Born on this day – George Agnew Chamberlain:

George Agnew Chamberlain

Writer

Diplomat

March 15, 1879 – March 4, 1966

Credits:

Books:

Cobweb (1921); Home: A Novel ... (1914); John Bogardus (1916); Knoll Island (2011); Lip Malvy's Wife: A Novel (1923); Lost: a Play in Seven Settings (1926); Lovely Reason: A Story to Dispel Dull Care (1918); Man Alone (1926); Midnight Boy (2011); Pigs to Market (1920); Rackhouse: A Novel (1922); Scudda-hoo! Scudda-hay! (1946); The Red House (1945); Through Stained Glass: A Novel (1915); White Man (1919).

Movies and television:

April Love (1957); Home in Indiana (1944); Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948); Taxi (1919); The Call of Home (1922); The Ford Television Theatre (1956); The Red House (1947); Upside Down (1919); White Man (1924).

Recommended reading - The Goodbye Look, by Ross Macdonald (1969):

The Goodbye Look

By Ross Macdonald.

Published by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

First published 1969.

Paperback.

ISBN-10: 0375708650

ISBN-13: 978-0375708657

Description:

"The American private eye, immortalized by Hammett, refined by Chandler, brought to its zenith by Macdonald." – The New York Times Book Review.

In The Goodbye Look, Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary at the mission-style mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the Chalmerses are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, a mysterious hobo. Then a stiff turns up in a car on an empty beach. And Nick turns up with a Colt .45. In The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald delves into the world of the rich and the troubled and reveals that the past has a deadly way of catching up to the present.

If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his pre-decessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.

Author humor:

4,000 years later and we’re back to the same language…

Introvert insight:

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.

– Henry David Thoreau.
 
Don’t think of introversion as something that needs to be cured.

– Susan Cain.
 
I don’t have time for superficial friends.

I suppose, if you’re really lonely, you can call a superficial friend, but otherwise, what’s the point?

– Courtney Cox.
 
Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.

– William S. Burroughs.

Farley Mowat, on writing:

I write every day.

I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

- Farley Mowat.

Go Pens!

March 14, 2026

Pittsburgh Penguins: 4

Utah Mammoth: 3

YEAH!

GO PENS!

On this day in television history - The Pacific (2010):

The Pacific

10-part mini-series.

Produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, 

HBO, Playtone, DreamWorks, Seven Network and Sky Movies.

Based on the books With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge

and Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie.

Released in the United States on March 14, 2010.

Music by Blake Neely, Geoff Zanelli and Hans Zimmer.

Episode titles:

Guadalcanal / Leckie; Basilone; Melbourne; Gloucester / Pavuvu / Banika; Peleliu Landing; Peleliu Airfield; Peleliu Hills; Iwo Jima; Okinawa; Home.

Cast:

James Badge Dale, Ashton Holmes, Josh Helman, Keith Nobbs, Jacob Pitts, Toby Leonard Moore, Henry Nixon, Tom Budge, Caroline Dhavernas, Joseph Mazzello, Rami Malek, Martin McCann, Brendan Fletcher, Linda Cropper, Conor O'Farrell, Dylan Young, Leon Ford, Scott Gibson, Gary Sweet, Jon Seda, Joshua Bitton, William Sadler, Jon Bernthal, Annie Parisse.