BillSaysThis

The post-World Cup lull in soccer is ending. On the global front, the US national team has moved into the Top 10 in world soccer rankings for the first time ever, tying Italy for ninth in the list released yesterday. This is a well-deserved reward after reaching the round of eight at the World Cup and winning the Gold Cup. On the home front, the San Jose Earthquakes seem determined to repeat as Major League Soccer champions. The team is sitting atop the league table three fourths of the way into the season, have Landon Donovan and Jeff Agoos back from their national team duties, have one of the league’s top scorers (Ariel Graziani) and best keepers (Joe Cannon), and a great young coach in Frank Yallop.

Liverpool FC, on the other hand, is not looking as good early on. The Premiership season gets going this weekend and the Reds travel to face Aston Villa on Sunday for their opener. However, the preseason has not gone well; in the last four matches, they’ve been shut out by Lazio, Real Madrid, and Arsenal. Some fan writers claim the future’s bright and point to the return from injury of Markus Babbel and Stephen Gerrard, the emergence of young Czech striker Milan Baros, and the additions of El Hadji Diouf and Michael Foley as the reasons. Diouf and Baros will certainly be pushing one of my team favorites, Emil Heskey, for the second front line starting spot. But LFC’s main competition for the top place in the league, last year’s champions Arsenal and perennial world leader Manchester United hardly sat still over the summer either. Should be an exciting race if goalie Jerzy Dudek can show his first year was no fluke. And is manager Gerard Houllier completely recovered from last season’s heart troubles? Three away points Sunday against a clearly weaker team will be a very good sign.

The hamburgers are amazing. I don’t care for the fries but just found out that you can order them well-done and I need to check into that. Atkins dieters can find satisfaction by ordering their burgers protein style. The Times captures it in their style, MetaFilter in their’s. Check out the Secret Menu.

Here’s my local sanctuary:

Red Rabbit is the new book by Tom Clancy featuring Jack Ryan, the hero of many previous Clancy novels, though this one goes back in time to 1982 and the aftermath of Patriot Games. Janet Maslin, writing in the NY Times (Clancy’s Three-Star Spy Still Fighting the Cold War), has the first in-depth review which I’ve seen. She claims to have enjoyed the book and, as a total Clancy fan, I hope to as well, but read her article for yourself and see if that attitude comes through. I’m thinking I get this one in paperback or from the library.

Either way, after this tome, there will only be one last Jack Ryan novel.

Rob and Kim Fahrni have made it happily to their 15th wedding anniversary. Let me be one of the screaming throngs to say congratulations (“Congratulations!”). May you two have many more happy and healthy years together. I guess Rob is a ‘Softie in more ways than one.

What the hell, Paul Krugman says it better than me: Clueless in Crawford. Read it, ’nuff said.

For the last four years I’ve owned a home in a kind of neighborhood called a planned unit development. More or less townhomes, we have 14 buildings with two homes in each building. The homeowners association (HOA) takes care of all exterior items (roofs, fences, outside building walls) plus the common areas (we have driveways, fencing, a large interior yard, a pool with some chairs, and a clubhouse), and a few other items (water, garbage, insurance, and such) and for this each unit pays $250 per month. There are also some fairly strict rules about living here, not about social aspects, but more along the lines of things that can’t be done outside the unit.

When one of the units is sold, under California law, the new owner must sign a declaration agreeing to abide by the rules (called the CC&Rs). Not only is the new owner supplied with a copy of the CC&Rs but also back issues of the HOA newsletter and other documentation. In other words, the buyer is well-informed as to the rules. The bigger the association (the first home I purchased, in New Jersey in 1987, was in a 440 unit HOA), the more strictly the CC&Rs are generally enforced. Small developments, such as ours, often have boards of directors that operate with more flexibility. A homeowner wants to do something a little different, comes up with a plan, and presents it to the board for approval.

For better or worse, I volunteered to serve on my HOA board back in February and was elected (technically, but since no one else wanted the job…) vice president. No big deal, meetings are only one Monday night every other month. We have a five member board and in February, one long-serving member was elected president, one person was elected to a second (one year) term, and two other residents besides me were newly elected. In June our president resigned as he’d purchased a home in Fremont and, as you might expect, the vice president–me!–was elevated to the lofty position.

While we do have some flexibility on decision-making, for the most part there are very strict rules that limit decisions. Recently, we had a request from a homeowner for the HOA to pay for the removal of a large tree that is within her patio. According to our rules, this is a homeowner responsibility. Much as we would have liked to handle it as requested, the CC&Rs would not allow this. And we are talking about a substantial amount of money, over $2,000; but look at it from the other side: that would be nearly $100 per unit for which we hadn’t budgeted. A couple of years ago, though, the flexibility allowed the Board to decide in favor of a homeowner who had requested permission to install central air conditioning (the compressor needed to be outside and therefore needed board approval).

Still, I can see how these things become political, personal, and emotional. We definitely have long-running conflicts between some of the homeowners in our little development!

In my old stomping grounds, some residents have teamed with the ACLU (Lawsuit Tests Power of Homeowner Associations) to have a court declare that HOAs “resemble a local government enough to be subject to constitutional restraints.” While the suit is filed under the New Jersey Constitution, the article indicates that if the dissident residents win, the result will eventually be felt by all associations.

Personally, I don’t get it. You buy a home in one of these places and you know upfront exactly what kind of situation you’re getting. These aren’t new, although HOAs are more widely created (by the company which develops the project initially), and the pros and cons are well-known. If that’s not your bag, and I know the constraints rub many people the wrong way, just don’t buy into one.

Okay, I’m only 41. Many more years to go. But there are times when my memory just plays tricks on me. Twice recently (xXx and Pulp) I was writing my movie reviews and referred to previous movies by one of the actors or directors and looked up my review for the movie to include as a link. But in all cases, even though I remember writing the reviews, I can’t find any trace of them on my site. Not in the Movie Review Index, not in the site search utility, not in the database of the movie reviews, not even in the Blogger database of weblog entries (accessible only to me in the authoring page). Strange. Very strange!

The perfect gift for the special lady in your life… Highly recommended by those in the know. Which would not include me.

Dark British humor in a 1999 BBC telefilm that Tivo Suggests was considerate enough to record for me. Martin Clunes plays Ben Black, the host of TV show called Sex ‘n’ Death, who can’t sleep. He claims the insomnia is due to the heat wave but events suggest other causes, like his deep-seated cruelty to all around him and heartache over losing his new love (the luscious, leggy, breastful Jane Peachey) and his true love (the producer of his show, quite lovely herself, Caroline Goodall, who played Anne Hathaway’s mom in The Princess Diaries).

Besides several episodes of his own series, the movie provides Clunes with a rival host, or Presenter as they say across the Pond, named Neil Biddle (Martin Jarvis) as a foil. Biddle hosts Just for Laughs, a cruel variant on Candid Camera, and the two take turns setting each other up: Black crushes Biddle’s prized Corvette, Biddle puts Peachey onto Black for a (not to be consummated) sexual reconciliation, and finally Black sets ‘sister’ prostitutes onto Biddle.

All comes to a climax as Black confronts his internal demons, challenges his viewers to grow up and get over their infantile need to see others humiliated, and threatens suicide. Faked, of course, and hopefully a boost in ratings for the repeat.

Recommended for fans of Brit humor

garret blogs about Earthships today. Not having heard the term before, I inquire of him “what the heck are earthships?” (The initial version of his post did not have the Wired link). He says they are popular in “the area west of [T]aos [New Mexico], where there’s a group of these things, looks like a giant garbage pit.”

I reply “This sounds incredibly strange, and not in a good way!”

Further, garret writes, in his idiosyncratic, capitalization-free style, “in a nutshell, up at taos they’ve build ‘recycled materials’ houses. the idea is, you cut “u” shaped areas back into an incline, or hillside. line the “u’s” with old car tires that have been sledgehammered full of dirt. in front of the “u’s” you build a sort of glass lean-to, to enclose all the “u’s”. each “u” is a room. most earthship folks go whole-hog on the environmentalist route, trying to recapture all their water (including blackwater). some have cisterns with algae and frogs and fish in them. but most i’ve been anywhere near pong (stink) like a sunuvabitch.”

He provides a link to Scott & Janis Derrick’s Earthship voyage. Quite an amazing, if ultimately pointless, voyage. Scott documents pretty much the whole building story. Takes awhile to read but getting the depth of the sheer lunacy of it all makes the time well-spent. I guess I don’t understand this thing at all. Environmentally friendly, mostly, sustainable, blah blah blah. Wood, last I heard, is a natural product. And the amount of labor that went into building this place is huge, much more than a normal house would need. They still used environmentally unfriendly products where necessary. And, given that there’s no garage, where do the residents park their cars?

I could understand building a house along Wright’s ‘harmony with locale’ ethic, modern, minimally intrusive, solar-powered (or wait a couple of years for commercial fuel cells). This ‘Earthship Biotecture‘ is just weird.

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraq’s information minister, told that font of Islamic truth al-Jazeera satellite television: “The work of inspection teams in Iraq had been completed.” He claimed that U.N. weapons inspectors had completed their work in the country before they left four years ago and so there was no need for them to return. Sahaf said Baghdad could “easily” refute U.S. claims that it was developing weapons of mass destruction. [info via Reuters]

Hey, it’s good to start out a Monday morning with a hearty belly laugh.

Loved the movie, hate the website: x X x. Why do these clowns have to make things so difficult? Sure, have it look and sound cool, have plenty of extras like games and wallpaper, but how about also providing the basic information like cast and crew. Even IMDB doesn’t have a good handle on this film.

Enough of that. Vin Diesel breaks out in this film, and breaks out hard. Even reviewers who panned the movie praise the actor. My opinion is that Triple-Ex is the next big action franchise, not Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan or Daredevil (coming early next year), or the Rock as Scorpion King. Actually, I think all four of these actors will do fine and will make numerous action movies that gross lots of dollars. X-Men, if X2 does well next year, will go on for quite a few years although no one actor dominates that series. But Diesel showed more here in one outing than these others have in several opportunities.

The script is by Rich Wilkes, whose previous contributions are highlighted by Airheads and The Jerky Boys, and who apparently spent most of the last five years brainstorming on this concept. I can just imagine him watching Bond after Bond, Arnold after Bruce after Sly, night after night, and thinking what would be the next logical step. He must have kept coming back to James Bond as the perfect model for a new franchise. Who could blame him? Die Another Day is the 20th film in the series, it’s survived through five actors in the role, and countless writers and directors. Bond, though, in many ways is so last century.

So Triple-Ex updated every which way. The character could be any ethnicity except Asian, the nationality is American, but he’s still, in the end, a patriot. The music is completely in your face, except for a disappointing little symphonic theme at the end. The car is as grungy as the character, just the opposite of Bond in both ways. In quite a few ways, xXx is just like 007: the women dig him, he’s always in conflict with his boss, he has a cool R&D team to supply neat gadgets, and he waits until the timer on the bomb shows 0:02…0:01 before saving the world.

Strong supporting cast: Samuel Jackson is the total pro although the scarring seems a touch too much. Asia Argento is bootylicious as well as intelligent. Marton Csokas, the baddie, looks Eastern European but comes from New Zealand where he did numerous roles in TV shows like Xena, Hercules, and Farscape. The actor who plays this movie’s version of Q is good too, reminds me a lot of Alias’s Marshall Flinkman, but I can’t tell you who plays him because the website is so crappy.

One jarring problem, which perhaps they’ll fix for the next go round: why do Jackson and Diesel work for the NSA? Sure, it’s a real American spy shop but the NSA is completely about elint, electronic intelligence. That is, these are the guys monitoring and processing every phone call and every email. They don’t do humint, or field work by humans. Why doesn’t xXx work for the CIA? This movie didn’t begin filming until after 9/11 last year so they could have used the higher profile of the agency after that tragedy. Hmm.

Director Rob Cohen cranked it up several notches from last year’s release, The Fast and The Furious (which I saw recently but didn’t review). The pace matches the music, pounding and throbbing. He puts lots of hotties on display but no real time wasted in bed. Good foreshadowing, good use of high explosives and imaginative tech. Several notches above The Skulls, that piece of Joshua Jackson college dreck.

Cohen should have pushed harder for a producer credit–Vin Diesel got one–because that will be worth money when they replace him as director but that’s his mistake. Neil Moritz, the producer, has a nose for money, just look at his track record. And this movie had a good, but not great, $46 million opening weekend. Austin Powers in Goldmember did $25 million better two weeks ago and Signs did $14 million better last weekend. Diesel, by the way, was paid $10 million for his time and will get “double that” for the 2004 sequel according to an exec at production house Revolution Studios.

Recommended unless you’re an old fart–Diesel is worth the price of admission.

A small dinner party was held here last night to celebrate the Sweet One’s mublety-mublety birthday (a gentleman does not ask a lady’s true age, but this observer must say that she looks far younger than her age) and was quite a lot of fun. The cake was particularly good:

The main dish, cooked by yours truly, was an ambition effort into the land of Emeril Lagasse, a three part effort called Mushroom Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Light Pan Sauce and Braised Celery. Trust me, it was more difficult than it sounds, but the end result was very tasty. Probably would have been easier had I seen the show on which it was prepared but I needed a chicken and mushroom dish that could be set up before the company arrived. Vivian’s friend Aggar brought a choice Sausage and Peppers side dish, Vivian’s sister Nancy C. brought the green salad, and Nancy D. came through with a cheesy zuccini casserole.

Nancy D. also brought Guesstures and we had fun while the Ladies beat the Men badly.

Who all came, you ask? Here’s a couple of shots:

<img src="http://www.billsaysthis.com/images/odds/all1_v_bday_802.jpg" alt="One view of the guests" height="200"   

Best of all, the Sweet One had a wonderful day. Considering how great she treats me every day, it’s little enough that I can do in return.

Happy Birthday, my Sweet One

My (first) name is number 5, beating out my dad by two. Woohoo! But the old family name wanders in at 7,745. Out of 88,789.

But do you believe there is a new American, net of death and emigration, every 11 seconds?

This link is via MeFi, where someone suggested a bland name score (first name score + last name score, lowest total is blandest) so if your name is Mary or James Smith, you win.

New page added to BillSaysThis: Big 2003 Movies. A listing of release dates and one liner info as available. Big means big name, big dollar films, not necessarily what will get the best reviews or awards. My early favorites: The Return of the King, Rendezvous With Rama (Arthur Clarke’s novel finally brought to life), and Tibetan Monk in New York (Jet Li).

One can only hope that Glenn is right.

Rob: The answer is Shrek.

garret, Steven has already explained why Apple can’t move to Intel (compatible) CPUs, regardless of what David Coursey might think.

Cam, good luck with the diet.

First entry I posted to MetaFilter, FBOW. Update: Turns out that my neophyte status on MeFi made my post out of bounds, not because I am a newbie but because it should have been posted on MetaTalk and I didn’t realize that. And it is an invalid post on MetaTalk because there the topic was already being discussed.

Simson Garfinckle: Too Cheap To Meter – he’s right.. and we have a great coffee shop like Momma Gaia’s here in Mountain View, the Dana Street Roasting Company. If only the damn battery on this laptop worked I’d be chugging coffee right now.

This is a movie I like the sound of: Bruce Almighty. Jim Carrey plays an average Joe who ridicules and rages against God (probably to be played by Morgan Freeman, which is a great touch likely to give racists ulcers) and God turns around and says “Okay, see if you can do any better.” Jennifer Aniston looks to play Carrey’s significant other. Ha!

Yes, the rumors are true: The Rising will debut at Numero Uno on the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart this week, selling about 526,000 copies for the best debut of Bruce’s career. This is the third Springsteen album to debut at No. 1 (“Greatest Hits” and “Live 1975-1985” also bowed in the top spot).

Tonight is the first show of the tour. As always, the opener is at Continental Arena in East Rutherford, NJ, more or less Bruce’s home venue. Only 20 days until I go to heaven (usually known as Compaq Center at San Jose) and see him myself!