It's a Gas Gas Gas

The Cassini satellite probe found oxygen in the atmosphere on Rhea, one of Saturn's moons.

Not a lot -- Rhea is a relatively small body that is able to keep only a very thin atmosphere. But both oxygen and carbon dioxide showed up in small amounts when scientists steered Cassini through Rhea's atmosphere to "sniff" it and see what it's made of. Scientists believe that the oxygen replenishes itself as the O2 molecules are carried into Rhea's surface by its magnetic field, breaking apart water molecules found there in ice into hydrogen and oxygen. The continuing impact of gas molecules with the moon's surface sort of splashes these newly freed oxygen molecules back into its atmosphere.

Rhea was discovered in 1672, along with Tethys, Dione and Iapetus, by Italian astronomer and probe namesake Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Rhea is the name of the Titan in Greek mythology who wed her brother Kronos, or Saturn, and gave birth to several of the later Olympian gods and goddesses like Poseidon, Hades, Hera and Zeus. Since Kronos was afraid one of his children would overthrow him, based on a prophecy he had heard, he swallowed each of them whole when they were born. But Rhea conspired to hide their last child, Zeus, until he could grow and free his sisters and brothers. He did so -- the story is iffy as to whether or not he made Kronos throw up or he cut him open, but out sprang fully-grown gods and goddesses who then took over as rulers of the cosmos. Zeus followed one of his father's customs and marred Hera, his own sister.

I sometimes wonder if astronomy is too PG-13 to teach to kids.

Bad, Nationwide, Etc., Etc...

On a Sunday afternoon in southern Minnesota, a young man brains a farmer with a baseball bat. The local police don't take long to figure out he did it, and they arrest him. The next morning, he's found hanged to death in his cell. The local sheriff makes the smart call, to Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and she gets help in the form of investigator Virgil Flowers, whose somewhat effete-sounding name belies his dogged detective skills and his toughness. Which he -- and the rather pretty female sheriff -- will need as another body is quickly added to the total and suspicion starts to fall on a wide segment of the town.

Virgil doesn't know exactly whom he can trust, although he discovers the sheriff is willing to work very closely with him, and he doesn't know how a close-mouthed religious community that came to that part of the country with immigrants more than a century ago fits in. But he will find out.

Bad Blood is the fourth Virgil Flowers novel from John Camp, writing as John Sandford. It's a step up from 2009's lackluster Rough Country. Sandford gives Virgil a little bit more of a real mystery to solve, steps his characterization skills back up to their usual level and forgoes some of the sophomore-level humor he indulged in last time around. Sandford also has some of Virgil's back story pay off. The investigator is the son of a Lutheran minister and regularly spends some time thinking about God before sleeping each night. Most of the time this has just been a way for Sandford to give Virgil some dimension and weight, but hasn't had much impact on who Virgil is -- his thoughts about God lead him to believe that God thinks about things pretty much the same way Virgil does, which is a convenient (and common) conclusion about God among modern folks.

But in Bad Blood, Virgil's religious background gives him an insight into the church community that's somehow mixed up in the murders. It also has a role in how some of the novel's endgame plays out. The mix of characterizations, interesting ideas and Sandford's usual writing skill makes Bad Blood a decent diversion of an afternoon.

Snicker

So Ohio State University president Gordon Gee questions the the legitimacy of some universities' claims for consideration in championship-level bowl games, saying that his Buckeyes compete in a much tougher league than such schools as Boise State and Texas Christian University, and are therefore much more worthy of placement in those games.

Said Gee of his OSU's schedule, "We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor." Some thoughts:

1) Gee had better be glad the Buckeyes don't schedule the LSP team -- they're non-conference for Ohio State, which means they'd only meet in a bowl game, of which Ohio State has lost three of its last four. Including a 41-14 smackdown at the hands of underdog University of Florida in the 2007 national championship game and a repeat lackluster performance in the 2008 national championship game.

2) Why in the world is this a subject being addressed by university presidents instead of athletic directors? Boise State president Bob Kustra shot a few snarks of his own back at Gee. Gentlemen, you are the presidents of your entire universities, both of which are public institutions financed partially by your respective state's taxpayers to offer quality education to your respective state's young people. Next thing you know we'll have a university president writing a letter to an athletic conference asking for a loss to be erased because of a blown call...ah, never mind.

3) What in the HECK is with that stupid blue field at Boise State?

4) Mr. Gee should check up on his "murderer's row" schedule thought. OSU's Big Ten Conference (among whose eleven teams are those paragons of virtue and clean living, the Northwestern University Wildcats), went 4-3 in bowl games this last season. That's the first time the Big Ten won more bowls than it lost since 2002 and still leaves it on the bottom end of a 19-31 tally. Sure, "harsh word speakers row" doesn't sound as tough, but it would seem to be more accurate.

5) Did we ever figure out why this is a discussion being conducted by the presidents?

Nine & Draggin'

The better crime and suspense writers often recognize that their characters can get in ruts and that they need to offer them some different challenges now and again or there's no reason to pay money for a new book when the old ones are just as good and already on the shelf at home.

Whether or not that was the motivation behind Michael Connelly giving his irascible detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch a suddenly larger role in the raising of his teen-age daughter, her presence is likely to affect how Harry does his business for the Los Angeles Police Department. In the 13 previous Bosch outings, Harry has been able to go his own way, consequences be hanged, because he has relatively few local ties and strings.

But over the course of the last several years, he has been deepening his relationship with his daughter Madeline, whom he first met when she was four. Maddie lives with her mother in Hong Kong, a fact which takes on serious weight when Harry starts to investigate the murder of a liquor store owner who might have been killed by Chinese gangsters or "triads." A cell-phone video of his kidnapped daughter sends Harry off to Hong Kong to bring his investigative skills and willingness to cross lines, break rules and crack skulls to get her back. Neither everything in Hong Kong nor everything in Los Angeles will be what it seems by the time Harry comes to the end of the case.

One of the appeals of Connelly's Bosch series -- as well as his series featuring Bosch's half-brother Mickey Haller, a hard-nosed defense lawyer -- has been that even though the cases involved may mix straightforward and out of the ordinary circumstances, Connelly rarely settles for an obvious solution or plot turn. Big-city homicide investigations may have a lot of similarities and stories that center on their solutions can definitely take on a paint-by-number quality. Witness the last six or seven years of Law & Order, for example. Connelly has always seemed to be able to mix the plain-brown-wrapper-styled procedural of Ed McBain with enough different flavors to keep his books from being too much like every other detective story that's been written.

In 9 Dragons, though, Connelly puts Harry in a scenario that's played out probably thousands of times since Auguste Dupin figured out who killed Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter Camille: An important woman in the life of the lead investigator is believed to be imperiled by his work on a case, and he has to drop everything to try and find her. Even though Connelly's writing, pacing and characterization remain top-notch (he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985), the story is hackneyed enough to drop 9 Dragons towards the bottom of Harry's adventures.

Paycheck Fairness!

Will Ferrell, determined by Forbes magazine to be the most overpaid movie star, is not all that upset by being so designated. He jokes he's "living the American dream without even trying" by being overpaid, which he sees as a goal many people have. I feel badly about not being able to have helped Will very much in the pursuit of that dream, as I've yet to see any of his movies in the theater. But with the exception of Anchorman and Stranger Than Fiction, every Will Ferrell movie I have endured has been awful, so maybe Will and I are even.

The ranking, for the curious, comes when Forbes crunches numbers on a star's salary and compares it to the box-office take for his or her movies, including overseas figures. The formula's a little more complex than that, but you get the idea. So if you were a movie studio who hired Will Ferrell, you averaged $3.35 back for every dollar you paid to him. The Forbes article notes that comedians have the toughest time increasing the bang for the bucks paid to them because funny in the U.S. isn't necessarily funny elsewhere, and their foreign box office figures lag.

Earlier this year, Forbes also published a list of the best investments movie companies had made, and that list was topped by...Shia LaBeouf? Because the list takes into account box office over the past several years, and because LaBeouf wasn't paid all that much for the first installment of the blockbuster money-earner Transformers, a movie company that hired him made $81 for every dollar it paid him. Because actresses are usually either the centerpieces of smaller-grossing films or they're secondary characters in the larger-grossing action or super-hero blockbusters, they make up half of the top 10 best investment list. Although Anne Hathaway hasn't starred in anything with Transformers-level take, she made her bosses $64 for every dollar they paid her, based heavily on the $1 billion worldwide receipts for 2010's Alice in Wonderland and the two tween-fave Princess Diaries releases. That makes her tops for actresses and actually second to LaBeouf overall.

But there's no way to know if actors' box-office muscle will continue to grow along with their salaries. Yes, they were paid chump change for their last movie and it turned out to be a mega-blitz powerhouse at the box office, so negotiations start with a demand for the director's firstborn son to be raised as their own. This movie, though, may tank completely and not make enough to pay for the free popcorn the movie critics ate watching it. No guarantees on the investment.

Although I do feel safe in saying that no matter now much money either of them is paid and no matter how much money their movies make, any film that stars Will Ferrell, Shia LaBeouf or any combination thereof is pretty much guaranteed to suck.

Thaaaaaank You!

I'm normally a little skeptical of pop culture lists found on the internet, since they often seem to be gathered up by people whose memories seem to stop somewhere around 1998. But the TV Squad hits things just about right in this list of the Top 10 Thanksgiving TV episodes.

Sure, someone older than me might quibble with the "Top 10 Ever" part and insist that the list's failure to include something from My Mother the Car makes it meaningless. Although I don't know if that show did a Thanksgiving episode in its only season.

Anyway, a misfire for me is the inclusion of a Roseanne entry -- her show began kind of fun, thanks mostly to John Goodman, but got old quickly, thanks mostly to Roseanne. Also getting a down-check is the Gilmore Girls show at number 6 -- I have no real dislike for that show, but I could never find an entry point that made me want to watch it, so I don't much care that Rory and Lorelai have to attend four Thanksgivings because they're too much a pair of enablers to stand up and say "no" once in awhile.

On the upside, we find the often overlooked The Bob Newhart Show making the list. I myself would drop the Friends episode to number 3 and bump Cheers to the second spot, but both are definitely in the right place by being in the top 3.

And as is only right in a world in which we expect natural laws to make sense, the great "Turkeys Away" from WKRP in Cincinnati comes in at number one. Of course, because natural laws make sense, turkeys can't fly, and therein lies the problem for one Arthur C. Carlson, and the laughs for for the rest of us, even 22 years later.

Journey of Discovery

Trojan Odyssey is the first Dirk Pitt book Clive Cussler published after the death of his wife Barbara in 2003. In it, Pitt reflects on his life of derring-do and decides he might need to settle down after his long string of romantic encounters, world-saving adventures and thwarting of evil-doers. It's easy to believe that his wife's passing prompted some reflection on Cussler's part about his mainstay character and what kind of a life he was living out through Cussler's keyboard. But before then, there's another dastardly plot to foil and group of megalomaniacs to send packing off to their well-deserved fates.

A mysterious brown crud is endangering life in the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean near Nicaragua. The potential disaster is being investigated by the two adult children Pitt learned in Valhalla Rising that he fathered, Dirk Jr. and Summer. But what is the connection with the mysterious Odyssey corporation and its enigmatic CEO, known only as Specter? And what is the significance of the European Celtic artifacts discovered in a sunken temple in the Caribbean, thousands of years older than any known cross-Atlantic voyage? Dirk Jr. and Summer will find out, but Dirk Sr. and his friend Al Giordino will need to take a hand in making sure things turn out all right.

Some of Odyssey ranks with Cussler's best writing. The scene where Pitt and Giordino help save a floating hotel from being driven onto a reef is guitar-string taut (that they succeed can't possibly be a spoiler; it happens too early in the book and any Cussler reader knows the day has yet to dawn that Pitt and Giordino can't save). But some of the rest of the book is muddied by Cussler's fascination with the work of Iman Wilkens, a professor with some different ideas about the Trojan War written about by Homer in The Iliad. Wilkens suggests that, instead of Greeks and Trojans, the war was fought between two bands of Celtic people from Europe, and that the locations involved were actually in England and northern France. This theory offers some interesting ideas to play with and a little background for the shadowy Odyssey corporation, but Cussler preaches it heavily enough it gives his story plenty of sloggy passages.

Aside from that, though, Odyssey gives Pitt and Giordino a fairly graceful first step to the side of the stage, and Dirk Jr and Summer their initial "speaking parts" in the series. It also readies the series for Cussler's own handoff to his son Dirk, who will begin to co-write the series with 2004's Black Wind.