Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Our Resistors Are Made By Holmes Ohms

2023-Dec-29

A somewhat shocking reminder of the development time spent on this big refactoring project occurred to me recently. Work had moved over to the ‘track_catalog’ table in the Sqlite3 database, putting the focus on the back end. No back-end jobs had been written to handle the update of new tracks to be added to the ‘track_cat’ Flask model, which also had to be created. Decent progress had been absolutely halted when trying to capture the right order in which the updates needed to be made. October 10 was when I made a very crude notebook that handled migrating the first wave of tracks to be entered into the ‘track_catalog’ table. Perhaps if I start to pick the right religion and start praying proficiently to it, I could get the v3.1 refactoring done before the three month mark in a couple weeks.

Oh well. I like messing around with the front-end stuff I made for the art_cat. I bet I can slap something similar with the track_cat in less time.

Another novel for the review on the fredlambuth.com blog: Slam the Big Door by John D. MacDonald. A 200ish page noir romp on a Florida key in the late 1950s, when the land was raw for rapid development to accommodate an influx of non-Floridians. This is my third novel from this author, who is most famous for a series of novels involving a sharp-witted middle aged white guy that pokes around his friend’s noir-ish problems that need a noir-ish kind of guy to handle it for them. This novel does not feature Travis McGee, but the protagonist fits his mold. This time the wise guy noirish friend intervening into noirish circles on behalf of his swell friends is an ex-newspaperman helping a PTSD afflicted buddy who has gotten overwhelmed with a land development project in south Florida.

I applaud MacDonald for pushing right into the story on page one. Although it takes a little bit of searching in the first few pages to find the real meaning of what the author is trying to convey in his often slick stylish language, I prefer that to formal introductions. Especially in a ‘noir’. The setting presents itself, and the sleaze that makes a noir worth reading creeps in on decent people facing a dirty situation.

An audience expecting more superficial noir props might come away from this novel unsure if that’s what this novel is supposed to be. Perhaps the more generic ‘thriller’? What separates this iteration of the John D. MacDonald's novel from a more general thriller among a beach setting is the playful language, the dime-store Dostoyevski analysis of big topics in first person reflection between the tough guy dialogue. There are no guns used, no obvious murders, gritty urban alleys, or hard boiled detectives.

Textbook noir or not, I found it to be a page turner. That’s more of a commendation that comes with ‘thrillers’ which I feel use somewhat cheap manipulative writing techniques to create short term interest upon the reader. The book did not compel me to go because of obvious writing tricks in the pacing, but because it was giving me solid noir bona fides in this medium boiled survey of adults with sins trying to get rich among local landed elites wanting to get rich instead, and are willing to use local muscle to make sure it happens. Enter a protagonist likable enough to get their hands into the muck of the situation. This book did that for me. Enough to find another J. D. MacDonald.