Camille's Contemplations

Recent Reads

2012-01-22T09:07:00.000-05:00

Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland by Gerald Clarke. Why spend your time writing a biography of someone you don't like? I have no problem with trashy biographies, but at least be honest with your motives and don't try to make your hatchet job out to be a legitimate book. Clarke prides himself on using tapes Judy had recorded when she was thinking of writing her autobiography. Thing is, Judy was a well known teller of tales (why tell the truth when you can make up a better story?). Clarke states the actors portraying the Munchkins had to have someone assigned to help them use the bathroom after one of them fell in. That story is ridiculous for at least three different reasons. He believes Garland's memories then ignores Margaret O'Brien's since Margaret was a child so her memories can't be trusted (no, she was not threatened with a dead dog to make her cry). The books is fully of smutty details which, when you check the footnotes, are all attributed to anonymous sources tat the author believes are credible. Garland's marriage to Vincente Minnelli and her relationships with her children are all glossed over to the point of being almost nonexistent in this 400+ page book. Clarke hates everything Garland did professionally except The Wizard of Oz and some of her concerts. He insults Betty Hutton for daring to be glad to get the role in Annie Get Your Gun after Judy was fired for being unreliable (was she supposed to turn a great part down?). Overall the book is somewhat readable trash that tells you nothing in the end.

The Murder Room by Michael Cappuzo. It should not have been difficult to write a decent book about the Vidocq Society (a group of criminologists who help solve cold cases in their free time). Talk a little about the members and detail some of the cases they helped solve. Instead, Cappuzo wrote a disjointed account that jumps all over the place. Most of the cases discussed are ones that remain still unsolved. He's overly obsessed with the open marriage of one of the founding members (open marriages are not that common, but they aren't that rare either). The people are more caricatures than real people. And there's a strong thread of homophobia through the book that is very out of place in a book written in this century. A potentially interesting subject that deserved much better than this book.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe. As a teen in the 1980's I saw the Brat Pack movies, but I was too busy obsessing over British pop stars to obsess over actors. I grabbed this when Audible had the audio book of this available for free. Rob does a good job reading his book. He comes across as honest if a bit self-important (he is an actor, after all). He doesn't gloss over his screw-ups or try to blame others for his problems. A decent read.

Ten Plus One and Like Love by Ed McBain. A couple months ago I got the daily Publisher's Weekly email at work and saw Amazon had reached a partnership to publish McBain's back catalog in ebooks and paperback. I squealed with happiness loud enough to startle one of my coworkers. The ebooks would be priced at $4.99 each (a decent price point in that it is a couple dollars cheaper than a paperback version should be), and I was hoping the books would show up on Amazon's occasional deals. Then Amazon put out 35 of the 87th Precinct books for $.99 each as the Kindle Daily Deal last week. I had not planned to buy books this month. Fortunately, I only needed 14 of the 35, and I zipped through these two last weekend. I figured out the killers before the cops did in both (solving the mystery before the solution is presented always leaves me both proud and annoyed for some reason), but that's a minor quibble since McBain is awesome. This is the kind of situation where ebooks can shine--introducing people at reasonable prices to authors who are not readily available or widely known any more.

Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein. A soldier meets up with a beautiful woman and goes on a quest. This has all of Heinlein's usual elements--self-reliance, the importance of leading a productive life, a strong female lead, flexibility in sexual relationships, love of literature (the sidekick is very Sancho Panza like). The journey is the important bit with the object of the quest being largely a MacGuffin. A good adventure yarn.

Nora Corbett's The Letter L

2012-01-16T15:22:00.000-05:00

This was a Christmas present for my sister. I disliked the color scheme of the pattern and changed it to be more suitable for her color scheme. I planned to list my color substitutions, but my notes are gibberish. I used DMC's color variations for the bulk of the "L" and for the center sections of the wings. I added silver blending filament to the dress and iridescent filament to the wings. I think this one turned out really well.

Recent Reads

2011-12-31T19:47:00.000-05:00

Where There's a Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart. I couldn't find any descriptions of this book when I downloaded it, but figured if Rinehart wrote it, it was probably good. The narrator works in the spring house of a health spa whose owner dies. Due to the conditions of the will, the staff ends up engaing in fraud and impersonation. Overall a nice little comedy.

Yul: The Man Who Would be King by Rock Brynner. Too often, when a celebrity's child writes about their parent the book either portrays the celebrity as a demon or trys to gloss over the parents faults until the book is dull. Rock Brynner avoided both these pitfalls and wrote a very engaging book about his father. The two had a rather complicated relationship. Yul starts out as a great dad who spends a good deal of time with his son and treats the kid with a good deal of respect. Of course, Yul also had no problems with creating his own realities to suit his whims, so their relationship had a lot of ups and downs. Yul had a lot of potential and probably should have stuck to stage acting. He was rarely satisfied with his movies and so stopped trying to do his best in them. You can't help but feel a little sorry for Yul who ended up trapped in endless tours of The King and I in order to pay his bills, but on the other hand, he created his own problems.

Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. I always thought this was a book about gays in San Francisco, but most of the characters are straight (didn't matter either way, but I was a little surprised). Surprisingly fresh for having been written in the late 1970's. A young woman looking for change moves into a boardinghouse in San Francisco. There's a lot of oddball characters who interconnect in various ways. I'm looking forward to reading more of the series.

Murder at Madingley Grange by Carolyn Graham. Graham wrote the Inspector Barnaby mysteries which were the basis of Midsomer Murders, one of my favorite shows. This was not a Barnaby mystery. Two young adults minding their aunts manor house decide to raise money by hosting a 1930s murder mystery weekend. This sets the stage for the classic English country party murder. The book is about 50 pages too long and drags about about halfway through. The ending is somewhat clever and funny which almost makes up for it's needing a good edit.

The Case of the Fabulous Fake by Erle Stanley Gardner. Gardner always came up with decent and different plots (amazing considering his huge output), but there is always one common thread. Why is the client smart enough to hire Perry Mason, the best lawyer around and yet dumb enough to lie to Mason at every turn?

The Shack by Wm. Paul Young. A man's daughter is kidnapped and murder. He then receives an invitation from God to spend a weekend at a deserted shack. God is portrayed as three different people, separate but equal. Jesus reminded my very much of painter Bob Ross. God is all-encompassing love and not religion which might be a problem for some people depending on their level of open mindedness. Better than I expected it to be if a touch sappy at times.

The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene. The first Nancy Drew book. Got this for Christmas, and judging from the cover it's the early 1950s version which still had the original 1930 text (no longer available). I truly hope the day never comes where ebooks are the only books available. My copy has the best old book smell (yes, I sniff books--there's worse kinks to have). The plot holds up pretty well after all these years.

Hallowe'en Party by Agatha Christie. I often argue with family and co-workers over the state of the world. People insist that the world is constantly getting worse, but I know it is not since I read Agatha Christie. This came out in 1969 and there's a lot of characters making statements about the world going bad with lunatics roaming free. Of course, in the end it all comes down to love and greed. Christie might have disliked Poirot, but he's my favorite of her characters. I appreciate his sense of superiority in the power of his intellect.

Ben-Hur

2011-12-30T17:33:00.000-05:00

William Wyler directed some great films. And he directed the 1959 version of Ben-Hur which is two hours of one of the most boring films ever made followed by 20 minutes of an awesome chariot race then another hour of one of the most boring films ever made. Wyler was his best with films about relationships. Why give him an epic? So I was somewhat excited to see the 1925 version of Ben-Hur pop up on TCM earlier this month to see if it was any better.

The 1925 version clocks in at around two and a half hours. Still long but not "oh God will this ever end?" long. Ramon Novarro is similar to Charlton Heston in being well built and a bit over the top in his acting style. Novarro's more my type and while I'm not usually a leg woman, Novarro had some magnificent legs (shown off in barely there tunics). Francis X. Bushman plays Messala as a magnificent bastard and easily steals any scenes he's in. The film's full title is Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ and this version has more Jesus than the later version. I was almost moved to tears when Ben-Hur offered Jesus legions to save his life, and Jesus said no "my kingdom is not of this world". Several scenes are presented in early Technicolor which helps add some pop to the religious scenes, and the rest is a mix of black and white and tints ( I rather like the use of tinted scenes in silents and wish it had been used more when the switch was made to sound. The Moon and Sixpence is the only talkie I've seen that mixed b&w, tints, and technicolor and I found it very effective). This was pre-code so there's a touch of nudity with some topless girls in a parade and a naked slave strung up in the galley.

The two big scenes are the battle at sea and, of course, the chariot race. It's amazing what you can do when there's no laws governing film making and you have a director and producers with absolutely no regard for the health and safety of their actors. So people probably died while filming both those scenes, but the results look fantastic. Those are real ships in the sea battle, not just models. The chariot race is, if anything, even better than the 1959 version. It's faster and more dangerous looking. That it is not super-widescreen adds to the feel that this is truly a duel to the death between Ben-Hur and Messala.

The 1925 version is available on DVD as part of a box set with the 1959 version. I'd buy it for the 1925 version and look at the 1959 version as the extra instead of the other way around. This is a case that color, sound, and widescreen do not necessarily make a better film.

Recent Reads

2011-12-11T17:36:00.001-05:00

So Many Steps to Death by Agatha Christie. A political thriller about a despondent woman who is recruited to help track down scientists who have been disappearing. I normally am not a fan of Christie's political thrillers, but this one was enjoyable and had some clever bits. It was quite like one of Dorothy Gilman's Mrs. Pollifax novels.

Public Enemies by Bryan Burrough. Burrough's set out to explore the rise of the FBI from 1933 to 1935. It seems like an informative book except for a few points: Burrough spells Doc Barker's nickname as "Dock" and the people in the photo of the Hamer posse that tracked down Bonnie and Clyde are not identified properly. A quick Google search shows nowhere else (including the FBI files that were supposedly primary sources for the book) was Barker's name spelled Dock. If something as simple as the name of a major character is spelled wrong, how can I trust any of the information in the book? . So I'd call it a decent overview of the subject, but I wouldn't wholly believe the contents without further research. It was a tad bit long, too.

Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson. I downloaded this for free from Gutenberg after watching a film based on another Johnson book. It's a book that hasn't aged well. If you want to know about the social structure of Yale in the beginning of the 1900's, you might find it good, but as a story not much happens.

Have Spacesuit--Will Travel by Robert Heinlein. As a teen I was disappointed with our library's selection of Heinlein novels, and now I wonder if I just hadn't looked in the right spot. I only looked in adult fiction and never checked the card catalog, so it was only in the past few years that I found out Heinlein wrote juvenile fiction ( a surprising discovery considering Heinlein's obsessions with sex and breasts). A teenager wins an old spacesuit in a soap wrapper contest and ends up involved with aliens. Loads of fun with decent action, smart female characters, and insightful social commentary. I love the boy's father who complains about the American educational system not really teaching students things they should know to succeed (this in 1958). I love that the boy is smart enough to know he doesn't know anything. One of Heinlein's best.

Washington Square by Henry James. For a short novel, this was unbearably long. We have a homely unloved daughter pursued by a gold digger. Her father promises he will leave her nothing if she marries the guy (she already has a fortune inherited from her mother). The girl also has a meddlesome aunt. The girl is a blithering idiot who apparently expects the boy to wait forever. The boy is not much of a gold digger since he barely seems to bother pursuing her. I disliked everyone in the book and did not care in the least what happened to any of them. Skip the book and watch the infinitely superior movie version, The Heiress.

Google Chrome

2011-12-02T19:51:00.000-05:00

I hate Internet Explorer. I have to use it at work, and I don't think more than two days go by without my curing it for its clunkiness and ugliness. So I've been using FireFox for several years now and all was well until about a year ago. Starting with the update that added sync, FireFox started being a bit glitchy. I liked sync, but hated the pop-up alert when sync wasn't working since the alert doesn't go away on its own and also cannot be turned off. Then last week my FireFox updated to version 8.something and FireFox stopped working. Okay my computer is old and apparently FireFox doesn't always play nice with Avast free antivirus (which has also been a bit glitchy lately), but that should not cause browser failure. Pages wouldn't finish loading, and then FireFox would completely freeze up. After two hours of trying to find a solution on Mozilla's website (using the dreaded IE), switching to AVG free antivirus, and uninstalling and reinstalling FireFox twice I was quite frustrated. I'd managed to get my bookmarks loaded into IE (current and a bunch that were probably years old ) and almost walked away from the mess, but then I figured I was already frustrated and should just go ahead with installing Google Chrome.

Their website required a bit more clicking than I would have liked to see the features, but I clicked install. Within a few minutes, Chrome was installed, my FireFox bookmarks were loaded, and everything was running great. I was shocked at the speed and ease of use. It syncs to your Google account, and when I downloaded Chrome to my laptop a few days later my bookmarks synced within seconds (when setting up a second computer, don't import bookmarks and sync--I ended up having to delete duplicates though that was no big deal). Instead of separate search and address boxes, there's an omnibox. Type in a word and you can opt t o search or click on a direct link. Add-ons are easy. Opening a new tap shows a pane with your most visited site and a link to the Chrome store where add-ons are obtained. The option folder opens in a full tab instead of a little pop-up, and only things the normal person uses are there. You can set up as many tabs as you want to appear on start-up. Your home page is a single page of your choice.

Things I don't like. The Ad Block Plus extension does not block as many ads as a similar program I used in FireFox. The worst thing is that you can only print full pages. I was paying bills and ended up having to cut and paste the pertinent information I wanted to print into Word (I'm cheap and hate printing more than I have to). Like FireFox, it tends to be slow with loading when my computer's trying to do other stuff (like stupid morning updates), but if one tab freezes, you can often go into another tab that works fine. I've gotten a few warnings that a plug-in isn't working but if I leave it running it usually starts working in a few seconds.

Overall, I'm extremely impressed with Chrome so far. It looks great and is extremely easy t o set-up and use. I highly recommend giving it a try.

Neti Pot

2011-11-24T17:12:00.000-05:00

Neti pots get almost universal praise for helping reduce allergy and sinus symptoms. Despite the raves, I've been hesitant to try using one. After all, pouring water through your nose sounds both unpleasant and gross. On the other hand, I hate taking medicine so a none chemical treatment is something I should try. I checked prices, and decided that a pot could be obtained at a low enough price that it wouldn't feel like a complete waste if I hated using the thing.

I went with the NeilMed Neti pot despite it having some of the most unattractive packaging ever. Any time I see that many words on a medical product, I get the feeling it must be snake oil to need so many testimonials to justify purchasing it. The two main things it had going for it was that it had a lid and came with 50 salt packets for making the solution. Sure you can mix your own solution, but pre-measured packs are convenient and help make sure you aren't pouring too much or too little salt in your nose (plus they're about $.10 a pack). The end of the spout is a little big and the lid leaks a little, but it works well.

There is a moment of unpleasantness when you start pouring the water, but it is not as nasty as I feared. The trick is to tilt your head both to the side and far enough forward to keep the solution from draining down the back of your throat. Using the pot while I was slightly congested meant water down my throat no matter how far front I turned my head, but it was just a minor inconvenience. The instruction book (27pages!) says filtered or bottled water is okay, but I use water from the teapot that was boiled earlier in the day. I heat it for 27 seconds in the microwave to get it close to body temperature. The pot is microwavable, but I use a measuring cup since I don;t like microwaving plastic. Room temperature water is probably fine as well. You're supposed to pour half the solution through one side, blow your nose, then pour the rest through the other. I find counting to 20 at a normal tempo works out to about half the pot.

But does it work? It's nit allergy season, so I haven't really ben having major sinus issues. My nose does seem a bit clearer than normal (one girl at work said I sounded clearer, but that was after I told her I'd tried the pot, so I'm not sure her opinion counts). I don't wake myself up snoring when I fall asleep on the couch with my head at a bad angle, which I guess is something. It certainly does no harm, so I'm going to keep up regular use in hopes that it will help when the bad allergy season starts. It is definitely a maintenance product and not a miracle cure, but anything that helps without leaving me doped is a good thing.

Recent Reads

2011-11-18T17:41:00.000-05:00

Shelly, Also Known as Shirley by Shelly Winters. At least Winters starts out saying her memoir covers things as she remembers them and not necessarily how things were. This is the kind of gossipy celebrity memoir that has the nice gossip and name dropping that makes such books fun, but I came away with the distinct impression that she exaggerated some of her escapades. The woman clearly had some self esteem issues. She was also one of those Method people spouting about craft and what not. Then she turns around and claims she only had good performances in some of her films and only when she worked with great director's. I'm sure Method works for some people, but I hate the way so many Method actors claim it is the only way to give a good performance. the trashy gossip parts were fun.

Victoria Victorious by Jean Plaidy. A thoroughly well researched work of historical fiction posing as Queen Victoria's memoir. Plaidy seemed to really capture Victoria's personality (somewhat shallow and self-absorbed). A good example of the genre. It is unfortunate that Victoria herself was a bit of a pill and not overly interesting as a person.

Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie. I was so looking forward to this. Massie's Peter the Great is one of my all time favorite biographies (and Peter I my all time favorite historical figure), and his Nicholas and Alexandra is also pretty darn good. I guess I was disappointed in that I've already read so much about Catherine and Massie did not come up with anything new or different to say about her. Massie's style is quite easy to read. After she becomes Empress, the book switches from chronological order to more grouped by subject which didn't quite work for me. Catherine herself was such a fascinating person it is always worthwhile to read about her. I also disagree with Massie's conclusion that she never slept with her husband. Even with Empress Elizabeth's permission for Catherine to have an affair in order to conceive a child it would have been very risky for Catherine to have that first child without at least some possibility that her husband was the father. Russia at the time had too many convenient convents in which to deposit inconvenient wives and Elizabeth could be fickle). Besides, Paul I looked and acted more like Peter III than the other candidate for the father (although looks are judged from paintings that may not be entirely accurate). And it wasn't until the birth of Catherine's second child that Peter made comments about not knowing who's child she was carrying.

The Tinted Venus by F. Anstey. Those three books were each over 550 pages long which is a bit much, so I read some other stuff on my Kindle. This was the best of that lot. Set in Victorian London, a hairdresser on a visit to a pleasure garden slips an engagement ring on the finger of a statue. The statue then becomes inhabited by the spirit of Venus, much to the chagrin of the hairdresser and his fiancee. It's got a nice bit of humor to it. io9 has started a periodic column suggesting what might have been nominated for Hugo awards had they been around starting in 1885, and this book made their short list for 1885. I enjoyed this book more than their columnist. Still, if you are interested in checking out classic (and therefore often free digitally) SF and fantasy, the column is well worth checking in on every few weeks.

Three Men Out by Rex Stout. Oh how I wish I would find more Rex Stout at book sales. His Nero Wolfe novels are some of the best things ever. This included three short stories including one where Wolfe is tricked into leaving the brownstone, one where Archie gets exasperated and takes a case without Wolfe's approval, and one where Wolfe escorts a distinguished guest to a ballgame. The mental image of Wolfe trying to fit into a stadium seat is utter delight.

Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen. I downloaded the audio book version when Audible had it for free a few weeks ago. After listening to it for a week to and from work and getting half way through, I decided I'm done. I don't like any of the characters. The author won't use one word when five would do. I should have given up sooner when there was about a five minute description of the way a stripper's breasts moved when she slung them around. Who needs that? I might have done better with the actual book. The narrators chosen did nothing for me, and every now and again they'd insert some random, discordant music that served no purpose at all. Not recommended.

More Bookmarks

2011-11-13T13:50:00.000-05:00

Picked up some thread last week and finally finished off the last round of bookmarks I'd stitched. These are from a couple different pattern books. Again I was using up a lot of extra thread I had and added a bit of sparkle to some of the bookmarks.

More Bookmarks

2011-11-04T12:07:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a few days off and wanted to finish up the bookmarks I stitched over the past month. Then I quickly ran out of thread and didn't feel like going to buy more, so only a few got finished this week. The patterns are form a few different sources. Again I was using up extra fabric and threads I have a lot of/

The Letter R

2011-10-30T11:43:00.000-04:00

In addition to her Mirabilia designs, Nora Corbett does a bunch of smaller cross stitch designs under her own name. I wanted to stitch some of her letter fairies for a while now since I thought they were quite lovely designs. I was less sold on the color schemes. For starters, the patterns call for hand-dyed specialty floss. The one time I used such floss it bled so I wanted to switch things to DMC. Then there is the fact that using the called for supplies would make the project cost at least $50 which is way too much for a project you can stitch in a few days. So I bought new linen, but used threads and beads I already had.

I started by trying to match the called for colors to DMC floss then ended up chucking that and improvising. I stitched the main part of the R in 4180 (all colors DMC, blending filaments and cord from Krenik, and beads from Mill Hill). The shadows and fairy's hair are 3371. I simplified the colors in the upright using 3808, 3810, and 597 accented with beads in 3035 and 18022. The flesh is 754 back-stitched with 758. The dress is 317, 318, and 762 with 001 blending filament. I used silver thread of unknown manufacturer for the strings coming off the dress. The beading in the dress and hair was done in 3007, 2010, and 16010. I wanted the wings to look semi-transparent (unlike the original design) so I used one strand of whatever color should have been there in the R along with one strand 5200 and 095 blending filament. The rest of the wings were in 5200 with one strand 095 blending filament. The wings were back-stitched in 095 #4 braid. The fabric is a light blue with some sparkle woven in. I think it worked out pretty well.

Recent Reads

2011-10-20T19:36:00.000-04:00

The Book of All Power by Edgar Wallace. Wallace wrote 175 novels and yet is one of those novelists who seem to have been forgotten. I'd never heard of him (and can't remember how I stumbled upon him), but if this is an example of the quality of his work, I'm looking forward to reading more. It can roughly be divided into three parts. The first part takes part in London with a plot to murder a Russian nobleman. The second part is in Russia just prior to the revolution and largely deals with an Englishman's relationship with a nobleman and his daughter. The last part takes place during the revolution is the jam packed adventure of the main characters trying to escape. Might be viewed as slightly anti-Semetic today but not overly so by the standards of the time. The final revelation of the contents of the Book of All Power is reaaly great.

The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin by Alex DeJonge. Rasputin often gets most of the blame for the downfall of the Romanov dynasty. It's somewhat unfair since by that point in time the Romanovs had devolved into a pretty useless lot. I liked that DeJonge tried to strip away the nonsense and be objective. He makes the rather sensible suggestion that Rasputin used folk remedies to effect his miraculous cures. He also points out that Rasputin wasn't in it so for money (for example anytime he got money, Rasputin would often give it away immediately) and he wasn't in it for power and control. Rasputin' motivation was largely to be considered important. He was the hick from the sticks that had the ear of important people (I think like Andy Griffith's character in A Face in the Crowd). Whatever influence he yielded, he used to keep himself from being sent back to his small hometown where he would be no one.

The Gibson Upright by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson. I normally don't read plays since I think they should be seen not read, but when will I ever get a chance to see a Booth Tarkington play? This came out in 1919 when socialism was still okay in the US. Gibson runs a successful piano factory where he is being driven insane by workers' demands for more money, less hours, and a greater share of the profits. He gets fed up and turns the whole lot over to the workers with rather predictable results. I really enjoyed it, and for being 90 years old it was quite topical. (Rant: The whole Occupy Wall Street thing smacks of socialism to me. Complaining that corporations make money is like complaining that the sky is blue. If anything, the protesters should be in Washington, DC complaining about unfair tax rules. I don't mind paying taxes since we need laws, infrastructure, and social services, but I think everyone should pay their fair share.)

Princess Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth by Carol Felsenthal. Alice was Theodore Roosevelt's only child by his first wife. he became a fixture of Washington society and was supposed to be this witty charming person. The book itself was okay but very slanted towards Alice being wonderful and very skimpy on details. Her childhood seemed skimmed over and it was only toward the end where a glimpse of her famous diners parties was seen. The problem with trying to make Alice the heroine of her own life's story is that she was at heart a self-absorbed, grasping, spoiled, hateful bitch. Edith Roosevelt is made out to be the wicked stepmother with Alice having a deprived childhood. Yes, it was so tragic that Alice was sent to visit her wealthy grandparents while the rest of the family lived on a meager budget. Alice's relationship with her siblings is barely mentioned. Villain number two is supposed to be husband Nicholas Longworth, the friendly, popular Speaker of the House who tried to build a consensus between Republicans and Democrats (heck, we could use more like him). In the book he is portrayed as little more than a drunken letch. Alice actively campaigned against her husband in supporting TR's doomed Bull Moose campaign. She carried petty slights with her forever and took pride in destroying people. She treated her only daughter like crap and drove the girl to an early grave. Apart from herself, she only seemed to care for two people. One was TR since her entire existence and character was based on the fact she was TR's daughter. The other was the granddaughter she took in after her daughter's death. I suspect Alice realized she was getting old and needed someone to look after her in her old age and preach the gospel of the great Alice after her death. What a waste of a human being. At least TR's other children tried to lead productive lives.

Scary Mary by S.A. Hunter. Free for Kindle so can't really complain. the cover made it out to be a scary short story. It's actually teenage angst about a girl who is bullied because she's different. Ho hum. For dealing with the cause de jour of bullying, the references are a bit dated. Today's teen would try to summon Heath Ledger with a ouji baord, not River Phoenix (it's been 18 years since his untimely death, and most of his movies were not standard teenage fair that would be regularly watched by today's kids).

A View From Above by Wilt Chamberlain. I don't know much about basketball, but had of course heard of Wilt. This was surprisingly good. It's Wilt's opinion on sports, politics, women, and life. Okay, he's got a huge ego but he kind of deserves to have one. He packed a hell of a lot of stuff in his life and was good at most everything he tried his hand at. He made a lot of good points. The media decides who the heroes and villains should be and twists things accordingly. Making money should be about what good you can do with it and not just a means to an end. Women's sports should get as much attention as men. Do your job to the best of your ability. He's honest in his opinions and writes well. The book is most famous for it's second to last chapter where Wilt claims he slept with close to 20,000 women. I picked up my copy at a book sale. It was stamped showing it was once part of the library of St. John's Lutheran Church. Bizarre choice for a church library.

Robert Osbourne's Coming Back!

2011-10-11T17:02:00.000-04:00

When TCM announced Robert Osbourne was taking a vacation, it was supposed to be for three months which have come and gone. I went on the website today to look for the name of the awesome song in the October promo (Saw You Firstby Givers) and saw Robert's coming back on December 1. Yippee!!! Granted, it is still a long time to wait, but the guest hosts have largely sucked. The actors were universally horrible. The movie critics have been better since they at least are used to talking about movies and not themselves. Thank God, they had Ben Mankiewicz as evening host for August's summer of the stars. Should have just turned the whole thing over to begin with. And TCM has now started taking the back bumper off of movies which I'm hoping is just because the hosts have been bad. If someone introduces a film, I want them back at the end for a recap.

Yes, I am a TCM addict. It wasn't so bad when I had my Tivo since it was old and could only record one thing at a time. Now I've got a DVR that can do two programs at once so I don't have to chose between an interesting looking film and something else I want to see. I even subscribed to the Now Playing magazine a few months ago to better track what movies looked good.

Fairy Tales

2011-10-10T19:38:00.001-04:00

I've always liked fairy tales and stories, preferably in as close to the original version as possible (I firmly believe there is a special pace in hell for the people at Disney responsible for that bastardization of The Little Mermaid). One of the nice things about the Kindle is free fairy tale book. so I've been reading a story a day.

I discovered Andrew Lang's work with Historical Mysteries. From there I discovered he'd put out a series of twelve fairy books named for colors. So far I've read The Lilac Fairy Book (Andrew Lang's Fairy Books) and The Olive Fairy Book (Andrew Lang's Fairy Books). Lang readily admits he's an aggregator. He picked the stories often from foreign collections and then had them translated instead of going to traditional oral sources. He used sources from all over the world so you get a nice variety along with stories you have never heard of before. I also find it interesting to see the different variations of the stories everyone knows. So far the free versions lack illustrations but seem to be well formatted. The are aimed at children, so most gruesomeness has been edited out.

Lang mentioned Popular Tales from the Norse in one introduction, so I decided to check that out. George Webbe Desant did the translation. Being all from one country, there's a lot of variations on the same theme, but one of the reasons fairy tales survive is the comforting sense of familiarity. The first quarter of this is an extraordinarily dull essay. At least what I read of it was dull. The themes and structures of the various stories were clear enough without needing a lot of extra explanation. It's great Webbe wrote it for the scholarly, but for most people it's just so much extra blather keeping you from the actual text of the book.

Recent Reads

2011-09-25T19:15:00.000-04:00

My Life In France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'homme. This book was utterly delightful. I grew up watching Julia on PBS and have always had a fondness for her. Her complete rapture over food and life practically explodes from the page.

Death on Demand (Death on Demand Mysteries, No. 1) by Carolyn Hart. This was the first of the Death on Demand Series. I like that there is minimal back story on Annie and Max since back story can bog things down. sometimes I wonder why I read this series when I don't really like the main characters. I guess I find the story's interesting enough despite the main female character being incredibly stupid.

The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscencesby Dr. Frederick Treves. Only a short portion of the book is about Joseph Merrick the rest deal with Treves' medical career. the book was published in 1923, 33 years after Merrick's death which might explain Treves' errors and lack of details about the case. The rest of the book is about various episodes in Treves long and distinguished medical career. It is especially interesting considering all the changes in the medical field during that time. If you're looking for information on the Elephant Man, this is not the best book. If you are looking for the memoir of a great doctor, it is a worthwhile read. I wouldn't mind reading Treves' other books at some point.

The Murder of Adolf Hitler: The Truth About the Bodies in the Berlin Bunkerby Hugh Thomas. I get the feeling the murder part of the title was thought up by the publisher to boost sales. Thomas starts with the idea that all the eyewitness testimony of the people in the bunker at the end is not to be trusted so he looked to other sources. One source was Albert Speer who wasn't in the bunker at the end and who would say anything to make himself look better, self-serving jackass that he was. The other main source was the reports on the bodies by the Soviet authorities which the author admits were written at a different time than they are dated. Now my favorite totalitarian dictator Joe Stalin was insistent that Hitler had committed suicide and equally insistent that Hitler had escaped. If I was having to write a report for Stalin in those circumstances, I'd be less concerned about accuracy and more concerned with putting something down that could serve both stories. I will give Thomas credit for not insisting that Hitler was murdered but presenting it as a hypothetical case that was no ore ridiculous that the official story (and the murder takes up maybe ten pages of the whole book). My problem is his claims about Eva Braun Hitler. To explain his view of the Soviet reports, he claims Eva attempted suicide to avoid actually having to commit suicide then as Hitler was murdered another female body was smuggled into the bunker, dressed in Eva's blue dress with Eva's dental bridge put in it mouth allowing Eva to escape. What a mess. The Red Army is a couple hundred yards away and Martin Bormann is doing a shell game with bodies? What happened to Eva if she escaped the bunker? If she didn't want to die with Hitler, why did she chose to come to Berlin? I'll believe the silly story that Hitler was murdered before I'd believe Eva didn't die that same day. She was dumb as bricks, but she was loyal.

The Flight of the Romanovs: A Family Sagaby John Curtis Perry and Constantine Pleshakov. I have long been interested in Russian history. This was a different take on the end of the Romanov empire in that it focuses on the extended family and not on Nicholas II and his family. It starts with the murder of Alexander II which is a good place since that sets up all the Romanovs who were alive at the time of the revolution. It is somewhat hard to keep track of everyone with so many similar names and nicknames. The Romanovs seem equal parts devoted to Russia and to stupid to live given their reluctance to leave and their lack of foresight in having funds outside of Russia. They really seemed to not be able to grasp that the people wanted to kill them (silly considering the story starts with the tsar being blown up by a bomb). Nicolas II's sister Olga seemed pretty cool and the only one to really grasp what was going on. It's also rather striking what a close-mindeed, stuck up group they were, particularly about marriages. Guess they conveniently forgot Peter the Great's beloved wife Catherine from whom they are descended was a peasant and a camp follower.

More Bookmarks

2011-09-08T18:29:00.000-04:00

Was able to finish one last round of bookmarks before the Myerstown Library Book and Bake Sale on Saturday.

I made some modifications in thread choice. You can't really tell from the pictures, but the Read and Frog bookmarks have sparkling threads. I'm trying to use up the DMC sparkly thread I have since it is a pain to stitch with due to constant snarling (Krenik shiny stuff is infinitely superior), but I'm too cheap to just throw the stuff out.

Recent Reads

2011-09-05T16:40:00.000-04:00

I am Scout by Charles J. Shields. This is an interesting idea. Shields wrote a full biography of Harper Lee and then wrote this which is a young adult version of the biography. It's pretty good, but left me with unanswered questions that make me want to read the regular version. This centers largely on the writing of Mockingbird and Capote's In Cold Blood. I'd have liked a bit more on Lee's relationships with her sisters and on what she does with her life.

The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr. A painting turns up in an Irish monastery and is possibly a lost Caravaggio. This book follows scholars trying to track down documentation and restorers trying to authenticate the work. Nicely written in that it is clear several of the characters do not like each other, but the author does not take sides. An entertaining real life detective story.

They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie. A political thriller by Dame Agatha. I had a hard time getting into it at first, but it gets nice and twisting with some good surprises thrown in.

Memoirs of a Vending Machine by James Pollard. This was free for Kindle which is about what it is worth. Only finished it because it was short. This is the story of the first night a man spends in Japan. He arrives knowing nothing of Japan's language or customs and gets hopelessly lost and confused. I was confused since his purpose in going to Japan was to teach English, but how can he do that is he cannot communicate with the Japanese?

Mrs. Jack by Louise Hall Tharp. A biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner from 1965. A proper biography presenting Gardner in a glowing light. Yes, she gifted the world with a great museum, but the author seems a bit too enthralled with her subject. Gardner "mentored" promising young men, but the author is clearly tap dancing around the idea that at least one of those relationships was a full blown affair. Then there is the insistence that Gardner was a charming person who was just a little strong willed when the book lists enough incidents to make it clear Gardner was more a harpy who always had to have her way. And as a side note, I was somewhat disappointed in the web site for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The main feature of the museum is that each piece was personally placed by Gardner. You can explore individual pieces of art on the site, but you cannot explore rooms and see the art in its surroundings.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. When Vonnegut is good, he is very good. The book examines pure researchers who look for answers in the name of science with no concerns of consequence. There's also a interesting religion based on untruths. The writing is simple and plain, but there's a lot of deep thought behind it.
Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories edited by Alex Belth. I picked this up for Kindle when it was free one day. A nice collection of memories of the old Yankee Stadium by people who both loved and hated the Yankees. I'm not a baseball fan, but enjoyed reading about the passions a building can engender.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

2011-07-30T16:04:00.000-04:00

Spoilers 'cause I don't think I can write about this without them

Yea Neville!!! After years of watching Neville's role minimized I was scared that he's end up screwed in the final film. Not only does he get his main hero bit killing Nagini, he gets several other hero bit as well. And he goes for Luna which is a pairing I was always for.

Yea Aberforth! Of course I'll watch Ciaran Hinds in most anything (He was awesome as Caesar in Rome despite looking nothing like Caesar should) so I was thrilled with his casting. Despite the distinct lack of goats, he rocked.

For the most part, they got things right with the final film. They stayed mostly true to the books including minimizing the battle scenes and having the major deaths revealed only as aftermath. The only spots that failed were the final battle (the Molly/Bellatrix duel was a bit flat) and the pointless extended duel between Harry and Voldemort. I prefer the book version were the final duel is more a war of words than spells. For being a popcorn movie, it succeeded in being a well made film as well. They didn't get too jumpy with the cuts and the special effects weren't overwhelming. The music was subdued to the point of being almost unnoticeable at times which was quite effective. All in all quite beautifully produced. The sound seemed kind of soft, but that might have been the theater we were in (the surround sound only seemed to really kick in when Voldemort was whispering to the students).

Alan Rickman should get an Oscar nod out of this one. His death scene produced audible sniffles throughout the theater. I ended up with a terrible headache since I cried through most of his screen time.

Loved when the Malfoy family walked away from the final battle. Good, evil, whatever--their family group was all that mattered in the end.

Recent Reads

2011-07-29T20:56:00.001-04:00

Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber. This was an interesting collection of short stories largely about characters seeking their fortunes and finding things do not work out as planned (hence the title). There's some humor (the baseball story is quite funny) and one or two happy endings, but it's mostly bittersweet withe the last story being downright sad.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. You've seen the adaptation, but you've probably never read the book. We had a book discussion on this at the Myerstown Library a week or two ago and of the eighteen or so of us there only about a third finished the book. Not that that stopped us from discussing the hell out of it for over two hours which was oodles of fun. Yes it's Twain and has a good deal of humor, but for the large part this is a dark story. Out Yankee doesn't just travel through time and space, he decides the Britons are backwards and sets up secret schools to try to make Dark Age Britain into America. Twain uses a lot of ten cent words in this so keep a dictionary handy while reading. It's a bit of a tough read, but overall is thought provoking and worth the effort.

John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine & Doxology. This is a collection of essays celebrating Calvin's 500th birthday which I picked up one day when it was free for Kindle. I don't know if it is the Methodism I was raised in or Protestantism in general, but I've never paid much thought to the the theologians of the Protestant movement. The essays were well written and informative. Some of the stuff on predestination was like jumping down a rabbit hole, but given the shear volume of Calvin's writings he was bound to over think things at times. The book wasn't entirely my cup of teas, but was decent.

Einstein's Refrigerator by Steve Silverman. Another Kindle freebie. This is one of those books that started as a trivia sort of website that got turned into book form. The author thinks he is cleverer than he actually is, but that can be said of all of us who write on the Internet.

Asimov's Mysteries by Isaac Asimov. Short stories combining science fiction and mystery. Asimov was a brilliant short story writer. For someone with a thorough interest in science and technology, he didn't do a very good job of predicting the future, though.

Party Monster by James St. James. A true story of the death of a drug dealer by a NY Club Kid except it's more the story of the whole Club Kid scene and how it spiraled out of control by someone who was there through it all (later made into a movie with Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin). It's written in a breezy witty style that lets you imagine how much fun it all was while at the same time seeing that those involved were shallow, filthy drug addicts with few if any redeeming features. A trashy good time.

The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith. It started out promising with a guy falling from a balcony then bogged down into the angsty drivel of a middle aged spinster who is improbably rich and thinks way to much. When nothing else had happened by page 100, I stopped reading.

Go Down Together by Jeff Guinn. The true story of Bonnie and Clyde which is nothing like the movie (not that the movie isn't awesome in its own way). Very well researched and informative given the lack of accurate source material (newspapers were more interested in sensationalism than the truth). It's somewhat amazing that two such totally inept criminals became so famous.

Frankie Pickle and the Mathematical Menace by Eric Wight. I pre-ordered this months ago when it was a free pre-order and had completely forgotten it when it downloaded to my Kindle. This is junior fiction and apparently part of a series. Frankie's having problems with math and then has problems getting some studying done the weekend before a quiz. The story's interspersed with comic book pages (it reminded me of an old cartoon where the kid is daydreaming in class). I was impressed by the clarity and ease of reading of the comic book pages on the Kindle. Very well written kid's book with a good message that isn't preachy or heavy handed. What the heck, here's the cartoon

Fatal Justice

2011-07-25T19:57:00.000-04:00

I have a certain fondness for true crime books and once upon a time know I have read Fatal Vision, the infamous novel about the Green Beret killings. So when I saw Fatal Justice at the Palmyra book sale, I decided to grab it. Fatal Vision was about Jeffrey MacDonald's guilt. Fatal Justice is about his innocence.

In February 1970, MacDonald was found wounded in his quarters in Fort Bragg. His wife and two young daughters were beaten and stabbed to death. He blamed hippies. The army investigators blamed him, but an army investigation found no reason to court martial him. In 1979 he was tried in a civilian court and found guilty. Joe McGinnis spent the entire trial and short time afterward promising to write a book trumpeting MacDonald's innocence and ended up with Fatal Vision in which MacDonald was portrayed as a monster. Various investigators and lawyers have tried to get MacDonald free on appeal, but the only thing they have accomplished is the book Fatal Justice.

In the trial, the prosecution won on the basis of physical evidence from what they had claimed was a contained crime scene. The appeals have been based on the fact that the prosecution failed to provide various lab notes and other exculpatory evidence to the defense. While it is true that some information was withheld, I've got to agree with the courts refusing to grant an appeal based on that fact. The defense could have gotten a not guilty verdict without that specific evidence and was simply too incompetent to do so.(I could be wrong about some tings below since I'm going off of what I read in the book and not the actual trial transcripts.)

Between the time the crime was reported and the crime scene was secured, up to two dozen assorted MP's, neighbor, and looky-loos wandered through disturbing evidence. Why did the defense not call these people to dhow the physical evidence was unreliable?

Knowing that the prosecutor was withholding evidence, why did the defense agree to a stipulation on the prosecution's fiber expert's evidence? Fiber evidence was of supreme importance in this case, the defense should have insisted o a chance to cross examine.

The defense called Helen Stoeckley, the supposed girl in the blond wig and floppy hate MacDonald saw during the attack. Her supposed confessions consisted largely of "I think I was there but I'm not sure since I was on drugs". In other words, a extremely unreliable witness. After the testimony of those she supposedly confessed to was not allowed, why didn't they call the people who claimed to see her in the neighborhood and with bloodstains the night of the murder?

Why were MacDonald's doctors not called to give evidence that his injuries were worse than the prosecution let on?

Finally, why why why did they put MacDonald on the stand? One of the reasons he ended up on trial was that he came off as an ass in his media appearances made right after the army decided not to prosecute. In a big trial, you should never put the defendant on the stand. On cross, the prosecution will ask questions based on their theory which the defendant of course disagrees with. The defendant than appears evasive or deceitful when he can't answer those questions, and when he starts getting annoyed at the line of questioning, the jury will start to think that yes, he is the kind of guy who could fly off in a fir of rage.

Did MacDonald commit the murders? I don't know. The evidence was poor and there are too many inconsistencies in both the hippie theory and the MacDonald as killer theory. But, he got a fair trial and really has no grounds for an appeal.

As for the book Fatal Justice, at 4 00+ pages it was about twice as long as it should be. In the end, it was more like the authors had an axe to grind than a desire to present a clear and accurate telling of the story. Their argument would have been mush more compelling had it been a bit more succinct.

Degrassi

2011-07-18T18:18:00.000-04:00

I was just a scootch too old to be into the original Degrassi series when it first aired in the late 1980's. I've heard many people express a great deal of nostalgia for it, though, so I decided to check out the original series (available on Hulu and Amazon Prime) and the newer series showing on Teen Nick.

Degrassi is a teen soap opera produced in Canada. The original show followed a group of kids through junior and senior high and ran for five seasons starting in 1988. I was quite impressed. The first season ended with a pregnant 14 year-old (she kept the kid) and subsequent seasons had story lines on abortion, bullying, HIV, and drunk driving. The final episode even had two of the good kids using the f-word as a verb (quite racy for a teen basic cable show). There's messages, but it doesn't get preachy which was nice. Needless to say, it was heavily censored when the show first came to the US since we are not as progressive as out neighbors to the north.

Degrassi: The Next Generation, picked up about ten years later with one of the original kids now a teacher and one of the students being the child of the first show's pregnant 14 year old. I was playing catch up on Teen Nick, so I watched it largely out of order but I've gotten through most of the old episodes before the new season starts tonight. They hung on to the original cast a bit too long, even following them to college (stupid when the show is about Degrassi Community School). The show still follows all of the hot button issues for teens with someone pregnant every few seasons just to remind girls that this could happen to you. The biggest flaw is the complete disconnect from reality. These kids are running around largely unsupervised with concerned parents shown somewhat negatively (is it really as easy as the show makes it seem for kids to go off and live in their own?). There's too many celebrity cameos. It's great that Kevin Smith was a fan of the original show, but I don't need him and Jason Mewes playing themselves in an absurd plot about making a movie at the school and then helping some students get Hollywood careers. Students have appeared on numerous television shows, become Parisian fashion models (girl was way too short), gotten record deals, starred in movies, and worked as strippers. The plots on their own might have been okay, but the cumulative effect is to turn the show into a fantasy.

Maybe it is just because I am closer in age to the original show's characters, but the first show is much better than The Next Generation. Partly it is because the plots were more realistic, but it is also the characters were a lot more likable. Heck, I even got a bit misty-eyed over one of the bullies in the final episode of Degrassi High. In TNG, the characters are a lot more self-centered and nasty. I don't think I've gotten through more than three episodes in a row without thinking one of the characters was a complete ass who ought to be smacked upside the head. I'll probably keep watching TNG for now, but it is not a must-see.

More Bookmarks

2011-07-18T17:49:00.000-04:00

Finally got the sewing machine out to sew up the rest of the bookmarks I'd cross stitched.

I finished up the two pattern books I had been working on previously and started on a book of Biblical bookmarks. I'm continuing to use up some of the embroidery floss I have extra of instead of what the pattern calls for. I tried to use invisible thread to finish these but could not get the tension right on the sewing machine so ended up using white. I think they ended up pretty nice.

More Bookmarks

2011-07-04T11:17:00.000-04:00

I had rather grand plans of getting all the bookmarks I'd stitched up assembled today, but it was not to be. It is not so much that my allergies are bad since I just have a few bad coughing spells a day and a couple congested spells, but in dealing with those small instances I need to take medicine which exhausts me (non-drowsy my ass). And that's the OTC medicine. I shudder to think what a prescription medicine would do to me. But I digress.

I ended up just putting together some heat'n'bond and felt jobs while leaving the bookmarks to be sewn up for another day. I'm almost through with the bookmark pattern books I have. I have been playing a bit fast and loose with the colors, using old variegated floss and colors I have lots of instead of the recommended colors, but I think they turned out rather well.

Recent Reads

2011-07-03T19:18:00.000-04:00

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. i had heard of the series and knew it was about a boy criminal mastermind. I did not know the series is about his world colliding with the supernatural world of dwarfs, sprites, and elves. It's young adult level, but quite well written. I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for the rest of the series.

The Brass Bottle by F. Antsey. A young man picks up an ancient bottle at an auction in an attempt to impress his prospective father-in-law and ends up in possession of a genie. Humorous complications ensue. On of the nicest things about e-readers is the ability to discover largely forgotten writers for free.

The First Rumpole Omnibus, Rumpole Misbehaves, and Rumpole and the Reign of Terror by John Mortimer. While knowing the name Rumpole of the Bailey, I never saw the TV show. I stumbled across these at a book sale and said "why not?". The omnibus is two books of short stories and a novel based on the show while the other two are short novels. I'm not overly familiar with the British legal system, but one muddles through. Rumpole is an aging barrister who loves nothing more than defending the rights of a defendant in court. He never pleads guilty with presumption of innocence being the cornerstone of his beliefs. He's got several bad habits and a wife he calls She Who Must Be Obeyed, but all in all is a lovable sort. I doubt the author expected the series to go on so long. The timing issue is a bit tricky since the series started the late 1970's with Rumpole in his late sixties. In 2006's Reign of Terror, he remembers serving in the blitz while defending a suspected terrorist in an Al Qaeda world. Basically Rumpole stays always around age 70 no matter what. A fun series well worth checking out.

Smokin' Seventeen by Janet Evanovich. Stephanie Plum is back for more wacky hi jinks while continuing to suffer from an inability to decide which man she wants. Blah, blah, blah. I know these books are basically junk food, but Evanovich doesn't even seem to be trying any more. I figured out the killer pretty early in the book. What I cannot figure out is why all these men keep falling for Stephanie who is a compete train wreck of a human being.

Know the Past, Find the Future: The New York Public Library at 100. A nice collection of pictures and essays showcasing some of the treasures of the NYPL. The pictures are best viewed in color with a Kindle app instead of on the Kindle.

The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Tish and her spinster cohorts solve a murder in a hospital and help two young couples fall in love. Along the way they lie, steal, and damage property. Not bad for three church going ladies in the early 1900's. Each of the three stories starts at the end then circles back around to the beginning so you need to pay attention. Altogether delightful and fun.

The Other Royal Wedding

2011-07-02T13:20:00.000-04:00

With all the brouhaha over Britain's recent Royal Wedding, the wedding of Prince Albert of Monaco has been rather overlooked. As far as I can tell, it wasn't fully televised in the US, so I ended up watching it on line. I guess Princess Grace has been dead for so long that most Americans feel no interest in the Monaco royal family. However Albert's marriage is quite a remarkable feat. After all this is a man who has seemed so against marriage that his country's constitution needed to be changed to secure the line of succession, not to mention the gay rumors that swirled around him for years that were only put to rest when he had a few illegitimate kids.

I wasn't overly thrilled with Charlene's out fit for the civil ceremony last night. It was nice, but palazzo pants while dressy didn't seem dressy enough for the marriage to a monarch. Her dress today for the religious ceremony blew me away. Portrait neckline and a simple silhouette with just enough embellishment to make it interesting. Loved the plain veil attached to the jeweled hairpiece around her bun and the lack of any other jewelry. The bridesmaids were adorable in their peasant girl outfits. the guests were also a lot better dressed than those at the British wedding--great colors with focus on a complete look instead of just an interesting hat.

The nice thing for Monaco is that it's a small country of no real importance other than as a playground. This meant they could throw the wedding they wanted it no worries about offending the rest of the world. Must be nice to be able to throw a three day party and pretty much invite your entire country. The staircase of the palace proved a perfect location (although most of the male guests seemed to be wilting in the heat). There was a great mix of music. Stephanie looked genuinely happy for her brother. Caroline did not. Not sure if that's her natural expression or if she's somewhat pissed that she might get bumped from the line of succession.

Albert and Charlene do seem genuinely smitten with each other. Given the rocky marital history of his sisters, I think he was wise to wait until he was sure he found the right person. Hopefully they will have a long and happy marriage.

The Book of Mormon Cast Recording

2011-06-11T18:05:00.000-04:00

I like a good show tune. The musicals I tend to enjoy the most are ones with catchy tunes that stick in your head. Or to put it another way, it should have a good beat that you can dance to.

I check out the New York Post on line every morning to keep up on the gossip and what's going on in the world of the arts, so I am at least semi-aware of what's on Broadway. I was quite excited by the prospects of The Book of Mormon since it was written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame. While South Park can be hit or miss, one thing that is undeniable is their ability to write a good song. And for The Book of Mormon, they teamed with one of the Avenue Q writers, and I thoroughly enjoyed that musical.

Odds of me getting to New York for a show are zero so I must wait for the touring production to come around in a year or two, but in the meantime I will settle for the original cast recording which was on sale in MP3 form for $1.99 on Amazon yesterday. It starts off with the incredibly bouncy and happy "Hello" before veering into African and metal influences. It is also rather on the filthy side if you mind that sort of thing. I'm looking forward to see which song they pick to do at the Tony's tomorrow since most of it is either perverse or plot centered or both.

The musical is about two Mormon missionaries sent to Uganda. You can get the overall plot just by listening to the songs, but I checked out the Wikipedia entry to flesh things out. While on the surface it seems to make fun of Mormons, underneath it shows them as dedicated people with a great deal of faith. It does make fun of religion, but in a spirit of it's all good if you don't take it too seriously. And I am thoroughly impressed by t he LDS response which is to brush the whole thing off as just entertainment. In some ways you have to respect a religion that doesn't get its knickers in a twist over silly things.

Recent Reads

2011-06-05T21:01:00.000-04:00

Roast Beef, Medium by Edna Ferber. Published in 1913, this is a delightful tale of a divorced, middle aged women who has worked for ten years as a travelling saleswomen selling women's petticoats. Along the way she has various adventures involving a rival salesman, her college age son, and a disastrous change in the fullness of skirts. She's tough yet charming and quite a remarkable specimen for a woman of her time. The book is also quite humorous. I'm looking forward to reading more of Ferber's works.

Through Glacier Park by Mary Roberts Rinehart. A travelogue about Rinehart's trip by horseback through Glacier National Park in 1916. The park was still in it's infancy at the time. A nice, short diversion.

Dere Mable, Love Letters of a Rookie and Same Old Bill, eh Mable! by Edward Streeter. Humorous letters fro a WWI dough boy to his girl back home. Okay, the humor does not hold up that well, but it's a nice glimpse of what was considered funny at the time. Streeter's Father of the Bride is a much better book.

Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella. This was free when I picked it up for Kindle. It is the book Field of Dreams was based on. The tale of an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball field for ghosts and kidnaps J. D. Salinger. I enjoyed it more than expected, especially since I find Salinger to be way overrated. Minor quibble in that the wife is too good to be true.

Heart of Darkness and A Set of Six by Joseph Conrad. My main interest in Conrad was that his one story was the basis for the movie The Duellists which is one of my favorites. The story "The Duel" is part of A Set of Six and tells the story of two officers in Napoleon's army who fight a series of duels over fifteen years and no one quite knows why. "The Duel" is decent apart from Conrad throwing in French phrases here and there (language should be consistent--if your French characters are written in English they should speak only English). The movie is better. As for the rest, I will never read Conrad again. I am not sure how Heart of Darkness got its stellar reputation since I found it a dull, wordy mess in which nothing much happened.

The Emo Bunny That Should by John H. Carroll and Hilda the Wicked Witch by Paul Kater. The plus side of eBooks is that it is easier to publish your work. This is also the downside. The Emo Bunny is the tale of a rabbit who rescues other animals from the Easter Bunny. Hilda is the story of a witch who somehow ends up in our world and needs to find a way home. Both are lacking in plot and characterizations. They might be okay as early drafts, but a good editor is desperately needed to whip the stories into shape. Both were free, so at least they were only a waste of time and not money.

The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl. A victim of the 100 page rule (okay, only made it to page 70). A Baltimore lawyer who corresponded with Poe goes off the deep end and sets off to investigate Poe's death. Slow, dull, nonsensical. Poe deserves better.

Goodbye, My Good and Faithful Tivo

2011-06-04T17:01:00.000-04:00

Everything has been breaking lately. There was the accident Tuesday. A couple weeks ago I had phone and Internet issues that required a day off to wait for Verizon (do not like the foreign customer support or the fact it is a whole day time frame). Then we had a bad storm a week ago Thursday that knocked out the power for a few hours. Power came back, cable did not. After a week of phone calls (to Americans who speak understandable English, thank God) they finally realized it was my box and not a general outage on this past Thursday. Tech was to come today between 10:30 and 1:30 (love a small window). Of course he ended up late, but as the accident Comcast offered me a $20 credit for the annoyance. But that is not the point of this post.

Worrying that my old power strip might have contributed to the death of cable, I replaced it last night. My beloved Tivo failed to restart.

I loved my Tivo for six years and eight months. It only showed the channels I wanted on its beautiful 12 day guide. It recorded things for me it thought I'd enjoy (okay, I've been using that feature less with all having streaming video on-line). It didn't always communicate properly with my cable box and could only do record one show at a time, but it was a good and faithful friend for many a year and shall be missed.

Lacking the funds for a new Tivo, I called Comcast and asked for a DVR. They couldn't guarantee I'd get one today, but I lucked out and the tech had one on his truck. Being newer than my Tivo, I can record two things at once, but it will be quite an adjustment to get used to Comcast's inferior program guide.

Here comes the amazing part. I waited until after Comcast came to call and cancel my Tivo service. They offered to replace my box with a newer model for free. I was gobsmacked since my Tivo clearly was obsolete. It wasn't even Tivo brand but a Toshiba Tivo server/DVD combo. They have made a lot of money from me over the years since I had a monthly plan and not a flat rate (I certainly had not expected it to last almost seven years), but I still thought it was a lovely gesture. Once I'm out of debt, I will definitely consider Tivo again.

My baby!

2011-05-31T17:34:00.000-04:00

I could entitle this stupid teenagers, but who amongst us has never glanced at the radio while driving? It was just his bad luck to glance down and not notice traffic had stopped.

I stopped, he hit me and pushed me into the car stopped in front of me. Low speed collission, thank goodness. No one was hurt, although my neck and back will be killing me tomorrow. The inside of my car is covered in coffee (planned to wash and wax it this weekend anyhow). The poor kid who will be buying me new bumpers was very nice about it. Called the cops immediately and made sure everyone was okay. He and his friend were even worried that they were going to be late to school (the school being the reason traffic backs up at that spot in town). He said he thought his first accident would be worse and with more yelling. I afford to scream at him but my heart wasn't in it. I was too close to hysterics to risk letting go. All I care about is he gets my car fixed in a timely manner. Might have to tape up the rear bumper in the meantime since it's loose enough on the side to create drag and screw up my mileage.
My previous car was a Neon that made it through 12 years with only dings and dents before getting hit bad enough to need a bumper replaced. My Yaris is only 4 and has been backed into twice and rear-ended twice. Okay, this is the first time she'll need body work (my normal mechanic was able to pop out one big dent), but it would be nice if she were paid for before I had to replace major bits and pieces

Recent Reads

2011-05-22T17:02:00.000-04:00

Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers. This was the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. The story involves a naked stranger found in a bath tub and a missing financier. The financier is Jewish, and since the story was published in 1923 it can seem a bit anti-Semitic. Not a bad mystery, but not great. It comes off as a cross between P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie.

The Big Four by Agatha Christie. I love Dame Agatha, but given the amount of books she wrote there are bound to be some stinkers. This book features Poirot trying to track down an international syndicate of criminals. It started life as a series of short stories and in making them into a novel things simply did not gel. It's not her worst book (I'm looking at you, Postern of Fate), but it's pretty not good.

The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein's another author whose good work is so good I'll forgive the bad (well, almost--The Number of the Beast really sucks). This is one of his better works and is basically straight science fiction. Dude gets screwed over by his girlfriend and partner then ends up doing some time travel to set things right. An all around enjoyable romp.

The Centurion's Wife by Janette Oke and Davis Bunn. I got this one when it was free for Kindle. It's set in the days around Jesus' death when Pilate's niece is fighting an arranged marriage with a centurion who is investigating the disappearance of Jesus' body. It's a little dull and a little suspect factually. At the time, Jesus was just one of many messiahs so I doubt there would have been this investigation over the death of just another rabble rouser. Plus the Jesus movement was strictly a Jewish proposition at the time and it wasn't until Paul stuck his nose into the business that non-Jews were accepted without having to follow the Jewish law. There's a lot of things about Paul I don't like (I consider myself a Christian and not a Paul-person) but he did open things up a bit and was an excellent propagandist. Then again, not a lot of primary sources survive from the time, so none of us can have a full understanding of the period (imagine 2000 years into the future with people basing their understanding of the 20th century on the National Enquirer and Kitty Kelly books).

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson. My aunt loaned me this since she was having a tough time getting through it which is understandable given it's 600+ page length. It's really two stories. The framing story is of an investigative journalist going after a businessman. The middle is said journalist trying to solve the disappearance of a girl 30 years earlier. To do this he enlists an anti-social girl with unusual hacking and organizing skills. It's a bit long and is slow out of the gate, only starting to get interesting around page 100. There's also the inexplicable fact that every woman falls into bed with the journalist (maybe not inexplicable given that Larsson was himself a journalist). A decent thriller that is somewhat over hyped. I might read the sequels if I stumble across them at some point in time, but I'm not compelled to search them out.

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. Larson is one of the few authors whose books I will buy in hardback when they are first published. This on the strength of Isaac's Storm which is one of the best nonfiction books of all time. Then I end up a bit disappointed in that nothing can live up to Isaac's Storm. This is the story of the America ambassador to Berlin in the mid-1930's, a hopelessly in over his head professor. It is also the story of his adult daughter who goes along with the family and cuts a sexual swath through Berlin, flirting with Nazi and Soviet ideology along with men. It's an interesting snapshot of the times showing how easy it was to focus on the normal stuff going on while ignoring the gross atrocities occurring at the same time. The main problem was that I didn't find any of the people involved to be particularly compelling.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. We recently lost the last combat veteran of WWI, a war that seems to become more forgotten each year. This book is horrible but real, and I would put it on the list of essential books to read about the Great War.

Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith. Free for Kindle and recommended for me by Amazon (presumably due to my love of Wodehouse). The author's name was buzzing on my mind so I looked him up to discover George was the famous Gilbert and Sullivan thespian, originator of the roles of the Major-General and Ko-ko (and I'll take this opportunity to plug the awesome film Topsy-Turvy about the making of The Mikado). This is the diary of a clerk named Pooter who thinks he's better than he actually is. He takes himself to seriously which is where the humor comes from. All in all a good bit of fun.

The Greatest American Hero

2011-04-30T19:05:00.000-04:00

I make a point of checking my Hulu queue at least once a month for things that are expiring soon. I didn't notice anything urgent in March and so was quite surprised two weeks ago to realize The Greatest American Hero was set to expire on the last day of this month. So I've spent my free time over the past two weeks making it through the series.

The show is about a Ralph, a teacher of troubled students who is given a supersuit by an alien. The alien tells him he needs to work with FBI agent Bill Maxwell to do good. They then lose the instruction book and spend the entire series trying to figure out what powers Ralph has. This is a general reconstruction since the pilot episode is not available for streaming on Hulu or Amazon which sucks since unless I buy the DVDs I may never know why Bill eats dog biscuits.

It's a Stephen J. Cannell so you know what kind of show you're going to get. Dude did make some good action shows that also had heart. The secret of this show is not that Ralph is a superhero, it is that he is a great guy who happens to have super powers. He's out of the suit more than he's in it. The first season's pretty realistic with more outlandish plots coming into play later. Apparently the network insisted the show be a bit more action oriented which meant Cold War plots since it was the early 1980's. The show is good enough to rise above the silly plots. It holds up quite well apart from the really bad special effects (although that is part of it's charm). There's also the fun of Ralph having a kid in the first season who quickly disappears with no explanation.

This is a case where whoever cast the show really deserves an award. William Katt is Ralph and manages to be sincere and earnest without becoming preachy. He was really cute, too (I like the skinny, muscular type with good hair). He and his love interest, a surprisingly good Connie Sellecca, have a lot of chemistry. her character is a lawyer who holds her own in insisting she be part of the crime fighting team. The real star is Robert Culp as Bill Maxwell. He's bombastic and bossy and almost but not quite over the top. Everyone involved looks like they were having a heck of a good time making the show. Simply put, it's a really fun show. It also has one of the best theme songs ever.

The Royal Wedding

2011-04-29T07:14:00.000-04:00

Squee! The dress is by Sarah Burton. One--her designs rock. Two--she's head designer for Alexander McQueen and he was an anti-monarchist so the choice is kind of humorous. I like the simplicity. The train is a good proportion for the Abbey. Would have liked the veil a little longer in the back. Glad she went with the understated tiara. Really hoping her dress helps end this sleeveless trend that's bee going on for the past few years.

Pippa's Maid of Honor dress is lovely. Hers is more of what I imagined Kate's would be like. It was so cute that they had her running herd on the two smallest bridesmaids during the procession.

Prince Albert of Monaco is too hefty for a swallow-tail coat. Posh and Becks looked amazing. Love the Princess Royal's purple and green outfit. It's so spring-y. Would have liked the Duchess of Cornwall's coat better without the box pleats.

Alexander McQueen

2011-04-28T21:20:00.000-04:00

I follow fashion in a casual way--checking out magazines and wasting ridiculous amounts of time on line looking at collections during the major Fashion Weeks. There would always be looks i liked, but rarely whole collections that caught my eye. Then I saw the pictures from Alexander McQueen's Plato's Atlantis Collection. The patterns, the colors, the Armadillo Shoes. It was over the top ridiculous FASHION--beautiful and inspirational, but something me mere mortals could never wear. I was really looking forward to what McQueen would do next when he killed himself (and while I generally only approve of suicide in a very narrow range of circumstances, I cannot help by admire the sheer thoroughness in his death--attention to detail was clearly his strength). When his final collection was shown after his death, it was so insanely beautiful it left me in awe. All that being said, I do like what Sarah Burton's been doing since she took over since I think she's making stunning clothes that are a little more wearable than McQueen's stuff.

The Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute will be hosting an exhibition of McQueen's work from May 4 to July 11 (and I'm almost looking forward to seeing what everyone is wearing to the Met Ball next week as much as I am looking forward to the royal wedding tomorrow). I almost didn't look for the exhibition catalog figuring the cost would be way out of my range, but I looked on Amazon and hit the buy button as soon as I was it was less than $30. It arrived today. It's huge--10"x13" and 240 pages. The cover is lenticular, morphing back and forth from a golden skull to McQueen's face as you move it around. There's almost 300 color photos. I almost feel like I could spend hours just staring at the photos since you can see the details and craftsmanship that went into every piece. (I don't know how Daphne Guinness ever gets anything done with her massive collection of McQueen's work. If I were her, I'd just sit in my closet studying the stitching.) The book even smells like a book should. Really, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Recent Reads

2011-04-24T18:03:00.001-04:00

A Man of Means by P. G. Wodehouse. Six short stories about a young man with more money than he knows what to do with and the women he trys to spend it on. It's not long and is really kind of delightful. Then again, I don't think you can go wrong with Wodehouse.

My Father as I Recall Him by Mamie Dickens and American Notes by Charles Dickens. The first of these is a slight book of remembrances by Charles Dickens' daughter. Okay not great. The second is Dickens take on America in 1842. I'll give you Dickens as a great author of fiction, but I do not find him agreeable as a person. His home life was messy (completely glossed over by Mamie who took his side over her mother's). In American Notes Dickens says some good things about the US, but he really comes off as a snob looking down on those dumb Americans. Towards the end there's a chapter where he blasts slavery (supported by ads from newspapers about runaway slaves) and then basically says but what else can you expect from these degenerates (supported by newspaper articles from across the country about murders.Yes, slavery was horrific, but British Imperialism wasn't exactly free from oppression. And people got murdered in England, too. The book ends with a postscript added after Dickens revisited the US after the Civil War which praises the US as wonderful, so at least Dickens was a man willing to change his mind. Mostly worth reading as an historical curiosity.

Drumbeat by Robert J. Trout. This is a junior fiction book written by my fifth grade teacher. Set during the Civil War, it's about a boy who joins the army after his brother returns home wounded (which army is only revealed a few chapters in). It's a pretty good kids story, but my favorite bit was the postscript where Mr. Trout told how he came to write the book and encouraged kids to find their own interests to write about. Once a teacher, always a teacher.

The Perfect Host by Theodore Sturgeon. I've heard about Sturgeon--writer of Stat Trek's "Amok Time" and inspiration for Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout. I was disappointingly unimpressed with this short story. It's about an entity that possess people which starts of kind of interesting but bogs down with author's notes in the middle.

The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson. Free and suggested by Amazon (probably because of all the W. W. Jacobs I downloaded). Sailor goes on a doomed ship haunted by shadows. A little long, a little too technical on ship structure. Would have been better as a short story and would make an awesome movie (Pirates of the Caribbean minus Johnny Depp).

The Fly Swatter by Nicholas Dawidoff. This is a personal biography of economist Alexander Gerschenkron written by his grandson. I'd never heard of the man before I read this. Gerschenfron escaped from Soviet Russia in the 1910's and from Vienna in the 1930's when he washed up in America and became a Harvard professor. He's irascible and opinionated in the way people in live solely in academia can become. Despite the fact he thinks he's always right, you kind of come to like the guy. If you're going to read a biography of someone you know nothing about, I'd recommend this one.

Elisabeth Sladen

2011-04-19T19:41:00.000-04:00

When I was little we had 13 television channels. Some weekend afternoons, we'd luck out and Doctor Who would be on. Probably never would have watched it if we had all the choices that exist today. Tom Baker was my first Doctor although I remember some Jon Pertwee as well. Both the third and fourth Doctors had Sarah Jane Smith played by Elisabeth Sladen as a Companion.

Even with my fuzzy childhood memories, I remembered Sarah Jane as awesome. When Doctor Who rebooted and she showed up in the episode "School Reunion" it was wonderful. Maybe The Sarah Jane Adventures wasn't the best show ever, but it was still pretty good. I'm still annoyed Syfy stopped showing it. The Doctor has had some other good Companions (Ace, Rose, Amy), but Sarah Jane was and will always be something special.

I've given some thought to how upset I will be when Tom Baker dies. I didn't think about how a Companion's death would be. Sladen always seemed so vibrant and lovely and young. And from everything I've heard, she was just as awesome as the character she played. Maybe it's because I didn't know she was ill, but her death today has made me far more distraught than I could have imagined. It is truly a sad day, and she will be sorely missed.

The Kennedys

2011-04-11T19:44:00.001-04:00

So History paid to make The Kennedys miniseries and then refused to show it saying it "is not a fit for the History brand". Yes, I can see how they are confused how a show they vetted before, during, and after production and was based on historical fact would not be fit for their brand. As we all know, History means blue collar workers or junk dealers swearing loudly. History has nothing to do with history. i used to watch that channel several times a week. Now I tune into their prime time schedule maybe once or twice a month and depend on National Geographic, PBS, and the Discovery family of channels for historical programming.

Further adding to the mystery is that History's parent company had no problem showing the show on History UK. Supposedly, it got trashed in the US due to pressure from the Kennedy family. I find this confusing since I was unaware the Kennedys had any real power left. Caroline showed an interest in entering politics a few years back and was laughed out of the race. On the other hand, she's been giving interviews this past week on an unrelated topic and no interviewer has had the balls to ask her about the miniseries, so there must be some clout there.

So the show aired on Reelz this past week. There's nothing in here we haven't seen in every other TV show or book about the Kennedy family that is out there. I am not a fan of the Kennedy family in general. That being said, I found myself liking and appreciating JFK as portrayed in the miniseries. Got to give the man some credit for putting up with that jackass brother Bobby of his (good father and husband, too mush of a Kennedy zealot otherwise). And it's amazing the family turned out as well as it did with Joe as a father. Greg Kinnear was great as usual. I liked how well he depicted JFK's bad back. Katie Holmes was decent as Jackie as well she should be since she and Jackie had a lot in common (shallow women interested solely in their kids and shopping who married powerful men as much for social position as love). My only criticism of her was the accent she attempted. Really she should have just talked in a breathy manner instead of trying an accent.

Overall it was a decent show. Not great, but not a waste of time. I could have done without the cliches right before the assassination--Jackie saying she's never been happier, Bobbie relaxing with his family. I didn't see any major historical inaccuracies (there were some minor ones for dramatic effect). I'm not sure Marilyn Monroe was as nuts as she is portrayed, and I hope Joe Jr. wasn't really such a prig. The sex and drugs were discussed, but it wasn't done in a salacious manner. History should have just aired the darn thing instead to begin with.

Machete

2011-03-20T20:51:00.002-04:00

I am generally opposed to overly bloody and violent films, but I make a few exceptions. I will watch anything by Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez. I enjoyed their Grindhouse films, but the best thing about them was the fake trailer for Machete which consisted of Danny Trejo kicking ass. I was excited when they made a film for the trailer but I rarely go through the hassle of seeing films in the theater anymore. Finally saw it this weekend on Amazon.

Machete is a former federale whose family was murdered by a drug lord. Now he's an illegal immigrant who is hired to kill a state senator who is running on an anti-illegal platform. Things go downhill from there.

Rodriguez co-directed this film with a man who had previously worked as a film editor. It really shows in the way the film is constructed. Yes there is tons of blood and guts, but it is all shot so beautifully . It's gore for art, not just shock value. And they didn't overly edit. So many action films today are virtually unwatchable with the fast cuts and fancy camera angles. I watched Kingdom of Heaven this afternoon and blanked out on the fight scenes since there was too much going on. Okay, a real battle is I'm sure chaotic and confusing, but I'm watching movie not a real battle. Give me more than a few frames to see what is happening (good article on this bad technique at Salon).

Machete frequently goes over the top which is great since it is supposed to be a glorified B movie. There's a lot of good funny bits in it as well. The biggest surprise was the good acting performances. Robert DeNiro wasn't chewing scenery or acting stupid (he's not my favorite actor, but I find it sad the way he's pissed away greatness on crappy films--The studio system is dead so he doesn't have to pick crap projects). Jessica Alba wasn't annoying. Don Johnson and Steven Segal were good.

The ending of the film promises two sequels to come. Since Rodriguez makes good films cheap, they might happen. If they do, I'm definitely going to see them on the big screen.

Recent Reads

2011-03-20T20:18:00.000-04:00

My Darling Clementine: The Story of Lady Churchill by Jack Fishman. This is one of those personal biographies that is short on facts and is supposed to give a general overview of the subjects life. I have no problems with that style of biography, but I did have a problem with this particular book. Fishman clearly thinks that Winston Churchill was the bestest thing ever and the book is as much about Winston as it is about Clementine. Her life before her marriage is barely mentioned as if she only existed as his wife. During WWII she worked with the Red Cross, spearheaded efforts to send relief to the Soviet Union, and even traveled there to see how that aid was being used. All of this pales in comparison to her most important war work of seeing that Winston was fed and got a nap each day. Women clearly only exist to amuse and support men. In the chapter on the Churchill's children Fishman includes a story of the one daughter getting spanked at a serviceman's club by an American GI. Of course the silly girl deserved it for daring to complain that the GI was stepping on her feet. In the end I learned very little from this book apart from the fact the author was an ass with a low opinion of women.

Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent by Anthony Rapp. Speaking of authors who are asses, here's another one. Rapp starred in the Broadway and movie versions of Rent. Despite the books title, there was very little about Rent in here. The main gist of the story is that while he was finding fame and success in NY, Rapp had to keep flying to Chicago to be with his dying mother. These trips were less about giving her aid and comfort than about his need to have her accept and discuss his homosexuality. Here's a thought, maybe her not wanting to talk about his love life had less to do with his being gay and more to do with the fact distance kept her from knowing his boyfriends or the fact some parents do not want details from their children. Rapp gives graphic details of his teenage fumblings in the book, and if he is willing to way over share with strangers, I shudder to think what he would tell close family. He expects his boyfriends to give him 100% of their attention and understanding while not reciprocating. I know actors tend to be narcissistic by nature, but Rapp's complete self-involvement is a bit much.

Cabbages and Kings by O. Henry. I've started working my way through O. Henry's complete works. The first book in the collection I bought was a collection of his short stories. The second was Cabbages and Kings, his only novel. Set in a banana republic (and coining that term) it features a large cast of Americans and natives trying to make do in Central America. It's delightfully twisting and the ending made me want to reread it to better see how he drew all the plot lines together. I settled for rereading the early chapter that set up the end. This is where Kindle for PC comes in handy since it is much easier to skim back and forth through an ebook through that than on my Kindle.

Ginger Rogers and the Riddle of the Scarlet Cloak by Lela E. Rogers. Everything about this book's design screams that it was written by Ginger Rogers. In fact, it is part of a YA series from the 1940s where actresses embarked on Nancy Drew type adventures. In some, the actress was herself. Others, like this one, had a main character with the name and looks of the actress who was not the actress herself. In this case, Ginger Rogers worked the night switchboard at a hotel. It was written by Ginger's mother and the strongest scenes were the ones involving the Ginger character's relationship with her mother. Other than that, it's not good. One fun thing about reading old books is seeing old technology. Before reading this, I didn't know jukeboxes were once controlled by switchboard operators (interesting article on that here).

101 Things You Didn't Know About Ireland by Ryan Hackney and others. I picked this one up when it was free for Kindle last week. The title suggests it will be a collection of trivia. Instead it is an overview of Irish history and customs. It wasn't what I expected, but I found it interesting as a primer on the country.

Sister Wendy

2011-03-18T17:50:00.000-04:00

I've been taking advantage of Amazon Prime this week to learn a little about art. Sister Wendy is a nun who did a few series about art appreciation. Three of those are available on Prime for free.

Sister Wendy's Odyssey and Grand Tour consist of ten minute episodes where the Sister visits various museums. She focuses on about three pieces per episode, mostly older pieces and not overly well known works. She gives a little info on the artists and gives her opinions on each piece. I didn't always agree with her interpretations, but she has a passion for her subjects and an honesty about her feelings that was enjoyable. The shortness of each episode was also a nice change of pace.

The third program is Sister Wendy: Pains of Glass. This is a 50 minute long piece that tended to drag at times. The program looks at the stained glass at the King's College Chapel in Cambridge, England. This is the most religious of the shows due to subject matter. The discussions between Wendy and a Dean of the college were nicely detailed. It's easy for us to forget today that for centuries, the Bible was in Latin and reserved solely for the clergy. For the average person, religious art such as stained glass became the main means of understanding the Christian narrative. The draggy bits came when they had long stretches of the Chapel Choir singing. It was lovely, but I wasn't in the mood for it.

Red Dwarf

2011-03-12T20:26:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago Amazon announced free Instant Video (previously Video on Demand) for many movie and TV shows for Amazon Prime members. I had never considered Prime since its main benefit was free shipping and with my massive wish list I could always get above the $25 needed for free supersaver shipping. After looking over the free video offerings, I decided to sign up for Prime. There's tons of British shows (including Doctor Who, Black Adder, and Yes, Minister) along with a decent documentary selection. For $6.50 a month, it's got the kind of shows I like that I can't get not having Netflix.

Now Red Dwarf is a British show I once loved. I have seen the first five seasons more times than I can count. It is the story of a slob who is the last living human stuck on a derelict spaceship with a hologram of his dead pain in the ass roommate and a creature evoled from a cat. The rest of the crew was killed by radiation three million years earlier. There's a senile ship's computer for several of the seasons and a robot. I was excited to see the later seasons were available free on prime since I had only seen 6-8 once on PBS and had never seen Back to Earth. I ended up disappointed.

Season 6 is not to bad although it lacks the computer who was a character I enjoyed. Season 7 was pretty bad. Rimmer was written out in the only good episode of the season and was replaced with Lister's old crush Kochansk (the addition of Kochanski being incompatible with the original premise of the show). Season 8 has nanobots resurrecting the entire crew of the original ship with the main cast being arrested and held as prisoners. This season is all about special effects and slapstick accompanied by one of the most intrusive laugh-tracks I ever heard. It's like the producers knew it was no longer funny and felt the need to overdo the canned laughter. Back to Earth (season 0 on Amazon Instant Video) was utter crap. It was shot as a comedy-drama with the crew ending up on Earth in 2000 and discovering they are characters in a TV show called Red Dwarf. They skipped the laugh-track all together so I had no clue what if anything of this mess was supposed to be funny. Even the cast looked like they were tired and didn't want to be there.

A look at Wikipedia shows that after season 6 the co-creators broke up leaving Doug Naylor in sole charge. Obviously Rob Grant was the smart one who realized continuing the show after that was beating a dead horse. Naylor on the other hand seems content to keep flogging away. They are planning to make more episodes which I will not be watching.

To summarize: First six seasons are worth watching after that you are just wasting hours of your life you will never get back.

2011 Oscars

2011-02-27T23:28:00.000-05:00

Red Carpet so far. Hailee Steinfeld continues to look flawless and age appropriate. Worst dressed is a toss up between Melissa Leo and (in a rare misstep) Cate Blanchett. Helena Bonham Carter is goth but not a train wreak. I prefer her as a mess over the all black she's been wearing since she got criticized for the two different colored shoes at the Globes. Lots of women in feathers and tulle. Helen Mirren looks great except a necklace a few inches too long that ruins everything. Reese Witherspoon looks like a Barbie. I don't think she's ever looked better.

The opening wasn't overly painful. Nice they pulled out one of the few true movie stars (Tom Hanks) to present art direction and cinematography. Wow--Kirk Douglas really doesn't look like himself anymore. Not sure how much of his bit was scripted, but he was damned funny for a man with speech difficulties. Shut up Aaron Sorkin. When the orchestra starts up, you wind down. Do not then go into a laundry list of names. If he wasn't a name they'd have cut the camera. The King's Speech gets its first award of the night. It's the only of the Oscar films I really, really want to see (although I think the True Grit reboot looks kind of good, too). Does anyone other than the Academy and ABC care about their partnership? A renewed contract does not deserve to be part of the broadcast. Oscar Winner Trent Reznor. Almost as odd as Oscar Winner Eminem. Political cause of the night is unions and not the Middle East. (Sorry Wisconsin, you voted the guy into office. Feel free to disagree and protest, but democracy means not everyone can have what they want. If you're not happy, go for a recall vote.) I like that several presenters are talking fast to try to keep things moving. I hate Randy Newman and his so-so songs that always get nominated. Nice that they are letting both winners talk in the minor categories. The "let only one person talk when there are several winners" never worked out well. The dweeb with the 'fro who won best live action short is completely adorable. The minor categories often end up with the best acceptance speech moment of the night. Tonight it is possibly this dude's shot-out to his mom for doing craft services on his short film. Damn--I wanted Exit Through the Gift Shop to win just to see what happened. Plus the guy who won documentary seems a bit of an ass. Just because your film was political doesn't mean your speech needs to be. I'm surprised Waiting for Superman wasn't nominated given it's one of the few documentaries I'd heard about last year. Billy Crystal. Yippee!!! With a standing ovation. Robert Downey, Jr. poking fun at his bad boy past--funny. The Fancy Feast commercial where the guy builds a cat room for his girlfriend is so cute. This year's song nominees suck, although I prefer the dress Gwyneth Paltrow has on now over her red carpet look. In Memorium. Surprised Tony Curtis was so early (third). Really odd that they ended the montage with Kevin McCarthy, after Blake Edwards and Dino de Laurentis, either of which should have been last. Then they take on Halle Berry doing a tribute to Lena Horne. I do not approve of singling out one dead person for a special tribute. King's Speech took directing. Bit of an upset there. Nice choice of the Henry V soundtrack for the honorary Oscar bit. That music gets me every time. It's so darn stirring. I like the set design. They seem to be keeping things moving. Anne Hathaway is too perky and Franco seems stoned, but they aren't bad. Rethink. It's 11:13 now and I thought we could get done before midnight, but Jeff Bridges is giving each beat actress nominee a long tribute which does not bode well for me getting to bed anytime soon. Damn I wanted Annette Bening to win. She is so much better than any one else and she keeps. losing. Okay, her other three losses were to decent actresses, but to lose to such a questionable talent as Natalie Portman is wrong. So glad Colin Firth finally one. Time to set the Tivo for the end. Since they will probably spend at least 30 minutes introducing the Best Picture nominees, and we all know King's Speech will win I'm not staying up.

1984 Best Picture Nominees

2011-02-27T07:51:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I inadvertently found myself watching two of the movies nominated for Best Picture for 1984. I had access to one more, so ended up watching that to.

A Passage to India (available on Hulu until May) is the movie based on an E. M. Forster that doesn't have Helena Bonham Carter in it (at the time her career was period pieces). This is a typical Oscar caliber film--sweeping period piece by one of the big directors. There was no way it wasn't going to get award nominations. It's a well-crafted film except for the fact I didn't care about the characters. I have this problem with most of David Lean's film. He made things look great, but there is no heart to them. For a movie to stand up over time, you have to develop some feelings for the characters. Actually, the only one of Lean's films I like is Hobson's Choice and that's probably only because Charles Laughton is in it.

The Killing Fields (available from Amazon VOD free for Prime members) is not my kind of film. It's the story of an American reporter in Cambodia and what happens to his Cambodian friend when the Khmer Rouge takes over. Sam Waterston is the reporter which works well since the part calls for righteous indignation and conflicted self-doubt, two things he does well. Hiang S. Ngor plays the Cambodian and deservedly won the Best Supporting Actor award (wow--Pat Morita was nominated for The Karate Kid that year). Ngor did a great job for a non-actor although that was largely because he was acting things he had lived through in real life. He probably deserved any award they could throw at him just for being willing to take the role and relive that experience. I like the choice made not to use subtitles when the characters spoke Cambodian. Subtitles would have been distracting and you really didn't need to know exactly what was said. This film is well worth seeing, but it's one that will leave you emotionally rung out.

Amadeus (again on Amazon Prime for free) won Best Picture. I remember going to see that in the theater when it came out. like A Passage to India, this film was made to get award nominations. Unlike Passage, the characters draw you into the story. Having seen Animal House more times than I can count, I still have a disconnect seeing Tom Hulce as Mozart, but he does a great job. Love Jeffery Jones as the emperor. The true star (and Best Actor winner) is F. Murray Abraham. This is one of the great acting performances of all time. The moment he starts talking, you can't take your eyes off of him. Most remarkably, his best scenes are when he's acting in old-age makeup. The richness and subtlety of emotions he conveys while acting through all that stuff on his face is truly remarkable. Awesome film. If possible go with the director's cuts since the added scenes add to the plot and character motivations.

W. W. Jacobs

2011-02-26T21:55:00.001-05:00

Probably the best thing about the Kindle is the ability to read easily public domain books for free. This means you can more easily chase down obscure authors who are not well known today. One such author is W. W. Jacobs.

I got to wondering last fall about who wrote the classic story "The Monkey's Paw". Turned out to be W. W. Jacobs. Between Amazon, Gutenberg, and ManyBooks, I tracked down all of Jacobs works for free. In the process, I forgot which book contained "The Monkey's Paw" so I in the process of getting to that, I read five short story collections and two novels. Here's the funny thing, while best remembered for a tale of suspense and terror, Jacobs strength is as a humorist. Most of his stories center on sailors and wharves set in the early 20th century. Characters and places run through his works. The best character is the night watchman at Wapping, London. There's also a trio of sailors who get into all sorts of scrapes when they come home and have money to burn after being paid for a voyage. It's a lot of good funny stuff which I highly recommend.

Back to "The Monkey's Paw" from The Lady of the Barge. It is a great little story well deserving of all the tributes it has gotten over the years. The problem is by the time I got to it, I was enjoying Jacobs too much as a humorist to love him as a serious writer. This is actually my least favorite of his books that I've read thus far due to its serious tinge. I'd suggest starting with this book and then moving on to his other stuff.

The Collector

2011-02-25T20:43:00.000-05:00

Turner Classic Movies is one of my favorite things ever. It never ceases to amaze me how many great movies are out there that are largely forgotten. Their 30 Days of Oscar is a special joy since you see the films that fall through the cracks over the year.

I'd never even heard of the film The Collector. Terrance Stamp stars as a young man who kidnaps Samantha Eggar and holds her prisoner in the cellar of an old house. It came out in 1965 when the production code, while in its dying days, was still in force. It honestly could be a movie made today. The interaction between kidnapper and victim is surprisingly raw for the day. There's more skin than other films from the period. The ending is a flat out shocker. This was 1965, the year The Sound of Music won most of the awards.

The film was directed by William Wyler who is now one of the most underrated directors ever. The main problem is he doesn't have a distinct style. Ford did westerns, Hitchcock thrillers, Lean epics. Wyler did everything. The tight family dramas of The Best Years of Our Lives, Mrs. Miniver, and The Little Foxes. The outrageous spectacle of Ben-Hur. Psychological dramas like The Collector and The Heiress Romances like Roman Holiday and How to Steal a Million. Even if he is somewhat overlooked today, at least he was well recognized during his lifetime with twelve Best Director Oscar nominations and an Irving Thalberg award.

Autumn in My Garden and Night

2011-02-19T16:16:00.000-05:00

After a few weeks of searching, I finally found a frame for the last cross stitch project I finished.

This is the second Mirabilia Garden picture I've done for my sister. Mirabilia patterns are prone to typos, but this one had more than most. I recommend keeping the picture handy and checking anything that seems weird if you stitch this.

My sister gave me this Teresa Wentzler kit called Night for Christmas a few years back. Wentzler's patterns are always a challenge to stitch since she is found of blended threads (one strand each of two different colors) and confetti (scattered single x's of color). There's probably 15 shades of green in that patch of greenery. All the blended threads tend to make Wentzler's designs more muted than if they were straight colors. This one is getting donated to the Myerstown Library Spring Auction.

Super Bowl XLV Pregame

2011-02-06T18:35:00.000-05:00

I hate Fox and its need to cross promote everything. Yes, I watch Glee. No, I do not need to see over-hyped Lea Michelle ruin "America the Beautiful".

I guess we should give Christina Aguilera for singing the National Anthem live and not lip syncing. On the other hand, it is the National Anthem. How in God's name do you screw up the lyrics to that? Why can't they get a decent singer to just sing the damn song straight without trying to turn it into a pop song? Actually, we need to get back to it being a song everyone sings at the start of a game and not some solo, diva turn by an individual singer.

Recent Reads

2011-02-05T18:08:00.000-05:00

Ramsey Milholland by Booth Tarkington (free for Kindle). This is an interesting little book. It starts with Ramsey as a boy observing a parade with his Civil War veteran grandfather. The book seems to be the story of a slightly dumb yet average boy growing up in the early 1900's. Just when you think it's going to be a love story, it turns out to be a nice bit of propaganda on why the US should get involved in WWI. Not my favorite Tarkington story but good to read, especially when people tend to forget how isolationist the US was at the time.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. A rather long tale of a family of academicians who hunt Dracula over the years. Dracula being the real Vlad Tepes. Despite it's length, the story kept moving. The ending was somewhat abrupt and disappointing, though.

The Purrfect Murder by Rita Mae Brown. I'm always torn when I read Brown's Mrs. Murphy stories. Set amongst the old families of Virginia, Brown trys to make her characters seem like decent people who take people at face value, but there's always this undercurrent that the old families and their way of life are inherently better than everyone else. (SPOILER) This ends with our heroine breaking into a suspects house and getting herself almost killed before she is rescued by her husband. She is hailed as a hero and not charged with breaking and entering. The police also use her rescue as a means to gain evidence of the suspects guilt. I am not an expert, but it seems to me evidence obtained by a non-police officer who is committing a crime should not be admissible in court.

The Incredible Marquis by Herbert Gorman. Alexandre Dumas was a larger than life figure. Son of a Napoleonic general, he lived large and enjoyed life. I should like a biography of him. This is one of those early 20thcentury bios that is written more as a novel than as a scholarly work. The author also assumes everyone understands French (I don't, but understand a lot of writers from that time assumed everyone could). I gave up about half way through. Dumas hadn't written any novels yet and was playing at being a revolutionary. The story was surprisingly dull for how much action was going on.

Flyboys by James Bradley. This is a true story of American pilots shot down over the Pacific in WWII. The first chapter made it seem like it would be a fascinating story of captured pilots. Then I got to Chapter 2 which was about how the United States was established by ethnic cleansing. Yes, the US ran roughshod over everyone else in the spirit of Manifest Destiny, but basically every major civilization in the history of the world did the same thing. It's only in the past century or so when this became a bad thing. You can disagree with what people did in the past, but you must judge them by the standards of their day, not ours. Bradley wants to put out a revisionist history of the US he can do so, but he should not have done it in a story that was supposed to be about men who died defending this awful United States. Needless to say, I only made it a few pages into Chapter 2 before adding this to the donation sack for the library.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

2011-01-23T20:02:00.001-05:00

One of the most talked about documentaries of last year was the film Exit Through the Gift Shop. There's been a lot of buzz it'll be up for an Oscar. Given the hype, I was quite surprised to see it has popped up on Hulu for a limited run (you have until February 15th to watch it).

The film consists of Banksy making a film about a Frenchman named Thierry Guetta who is making a film about street artists. Guetta starts out following various street artists after finding out his cousin is Invader (an artist who places mosaics of video game characters around the world). Guetta films everything and claims he plans to make a film but has no intention of doing so. Eventually he hooks up with Banksy around the time when people started looking at Banksy's work as worth a lot of money. Banksy encourages Guetta to finish his film to show it's all about the art and not money, and the film turns out to be crap. At this point Banksy takes over as filmmaker encouraging Guetta to return to LA and become an artist himself. Guetta becomes Mr. Brainwash, hires a bunch of assistants to manufacture art based on his ideas (ala Damien Hirst, most highly overrated "artist" ever), and becomes a hit artist who gets to design Madonna's album cover.

It is a really interesting film if you take it at face value. Guetta is a character just crazy enough to be real. Of course it is equally possible the whole thing is a huge joke. Banksy is known for humor and social commentary, so it is quite conceivable that he would invent this character of Guetta as a way of commenting on the insanity that is the modern art world. The whole thing is kind of brilliant and insane.

On a side note, I would also recommend Robert Hughes' The Mona Lisa Curse which is available on YouTube or collected nicely in this Mental_Floss post. Hughes is an art critic and curmudgeon who has a lot of interesting stuff to say on contemporary art. Hughes has a view point and has no problem with telling the rest of the world it is wrong. If you like art and crotchety old geezers, this is the documentary for you.

The Tudors

2011-01-18T14:40:00.000-05:00

BBC America is supposed to start showing The Tudors on Wednesday, but they had the first two seasons on this past weekend. Thanks to yesterday's holiday and today's ice, I watched whatever episodes I had managed to record (missing about five of the twenty for not realizing it was on at first or that they were showing two seasons and not one.

It originally aired on Showtime so I'm guessing the bits edited out to make way for commercials were largely sex and violence. Fine by me since torture was common at the time and I don't need to watch that. It's a pretty decent show overall. The acting is good and they keep the story moving. The scenery and costumes are lovely, too. The only problem I had with it was some of the historical inaccuracies (particularly the death of Wolsey). They clearly were not out to make a documentary, and I understand many of the changes they made to make the story flow better. My only concern is that people don't realize what bits are true and which are false. I enjoy good historical fiction as much as the next person,, but it never hurts to look into what actually happened.

Arsene Lupin

2011-01-17T07:15:00.000-05:00

At one point Amazon suggested the book Arsene Lupin to me. Being free for Kindle I gave it a try. Turns out there's a whole series of Lupin books (over 20) written by Maurice Leblanc in the early 1900's.

Lupin is a thief. He often contacts his victims ahead of his crime giving the exact timing of his robbery unless they would be so kind as to send him the desired treasure on their own. He's a master of disguise, often appearing as several characters in the same book (most notably serving as a police detective for several years). His strict code of honor means he never kills and often helps the police solve other crimes through ads in a newspaper. Of course, he has a weakness which is women who often prove his downfall. I've read five of the books so far and they are fun adventure stories.

One of the interesting things about the Lupin books is that they were written when it copyright law was a little more flexible (or at least creative artists had an easier time stealing from each other). Thus we have Lupin coming up against Sherlock Holmes in several stories. Conan Doyle objected so the name was changed to Herlock Sholmes and his assistant Wilson. You couldn't get away with that today. The two characters usually fight to a draw although Lupin naturally wins if there is a victor. Wilson is written as a complete idiot which is quite funny.

I decided to explore some of the free book sites looking for the series. Between Amazon, Many Books, and Project Gutenberg I've been able to get about half the books for free. Internet Archive and Open Library turned out to be a complete waste of time since books I downloaded from them were almost illegible. You get what you pay for so I am somewhat accepting of typos and odd formatting in free Kindle books. However some free books have missing blocks of text (one stopped mid-sentence and then started a completely new paragraph) or have random lines inserted into the text. One ebook had the title inserted inserted every few lines, often in the middle of a sentence, which completely destroyed the flow of the text. Since many free books have other versions available for cheap on Amazon, sometimes you are better off paying.

The Oz Books

2010-12-31T17:52:00.000-05:00

Like most people my introduction to the land of Oz was the classic Judy Garland film. Of course, when I was a kid it was pre-home recorders so the annual showing of the film was a big deal. Sadly, the film is something I have outgrown. It's a good film, but it's a kid's film that is overly-exposed. Or to put it another way, there are better musicals and much better Judy Garland films to occupy my time with. I remember reading an Oz book when I was a kid and being disappointed since I was too young at the time to appreciate that books and films are two different things. But Amazon has the complete collection of L. Frank Baum's Oz novels available for less than a dollar so I figured it was time to give them a try.

Baum's greatest strength was his imagination. He came up with a lot of fantastic creatures and situations. His greatest weakness was continuity. In the first book the Emerald City only appeared green since everyone was forced to wear green-lensed glasses. Mid-way through the next book, it is suddenly made of emeralds. If, like me, you are reading the books to fill in a hole in your reading history, this is a good version to get. If I had kids reading it for the first time, I'd defiantly seek out an illustrated version since the images are the best parts of the books.

I made it through the first seven books before having to put it aside for a while. The Emerald City of Oz seemed like a good place to stop since that's when Dorothy and family permanently relocate to Oz (the bank was going to foreclose on the farm). This collection includes The Woggle-Bug Book which is a short book based on a stage play Baum wrote about a greatly magnified bug. It's rather poorly written and relies heavily on the stereotypes and ethnic humor that were a fixture of stage shows when it was written. If you have kids, don't let them read this unless they can understand it in its historical context as an example of something common a hundred years ago that is not acceptable today.

The A-Team

2010-12-30T16:18:00.000-05:00

I am normally opposed to TV shows being turned into movies. The movies rarely manage to keep true to the show while tweaking the concept just enough to keep things interesting. I was, however, intrigued by the film version of The A-Team since the trailer looked cool and the show was basically silly over the top cartoon violence which often makes a good popcorn film. I've got a $5 Amazon Video on Demand credit, the movie was today's $.99 Deal of the Day rental, why not watch it?

Great art it is not, but only an idiot would be looking for art in The A-Team. The plot is light weight and lots of stuff gets blown up. They hired actors and wrote characters who were similar to the TV ones without being carbon copies. Hiring Liam Neeson for Hannibal was a stroke of genius since he's a great actor who does action hero really well. Lots of stuff gets blown up, although unlike the TV show, people get hurt. They kept the original music and the van. Most importantly, they kept Hannibal's cigar. One of the most memorable constants in the TV show was George Peppard smiling around a cigar saying "I love it when a plan comes together". Hannibal without a cigar would just be wrong, and I was quite worried they'd take it away from the character in the film since the MPAA considers smoking to be a worse sin than rape or violence. The love story dragged things down a little, but that aspect was kept short. Overall, it's a great mindless action film that doesn't aim to be anything more than that. At one point the team escapes by stealing an airplane which blows up leaving them flying a tank. It is awesome.

I was pleased with Amazon's VOD. I didn't sync up my Amazon account to my Tivo and simply watched the film on my computer. The picture and sound quality was good and it streamed smoothly with no hang-ups or glitches. I just rented this film, but I will definitely keep it in mind as an option for future film purchases. There's nothing to download and no physical product so you do not have to worry about the purchased format becoming obsolete. As long as Amazon exists you should have perpetual access to any content you buy.

John Denver and the Muppets

2010-12-17T20:56:00.001-05:00

I've been slowly making my way through Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas over the past week. It was free for Kindle from a Christian publisher which meant sometimes inspirational message usurped concrete fact, but not a bad book. It got me in the mood for some Christmas tunes which combined with recent viewings of Fraggle Rock and A Muppet Christmas Carol meant a yearning for John Denver and the Muppets.

For whatever reason, John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together has never been released in any form of home video. The album is widely available, but not the show. Thank goodness, someone has uploaded a clearly VHS copy of the show to You Tube.

I must say it was as charming as I remembered. Denver was so good whenever he was with the Muppets. Maybe because he was a bit Muppet-ish himself with the dorky haircut and super-skinny legs. Rather curiously, the part I remember the most is the toy soldier bit which isn't on the album. I'd completely forgotten the Nativity story being told while they sing "Silent Night".

Turns out there's anotther Muppet special with Denver so I'm off to watch that now. And here's my favorite Denver and the Muppets moment.

Fraggle Rock

2010-12-05T15:44:00.001-05:00

I saw magazine ads for the new Hub TV network and amongst the characters shown was Red Fraggle. But I got no notice from my Tivo that that channel was added to my line-up. So I'm checking out my Tivo's listings of Christmas programs this morning and spot A Muppet Christmas Carol will be playing on the Hub. Turns out is was one of those cases where a channel changed names and I didn't notice thus cheating myself out of nearly two months of Fraggley goodness.

I love Fraggle Rock and consider it one of Jim Henson's finest moments. There are four communities within each half-hour show. The Fraggles are the main Lot and generally are about having fun. Sharing the Fraggle caves are Doozers, little green creatures who are constantly constructing things. For food, the Fraggles need to go to the garden and slip by the Gorgs, a race of giant fuzzy monsters. Each ep has a framing story set in Outer Space (the human world) with an inventor named Doc and his dog Sprocket. All with really catchy music.

Boober is my favorite. He's introverted and mopey and occasionally goes nuts and turns into Sidebottom, a manifestation of his free-spirited side that he keeps pushed to the bottom. I drove my mom nuts one Christmas searching for a Boober doll (I was a teenager at the time). Wembly's pretty cool, too. He's green and a bit silly.

Also on the Hub is Batman Beyond which is a part of the DC Animated Universe. Here we have an elderly Batman forced to pass on the mantel and cape to a young hothead. Bruce Wayne is a crotchety, mean old coot and is awesome. Starting with Batman: The Animated Series and ending with Justice League Unlimited, this universe rocks. Screw Christian Bale, Kevin Conroy is the real Batman.

Animated Pearls Before Swine

2010-11-28T14:50:00.000-05:00

Pearls Before Swine has been one of my favorite comic strips for years. It's got that perfect blend of silliness, death, and bad puns that can just brighten any day. Now there are animated versions of PBS strips available on Babelgum. Each is only about 40 seconds long which is about the perfect length. Pig doesn't sound like I'd have him sound, but otherwise the voices are mostly good

There's 28 of them now and hopefully they'll eventually add more.

Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated

2010-11-25T19:26:00.000-05:00

It's hard to believe that Scooby Doo is forty years old. Like any long running show, it's had it's ups and downs. Scooby Doo, Where are You! was pretty cool as were some of the animated movies in the late'90's-early '00's. The less said about the live action films and the Scrappy years the better. So which way would the Cartoon Network's Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated go?

The show is a reboot ignoring everything post-SD,WAY. The gang lives in Crystal Cove where the adults are always trying to drum up tourism through monsters. Velma's parents even run a museum full of the costumes the villains wore in SD,WAY. Fred is clueless about anything that doesn't involve buiolding traps. Daphne is smart and very frustrated with Fred. Velma and Shaggy start off secretly dating then break up when Shaggy chooses his friendship with Scooby over her. Each episode is a stand-alone monster of the week, but there is also an overriding season arc where the gang is trying to find out what happened to the original Mystery Inc., a group of teens who vanished years earlier. All in all quite good despite the lack of Scooby snacks.

The stand out episode is called "The Shrieking Madness". The gang goes to visit a local college where there lives a professor named H.P. Hatecraft who writes books about a monster called Char Gar Gothikon (aka the beast that has no name). Having read one book by H.P. Lovecraft and hating it, I thoroughly approve of any show that rips on his and his works, in this case the"thing that cannot be described", Cthulhu. It gets better. The guest speaker on the campus is author Harlan Ellison written with all of Harlan's legendary irascibility. The real Harlan Ellison did the voice. Now the show's intended audience of kids is going to have no clue who Lovecraft or Ellison are, but I love that the creator's put in that much nerdy detail for the adult audience.

The Hunger Games, part 2

2010-10-31T20:43:00.000-04:00

Having devoured The Hunger Games last weekend, I spent a decent amount of this weekend devouring the next two books in the trilogy. Much to my delight, they both lived up to the gripping promise of the first book. Catching Fire was a little slow at the beginning, but once it got moving it really moved. Mockingjay was a slightly harder read because it was the darkest of the three. I want to write this without spoilers, but the ending of the series left me completely wrung out and in tears. It took me about 5-10 minutes of pacing the floor to enable myself to absorb the ending and get over it.

As I'd hoped, the last two books expanded on the politics and power plays in the first book. You learn who the rebels are and what their motivations are. Again the characters and situations leap from the page. Real people in all their screwed up glory. I love how the main character is simultaneously brilliant in somethings and a complete idiot in others. The series is a brilliant depiction of the power of the media and the folly of war. As I read, I developed some nagging questions about the size of the districts and the sustainability of life there. I love that the author answered all my questions in the course of the stories while throwing in all sorts of twists and turns I hadn't thought about. All in all, a thoroughly awesome read that I highly recommend.

Winter in My Garden

2010-10-30T17:08:00.000-04:00

This is the first big project I've finished in a while. It's a Mirabilia pattern, although I made some modifications. The struts of the greenhouse in the pattern didn't touch the bottom shelf and there were a few spots I thought there should have been struts but weren't. I changed those along with making doing the holly berries as beads instead of floss. I think she turned out pretty well.

Ain't Nature Grand?

2010-10-27T16:41:00.000-04:00

I'm a big fan of garlic and onions. It's often hard to find good garlic in the stores, so I decided to give growing it a try. Garlic is a something you plant in the fall and harvest the following spring. I'm hoping this works out, since have have invested a ridiculous amount of money on planters, dirt, and starter bulbs (bought three different kinds from Gurney's).

Yesterday my planters looked like dirt. After a few days of rain and unseasonably warm temps, I came home from work to see this:

Those are two inch sprouts that popped up since last night. It's kind of awesome to see something grow that fast.

Charlie Chan

2010-10-25T22:13:00.000-04:00

I had an Amazon gift card balance a while back and on of the things I treated myself to was a bundle of all six Charlie Chan novels by Earl Derr Biggers. At about $7 it was a steal. Then I got an e-mail from Amazon saying whoever listed that bundle did not have the authority to do so. End result, I got a refund and got to keep my copy of the books. Of course, the books would no longer be available to download the books should anything happen to my current Kindle, so I figured I should read them soonish. Yet another downside of ebooks--with no physical form, they can be removed from your device or otherwise be made to disappear at the publishers' discretion.

The Chan books were published between 1925 and 1932. Chan is a detective (later inspector) with the Honolulu police. He was developed as an answer to negative Chinese stereotypes of the time. How racist the books are is debatable. Chan does talk in the somewhat convoluted and flowery way of the classic stereotype. He is also saddled at times with a a Japanese sidekick who is portrayed as inept, and all the Japanese characters hiss instead of speak. The guy is inept, but it's also clear that Chan at least slightly looks down on the Japanese as inferior to the Chinese. On the other hand, Chan is clearly the darling of almost all as the pinnacle of police perfection. While he does encounter some racism, for the most part he is well-respected and well-treated. There's a few points in the books when others make comments about his race and he delivers a most polite smack down to them. So there are some racist elements, but it is fairly even handed for the time in which it was written.

As far as the stories themselves, they are quite entertaining mysteries. I didn't guess the killer in any of them. Three take place in Hawaii and three in California. Some characters carry over from one book to the next which is when it really pays to read all of a series within a short time frame. My personal favorite was The Black Camel. A Hollywood actress is murdered in Hawaii and Chan must find her killer. She is tied to an earlier unsolved murder that happened in Hollywood. The Hollywood murder is ripped from the headlines in bearing a close resemblance to the murder of William Desmond Taylor. The first book is mostly a story of differing branches of a Boston family (the respectable side and the wandering side). Chan's a minor character in that one, and it was probably my least favorite. The books reference each other, so try to read in published order if possible.

I must say, the covers for the paperback versions of these novels are flat out stunning. There's nice clear pictures here. The fit the novels perfectly, which mystery covers sadly fail to do quite often.

Side-note: There's a great character in one book who is working as a steward on a ship after losing his job, the victim of downsizing in the newspaper business brought on by consolidation. It seems the death of the newspaper business has been going on for nearly a century.

The Hunger Games

2010-10-23T14:47:00.000-04:00

After the awfulness that was The Book Thief, I was a but concerned when The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins was chosen as the November book for the Myerstown Library's book discussion. After all, it too is a young adult book with stellar reviews. I must say, the reading experiences were like night and day.

The Book Thief took a week to read and I only got through it by taking breaks to read other books. I started The Hunger Games last night and had to force myself to stop after the first two sections since it was getting late and I wasn't sure I could stay awake long enough to finish it. The only reason I was able to stop was I had been spoiled to the major part of the ending by reading the reviews for Mockingjay (the final book in The Hunger Games trilogy) when it came out. That was before The Hunger Game was picked as a library book and I had no intention of reading the trilogy.

The story is set in a future time when the US has fallen and become districts that exist solely to support the corrupt capital. Every year, two teens are chosen from each district to fight to the death in an arena on television. The characters come across as real people. The writing is clear. For all the overly descriptive language tossed into The Book Thief, I never got a clear picture of it. Not so with The Hunger Games. I could see everything in my mind's eye in glorious 3-D technicolor. Part of me wondered why this isn't a movie yet (the movie is in the works), but part of me thinks a movie won't live up to the pictures the author was able to create with her words.

The author clearly drew on ancient Greek and Roman sources which adds an extra layer if you see it but won't detract from the story if you don't. One of the things that intrigued me the most was that there is clearly a story going on behind the story. The mentor and handlers of the story's heroes so clearly are grooming them for something more than the games. The author was planning a trilogy from the start, and while this works as a stand alone story, I was so interested in knowing the hows and whys of the intrigue I ended up ordering the other two books in the trilogy before finishing this one. Okay, I ordered all three since this could get read again, and I bought them in hardcover so I could loan them out. (If ordering from Amazon check the prices, it was slightly cheaper it order the books separately than as a set).

Halloween Reads (free for Kindle)

2010-10-16T22:14:00.000-04:00

The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould. The title is somewhat misleading. The author starts out talking about werewolves and his theory that they are mentally ill people who kill while wearing animal skins. They kill from a desire to eat human flesh or drink human blood. He then gets into the myths and traditions about Gods turning into animals and men wearing skins to attain the attributes of a particular animal (ex. Viking berserkers were named for the bear skins they wore). After that he abandons the werewolf theme and talks about historical murderers. It's a bit of a dry, scholarly text as befitting a work from the Victorian era. Not bad, but not really about were-wolves. Fun fact--the author also wrote the lyrics for "Onward Christian Soldiers".

The Vampyre: A Tale by John William Polidori. It was a dark and stormy night and a group of friends on vacation challenge each other to tell ghost stories. Out of that night came Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and this short story written by Lord Byron's physician. The vampire is loosely based on Byron and is the first example of the charming, elegant vampire figure. This particular Kindle version is somewhat buggy. There are poems that don't display fully (although you can go to locations to see the hidden bits) and there are a lot of misspellings.

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Like The Vampyre, this story predates Dracula and helped influence Bram Stoker. There's beautiful women and a vampire expert who is a precursor to Dr. Van Helsing. It is another work of the Victorian times, and while there was a tendency of women at the time to be overly gushy and romantic in their platonic relationships with other women, this story pretty much crosses the line into lesbian vampire land. Carmilla is a novella so if you're looking for a short vampire read, it's an excellent choice.

Making History

2010-10-14T19:39:00.000-04:00

National Geographic Channel has started up a new show called Making History. Basically, they pick a subject and then have special effects guys do recreations. There's some interesting moments in it, but the producers also made some very strange choices.

The first episode was about Hitler. Recreating Hitler's near-death experience in WWI was a good choice since it was a pivotal moment in his life and world history. The same goes for creating images of a German super-plane that was never actually made. In between was an actor recreating a speech by Hitler supposedly to highlight Hitler's charisma. Okay, they had the guy speak English so us English speakers what was being said instead of just "Duetschland, Duetschland, Duetschland", but there are tons of archival footage of Hitler speaking. Even without knowing German, I can watch a film of real Hitler to see his charisma without needing a recreation.

Episode 2 was about Nostradamus. Good choice since he lived in the days before cameras. The death of Henry II of France and a village and the plague years was good. Then they got to the end and recreated the moon landing that Nostradamus supposedly predicted. The choice seemed to be based on the fact the effects guys said moon landings are hard to recreate and they wanted to show how cool they were. When it came time to show the recreation, they proclaimed a remarkable resemblance to the real footage but then kept cutting back and forth between real and fake, pre-effect and post-effect, that the whole thing became so much visual gibberish.

I'll probably keep watching since I enjoy historical shows, but I'm really hoping they focus more on pre-recording times and stop wasting money and time on events where good archival footage exists.

Eerie, Indiana

2010-10-03T16:43:00.000-04:00

Hulu has all 19 episodes of Eerie, Indiana streaming until the beginning of next year. I'd never watched the show when it was on but remembered hearing about it. I didn't realize it was made back in 1991 until I recognized the one kid from Picket Fences was in it. I guess I thought it was more recent since it was syndicated later on.

The series is about a teenage boy who moves to Eerie, Indiana the most normal town in the country. Soon weird things start to happen. Elvis and Bigfoot live in the neighborhood. People sleep in plastic to keep forever young. There's ghosts and alternate universes. A mummy comes to life from the TV screen. The final episode has the main character finding himself as an actor in a TV show called "Eerie, Indiana" where another character is trying to kill him to become the star of the show.

It's definitely aimed as a family show. I think of it as The Adventures of Pete & Pete meets The X-Files. It's less surreal than the first, and less scary than the second. It's a fun show and good to watch in this Halloween month. The show also has some great references to pop culture. I especially loved the "Mr. Chaney" episode that included a werewolf (for Lon Chaney) and a reference to Twin Peaks' Log Lady. Plus you have Ray Walston playing an alien in another episode and you have to love that.

Random Harvest

2010-10-03T08:18:00.000-04:00

TCM showed Random Harvest last week, so i took that as my excuse for finally reading the final book in James Hilton's Three Famous Novels. I read the first two books a while back. Lost Horizon is the classic tale of Shangri-La and was pretty good. The second book was Good-bye Mr. Chips which was good, but not as good as the Robert Donat version of the film (the Peter O'Toole version isn't very good).

Random Harvest is the tale of Charles Ranier. The novel is set in England during the build up to WWI. Ranier is shell-shocked in WWI and loses his memory. Two years later, he regains his memory of his pre-war life but forgets what happened in the two years he had amnesia. The book is narrated by Ranier's secretary who is intrigued by his boss's condition. Ranier's story is told in two extended flashbacks in which is past is finally revealed. It's a nicely paced mystery with the solution only revealed in the last line of the book. There's also some great stuff in there about mistakes that lead to financial collapse in the 1920's, the failings of the Treaty of Versailles, and the rise of Hitler.

The movie was something of a failure. The mystery in the book works because you can't see the people and places involved so you can't figure out Ranier's past before he does. So the filmmakers chucked the flashbacks and turned the book into a typical romance film. The basic plot is there, but much of the characters and details are changed. Released in 1942, the political stuff was removed since no one wanted to be reminded that WWII arose in large part because of the actions of the victors in WWI (in the book someone points out the stupidity of the massive reparations Germany was forced to pay). Ronald Coleman at 50 looks too old for his character at the beginning of the film. The film's not bad, but the book is much better.

The Book Thief

2010-09-29T21:05:00.001-04:00

The Book Thief is the a One Book, One Community book around here. It's the story of a young girl in Nazi Germany who sort of steals books and lives with foster parents who harbor a Jew. Honestly, the subject didn't really appeal to me to start with since it seemed a depressing theme. It turned out to not be depressing, but to be boring as hell. Had it not been a community thing, it would have fallen to the 50 page rule. I had to read two other books while reading this just to give myself strength to get through. The book picks up a little around page 450 of 552, but it's a little late then.

The book is narrated by Death. Sorry, I think he was a bit too busy between1938-45 to become obsessed with a completely nondescript girl. None of the characters has real depth or experiences much growth. We have the Jew with survivor's guilt, the foster mother with a heart of gold hidden by a tough exterior, the kind hearted foster father, and the boy next door. And Death tells you pretty early in the book what each character's fate is, so I couldn't even dredge up interest in what would happen to these people.

The writing style was along the lines of Kurt Vonnegut with short sections and random asides. (I was really itching to put The Book Thief down in favor of Vonnegut's Slapstick which I found at the Myerstown book sale, but I'm saving the pleasure of rereading that book for my 40th birthday in November.) The characters are Germans, and the author has them mostly speaking English, but then he throws in a German word or phrase and translates it. Pick a language and stick with it, otherwise the flow of the dialogue is interrupted ruining any hint of realism. The author is also overly found of flowery phrases and descriptions. Sometimes it worked, but it often felt forced. Playing with the words became more important than the story.

Things that annoyed me as a History fan. "Hans didn't join the NSDAP like the majority of people did." At it's height, only about 10% of the German population were members of the Nazi Party. I also thought it a waste that the main character of the girl is sent to live with a foster family because her father was a Communist, but the book only dwelt on the Jews going to the concentration camps. Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, but they also murdered six million others including Communists, gypsies, gays, mentally ill, and Poles. There's, I think, one passing reference in the book to the Nazi's not liking Communists The author could have gotten her into the foster family situation in any number of other ways, so why give the girl a Commie dad and not exploit it a little? To paraphrase Chekov, don't put a gun in a story if you ain't going to us it.

To get through this, I stopped twice to read other books. The first, P. G. Wodehouse's The White Feather, is a schoolboy story of a boy who's called a coward and seeks redemption by winning glory for his school. The second was H. G. Welles' The Time Machine. Either one is much better than The Book Thief.

The Art of War

2010-09-25T19:43:00.000-04:00

One probably shouldn't complain about things that are free, but I was sorely disappointed in the version of Sun Tzu's The Art of War available for free for the Kindle. There was an introduction that I started to read. It was dry and dull and took up 24% of the text. Finally I got to the actual The Art of War. It's divided into chapters and verses and includes commentary. The way the commentary was formatted made it almost unreadable. If a sentence was divided into several sections, a piece of commentary would come after each comma. Commentary ranged from a few sentences to a few pages. One of the main problems with the Kindle is it is not easy to flip back and forth between pages. Till I got to the end of a sentence of text, it felt like a hassle to page back to try to find the beginning of the sentence so I could read the comments interspersed.

Amazon lumps reviews of different versions together for any given book. They usually say which version was the basis of the review, but you can never be certain which review goes with which version. I suppose at some point I'll have to go to a bookstore and see if I can find a version where Sun Tzu's text and the commentary are presented in a manner that is easier to read.

Recent Reads

2010-09-18T20:13:00.001-04:00

Last Train to Paradise by Les Standiford. I picked this up at a book sale thinking it would be the story of the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane. A bunch of WWI veterans were sent to the Florida Keys to help build a highway to Key West. A hurricane came, the rescue train wasn't sent in a timely fashion, and several hundred people died. That story bookends the text. This is actually the story of how Henry Flagler built a dream. Flagler built Standard Oil and then fell in love with Florida. He spent most of his fortune building a railroad first down the east coast of Florida and then to the end of the Keys, a remarkable engineering feat. Flagler's vision was a major contributor to Florida becoming the tourist mecca it is. All in all a good mix of biography and history.

The Blood Countess by Andrei Codrescu. I novel based on Elizabeth Bathory seemed to have a lot of promise. Bathory supposedly killed 600 girls and bathed in their blood in an attempt to regain her lost youth (even in Eastern Europe of the 1500-1600's, I doubt she could have killed that many before getting caught). I made it to page 5 where Bathory starts to rape a young girl in such a ridiculously poorly written and over the top manner that I put the book down in disgust. I normally apply Nancy Pearl's Rule of 50 when deciding to put down a book, but life's to short to waste even time on 50 pages of this dreck.

Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain. I've been reading a decent amount of Twain lately since it's the 100th anniversary of his death. Both these books are follow-ups to Twain's most famous books and are narrated by Huck Finn. TSA is a take off on Jules Verne withe the boys going to Africa in a balloon. TSD involves a robbery, disguised identity, and Tom pulling a Perry Mason in a court room. They're all right stories, but my main problem is I don't like Tom Sawyer. In Huck's eyes, Tom's the greatest thing ever, but to me Tom is a self-centered ass twisting everyone to his will.

Towards Zero by Agatha Christie. I haven't read any Dame Agatha in awhile, and was thrilled to find this at the Myerstown book sale (she doesn't show up at book sales as often as you'd think). I was less thrilled when I started reading and the pages started falling out as I read them. The main detective is Inspector Battle, a Poirot sidekick. The story is wonderfully twisty and turny with some nice red herrings. There's some weak spots in the characters and ending, but a damn fine mystery none the less.

The Blue Lagoon by H. De Vere Stacpoole. I downloaded this for free for my Kindle intending to watch the movie about the same time I read the book. Then my Tivo and cable box miss-communicated and I didn't get to watch the film (quite the pity since Christopher Atkins was quite lovely back then). From what i remember of the film, it follows the book closely with the exception that in the book, the kids are more articulate than in the film. Two children get shipwrecked and live for years on an island without the constraints of civilization about clothes and sex. What came as a surprise was this tale of free love between cousins was written in 1908. The book was a decent bit of tropical romance.

Dragnet

2010-09-18T15:50:00.002-04:00

I've mentioned my love for Dragnet a few times already. The full four seasons of the 1960's version of the show are only on Hulu until the beginning of next year, so I've been working my way through them over the past few months.

I won't go so far as to say the show is propaganda, but it is a love letter to the police. The show's main purpose is to show how the "dedicated men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department" serve and protect the public. Each week Joe Friday and his partner Bill Gannon work in a different department of the force. One week they're tracking down a murderer, the next they're showing merchants how to prevent theft. You get a great overview of how many different things the police do. And it's not all sunshine and rainbows. You see the cops getting frustrated by the lack of respect and low pay of the job as well as some corrupt or prejudiced cops get their comeuppance. There's even an episode dealing with some cops being shot which left me in tears.

Friday has become a bit of a cliche as the emotionless, "just the facts" policeman. In truth he's a bit more complex. He gets pissed off at times, especially about drugs. He likes to learn and try to improve himself. And his conversations with his partner make it clear he's a bit of a ladies' man.

Gannon is something of a know-it all and a hypochondriac with an iron stomach. You can tell Friday gets exasperated with him at times. But then there are the two episodes focusing on the partners trying to have dinner together and the episode where they have a guy's weekend. Gannon may annoy Friday, but there's a friendship there. The weekend episode is particularly good. Gannon's trying to make duck and Friday keeps laughing at him. It seems like really genuine laughter like Jack Webb is just having a heck of a time making the show with Harry Morgan.

The show is rounded out with a lot of a the same actors playing different roles. It's a practice that was fairly common a few decades ago, but which can be disconcerting to today's viewers. Virginia Gregg seemed to be a particular favorite, appearing in 13 episodes. Her gap teeth should make her easily recognizable, but she sneaked by me unnoticed in at least one episode. (Fun fact--she was the voice of Mother in Psycho.)

Dragnet does tend to get a bit over the top in the drug episodes (including my favorite, "The LSD Story"). The stoner couple who let their baby drown elicit more laughs than gasps of horror today. Then again, I've never indulged in pot or hung out with people who did, so maybe they do let their babies drown. Friday repeatedly presents the case that pot is bad because it's a gateway drug to harder stuff. I like that in a few episodes he does admit that pot may be no more worse than alcohol, but alcohol does a lot of damage, too. He points out that people who don't like the laws can try to change them which is quite valid. I also like that he points out that it's his job to enforce the laws whether he agrees with them or not. I have the feeling Friday would be okay with the current attempts to legalize some marijuana consumption.

The Last Best Hope

2010-09-13T21:30:00.000-04:00

I've been reading Ed McBain books for over thirty years, but it's only been in the past five years that I've read any of his Matthew Hope novels. Hope is a lawyer in Florida who invariably gets mixed up in crimes. The Last Best Hope is an oddity in that all the other books in the series are named for fairy tales or children's stories (although this book features a couple named Jack and Jill). This is McBain's last Matthew Hope novel, but I'm not sure it's the best.

The story concerns Hope's search for a missing man and features flashbacks to tell a convoluted heist story. the odd thing is that Hope is barely in the story. Heck, Hope calls north to get help from the police of the 87th Precinct, and Steve Carella plays as big a role as Hope does. That is not a complaint since Carella is one of my favorite characters, but it is a little odd. Hope had been shot in a previous book and comes off as adrift and unhappy. The book would have been less enjoyable if he's had a bigger role. While I haven't read all the Hope novels, the last few give the impression that McBain was getting bored with the character. I appreciate that he gave a satisfying ending for Hope instead of trying to continue a series that was running out of steam.

One of the pleasures of the book for me was McBain's references to his other works written as Evan Hunter. It's a bit egotistical sure, but it's also fun to get it when the characters reference The Blackboard Jungle or The Birds. He even drags in Lizzie, his novel about the Lizzie Bordon case. I read it years ago before knowing McBain and Hunter were the same person. I don't like his writing style as Hunter as much as his McBain style, but Lizzie's main failing was I didn't quite buy the his theory of the murder.

More Bookmarks

2010-09-06T12:21:00.000-04:00

I wasn't expecting to get another round of bookmarks finished before the Myerstown Library Book and Bake Sale next week, but the long weekend let me polish a few more off.

Again I used felt and Heat'n Bond for many of them. The robot, alien, and worm are my favorites, but I'm happy with them all. With any luck, they will sell at the $3 price point I'm putting them at. I did okay last year pricing them at $4, but I'd rather make them a bit cheaper and try to sell more. It's been another bad year for library funding, and I like to think my poor contribution helps a bit.

I have patterns for 18 more bookmarks, but I'm taking a break and working on a big project for my sister, Mirabilia's Winter in My Garden. It's one of the less complex Mirabilia designs, but it's still quite a lovely design.

The Velveteen Rabbit

2010-08-29T21:31:00.000-04:00

One of the cable movie channels had on the 2009 version of The Velveteen Rabbit at some point over the past week or so, and I finally had time to watch it today. Now it's been years since I read the story, but I remembered it was about a toy rabbit. This film is decidedly not. The plot now revolves around a boy who is sent to live with his grandmother because his father doesn't want to deal with him. He spends time in a "magical attic" which is when the film switches from live action to animation. The toy swan and rocking horse get a lot more screen time than the rabbit does (they have stars voicing the characters while the rabbit is voiced by an unknown who didn't even get a credit). As a children's film touted to be family friendly it was okay, and is probably quite enjoyable to people unfamiliar with the book. At least the producers were honest enough to call it "inspired by" the book.

After watching it, I decided to see if the book was old enough to be in the public domain. Sure enough, I was able to download it for free for my Kindle. The book was as charming as I remembered it to be, and wasn't quite as sad as I remembered. It's also a good short read that can be got through in less than thirty minutes. This free version is not illustrated, but there are occasional random phrases inserted in the text that I think show where the illustrations were in the original text. It is always nice to revisit a childhood book and find it lives up to my memories.

Lincoln Legends

2010-08-15T12:41:00.000-04:00

There are probably more stories about Abraham Lincoln than any other president. His humble beginnings in the frontier mean that there is little documentation of his early life. Plus his stature as our greatest president means everyone tries to tie Lincoln to their cause meaning we have depressed Lincoln, racist Lincoln, and gay Lincoln. Lincoln Legends by Edward Steers Jr. tries to dispel some of the myths.

In each chapter, Steers starts with the legend and then deconstructs it to try to get to the facts. I learned a bit since I didn't know there were questions about Lincoln's legitimacy or that his romance with Ann Rutledge has been almost completely discredited (I always figured that romance was slightly exaggerated since its main supporter was Lincoln's law partner who hated Mary Todd). Steers does an excellent job of tracking down sources and explaining why some are good and some are not. Having read The Lincoln Conspiracy, it was nice to see a full explanation of its source material. I appreciated the fact that Steers treated Mary Todd in an even-handed matter and came down hard on Dr. Mudd, as well.

I bought the book for Kindle since it is currently on a really good sale as is the hardcover version (not sure how long that will last). There were some formatting errors, but nothing to major. The photographs showed clearly on the Kindle's screen. My only complaint was that the book could have used a better editor since Steers does have a tendency to be a little repetitive in some points and the text of the Gettysburg Address was missing words.

Patricia Neal

2010-08-12T22:01:00.000-04:00

Patricia Neal died earlier this week. I'm somewhat indifferent to her as an actress. She's good in the movies I've seen her in but always seemed a little cold. I won't watch a movie just because she's in it, but I won't not watch it, either. I had picked up a copy of her autobiography at a recent book sale, so I decided to use her death as the reason for making it next on my to read list.

Neal comes off as very honest, but very self-absorbed. She goes off to college and sends her boyfriend letters detailing the petty hardships of college, I say petty since this was 1942 and the boyfriend was in the army (he would later be killed). She becomes an actress and starts carrying on numerous affairs with married men. She thinks it's okay since these relationships aren't serious. The men's wives are not around and are unaware of what's going on. She clearly sets out to seduce Gary Cooper. Then she falls hard despite his his wife and kid. I'm pretty open-minded, but you don't sleep with a married man unless his wife gives permission, and if he's not in an open marriage and you sleep with him you deserve whatever heartbreak you get. He, of course, ultimately stayed with his wife and Neal never really got over him.

Neal rebounded from the Cooper affair by marrying writer Roald Dahl, not because she loved him, but because she thought they'd have beautiful kids. They lost one daughter to measles because they couldn't get the girl vaccinated. Their son suffered major brain injuries in a traffic accident. Neal had a series of strokes while carrying her last child and almost died. Over twenty-five years of marriage and through all that, she came to love him. Why she loved him I will never understand because Dahl was a truly repulsive human being. He was rude to almost everyone and insisted on controlling every major decision in their lives. When Neal was heavily pregnant and recovering from her strokes, she had to crawl to the bathroom at night since Dahl wouldn't let her have a night nurse and God forbid she should interrupt his sleep. He told their children mommy wasn't doing her job around the house not because she was recovering from major brain damage but because she was lazy. Then he started screwing around on Neal with a family friend (and the nasty things I said above about Neal's affair with Cooper apply to Dahl and his affair). Even when he threw her out with a one-way ticket to the other side of the ocean and destroyed or disposed of many items she valued, she still claimed she loved him and that he saved her life. The sad thing is that if he comes off as this horrible in the words of a woman who claimed to still love him, he had to have been much worse in fact.

To sum it up, you have to admire Neal for surviving her tragedies with grace and for championing the cause of stroke recovery. It's a pity the times in the book where she shows caring and compassion are far overshadowed by the general sentiment that the world should spin around her.

(Gee, looking at the link to Amazon I'm rather sad my copy is a former library book with one spot of loose binding at the title page. In slightly better condition, I could have made some money from this find. Trying to sell a book in only acceptable condition is just too much of a hassle.)

Hiassen and Rachlin

2010-08-02T21:52:00.000-04:00

A week or so ago I saw that Carl Hiaasen had a new book coming out this past week, and Amazon had the hardcover for under $15. Hiaasen's one of the authors I like to have in hardcover, the Kindle edition was only a buck cheaper, and I had a gift card balance at Amazon so I decided to order it and whatever was on my wish list that would bring the order to over $25 for free shipping.

Hiaasen's new book is Star Island. It centers on an actress who works as a double for a fading pop star who can't stay off the drugs. There's Hiaasen's usual amount of quirky humor and casual mayhem and maulings. Some characters from previous books show up, including a major role for Skink who is a favorite. Overall it was quite enjoyable, but it is a book that is very much a book of the moment. The pop star is stalked by a paparazzo, and there is a lot of celebrity name dropping. In five/ten years the references will be meaningless to readers thus making the book dated and less enjoyable.

The second book I got was Harvey Rachlin's Scandals, Vandals, and Da Vincis. I'd read two of his previous books Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, and Einstein's Brain and Jumbo's Hide, Elvis's Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha (dude likes overly long titles) which dealt with artifacts of history and what happened to them. Scandals covers the stories surrounding twenty-six paintings from the Renaissance on, some really well knows and others less so. I'm sure anyone whose studied art history will find this boring, but it's a good little book for those of us who don't know much about the subjects. The paintings are represented by black and white pictures so the book probably took me twice as long to read as it should have since I was looking everything up on the internet. This does not work well for me since I have a magpie mind and while I start looking for a color picture of a young Ben Franklin, I end up looking for Benedict Arnold's grave (Franklin's portrait was stolen by Major Andre who was Arnold's contact for the handing over of West Point). If you are looking for some trivia on objects, I recommend all of Rachlin's books.

Recent Reads

2010-07-23T19:41:00.000-04:00

Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush. I don't like the Bushes in general, but what the heck. I didn't like the Reagans, either, and Nancy's memoir is one of my favorites. The most striking thing about Bush's memoir is how little substance there is to it. I get that she is a private person, but everything here is superficial. She says she and George share a deep connection, but never gets into what that connection is. About the only thing I got from the book is a better understanding of how we got into this endless fighting. After 9/11, it seems security agents were taking every threat as a major one and panicking. Run and hide since a small plane drifted slightly off course. I can see how W. made inaccurate judgements when he was surrounded by such paranoia.

The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans. The book starts "There are three sides to every story...yours...mine...and the truth". Evans started as an actor, worked for his brother (co-founder of Evan-Picone), and ended up head of Paramount studios where he was responsible for The Godfather, Chinatown, and (my personal favorite) Harold & Maude. His life was a roller coaster and part of the fun of the book is trying to figure out what the truth was. I never knew that Dick van Patten was once a top juvenile star on Broadway. Whether or not he and Evans used to spend their time gambling and whoring, who's to say, but it does make van Patten seem much more interesting.

Barbara Stanwyck by Al DiOrio. This is one of those celebratory bios where the author is so much in love with his subject everything is sunshine and unicorns. Stanwyck's the perfect human being--let's gloss over the teenage son she basically abandoned. Baby Face is described as a glamor pictures (forgivable since the original racy cut wasn't rediscovered until twenty years after this was written). Nice to see contemporary reviews share my opinion that Night Nurse existed largely for scenes of the nurses dressing. I never realized Cesar Romero was gay until I saw a quote from Stanwyck about his being the go-to escort of unattached actresses of a certain age.

Twelve Stories and a Dream and The Door in the Wall and Other Stories by H. G. Wells (both free for Kindle). There's a ton of free Wells out there for Kindle, and I downloaded a lot of it since he's one of those authors I haven't read a lot of and probably should. These are both collections of short stories (one appears in both books) with a nice mix of fantasy, horror, and SF. There's some humor tossed in, too. Twelve Stories is the better of the two (love "The Magic Shop" and "Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation"). For being 100+ years old, the stories hold up quite well.

Live Aid

2010-07-14T19:04:00.003-04:00

Thanks to my weekly e-mail from Life, the closest picture site on the web, I was reminded that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of Live Aid. I was 14, my sister 16. We got up early to see the whole thing on MTV since we were major British new wave fans and all the good acts played London. Of course, Adam Ant's one song wasn't broadcast giving me a major sad. Queen gave the best performance ever. The Metropolis inspired video for "Radio GaGa" rocked on its on, but when all of Wembley Stadium reenacted the chorus part of the video, it was freaking awesome. And now I'm getting teary because Freddie Mercury is one of the best things ever in rock history and he died too damn young (and my idiot college roommate had no clue who Queen was making his death even more tragic because how do you not know who Queen is?). Can't embed the original video (see above link), but here's the Live Aid performance.

Life's Live Aid gallery is pretty cool. The best picture of the lot has to be this one:

Madonna is singing back up for the Thompson Twins.

And I would like to take a moment to praise Midge Ure. Bob Geldof seems to get all the credit for organizing Band Aid, Live Aid, etc..., but Midge was there every step of the way. Co-wrote and produced "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and helped organize the charity's trust. Maybe I'm partial to Midge since i know several Visage and Ultravox songs and only know one Boomtown Rats song (plus Geldof has had a freaky personal life) but I really wish Midge was acknowledged more.

Cul de Sac and other Comic Stuff

2010-07-10T09:46:00.000-04:00

I've got a three day weekend and decided to treat myself to something fun. I decided on the first Cul de Sac book. Cul de Sac is a delightful strip written by Richard Thompson about a family living near D.C.. Four-year-old Alice is an imaginative hyperactive girl who spends her days playing with friends at Blisshaven Preschool. Her older brother Petey likes to lead a boring life and is ranked in the top twenty of picky eaters in the world. The drawing style is loose and a bit crude which adds to the charm. This book has a foreword by Bill Watterson. If the creator of Calvin and Hobbes likes it, you know the strip is good.

I became a fan of comic strips because I read the newspaper growing up. When I got a place of my own, I opted for on-line news and had to go searching for on-line comics. On-line comics rock because you get the chance to read whatever you want and not be limited by the tastes of the local newspaper's editor.

GoComics is a pay site with an awesome selection (including Cul de Sac). You can access the site for free, but if you want to build your own comics page or pages and have them e-mailed to you, it will cost $11.88 a year. That is one heck of a bargain especially since it includes some of my other favorite strips like Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, Fox Trot, and Doonesbury.

Comics.com gives a nice choice of comics for free. You can create a page of what you want to read and there is an option for a daily e-mail of your choices. It used to be a pay site. When it switched from pay to free, I stopped getting the daily e-mail. I e-mailed them about the problem a few times with no response, so I have to read my strips on the Internet which is still okay.

Daily Ink is the home of King Features strips. I do not like enough of their strips to pay the $15 a year for that, so I get mine from Seattle P-I. I simply bookmarked the strips I read into their own folder on FireFox and click open all in tabs for these comics each morning. These are mostly soap opera strips.

The fact that I am reading any soap opera strips I blame on The Comics Curmudgeon where Josh reads the comics so you don't have to. I read Apt. 3-G now to see how evil Margo will be and Mary Worth for the world class meddling. When Josh points out an particularly interesting or insane story line, I dip into Mark Trail and Funky Winkerbean (which was about a marching band when I was a kid and is now about misery and death). There's a devoted band of commentators (including some comic strip writers), and while I don't have time to read the comments every day, I skim them occasionally. Every Tuesday, Josh posts the best comments of the week so the commentators are constantly trying to be amusing enough to win the title of best each week.

Fame

2010-07-06T21:47:00.000-04:00

As part of Hulu's days of summer, the have the first two seasons of the TV show Fame available until Oct 1, 2010. i watched the movie early this year, but it was an edited for TV version that was so chopped up it was nonsensical. I'm looking forward to the TCM showing July 16th. The TV show ran for two seasons on NBC starting in 1982 and then did four more seasons in syndication. I have vague memories of watching it occasionally back then, but it wasn't one of my favorites.

The show is quite enjoyable. Set in a NY high school for the performing arts, it is a bit more realistic than today's high school shows. The sets look like an old run down high school and the characters look like real people. It is pretty realistic. You really feel like these are people you would see in a real school. It's nice to hear NY accents as well since they seem to have disappeared from television over the past thirty years. Every episode has at least one production number. Think of it as Glee without the designer clothes and autotune. I highly recommend watching if you have the time.

Recent Reads (All Free)

2010-07-04T20:17:00.000-04:00

The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde. I really had no idea Oscar Wilde wrote The Canterville Ghost until I went looking for free Wilde books for my Kindle. The Ghost has been happily terrifying people for centuries until he runs up against an American family. Really, what can you do when you try to frighten someone and they offer you oil to quiet your chains? Very humorous.

Beasley's Christmas Party by Booth Tarkington. I probably should have saved this for Christmastime, but I was looking for something short to read one night. This is utterly sweet and charming. A newspaperman lives in a boarding house next to a politician who talks to invisible people. It would spoil it to tell too much more, but this is well worth reading.

Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up by Eleanor H. Porter. Pollyanna is the girl who tries to find something good in even the worst of things. Soon she gets everyone she knows to play the Glad Game and changes everyone she know. The plot of Pollyanna is pretty close to what ended up in the Disney film which I just assume people have seen. The book is enjoyable without being preachy. Pollyanna Grows Up is a bit more hit or miss. The first half has Pollyanna going to live with a friend of a friend for a few months. She sees true poverty for the first time and flirts with socialist ideas. Her aunt worries Pollyanna will become a preachy prig if she ever realizes the beneficial effect she has on people and takes Pollyanna to live in Europe. The second half of the book takes place when Pollyanna is twenty. It is a rather convoluted bunch of romantic entanglements. The first book is definitely the one you should read of the two.

Happy Birthday America

2010-07-04T07:43:00.001-04:00

In honor of Independence Day, here's my favorite rendition of the Gettysburg Address.

The LSD Story

2010-07-03T22:01:00.000-04:00

I couldn't get the show I wanted to watch to work on Hulu, so I decided to opt for a couple of episodes of Dragnet instead. The Dragnet episodes expire next February, so I figured I should start watching them now. I love this show like meatloaf. It is simple straightforward comfort food. Minimal plot, staccato dialogue, not much thought required. Jack Webb as Joe Friday is an unabashed square and proud of that fact, but he's also extremely likable.

Hulu's episodes are the color ones starting in 1967 (Dragnet had several runs on TV and radio). "The LSD Story" is the first episode. It is so worth watching for the drug trips. There is a girl literally climbing the walls. This is genius.

Kindle Bible

2010-06-28T21:18:00.000-04:00

When my sister first showed me her Kindle last Christmas, I asked about a Kindle Bible. At the time, she said she couldn't find a good one. Yesterday, I was paging through the Kindle bestseller list and saw the American Standard version available for $1.99. Good price, but I'm a King James kind of girl. I like my God to sound slightly archaic. So I searched and found the KJV for $.99. How awesome is that? It's even got the Apocrypha which my physical Bible lacks. You can jump to each book from the table of contents, and at the start of each book, you can jump to the chapter. Haven't figured out if you can jump to a particular verse. There's a suggested reading list if you're having a particular crisis. There are illustrations, but I think they're somewhat muddy even when zoomed (then again, looking at Gustave Dore's Wikipedia page, muddy might just be his style). All in all an excellent buy.

Do Nothing But Read Day

2010-06-25T18:05:00.001-04:00

Every Wednesday, the mental_floss blog has an At the Libraries post about various activities going on at libraries around the country. It's a cool collection of links that also helps remind people that libraries are amongst the best things ever. Last week, they mentioned a neat idea called the Do Nothing But Read Day. It is happening this Sunday, June 27. While I have things I need to do this Sunday other than read, I am planning to spend some quality time with Ed McBain. I should be able to get through at least one of his books that day. If you sign up on the DNBRD site, you can even win a prize for doing nothing but spending a few hours enjoying some books.

More Kindle Stuff

2010-06-25T17:37:00.000-04:00

Thanks to my sister, my Kindle is now all pretty and protected. I gave her a few choices from DecalGirl for the skin, and she picked Mystery.

This is the back view. In person, it's a nice mossy green color that blends nicely with the Kindle's display screen. It was really easily to apply. The screen protector also applied rather easily.

This is the front view. Next to it is the padded carrying case she made me. This is something of a necessity, since I've had to tote my Kindle in to work a few times to show my fellow employees. Might as well get someone else hooked.

Now one of the original reasons I had planned to wait until fall to buy my Kindle was the thought they would drop the price for the holiday season. I was somewhat gobsmacked when they dropped the price two days after i bought one. This would not be an issue if I'd bought from Amazon which automatically refunds adjustments, but I got mine at Target. Target doesn't price match, and only gives seven days for price adjustments. I was happy with what I paid and was not overly annoyed when I stopped at Target Tuesday and saw the price was still $259. Fortunately when I stopped again yesterday, the price was down to Amazon's $189 and I was able to get a refund with no difficulties.

So far I've read P. G. Wodehouse's The Adventures of Sally, Kipling's The Man Who Would be King, and Elizabeth Gaskell's three Cranford novellas. The Cranford books are in order of Cranford, Mr. Harrison's Confession, and My Lady Ludlow, but i think that's reverse chronological order. Doesn't really matter since the link is places more than characters. The Kindle is very light to hold and easy to read. I love the built in dictionary, although the default dictionary is not up to all English words (oh, for the option of a built in OED, not that I could afford it). Real books have the advantage in that you can page ahead more easily to see how long the next chapter is. Chapter length is important in figuring out if I should read one more chapter before bed. I've decided to leave most of my book unsorted until I have read them and then move the ones I have read into collections named by author.

Quick Ones

2010-06-19T22:16:00.001-04:00

Crawford (available on Hulu). Crawford is a small town near Waco, TX where George W. Bush bought a ranch shortly before he ran for president. The film studies the town throughout the Bush presidency. It's interesting to see the optimism at the start where all the storefronts in town are full and how by the end people are closing up and leaving. The film show that the town had both pro- and anti-Bush people, and neither side seems denigrated. I think my favorite part was how people loved the prosperity being the Western White House brought to the town, but then were grew thoroughly sick and tired of not being able to go anywhere without encountering media or protesters. I also found the preacher interesting. He talks about who much of the town is "unchurched" and what a boost it would be for Bush to visit his church. He thought Bush was a great God-fearing president, but Bush never came to church in town.

WarGames. Remember the '80's when we all lived under constant threat of nuclear annihilation since Reagan the cowboy anted to be hard line? I'll take terrorists over the Cold War any day. The chance of the entire world coming to an end is far less. Matthew Broderick plays a smarmy high school hacker who breaks into the NORAD computers thinking he was breaking into a game company. He does research by checking out the library card catalogue and pulling magazines from the shelves. He's got a dot matrix printer. His computer is DOS with the big floppy disks. The film itself is a fun romp, but for me it was worth watching just for the nostalgia value.

Mommie Dearest. Remember the '70's when Faye Dunaway was the best actress in film? Then she made this. While Christina Crawford's book is poorly written and probably at least somewhat exaggerated, a good film could have been made from it. Instead, the replace plot with scene after scene of crazy Joan, hired lousy actresses to play Christina, and edited it to make Dunaway's performance even more over the top. The girls playing Christina are the biggest weakness. They're so bad I couldn't even enjoy the film on a camp level.

Rose Marie. Jeanette MacDonald is a soprano searching the Canadian wilds for her escaped con brother (early Jimmy Stewart). Nelson Eddy is the Mountie who sings tenor. "Indian Love Call" is the oft-repeated song. Really not a bad film considering all the cliches it spawned.

The Incredible Mr. Limpet. I had not seen this in years. Don Knotts is a man who turns into a fish in this blend of animation and live action. The morality's questionable (is Mrs. Limpet screwing around before she thinks her husband drowned and can Limpet in good conscience go to the spawning grounds with a female fish while still married to a human? They never do get divorced). WWII consists of one sub encounter and a convoy. A decent bit of fluff suitable for everyone.

Jaws and Jaws 2. Read this article on NPR about the search for any remaining shark props, and in a bit of serendipity discovered my TIVO had recorded two Jaws films. Jaws is remarkable for how talking it is. Lots of scenes of people talking about the attacks interspersed with a few shark attacks. Got me to thinking that if it was made today, the shark would be CGI and in every other scene, Richard Dreyfuss would be replaced with a 20-year-old who'd have his shirt off in every scene, and the adultery plot from the book would have been kept in. Then I watched Jaws 2. Within ten minutes of the start, the shark attacks a boat that gets blown up in a splendid fireball. The shark is in a lot of scenes. the plot centers around a group of teenagers out boating. It is complete crap. Almost makes me wonder how bad Jaws 3-D is.

Kindle

2010-06-19T11:19:00.001-04:00

I was planning to wait for my birthday in November and get myself a Kindle DX, but then came the news that Target is selling regular Kindles.After looking at in the the store, I decided the larger screen wasn't worth the extra $200 cost plus I could put it on my Target card which gets paid off every month instead of my major card that I won't get paid off for a few years. Besides, I've got the weekend off, and I wanted a treat. Of course, a few hours after buying it, I remembered i have a nice amount in my Amazon gift card account for their textbook buy-back program that I'd planned to use for the Kindle. Guess I can now buy some e-books.

I love new toys. It took a few hours to put all the free books I've bought over the past few months onto my new toy. And I had to figure out how to move the books I'd gotten from Girlebooks over and how to manually download the new software update. The actually copying part was easy, but for some reason I was having difficulty getting my Kindle to stay in USB mode so I could do the copying. Right after I decided to contact customer support, I got it to work.

The newest update allows you to organize books into collections. I'm going to have to do some playing around with that. I'll probably end up grouping by author name.

Now comes the all important decision of what should be the first book I read. So many choices.

Hamish Macbeth

2010-06-10T22:30:00.000-04:00

Last year I read M. C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam which I did not enjoy due to not liking the main character. My sister recommended I give Beaton another try with her Hamish Macbeth novels. I found four at the last Robesonia Library book sale and must say I was pleasantly surprised.

Macbeth is the lone constable in a small town in northern Scotland. His territory covers a number of other small towns. He has a croft with chickens and sheep and is very unlucky in love. He's very good at police work which is something of a problem for him. He loves his simple life in his little town and whenever he does good at his job there is the threat that he will be promoted and have to move to the city. His lack of ambition and complete inability to maintain romantic relationships are the main themes of the books.

The four I read were Death of a Scriptwriter, Death of a Dustman, Death of a Village, and Death of a Maid. All were quite enjoyable and imaginative. Macbeth has a way with the locals that enables him to find solutions where the city coppers cannot. I'm rather looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

There's also a Hamish Macbeth TV show from the mid-1990's that I'll have to check out at some point. Robert Carlyle played Macbeth which is pretty perfect casting. It looks like they threw out the rest of the characters, but it still could be interesting viewing.

Beautiful People

2010-06-08T11:31:00.000-04:00

I was checking out the NY Post on-line the other day and saw their must-watch TV of the summer article which included season 2 of Beautiful People on LOGO. How did I not know there was a TV show based on Simon Doonan's memoirs? Doonan is the creative director at Barney's and his segment used to be the highlight of HGTV's Holiday Windows special every Christmas season. Dude is upbeat and hilarious and seems truly happy with life. I have not gotten any of his books yet, but his website is fun, especially the Random Scribblings page.

Yesterday, LOGO had a marathon of the first season of Beautiful People (being British, it's only six episodes long). It's very loosely based on Doonan's life and each episodes starts with a variation on "before I was a fey window dresser in New York, I was a fey boy growing up in Reading". It's set in the late 1990's with Doonan at age 13 (he's a good deal older than that). Each episode focuses on how grown-up Doonan got something as a child. The best two episodes tell how he got his nose which involved several musical numbers and an ode to Carrie and how he got his Posh Spice doll. His family is lower middle class and not without their problems and quirks, but they're always supportive. Season 2 starts Saturday night and I am looking forward to it. British TV always seems so much better than American TV in making comedies with characters who seem like real people and not caricatures.

More Bookmarks

2010-06-07T12:15:00.000-04:00

Finished up another round of bookmarks this morning.

I again did a mix of glued to felt and sewn. Fringing out the ends took the most time. I have a few more pieces of cloth that should be enough to finish off the patterns I have. By the time I finish those up, I should be able to afford a big project again. It's such a shame that the things I like to sew for myself tend to cost a bit, and I am trying hard to be frugal.

Doctor Who Season 2

2010-06-04T20:50:00.000-04:00

I find it odd to refer to a season of a show as season 2 when it's a show that's been on for over 40 years, but that's the way Doctor Who rolls. My sister loaned me her season 2 DVD set for my vacation which I did not get to, but I finally got around to it.

Season 2 is the start of David Tennant's time as the 10th Doctor. It's also the season where we learn of Torchwood. There's some truly epic episodes and only a couple poor ones (the Olympics and 1950's episodes do little for me). The gem is probably "School Reunion" which brings back Sarah Jane Smith (probably every one's all time favorite Companion) and K-9 (gotta love the tin dog) and has Anthony Head as a guest star. Any one of those three makes my geek heart go pitter-pat and the combination just makes me happy beyond words. The season brings back the Cybermen and ends with an awesome double-header where the Daleks and Cybermen square off and talk smack to each other. Good times.

They did an excellent job with the DVDs. Every episode has a commentary track and there is a nice mixture of regular cast, guest stars, and crew members. The last disc consists of several hours of behind the scenes stuff which is kind of cool. I'm a believer that DVDs (and BluRay) are a doomed format. Just as most music is purchased through downloads, I think the day will come soon when movies and TV shows will be watched mostly through downloads or streaming. The industry might be able to keep the format alive if they focus on loading on extras.

In my last Doctor Who post, I mentioned I was leery of Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor. He has surprised me. I've been enjoying his performance, although I think the stories have been a little weaker than previous seasons. I like that he smacked down Amy Pond's unwanted advances, which hopefully ends any possibility of romantic entanglement. The most annoying thing about Season 2 was Rose's obsessive love and jealousy for 10. The Doctor flirting a bit is fine, the Doctor in a romantic relationship with a Companion is not.

Horatio Hornblower

2010-06-01T14:21:00.001-04:00

My introduction to Horatio Hornblower came about ten years ago through the excellent A&E TV movies about HH's early career. This series of eight movies starring Ioan Gruffudd covered the early years of HH's rise through the British navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Oodles of action and fun. Being the kind of person I am, I wanted to read the C. S. Forester novels that were the source of the movies. I was not the only library patron with that thought, so I read the novels in whatever order I could get my hands on them. Since the, I picked up the books whenever I could find them at sales and finally read them in order.

The books start with HH first setting foot on ship as a lowly midshipman. Over the course of eleven novels, he rises to Admiral and Lord through naval skill and a healthy dose of luck. The novels are good adventure stories and quite enjoyable despite HH's faults. That is probably the most noteworthy thing about the novels--you can't help but like HH despite the fact he's a bit of a jerk who degenerates his own skill and is unhappy most of the time. It is the story of a great naval officer who is a somewhat miserable human being. Plus you learn something of history and the lives of British seaman.

C.S. Forester started the series in the middle with HH a Captain in the Pacific. He worked HH up to Lord, ten looped back and wrote HH's early years. This creates a few issues since the Bush who hangs out in a gambling den with his HH between wars seems very different from the Bush who serves as 1st Lieutenant under Captain Hornblower later on. Then again, most series have their inconsistencies. I recommend chronological order if your going to read the whole series although maybe not all in one stretch. It's a heck of a lot of naval warfare over a few weeks. I'm going to read a nice trashy novel next.

Law & Order

2010-05-25T20:01:00.000-04:00

After twenty years, Law & Order had its finale last night. The original has always been my favorite of the L&O shows. A simple police and courtroom procedural. No need for flashy camera angles and camera tricks. We all have characters we've liked more than others over the years, but it managed the amazing feat of retaining a consistent quality level. It wasn't the best show ever, but it was always good.

NBC again proved itself as the network most worthy of disdain. Whatever backstage tension existing between the network and series creator Dick Wolf, the show deserved a better send-off. Heck, the commercials didn't even say "series finale", only "season finale". NBC made a lot of money off that show over the years. They could have hyped the ending a bit more.

I was quite happy with the final episode. The cancellation came after the show was filmed so it wasn't written as a series-ender, but it had a nice feeling of closure to it. Jack McCoy got to roar like the lion he once was and Lt. Van Buren got the send-off she deserved. I even teared up a bit. At least it will always live on in reruns.

Daria

2010-05-23T10:10:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time, MTV was capable of producing decent programming. In the late 1990's, the came up with Daria, the tale of a high school misfit. After years of hang-ups due to music rights issues, they finally put Daria out on DVD this year.

Daria is smart and sardonic. She is honest about how she sees life and does not fit in. . In the episode "Misery Chick", a former athlete accidentally dies and everyone comes to her to find out how they should react since she's good with the dark side of life. Daria gets pissed. Just because she is not like everyone else and actually thinks about things does not mean she is miserable. She's the fictional character I can most identify with.

Daria starts with her and her family moving to a new town. She's got a cute, popular sister, and over-stressed parents. The school is populated with an interesting mix of people. It's not like a real school in that people from different social groups interact freely. The series covers about three years, and it is fascinating to see how the characters change. Daria learns people can be okay by the end. the show is witty and smart and loads of fun. It goes a bit downhill with the introduction of Tom as Daria's love interest. He's a self-absorbed jerk who talks down to Daria more than he should. He's not mean or evil, but I cannot stand him.

The DVDs themselves were somewhat disappointing. They had to replace most of the music which is okay except for removing REM's "Everybody Hurts" from a scene where characters get stuck in traffic. The only accompanying material is a note saying to suck it up about the music changes. There's nothing listing which episodes are on which disks. With eight disks covering 26 hours, an episode listing would have been nice. the list price is $73 which is high. I was able to get one for $30 at Best Buy the week it came out. I adore the show, but would not want to spend more than $35 for it.

Jim Henson

2010-05-17T23:01:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Jim Henson's death. I was in college. PBS had a show about the music of Sesame Street that night. I cried my eyes out. In fact, it was a year before I could even see a Muppet without crying. Mad the mistake of clicking on Wired's remembrance article tonight and here I am crying again. Should never clicked on the links to the funeral.

I was born around the same time as Sesame Street and grew up watching it. This was the good days when SS was educational and smart. Now every time I try to watch it, it is just noise and hyperactivity. So Jim Henson helped teach me to read for which I am forever grateful. Later there was The Muppet Show. I saw Mummenschanz live once solely based on my memories of the on The Muppet Show (I highly recommend seeing them if you ever get a chance--awesome show). Saw most of the Muppet movies in the theater. And Fraggle Rock, I loved that show. Drove my mom nuts one Christmas insisting I wanted a Boober doll. She came through. The Dark Crystal was the first DVD I bought. Henson's work enriched my life in ways I could never explain. I still miss him.

Kings

2010-05-16T14:24:00.000-04:00

Kings was a series on NBC a few years back. Another one that looked interesting, but you kind on knew ahead of time it wouldn't last. From what I remember of the commercials, it looked like it was going to be a cross between Ian McKellen's Richard III and Starship Troopers , a mix of fascists and fighting. All thirteen episodes are up on Hulu until September, so I watched those this week.

Turns out it is a modern day retelling of the Biblical story of David. There's a king of a present day military power with a son he'd not overly pleased with. There's a soldier named David Shepard who defeats a tank called Goliath and becomes a war hero. There's a preacher named Samuels. The acting's good, and the story is nicely done. Love that the queen is as much a schemer as every one else is. Macaulay Culkin is ever so good as the sleazy nephew. The character's are well-rounded and even the dad guys are likable. All in all a nicely done bit of political intrigue.

Now to me this is just another example of NBC's blazing stupidity. This is a biblical story with much talk of God. They aired it on Sunday night to start (then pulled it before bouncing it around the schedule). They did not mention the religious aspect in any of the promotional materiel (as stated above, I had no clue it was Biblical until I started watching it). As Kirk Cameron's career and Mel Gibson's snuff film have shown us, market to the religious and you will find an audience. Fireproof made $33 million just by reaching out to churches. Had NBC mentioned the religious theme of the show, it might have at least started off with better ratings instead of having next to no one watch it.

Wonder Woman

2010-05-15T17:24:00.000-04:00

For Christmas, my best friend got me the complete set of Wonder Woman DVDs. I finally got around to watching them this week.

The first season is a short one and is set during WWII. Steve Trevor is shot down over the Bermuda Triangle where he land on Paradise Island where the Amazons live. The Amazons have been isolated for centuries and yet have both handguns and an invisible plan. Wonder Woman develops a small crush on him then goes back to the USA with him to fight the Nazis. The biggest problem with the first season is that Lynda Carter cannot act. At All. It sort of works in scenes where she is adjusting to our world, but doesn't work most of the time. This season's costume is god-awful, too. Bullet bra and granny panties. Carter had a great figure, but this made her butt look huge.

For seasons two and three, the show moved to present time (1977) with WW helping Steve Trevor, Jr. in a spy agency. Carter can now act and gives WW a sweetness and niceness. Her costume is much more flattering, as well. Not sure if it was the decision to not develop a romance between WW and Steve or the rumored tension between Carter and Lyle Wagoner, but Steve gets a desk job and increasingly less screen time. Their is the obligatory disco episode and alien episodes and a high tech computer that looks like a room-sized Lite Bright. Gotta love the '70s a little. At the end of season 3, WW gets transferred to Los Angeles (before it was set in Washington). Steve was totally gone and replaced with an indestructible man and chimp along with a sassy little black boy. Thank God it got cancelled since season 4 would have been a mess.

Highlight of the series was the season 3 episode "My Teenage Idol is Missing" guest starring Leif Garrett (one of the few episodes not available on WB.com). He plays dual role as a kidnapped pop star who is replaced by his unknown twin. The twin gets found out when he, shock of shocks, lip syncs at a concert. Today no one would even notice.

Lynda Carter does commentary on two episodes as well as appearing in the documentaries included. I kind of like her. She knows it was silly jiggle TV, but takes pride in it and respects the character. She seems like a really cool person. There are worse things in life then being know as Wonder Woman.

Lumosity

2010-05-13T21:33:00.001-04:00

Lumosity is a neat site I stumbled on through Yahoo!. I think I was adding some content to a My Yahoo! page and this came up as recommended. It is a nifty little gaming site designed to improve your cognitive function. For me the single most terrifying thing is the thought of losing my mind. My brains are all I've got going for me and I don't want to live without them. I am young enough yet not to worry too much, but with a history of mental deterioration in my deceased relatives, I worry a little. They say the best way to stave off dementia and such is to use your brain and not get into ruts. Use it or lose it.

Lumosity has a free mode which provides you with five games. They have a variety of pay plans, and when they had a 25% off sale earlier this week, I decided to spend the $60 and sign up for a year. The pay plan provides about 50 games. The games are varied. Their are several arithmetic games (I've always had some multiplication issues, particularly 7x7 and higher, but I had not realized how badly my ability to do simple math in my head had slipped). Their are several games for memory, flexibility, and attention span. My favorite is Birdwatching where you have to remember the location of a bird and a letter that flash on the screen at the same time. Penguin Pursuit is fun, too, where you try to move a penguin through a maze that is constantly spinning.

The paid program provides a choice of courses. It tracks your progress and can tell you how you compare to others. The courses get harder as you go through them to keep you challenged. I usually hit a point in a game where I know I'm done for for that session. I'm doing the basic training course right now which is 40 5-game sessions. Each game only takes about 5 minutes to play, so it's not too time-consuming. You can play games outside the set course as well. They also add new games occasionally and seek feedback. I've had good sessions and bad ones, but I think if I keep at this I'll improve some cognitive skills.

Much better review of the product available here.