Doug Cornelius .com

From Geek and Poke:

It’s coming May 10, 2010 and currently available for preorder on Amazon.

A Swedish crime novel sounds like an odd mix. But apparently Swedish crime novels are taking off.

Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a tale of a complicated international financial fraud and the buried evil past of a wealthy Swedish industrial family.

After reading Mission Flats, I decided to stick with another crime novel. This was a big change moving from the comfy confines of New England in Mission Flats to the stark, cold Swedish landscape in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The central character, Mikael Blomkvist, is a crusading financial journalist who has fallen into disgrace by publishing an untrue story about a titan of industry. His eventual sidekick is a prodigy with superior computer hacking, serious trust issues and a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade.

In the town of Hedestad, a village three hours north of Stockholm, an 82-year-old Henrik Vanger wants to offer him a job. He wants him to solve a 40-year-old mystery: What happened to Harriet Vanger, the daughter of Vanger’s pro-Nazi brother, Richard? Harriet was just 16 when she disappeared, and despite a lengthy investigation no trace of her was found. But every year on the anniversary of her disappearance unusual flowers are delivered to Vanger.

I found the Swedish names very alien in the text. Other than Ikea, I am not used to running into the language and its places. I also found the combination of financial journalism and a murder investigation to be an odd combination. It worked, but it seemed odd to me at times.

In its original Swedish it won Sweden’s Glass Key Award in 2006 for best crime novel of the year, and won the 2008 Boeke Prize. Larsson was posthumously awarded the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for International Author of the Year in 2008. Larsson died at the age of 50 of a massive heart attack in 2004.

The book is first part of in Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy”. The title character with the tattoo appears in the second part The Girl Who Played with Fire. At least according to the excerpt in the back of the book.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is worth reading if you are looking for a good crime novel.

What do you look for in your crime novels? Plot twists? Good cops doing good things and bad cops doing bad things? Good cops doing thing bad things and bad cops doing good things? The seedy underside of the criminal justice system?

Then you will enjoy William Landay’s Mission Flats. If you have some leftover funds from your holiday gifts, pick up a copy.

The book starts off with three homicides: the ugly slaying of a beat cop in 1977, the botched drug bust that left another officer dead in 1987, and a dead assistant district attorney in the present. The last murder happens in a small town in Maine. That brings the local sheriff into the investigation of the other two murders.

Before I go much further, I need to let you know that Bill (yeah, I know him as Bill) is a friend. Our sons went to the same preschool. We have been to each others’ homes and countless kids’ birthday parties. And if you buy his book through one of the links in this post I get a very small commission from Amazon.

But you don’t have to take my word for how good the book is.

Mission Flats won the John Creasey Memorial Dagger literary award for first time novelists writing crime fiction in 2003.

New York Times Book Review: “Tough but true: a first-time novelist has to bring something new to the table — something like the trumps that William Landay throws down in his high-stakes police procedural.”

Bill is a former was an assistant district attorney before he turned to writing. He brings depth and authenticity to the characters and criminal justice system.

Here is my favorite quote from the book:

“There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.”

My review may be biased, but I’m also a bit sheepish to admit that after all these years I just got around to reading his book. Now that our kids are not in school together, I wish I had read the book earlier. You can read the chapter one of Mission Flats if you want to get a taste of the book.

I added his second book, The Strangler to my reading list. Bill is also working on his third book. You can see how he doing with it on his blog: William Landay’s blog.

Thanks to the LEGO Space Police keeping us safe from the Alien Outlaws.

At least that is the story in our house with the latest LEGO kits that the Son got for Christmas

LEGO Space Police

LEGO Alien Outlaws

• 5971 – Gold Heist
• 5973 – Hyperspeed Pursuit
• 5981 – Raid VPR
• 5982 – Smash ‘n Grab

Bela Fleck playing The First Noel, Oh Come Let Us Adore Him, Jesus Joy of Man’s Desiring, Joy to the World during a banjo Jam at the Chicago Bluegrass and Blues Music Festival at The Congress Theater on December 12, 2009.

Dave, Matt, Ken and Doug

Last Saturday afternoon was GeekDad day at the Wired Holiday Store in New York City.

I played chicken with the weekend blizzard and traveled down to New York City for the day. It is not often that the GeekDad contributors, strewn across the U.S. (and the U.K.), are able to get together in person. So the stakes were high.

As of Friday night, the powerful winter storm was moving slow. It was hitting Washington hard. But it looked like it would hold off on covering Boston with the white stuff until late Saturday night. It looked like I could get down to New York and back, beating the snow.

The trip down was uneventful, but I could see the storm clouds just south of New York City.

Ken Denmead, the editor of GeekDad, had hosted the first GeekDad on December 2. See Ken’s post: GeekDad Day at the Wired Holiday Store FTW.

Ken came back from the west coast, along with Matt Blum, the assistant editor, and Dave Giancaspro. Matt escaped Washington just before the blizzard hit that area. Dave was just a subway ride away.

We ran some LEGO building contests to give away prizes to a group of enthusiastic kids and their parents. The winning builders walked away with LEGO Star Wars Hyena Droid kits Bomber, copies of LEGO Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary, MythBusters Weird World of Water kits, and Mythbusters DVDs.

You can see more images from the day in my photo album: GeekDad at the Wired Holiday Store.

By the afternoon, the snow was upon us. Ken’s airline called him to let him know that his flight on Sunday morning was canceled, but they would be happy to re-book his flight for Friday. (FRIDAY!)

For me, I went to Penn Station and saw carnage. The Northbound trains from NYC to Boston come out of Washington and they were not getting out. I re-booked from the 7:00 train to the 3:00 train since the 3:00 had not yet arrived. I though that was clever until I sat down across from a very tired gentleman who was still waiting for the 2:00 train. This looked bad.

Upstairs, Megabus was willing to get me to Boston for $20 and claimed that the buses were running on time. The weather forecast for Boston called for the storm to hold off until midnight, the Boston arrival time for that bus. I had visions of the bus getting stuck in a blizzard in Connecticut or sliding off the road. That’s the reason I booked the train trip. Of course, when I went back down into Penn Station I had visions of not getting home at all by train.

I crossed my fingers and jumped on the bus.

The roads in the city were snowy. I-95 was snowy. Those visions of being trapped on the highway in a blizzard came back.

But then we turned north onto I-91 and the snow disappeared. We had blacktop and highway speeds all the way to Boston. Sure enough the snowflakes started in Boston right at midnight just as I arrived home.

Join Ken Denmead, Editor of GeekDad, Matt Blum, Assistant Editor of GeekDad, me (!), and some other GeekDad writers at the Wired Holiday Store in New York City on Saturday, December 19.

GeekDad will be featured inside the store during the early afternoon, with contests and prizes.

The WIRED Store is located at:
415 West 13th Street
(between 9th Avenue & Washington Street)
New York City
212-645-0210

The Store is open:
Wednesdays through Sundays, noon to 9pm
(closed Thanksgiving and Christmas Day)

Here, you’ll find all that’s new & next in the world of WIRED: Cutting-edge technology & design… The latest in games & gaming… Cool new music & books… Hot new gear & gadgets… Indoor & outdoor inspiration… Products to help you lead a greener life… And the opportunity to own your very own WIRED-branded stuff.

• Check out our interactive mural, in collaboration with Moby
• Get your game on in our Tony Hawk-inspired Gaming Lounge
• Go green with Adrian Grenier
• Sunday Game Day Lounge
• Play along with our Geek Dad demos on Saturdays
• Spend Sunday in our Game Day Lounge
• Get your gadgets laser-engraved by tattoo artist Scott Campbell
• Demo the coolest gifts to give and receive

Our Courts is a web-based education project designed to teach students civics and inspire them to be active participants in our democracy. They have produced two video games to help educate our kids about the legal system.

Our Courts is the vision of recently retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who is concerned that students are not getting the information and tools they need for civic participation

Read more about the project and the two video games they have produced in my latest post on GeekDad: So Your Kid Wants to be a Civil Rights Lawyer.

Here are some of my other recent posts on GeekDad:

• Heavy Metal Task Force Brings Big Machines to your TV
• You Are Here: From the FTC for Your Kids
• The End of LEGO Bionicle
• Add Fun to Your Thanksgiving Turkey – Fry It!
• The New Hess Toy Truck is Here

The Daily Mail has a a great story by James Delingpole on the business side of LEGO: When Lego lost its head – and how this toy story got its’ happy ending.

“In 1998, Lego posted a small loss; in 2003 a much bigger one; then in 2004, carnage.”
…

“Then he consulted old colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (where he studied for a PhD in business and economics), who told him Lego is the ideal way for a child to learn how to think systematically and creatively – something that was confirmed to him by a cover story in Time, in which the Google founders said that it was Lego that had shaped their young minds.Then it dawned on him: the problem lay not with the product, but with the company’s attempts in the Nineties to make itself more modern and relevant in the age of video games. It had attempted to broaden its appeal to the young female market; it had tried to become a lifestyle brand with its own lines of clothes and watches; it had built more theme parks. But in doing so it had neglected its core business.”
…

“Thinking up brilliant new ideas, though, is only half the battle. No new product can be developed unless it fits perfectly within the Lego template. It must be a challenge to build (which is what sets Lego apart from the similar-looking but readymade products of rival Playmobil); it must be robust enough, once constructed, to survive rough play without falling to bits; and it must fit in with Lego’s family-friendly, cross-generational ethos.”