TV postscript

My previous post might seem like I watch too much TV. This is possibly true. That's just a prime time schedule. You may have noticed I seem to watch a lot of soccer too. This is also true, for instance I'll be taking Wednesday off as comp time so I can see Liverpool take on Milan. There are no excuses, just what I do.

Blogger Buzz gives a shoutout to fellow Sun alum Owen Linderholm on the launch of his new company's first book, Digital Dish. Good luck with the book--this is some sweet visibility for you--and then the next one, Owen.

The human condition: part 5,437

Reading the last entry of Simon Ng's blog was chilling. The post, just a short paragraph, was written moments after allowing sister Sharon's ex-boyfriend into their apartment, moments before Jin Lin stabbed him to death. As efforts towards citizen journalism grow, little bits like this cut steps through the forest. [via Anatoly]

Wait a second. There are "sneaker bloggers? So many that Nike could include 20 in a contest and still leave one out?

a != b

Yesterday: Pouring rain
Today: Bright sunshine

Yesterday: Office full
Today: Office nearly empty

You do the math.

Last night's movie: Alfie

We're talking about the original 1966 film Alfie, not last year's example of how Hollywood generally can't leave well enough alone. The broad strokes are the same, except this one's set in London and stars Michael Caine, still young enough to be on the barely muscular side of pretty boy pretty. Another difference, and this is important, is that 1965 London is filled with people just barely over the recovery from World War II and into an economic boom. Class is still important but not so much that Caine can't bluff his way around it.

Everyone knows the punchline to the theme song: "What's it all about, Alfie?" That's also the theme of the movie, the journey which Caine's character takes. Women can barely resist Alfie's charms, despite the harsh, careless way he treats them, but the less pleasure he takes from them. One woman loves him so much she has his child, cooks and cleans for him, though he never marries her or makes a commitment to the boy and eventually walks away.

Director Lewis Gilbert (who also helmed three James Bond flicks) shows Alfie often enough what he's missing through all this. A father's love for a son, a husband's love for his wife, a wife's heartbreak over betrayal, but all Alfie wants is the pleasure. One can only presume that as a child his parents or father left him (died in the war?) but Bill Naughton's script, adapted from his stage play, never goes there. To me this is fine, we can infer what we like and aren't spoonfed every little detail that might matter. Even the ending leaves us unsettled, Alfie standing on a bridge looking off into the distance.

recommended

Book review: Pandora's Star

I have to tell you that Peter F. Hamilton, even without a personal website that I can find, is one of my favorite writers. I just finished Pandora's Star and it ranks right up their with his Night's Dawn trilogy. Nearly a thousand pages--this is part one of two--and the characters are there, the plot twists are there, the SFnal creativity is there. Sort of pisses me off that I didn't wait until the second half comes out next year so I could read it all at once but I'll probably just re-read this one then.

Nearly 400 years from now life is good for most humans. By 2050, wormholes, memory storage and periodic body replacement are developed and now people live on hundreds of planets for hundreds of years. Good is not perfect, of course, since people still have emotions that block optimum decisionmaking as we have today. A few alien races have been encountered, though not many, and those that have are either friendly or far less developed. Mainly people can experience variety and abundance on, well, exactly the scale we dream of today. Which is kind of Hamilton's point.

Not everyone believes that all the aliens are benign. Specifically, one group claims that an alien named the Starflyer (which has never actually been seen by anyone who'll admit it but is alleged to have been on a crashed ship on a world called Far Away) has subverted people at the highest levels of government and business, to ends that will do great harm to humanity.

Elsewhere, one of the few academic astronomers left--who needs telescopes when you can open a wormhole close up--notices two stars simply disappear from the sky. Hundreds of lightyears away, so he takes a wormhole train to another planet at the right distance so he can observe and record the event as it happens. The stars don't explode, their light simply disappears in three seconds like a light switch turned them off.

A starship is built and a couple of hundred humans take a four month trip to see one of the systems in person. On arrival, the crew find the star system is inside some type of quantum barrier and then one day, two thousand years after it appeared the barrier switched off. Though not at the second system. Inside are, well, exactly the vicious, powerful kind of alien that's been missing so far. Someone put the barrier up for a reason.

I don't want to say more but I've barely scratched the depths of the creations Hamilton's got in here. Those psychological imperfections mentioned are wielded like craftsmen's tools and when the final page is read I could have punched the author for making me to wait until next year for the second half.

definitely recommended

RSS with ads?

For those of you reading this through the feed, I wonder whether you have any strong feelings about this topic. Google has announced they'll now allow AdSense publishers to include the ads in feeds and since I run the ads on the web pages from which these entries come seems reasonable to use them here too. Would you unsubscribe, not care at all, or occasionally, if an ad was for something useful to you at that moment, click them? The current ads hardly pull in any money, maybe enough to cover the hosting fees for the site, maybe a little less, not that I'm complaining, but no point in not taking advantage of an opportunity if the consequences are low.

Want to let me know how you feel?

Have you been wondering what I've been up to at work? The linked page is an example of one part. Great crew, innovative and robust technology, strong leadership. But I don't want to gush.

Congratulations to Harlan Coben as his latest mystery, The Innocent, hit the NY Times hardcover bestsellers list this weekend at #6. Just started reading it this morning--if nothing else, Harlan has a great way with opening sentences:

"You never meant to kill him."

Huh?

In the neverending, unwinnable war against spam I have no email address exposed on this site (as far as I remember) but instead offer a contact form. Very little comes through this and usually the messages are questions about movies or suggestions that I add someone's upcoming favorite. Occasionally though I get puzzlers, messages that I can make no sense of, not connected enough to any specific blog post to trigger understanding.

Such as one just now received, which the sender chose not to even supply an address to which I could reply. Here I quote in the entirety:

"its about some scum buying my club nothing else we will break this club so we can buy it back and make it big again you watch"

Perhaps the author will see this and amplify. Possibly not and so I'll suffer to the ends of time.

Last night's movie: Open Range

Geez, been awhile since I watched a whole movie. Possibly Open Range (released in 2003) wasn't the right choice to break my dry spell. Kevin Costner and Robert Duval are old school cattle drivers, taking advantage of legal permission to graze their herds on open spaces. Or open ranges, that's probably part of where the title comes from. Trouble comes in the form of a rancher (Michael Gambon) who doesn't care for the men or the competition.

Costner also directed, using a script by Craig Storper from Lauran Paine's decades old novel The Open Range Men. As the film opens, Duval, Costner and two younger hands are settling in for the night with a thin tarp sheltering them from a torrential downpour; nothing much happens for the next 20 minutes or so except one of the younger hands, played by man-mountain Abraham Benrubi, heads back to the nearest town for some supplies. When he hasn't returned a couple of days later the two older men find him in jail, nearly beaten to death.

This is just a warning from Gambon, an Irishman who controls the largest ranch as well as the sheriff and town--you can pretty much picture one of those thin mustache twirlers from the silent picture days and nail this character. Duval immediately understands that his boys better destroy Gambon or leave their herd behind and run away, there won't be any middle ground.

But neither of them are willing to duck the fight. Costner's Charley Waite was apparently the Civil War equivalent of a Special Forces soldier though as director he feels no need to specify in which army. Though that might have been 17 years in the past, the stress and skills have lingered--Costner almost seems to making a Vietnam allegory or perhaps a Sopranos western. If there's a difference, the latter probably uses dark humor to emphasize the hollow core of its characters but Open Range is simply gritty and single-minded.

Is this a good film? Compared to other recent westerns like Eastwood's Unforgiven or Costner's own Dances with Wolves, I'd say no. While those two films twist a classic genre into modern psychological expeditions and emphasize the beauty of what we gave up for today's conveniences, Open Range exploits those conventions and wastes many minutes of screen time in plodding conversations or extended shots of (admittedly) beautiful vistas. The last hour was actually decent and if someone had stepped in to put Costner right this could have been much better.

not recommended

But can blood power a PDA?