Book Report: Driving Force

Driving Force is the van one. Not the trapped-in-a-van one, the horse-van-company one. I had a vague memory that this was one of the annoying late Dick Francis books, and it is, in some sense, both late and annoying, but I wasn’t annoyed by it this time through. So the claim of annoyingositiage is difficult to pursue, if (as a right-thinking Gentle Reader) you maintain that for something to be annoying, somebody must be annoyed.

Of course, you may be annoyed by this note, in which case this note is annoying. More annoying than the book. Except that more people have read the book, so even if a gazillion people were only very slightly annoyed, that adds up to a lot more annoyance than this note, which may annoy a couple of dozen people quite a bit. In fact, I am pretty well guaranteed that the total annoyage quotient of this post is substantially lower than that of the book, purely by virtue of the obscurity of the Tohu Bohu, and the popularity of Dick Francis. But how come he’s so popular, if he annoys people so much? Hunh? Answer me that!

It works the other way, I suppose. If this note somehow sent all my Gentle Readers into paroxysms of joy, such ecstasies all together would only rack up a fraction of the hedons tallied by a mild diversion of the mass Dick Francis readership. Ah, well.

If, on the other hand, we take a lesson from American foreign policy, and count pleasure or pain heavily weighted by proximity, this Tohu Bohu might catch up a bit. Well, and we couldn’t go by geographic proximity, because Gentle Readers are scattered across the continent. Scattered in the sense of being bunched in various places. Virginia, Indiana, California, Massachusetts. I think y’all cover the time zones, though. That’s a scattering, isn’t it? Anyway, the odds are fairly good that Gentle Readers are outnumbered by people who have read Driving Force and live within, say, five miles of YHB’s present location. So, geographic proximity wouldn’t work. No, we’d have to take a sort of personal proximity, perhaps using one of those strong/weak ties graphs, where the center node is YHB, and the links are direct communications (including email), and we weight annoyousness and happiage by distance in links. Which I think is how American foreign policy works, come to think of it, with effects on close associates overseas given more weight than those of people here that the Administration does not know.

Also, rabbits.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.