was clear that LOR was the only way to get to the moon by the deadline John F. Kennedy had set for the country so he started to relentlessly push the idea even when he was dismissed out of hand. Sometimes he was met with outright hostility like when another engineer angrily declared that Houbolt’s numbers were a lie in a meeting with some of the top NASA people.
Although frequently hurt and frustrated, Houbolt refused to take no for an answer and continued to push LOR, and he even risked his job by skipping the chain of command and sending letters and his report to one of the top men in NASA. Eventually the tide turned and LOR was adopted as the strategy to get to the moon. Yet, Houbolt was almost immediately shut out, and many in NASA began downplaying his role. Houbolt would end up leaving the agency just months after the decision was made, and for the rest of his life he’d insist that he hadn’t received the credit he was due.
The counterpoint to that is that Houbolt didn’t create the idea of LOR, he was just a believer who pushed it. So the NASA attitude was often that while Houbolt was an early advocate for LOR that other people were also studying it too, and that the idea was so logical that it surely would have been used even without Houbolt’s efforts.
The other odd factor is that Houbolt did, in fact, receive a lot of recognition. NASA awarded him a commendation at the time, he was interviewed and profiled in the media including Time magazine, he was invited back to NASA to witness the moon landing from Mission Control where Werner von Braun thanked him personally, and his old hometown gave him a parade and named a street after him. Houbolt and his struggle were even briefly depicted in the HBO mini-series From the Earth to the Moon back in 1998 so it’s not like he’d been completely ignored and forgotten. However, Houbolt was eventually denied a large cash award thanks to a NASA executive downplaying his importance so maybe that’s why he seemed to feel like he wasn’t given his due.
Another interesting aspect explored in this is that while LOR was probably the only way that America could have gotten to the moon by 1970, it might have been a mistake for long term space exploration. Some engineers were envisioning a whole orbital infrastructure that would be used to not just go to the moon, but beyond. By doing it the quickest way possible to make an arbitrary deadline NASA may have inadvertently set manned space exploration back by decades.
I very much enjoyed this as an Audible original I got as one of their freebies. There’s not really enough here for an entire non-fiction book, but the 3 ½ hours audio presentation including interviews and historical clips is just about the perfect way to learn about Houbolt and this story. It seems more like listening to a long NPR feature or podcast episode instead of a book, but it’s an intriguing side story for anyone interested in the Apollo landings....more
What if anyone who gets murdered returned alive almost instantly? That sounds like an improvement for humanity, but just think about what it would do What if anyone who gets murdered returned alive almost instantly? That sounds like an improvement for humanity, but just think about what it would do to Netflix’s stock price if new true crime documentaries were no longer a thing.
That’s the big idea here. For an unknown reason the nature of death changes one day. If someone is killed by another person their corpse vanishes, and they appear unharmed back in their homes. Only deaths from natural causes or accidents are permanent with only one in one thousand victims of violence not returning. Not only does this guarantee that the homicide rate drops to zero, it also offers opportunities for do-overs. Like if someone is getting surgery and they’re about to expire on the table, you could kill them instead, and then they’d reappear in the same shape they were just a few hours earlier. You aren’t fixing any long term health issues, but you could give doctors a second chance or save someone who was just in a car accident.
That’s where Tony Valdez comes in. He’s a government approved Dispatcher who is authorized to terminate people about to die so that they’ll return. A lot of people find what he does creepy or immoral since he has technically murdered over a thousand people, but Tony looks on it as saving lives, not taking them. However, when another Dispatcher vanishes, and there are signs of foul play Tony ends up reluctantly helping a detective by showing her some of the shady underground ways Dispatching is used.
This is a really intriguing concept, but unfortunately it was John Scalzi who came up with it. I’ve liked some of his books and generally think he’s entertaining, but the reason I stopped reading his stuff is that he relies almost exclusively on dialogue with almost no descriptions or deep dives into the sci-fi concepts he comes up with. This is a prime example because this is a pretty cool premise that opens up a whole bunch of potential storylines, and you could go crazy deep with some of them.
However, rather than sit down and really dig into that Scalzi is content to just toss together a quickie mystery that only hints at the bigger implications of what this would mean for the world. Yeah, he gives a few glimpses of it, but it’s mostly just relayed from Tony to the detective in exposition. There’s only a tiny bit of acknowledgement paied to how this would be a massive game changer in terms of religion, philosophy, and science.
Still, as a free Audible Original read by Zachery Quinto, it’s a fun two-hour listen. I just wish that a writer willing and capable of really making a meal out of this idea had come up with it....more
Loading...
