BillSaysThis

Coming up on the end of the year, I made a lot of updates and additions to Big 2003 Movies. Movies to which I’m most looking forward: The Lord of the Ring: Return of the King, Ripley’s Game, both follow-ons to The Matrix, and Julia Roberts’ bid for a second Best Actress Oscar, Mona Lisa Smile. Three promising comedies: Sandler and Nicholson in Anger Management, Jim Carrey as God for a week in Bruce Almighty, and Woody Allen’s next, Anything Else.

This morning I went with a pal to Fry’s Electronics in Santa Clara to take advantage of a pretty serious sale. A pack of glossy photo paper, usually $3.99, only 99 cents, with two brands on sale so I could get two instead of just one. A 64MB USB Flash drive, regularly $49.99, marked down to $39.99, and with a $35.00 mail in rebate, for a final price of $4.99. My pal wanted two of the 512MB DDR RAM that was on special for $84.99, so I bought one for him, and he also scooped up a 80GB hard disk for $49.95. I can’t add any more RAM or disk to this laptop (than it already has) so I skipped those values.

Very cool. But you would not have believed the line! We thought going early might minimize this, but the parking lot was nearly full when we pulled in around 9:20. People had to line up to get the Flash drives and memory but there was one line, all the way to one side, that most people didn’t see and we did, so that didn’t take long. Walked across the store to get the glossy paper. Altogether about 10 minutes.

Then I saw a line of people and wondered what great deal had so many people waiting for it. I asked someone and he said, “Oh, this is the checkout line.” Now, you have to understand we were probably a couple of hundred feet away from the normal entrance to the checkout counter. We started walking back along the line, it turned up an aisle and I thought that was the end. Um, nope! Keep going. All the way to the far side of the store–and Fry’s is not a small store–to find the last person.

A day like today is when you finally realize why the store has 60 cash registers. Because there were probably 400-600 people in front of us on that line. Yet it was always moving and in the end we probably got to a cashier in maybe 30-35 minutes. Where we ran into another bottleneck, that took almost 15 minutes to resolve, caused by nearly everyone wanting one of the USB Flash drives. Finally signed the charge slip and left at 10:40. Time for coffee.

Some people like shopping at Fry’s and some don’t, claiming the prices are no longer the bargains they used to be, but you have to give them a lot of credit for knowing how to handle sale crowds. Most stores wouldn’t come close to moving such a crowd through in anywhere near that little time. Now to mail in for that rebate.

A new photo gallery is unwrapped for your viewing pleasure: Dec. with the Family! Over 30 (thirty!) photos for your eyes to feast on. Wow! (LOL)

The Associated Press reports that Saudi Arabia Frowns on Christmas Cheer. Gee, that’s a shock, isn’t it? Foreign Christians (and any other non-Muslims) are not allowed to worship or show signs of their religion in public. By definition any non-Muslims located inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are foreigners since that nation’s constitution requires all citizens to adhere to that religion. What really got my gaul, though, is that our government is so willing to defer to others’ fears and biases that no Jews are ever assigned to work there. The Kingdom, our great and wonderful allies, generally won’t let people of my religion into the country.

I was moved to write about this to Colin Powell, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Anna Eshoo:

I just became aware that the Department of State discriminates against Jewish employees by not allowing them to serve in positions located in, or requiring travel to, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

I believe that no American should be limited in such endeavors due to the racism of other nations. I’m sure if the Saudis had the same policy regarding women officers we would not acquiesce and cannot see how this is different.

I would appreciate your assistance in correcting this situation.

———–

I would have written more but I doubt even that little bit will get read or any attention. I know Israel does not prohibit Muslim diplomats.

Sometimes I can be a very generous soul. More often when I’m employed than not, but even I can’t skip the holiday season completely. So Vivian and I gave a good buddy this film on DVD today and after lunch we watched it together.

Reservoir Dogs was Quentin Tarantino’s debut as a writer and director, released ten years ago, and boy what a blast it is. Five career criminals who only know each other by color nicknames (Mr. White, Mr. Brown, and so forth) given to them by the old crime boss who’s planned the job and brought them together.

The acting is terrific and for awhile I wondered how Tarantino scored such recognizable names for his small movie but then I realized that anyone reading the script would understand the quality and want to be in it. Harvery Keitel (Mr. White) and Tim Roth (Mr. Orange) have the biggest roles but Steve Buscemi (Mr. Pink and don’t think he didn’t chafe at that assignment), Michael Madsen (Mr. Blonde), Lawrence Tierney as the old hand who organizes the smash and grab, and Chris Penn as Tierney’s son Nice Guy Eddie all hit their marks.

One thing that most people (certainly me) on realize after repeated watchings, and then go “damn that was so obvious but so smart,” is that even though this film is all about the events leading up to and after a jewelry store robbery, the robbery itself (and the inside of the jewelry store too) is never shown. This is such a smart, and unHollywood-like choice, but really characterizes the kind of movie Tarantino made. Why show the job? It would hardly add anything to the film except time, be expensive, and this way the dialog can create visions of mystery and violence in the viewer’s mind. Another scene uses a similar technique on a smaller scale: when Madsen’s Blonde is left alone with the beat cop he’s kidnapped, the camera focuses away from the gruesome act itself but we hear the actors instead. The DVD shows two alternate takes where the explicit action was filmed but in editing they realized that nothing onscreen could match what would be generated in the mind.

Tarantino also plays serious games in sequencing the scenes and the flow of time, much as he would in Pulp Fiction. The first scene is the whole crew talking over breakfast before the job and the second is an abrupt jump to Roth and Keitel driving away from the robbery, Roth bleeding from a bullet in his belly all over the back seat, screaming and crying, Keitel trying to calm him down. We aren’t shown until much later, nearly at the end, how Roth was shot. We get to see how some of the characters (Madsen, Keitel, Roth) are brought into the job but not the others and these scenes are also scattered, in a manner almost random yet clearly calculated.

Bloody but amazing. Still my favorite QT movie. And I did like Jackie Brown even though almost everyone else didn’t.

Highly recommended but not for those who shun violence and blood

Joe Strummer died yesterday of heart failure at age 50. He was, for a short burning few years, the leader of The Clash. Not too long ago it was Joey Ramone, lead singer of The Ramones, who died from cancer at 49. So now the time people dread, when the bright lights of your youth start dying not from foolishness or accident but from the realities of life, illness and disease rather than drugs and car crashes.

I remember back in high school when some friends turned me on to The Ramones. The wacked out energy of Beat on the Brat was just so perfect for a 15 year old suburban boy. When, a few months later, the much more serious but just as unhappy Sex Pistols came along, I was hooked on punk. I had to buy it as an import but The Clash’s first album (Clash) seemed to fuse the two approaches: Johnny Rotten’s angry disruptive lyrics and the Ramones’ group ethic of making the music powerful yet fun.

A couple of years later, Strummer and Jones released their masterwork, London Calling–generally regarded as one of the top ten rock albums. 23 years on, mainly what one hears on the radio is the throwaway pop tune Train in Vain, a song that was barely included and not even noted on the album cover or record label. Much less often we might get the title tune, though Jaguar seems to have no difficulty using this forecast of apocalypse to attract consumers.

“The ice age is coming, the sun is zooming in

Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin

A nuclear error but I have no fear

London is drowning and I live by the river”

But the heat was white hot, too much for them to touch each other much longer. There were a couple more records released and they had hits with Should I Stay or Should I Go and Rock the Casbah from them but by 1983 Strummer and Jones were so caught up in their own needs that the guitarist was given the boot. New guitarists were brought in, the drumsticks changed hands as well, but things fell just about as quickly as you’d expect. Neither Strummer nor Jones ever made significant, substantial music on his own.

Some of my favorite memories of my own punk era are from 1979, when I was home from freshman year of college, and took the bus into Manhattan many nights with a rediscovered buddy named Brian Karlman. We’d been friends at age four or five, then lost touch until this time; we’d hang out at the Mudd Club, an after hours club called Atlantis, and a bunch of other punk dives in the City. Brian at least had the artifically bright blue and green hair but I refused to change my look just for the scene and continued wearing my plaid lumberjack shirts despite never getting anywhere with the women. It was the music.

The Clash finally made the 25 year mark and were elected into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to be inducted in the ceremony next month. Strummer and Jones had apparently played a few gigs together and intended to reunite to play a few songs that evening, a shame but it won’t happen now.

I sort of liked this movie but two major factors keep me from making a wholehearted endorsement. First, Kevin Spacey is a very good actor but he’s settled too much into playing the same character in movie after movie; where is the successor to Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects or John Doe from Se7en? Second, Lasse Hallstrom’s direction seems heavy handed here, as if he instructed the cast to mirror the wintry torpor in their movements and emotions.

The Shipping News is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by E. Annie Proulx and set, mainly, during a few winter months in a small coastal town in Nova Scotia. Spacey plays R.G. Quoyle (though throughout the film he is always called Quoyle by the others and I only got the R.G. from IMDB), a hapless loser, hated by his father, used and then abandoned by his amazingly slutty wife, and generally so picked on by life that he’s meeker than a mouse. Perhaps, then, a more extreme example but essentially the same character he played in American Beauty, Pay It Forward, and K-PAX. Spacey does a fine job, as one would expect, but has gone to this well at least once too often: man goes through a mid-life crisis that’s closer to a coming of age trial twenty years later than he should have.

Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, Cider House Rules, Chocolat) does have a mastery of lush winterscapes and small town life. Where he found pockets of passion and energy in Chocolat and a truly naife-to-man transformation in Cider House, Shipping News loses too much of what was probably much more subtle and sophisticated inner growth in Proulx’s novel. I just didn’t see sufficient action on the screen to justify Quoyle’s growth. Tobey Maguire had Michael Caine as both mentor and antagonist and Juliette Binoche had true magic, her daughter, and the charming antagonism of Alfred Molina. Robert Nelson Jacobs’ script gives us the older reporter Billy Pretty as somewhat of a mentor and Cate Blanchett as the treacherous wife, yet neither goes far enough, while Julianne Moore as Spacey’s true love is simply not significantly passionate, and this all adds up to not enough spark.

Yet Spacey is still Spacey, one of the top actors of this generation–Gregory Peck to Tom Hank’s Jimmy Stewart–so he makes the most of the script. Hallstrom, a Swede, has the ability to bring the winter landscape to life, a participant in the movie. Scott Glenn is terrific as the newspaper publisher and Blanchett is just…hot as the thong wearing slut.

Semi-recommended

(Gallery coming soon!)

Firefly, Robbery Homicide Division, Birds of Prey, Dante Culpepper. Just kidding about the last, of course, but he’s having an incredibly miserable first half against the Dolphins this morning. Two interceptions in the end zone, three fumbles. The Dolphins haven’t done much to take advantage and only lead 7-3 as they walk into the clubhouse. Saturday NFL football is great, as long as the Niners win this afternoon.

I think the saddest of these choices is Firefly. Not the easiest show to love but surely one of the more creative. A western set in a strange post-futuristic Civil War ‘verse from Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel), the show follows a ragged band of bad guys with hearts of gold traipsing through human-settled space. Other than Ron Glass (you remember him as the snazzy detective with the ‘fro from Barney Miller) and Adam Baldwin (a personal fav from My Bodyguard all those years ago), who aren’t exactly major stars, the other regulars are new to primetime. A taste from one of the show’s writer/directors, Tim Minear, can also be had.

Fox, I think, made a very poor choice by not showing the two hour pilot Whedon made right up front; for some reason they held it off and only burned it off last night after the cancellation (it will be replaced by relocating Fastlane from Wednesdays). The key plot line driving the episodes this year is River and Simon’s attempt to stay free of a government that has done strange, unexplained work to River’s brain; the pilot episode opens this up like a present unwrapped on Xmas morning and makes so much of what was perviously shown clear. Firefly’s complexity works against it with an audience that prefers simple straightforward shows like CSI, which I can’t stand, but Fox only made it worse.

Fox plans a major overhaul of the Wednesday night schedule beginning the week after New Years. That ’70s Show scoots over from Tuesday, followed by a half hour of the second American Idol, and Bernie Mac and Cedric the Entertainer take half of the 9:00 hour each. The two comics are probably better suited to the later time periods anyway. American Idol will take the whole 8:00 hour on Tuesday nights.

Robbery Homicide Division is a more traditional series, focusing on the police work of an elite Los Angeles PD unit led by Tom Sizemore (Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan). But this show has Sizemore, a much more interesting actor than William Peterson or David Caruso, and writers who got better and better as the episodes went by. A recent episode where RHD went undercover against an Asian gang was typical: Sizemore fell in love with the gang leader’s wife, slept with her, dreamed of taking the relationship past the bust, only to have her die during the climactic gun battle. A new show, called Queens Supreme, will debut on Jan. 10 to carry CBS’ hopes. Stars Oliver Platt and Annabella Sciorra as judges on the Queens (NY) Supreme Court. In New York state, the local courts rather than the highest court, are called supreme courts.

Bird of Prey never really met its potential, and viewers recognized this as the ratings went down week after week. The premise was there for another success on the level of Smallville (from the same producers) though I think the cast never gelled–a particular Smallville strength. Beautiful, heroic women and dark villains but the writers didn’t do enough in the way of dramatic tension. Whedon’s Angel will move over from Sundays to this timeslot.

The second half just started in Minneapolis, b the way, and the Vikings scored a TD to go up 10-7. Randy Moss is more or less invisible except for when he’s dropping passes. Update: Dolphins put up seven points on the next drive, then Randy Moss woke himself up by catching a 60 yarder from Culpepper and throwing a 13 yard touchdown pass to Bates. Dolphins managed a field goal to tie things up but the Vikings made South Florida cry with a Gary Anderson field goal to win the game with only seconds left on the clock. Probably the best outcome for the Raiders, which is the only reason I am the least bit interested.

And at least Friends will be coming back next year, after telling us for months we’re watching the last one, for a tenth season. NBC couldn’t not to pay the price, which is a huge $9 million per half hour, and the six pals probably said to each other “Hey, our movie careers aren’t going all that well and the $22 million each will be handy when we’re old.” Except Jennifer Aniston, who will probably make some decent money in films and in any case is set because her hubby Brad makes $20 million for one movie.

I was jumping around the web this morning and Jason Shellen pointed to a whacky collection of scanned album covers. I was just goofing and looked at this saucy cover for Acapulco ’22 by Laurindo Almeida. And I realized that these four lovely bikini-clad young women have nothing to do with Almeida or his Bossa Nova guitar music. Just another attempt by marketing meeps to use sex to move product.

Cause, you know, I always choose my beer/auto/music by which uses the sexiest women. Or not.

But I was also more than a little shaken by the song selection on this album: Hava Nagila, a Jewish folk tune; Miserlou, and American country folk tune, some songs I don’t recognize and then a bunch of syrupy romantic ballads, More, Satin Doll, I Left My Heart in San Francisco, and What Kind of Fool Am I. I checked on Google but couldn’t find any of these online. Wouldn’t you want to hear a Bossa Nova version of Hava Nagila?

A quality win, though a bit high scoring, as Liverpool makes it to semis in the League Cup by beating Aston Villa 4-3 at Aston Villa when Danny Murphy hit the net in injury time. The Reds will face Sheffield United, a team popping it’s head up from the First Division, in the semi-finals while top-rank teams Manchester United and Blackburn Rovers meet in the other match. Seems like the boys may have a decent chance for at least one title this season. Sad as it is to say, I find it hard to imagine they’ll be able to make up the gap with Arsenal in the Premiership.

It would be much easier to blog, and do most anything other than lie flat on the couch, if I hadn’t thrown my back out this morning. Maybe a nice hot shower will help a little.

James Snell wrote, in response to the current discussion over Trent Lott and the accusation of general Republican racism, specifically over opposition to affirmative action:

“You know, I must’ve missed the part in Martin Luther King’s speech that said, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character [except when trying to get a job, bidding on a government contract, or applying to college].‘ Somehow, I don’t think that’s what Dr. King had in mind.”

Respectfully, James, I think your opinion might be a little easier to verify if a white racist hadn’t murdered Dr. King. If King had lived long enough to participate in the discussions and negotiations which took place in the ’70s, after the movement achieved critical mass, we could have seen how his idealism translated into pragmatism. I’d love to see you post a specific quote/reference from King that actually supports your supposition. Affirmative action, especially when it was first used, certainly did have the support of nearly all the major civil rights leaders.

Further, if you think that right now today blacks and whites are treated equally and no measures are necessary to correct past inequalities, then you’ve obviously never been black. Perhaps affirmative action is not the best way means of correction but simply stating that color cannot be taken into account (in either direction) is surely worse. I’m not a Republican, to be sure, but I’m not a member of any other political party either either, FYI, but I do think that in this supposedly enlightened day and age the way people are treated based on trivial differences is a tragic farce.

Sun is closing the DotCom Builder website.

John Dvorak brings us an Obituary for OS/2.

Many of you have seen Mel Gibson’s movie Payback, which I thought was very good in a nasty, revenge sort of way. Especially the scenes with the dominatrix. That movie was based on Thomas Kelly’s first novel; The Rackets is his second.

This story lifts much from Kelly’s own life. Our hero, Jimmy Dolan, starts out the novel as a high-level assistant to a New York City mayor. He’s Irish, grew up in Inwood, the northernmost section of Manhattan, the son of a union rebel, and paid his way through school working construction. All also true of the author. So I think we can accept the emotions as authentic, which is good because this book is all about emotions.

Dolan begins his new journey when he fails to keep his emotions in check and instead decks a Teamster local president during a reception at Gracie Mansion, in front of the mayor. The union leader, Keefe, who is of course dirtier than a pig after a rainstorm, is also a major campaign contributor. Not to mention the man who keeps beating Dolan’s father in fixed union elections. So, like that, our boy is out on his keister. He’s been living with a high society female, who we never really meet, and she decides his unemployed ass no longer suits her apartment. So he’s really out.

Jimmy turns to his father, who’s in the midst of a third attempt to dethrone Keefe, and his childhood home. But Keefe isn’t just politically connected, he’s also connected by marriage to Tommy Magic, a Mafia don, and this don is tired of ‘doing things the right way’. The Magic Man decides he’s not willing to lose his main cash cow and pulls the trigger on Dolan’s old man. The law enforcement side of the government, natch, is mixed up in all of this too and makes for further complications. Jimmy has to find his way safely through this landmine, honor his father, and find time to fall back in love with his childhood girlfriend (a tall, blonde, gorgeous cop).

Once the father is killed, Kelly really picks up the story’s pace. Events careen around corners, figuratively and literally, connections are made only to twist apart, family saves and family kills. While the major aspect of the ending is not really surprising, the way we get there and a lot of the details are done quite well. If there are only seven true basic plots, this book brings in most of them.

And although the hero is already 29 years old, he still hasn’t really grown up. But by the end of the story he has, forced to confront the contradiction between where he comes from and where he wants to go. As one (much more thorough) review says, perhaps this novel also helped the author resolve this contradiction as well.

Oddly, ABC hopes to adapt this novel into a television series starring Billy Baldwin as Dolan, to be directed by Sidney Pollack. Hard to tell until they actually put something on the tube, if they actually put something on the tube, but seems like this will put Dolan back into his job with the Mayor, as if the events of this novel never happened. Except he’ll hopefully get the cop for a girlfriend and not the stuck up bitch.

Recommended

Keeping up a 23 year tradition, I saw the tenth Star Trek movie (“A generation’s final journey”) on Friday night. Since we were on vacation in New York, I was fortunate that Vivian’s best friend, who we were meeting for dinner that night, suggested the movie since her husband is as big into Trek as me. We had a totally non-Atkins, totally delicious all you can eat Sushi dinner beforehand.

Star Trek Nemesis is a very strong movie, probably the series’ best since Generations though my favorite is still number six, The Undiscovered Country. Getting John Logan to follow up such major films as Gladiator and On Any Sunday with a Trek flick was a great choice and possibly a good omen for the future as people like Logan (and myself) who grew up on the Federation stories become adults. Logan’s next scripts are for Tom Cruise and then Martin Scorsese, so for him to say he wants to write Trek XI is yet another coup. After seeing Nemesis, I’m sure every Trekkie, Trekker, and Trekonista out there would love to have him back.

Director Stuart Baird, while not as well known as Logan, was another solid choice. Baird has done more work as an editor than director, specializing in action films, not science fiction, and that shows up on screen in scenes such as the Jeffries tube fight between Riker and Ron Perlman’s Reman Viceroy and the initial face to face confrontation between Picard and Shinzon. TrekWeb has a nice interview with the director.

These two selections, bringing in new creative forces to the Trek franchise, were very important. The men weren’t steeped in ‘how Star Trek is done’ or wrapped in personal relationships with the actors and crew (other than Logan’s frienship with Brent Spiner which got him involved in the first place); I’d actually be very interested, in a good way, to learn how Stuart Baird got the gig. But their situations allowed them to push for the best story and film rather than worry so much about feelings. Worf, Crusher, and even Riker are barely factors in the film but since the story doesn’t particuarly need them this is a good thing.

The story itself revolves around two opposing pairs: Picard and Shinzon, Data and B-4, and the confrontations between them. Patrick Stewart is a masterful, Shakespearean actor who coolly handles the news that the Romulans created Shinzon, a clone of himself, then cast the clone adrift as politics changed the prevailing winds. Tom Hardy is surprisingly strong in his major acting job, easily creating the image of a young Picard, a Picard that might have been given similar circumstances. Meanwhile Spiner plays both androids (B-4 is a not before known prototype from Data’s creater Dr. Soong), with a similar contrast: B-4 does not have the same level of internal complexity as his ‘younger brother’ and therefore cannot quite comprehend Data’s quest to be human, to be more than he is. He does have the same yellow eyes, though. Spiner does well, not needing the sort of goofiness he is made to use in other roles (Master of Disguise, Independence Day); the audience is familiar enough with the Next Generation’s main supporting character that he can add subtle depths even to B-4.

The ending includes several surprises and while you might read these spoilers elsewhere, you won’t here. I think they are reasonable and open possibilities for future films. Should they be made. I thought going in that a good opening weekend (which generally predicts the final box office) would be anything over $14-15 million, and that this would assure another film in less than the four years since Insurrection. So at first I was happy with the nearly $19 million that was taken in. Until I checked the franchise history over at Box Office Mojo and saw that this was the lowest opening weekend since Undiscovered Country. Only time will tell but I would be interested to see another Logan/Baird collaboration, to see how they would push the series forward after all the changes that occur by the end of the film.

Absolutely recommended

This particular Reunion is a 2001 Pip and Flinx novel from Alan Dean Foster. Pretty good telling of part of the coming of age period of life of this complex, much travelled character. Flinx–Philip Lynx–is the product of far future (illegal) genetic engineering and he still doesn’t know all that much about himself or his capabilities; this book has him running hard and fast after some of this information. An enjoyable read, Foster has been writing tasty SF candy for over 30 years now.

Next two books in this series, already written and turned into the publisher, and due out in 2003, are titled Star Brake and Sliding Scales; these will be the 21st and 22nd books in Foster’s Commonwealth series.

We were catching up on some–to be honest, many–shows Tivoed during the vacation and the episode of Friends resonated with some recent events. Chandler, for the three of you who don’t watch this sitcom, has been running his firm’s Tulsa office all season and commuting home for the weekends. (This pattern is more common in real life than one might expect.) This time around Chandler is forced to stay in Tulsa over Christmas to meet an important deadline so during an Xmas Eve staff meeting he finally explodes with the absurdity of working to meet some artificial deadline set by people unaffected by it, and the absurdity of his whole work existence, so he sends the whole staff home early to be with their families. Chandler quits the job and flies home to be with Monica and the gang.

On the other hand, in real life, three times in the last couple of days I had people who were a pleasure to deal with. First, despite the financial chaos and personal difficulties emanating from it, the United Airlines staff on my nasty flight (and the flight East a few days earlier) were terrific. For a welcome change, the pilot kept us well-informed regarding all the turbulence, what he was doing to get around or above it, and what we might expect, and the flight attendents did not get pissy and ill-tempered at all in dealing with a full plane that included many small children. This from a team of people facing the loss of their equity stake in the airline (one near-certainty of UAL’s bankruptcy will be the complete wipe out of the employee’s collective 55% share ownership) and possible layoffs or salary cuts.

Second, was the woman from the title company who helped me with the closing paperwork on refinancing the mortgage on Casa Lazar; I’m taking advantage of the lower rates to lower my monthly payments. California law and banking bureaucrats mean there are scores, if not a couple of hundred, pages to read, sign, and initial to complete a mortgage and I am surely just a little bit compulsive about reading through what I sign. But this woman was cheerful, patient, and had the answers to my questions as we went through all of it. Which is in contrast to the people from the mortgage office who generated the paperwork, making several key (and annoying) errors in the process.

Third, I stopped by my bank to make a deposit. Things seemed a little odd as I pulled into the branch’s parking lot: unexpected darkness, people standing by the door, paper signs over the ATM machines. I walked up and all became, well, clear: for some reason the building had no power for the day and so the ATMs were off and the branch was more or less closed. The people standing by the door were employees patiently explaining the situation to customers and letting them in if their tasks could still be done. Inside the workers were all in place in the semi-darkness, taking care of us, promising to post the deposits (the main business of the day) tomorrow. Even though their (less than thoughtful) managers hadn’t been creative enough to go out and get some battery powered lights.

All of which contrasts with the doofus at the local post office. Before leaving I’d dropped off a delivery stop form, with delivery to resume when I came down and picked up the mail. Neither the form itself or the man at the counter (at the time I dropped it off) let me know that I needed to call a day in advance to have the held mail sent up from the sorting station a few blocks away. At the pickup counter today I spoke with the same guy who of course insisted he would never accept a stop form without providing the information and phone number! Denial aside, he was the person I left the form with. Too bad he broke my streak.

Three out of five ain’t bad though, not in this day and age.

From CBS MarketWatch: FDA gives VaxGen ‘fast-track’ status, stock surges. Stock surges over $3/share, although the current $16.20 price is still way off the $23.25 high at the beginning of this month. Still, the Phase III results are due in the first quarter and will hopefully be positive enough to drive the stock price into the $30s or higher.