Adobe Reader: source of eternal eyestrain

Seriously, Adobe Corp, is this the best you can do with non-English characters? 

The jpeg below is a screenshot of a PDF file as displayed on my good quality LCD screen, using the latest version of Adobe.  This same file  used to work just fine, but I've noticed in the last two or three versions of Adobe reader that the character quality is getting worse and worse.  The weird thing is, when you scroll the file, the characters suddenly go back into focus (sort of), but the moment you stop scrolling, the words slowly blur before your eyes.



It's a rendering issue, but since previous versions work perfectly well, the obvious solution is to revert to a much older version.

Detectives Beyond Borders interviews yours truly

Detectives Beyond Borders is a web site dedicated to non-US mystery books. It's run by Peter Rozovsky, who's the book reviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a copy editor of exceptionally high standards.

Detectives Beyond Borders interviewed me, Rebecca Cantrell and I.J. Parker on the mystery of writing historical mysteries. Peter was particularly interested in the "historical" part of historical mysteries, and a fun time I had answering the questions.

Boris Johnson's Ten Greatest Ancient Greeks

Boris Johnson -- his full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson -- is the Lord Mayor of London.  In addition to being something of a character, he also happens to be a classicist, and he's fluent in Latin and Greek.  It's such a rare thing to have a successful politician who knows anything about history, let alone someone who's an expert, that I thought this might be interesting.  He's written this article for the Daily Mail, in which he lists his Ten Greatest Ancient Greeks, complete with quotes in the original language.   Kudos too to the Daily Mail, for printing an article on ancient literature; something that would probably be anathema to most newspapers these days.

Hey, there's a dead guy in the living room

One of the more interesting blogs around that's dedicated to mysteries is a place called Hey, There's a Dead Guy in the Living Room. It's one of those shared blogs; in this case the contributors have ranged from specialist mystery bookstore owners to publicists to publishers to authors to literary agents. My own dear agent was a regular there a couple of years ago. So too is the very charming and terrifically nice Robin Agnew, who runs Aunt Agatha's.

Right now over at Dead Guy, Robin is holding a competition. Match the opening line to the correct book, for 15 different books, for a chance to win an advance copy of Death on Tour, by Janice Hamrick.

If you're a reader of this blog then you're starting with a natural advantage, because one of the 15 books used in the competition is mine.


A dictionary of Assyrian

Assyrian is a dead language. It was last spoken about 2,000 years ago, and you can't get much deader than that. But over the last ninety years (!) a dedicated group of scholars have been studying inscriptions and compiling the world's first ever dictionary of Assyrian. And now, at last, the dictionary has been finished.

You might not know a lot about the Assyrian family of languages, but you've probably seen a lot of it, because Assyrian is one of the major languages you're reading when you see cuneiform on a clay tablet. (Cuneiform was a remarkably successful writing system and quite a few languages were written in it.)

The title of the dictionary!


I've had recourse to the dictionary only once, when I was checking on the origin of apples. If Assyrian had a word for apple, then I knew I was safe placing them in Ionia in classical times.