The mystery revolves around a strange boy known for most of the book only as Mullet Fingers, a runaway with family troubles whose trust Roy eventually wins in his attempt to keep the owls from being bulldozed.
This group was charged with defining the "problem space". In engineering parlance, a problem space is composed of near-term problems that could be solved with tools available today, a middle-term problem set that will take some innovation in today's tools to get through, and long-term troubles whose solutions will require whole new ways of thinking.
Consider the caveman in "Stubble Trouble," whose beard grows nonstop, despite his heroic efforts to scrape it off.
Then there are the bleak, intense street rhymes of Alley Boy and Trouble, whose Duct Tape Entertainment label feels miles removed from the showy dollar tossing of the clubs.
Mr. Henry, known as D. J., was a football player, too, with no record of trouble, whose arms, which held the car's steering wheel, were tattooed with the words "Family First".
At the heart of the story is Frank Richards, the chatty clerk with perpetual "car trouble" whose icy indifference to the company's bottom line makes him a marked man.
In 1973, Ral says, he had an encounter with a four-foot-tall alien ("his skin was white with a slightly greenish tinge, a bit like someone with liver trouble") whose flying saucer had landed atop a volcano in southern France.
Much more care needs to be delivered in or near people's homes, he says, especially for the 15 million to 17 million patients with one or more long-term conditions such as asthma or heart trouble whose care already takes up 70% of the NHS's budget.
My sense is that a lot of what's going on in our ongoing policy disaster is that important people, up to and including the president, just find it implausible that such a big crisis could be essentially a problem of coordination, that it's just magneto trouble whose fix need not, in fact should not, involve inflicting a lot of punishment on working Americans.
"I am a man you can trust," begins A Patchwork Planet (1998), in the voice of Barnaby Gaitlin, a troubled adolescent whose troubles return in middle-age.
In the midst of its own troubles, Cambodia, whose army has confronted Thailand in recent months in a border dispute, donated $50,000 to Thailand for disaster relief, and provided a similar amount to Vietnam.
