Previously on Adam Riff™:
I just finished Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell. It's a brisk, crackin' read about a former killer for the mob who is discovered as a doctor in witness protection. I am eager to dive into its sequel, Wild Thing.
I rarely do drugs anymore, because as I've grown older I've become able to achieve the same states of emotional instability and poor decision-making skills without them. [157]
Blazer, untucked shirt, designer jeans, wedge-toe loafers: the full douchebag tuxedo. [22]
I just finished Wild Thing by Josh Bazell, which reads less like a sequel to Beat the Reaper and more like a spin-off, in which the former killer for the mob investigates a lake monster in Minnesota … where he is joined by Sarah Palin.
In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.
Whereas in the American system, the answer to "How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?" is "Go fuck yourself," because you can't directly relate any of those quantities. [86]
Beer is the perfect population-overshoot scenario: you put a bunch of organisms into an enclosed space with more carbohydrates than they've ever seen before, then watch as they kill themselves off with their own waste products. [88]
It's an odd, indulgent deviation. A crime novel does not need 35 pages of research source notes, which themselves are annotated.
The chapter on the origin of the canoe from the perspective of Sheriff Albin is, to quote Sam [sic] Purcell, "drawn without reference material."*
* Sam and Max: Freelance Police, Issue #1, 1987. [359]
If digital devices really do make children less likely to develop the skills and focus to do things like design more digital devices, how is that not a self-limiting problem? [272]
The ending sets up a promising third installment, however.