BillSaysThis

Tilting at Victory, ‘Quixote’ Tops Authors’ Poll – what, no Heinlein or Asimov? I want a recount

It really sucks being sick when you want to be strong for someone close to you. And I hate coughing, someone needs to explain how this is a survival strategy.

I could write a lot about Harlan Coben’s ninth novel. I would say that Harlan has achieved his goal of writing a crisp page turner. That his characters are full and his plot is not even close to predictable. That he knows how to engage the reader’s emotions. Since this book, as good as the rest is, depends on plot I wouldn’t even try and summarize it here. Trust me, this is worth the price of the hardback.

I wish I could tell you that he won another Edgar the other night for last year’s Tell No One but that novel was only nominated for Best Mystery and didn’t win.

Someone very close to me lost a parent today so postings and email will likely be slow from me for the next few days.

On the spur of the moment a buddy and I went to see this movie, mainly to see if The Rock will be the next big action hero (we agree, he will) and to just gawk at the luscious Miss Hu. The story of The Scorpion King is a mishmash of mythical history althou one wonders how a Hawaiian beauty ended up in ancient Egypt. Or how an ancient Egyptian, even just one, even knew of the existence of China. Still we didn’t expect anything resembling veracity, so no big disappointment.

The Rock didn’t have a lot of dialog, which was a good decision, but he also didn’t rely too much on his trademark arched eyebrow either. Steven Brand, an English actor in his first major film role, was reasonably slimey smart and sort of Russell Crowe-ish as the bad guy, Michael Duncan Clarke was okay, albeit sporting weird facial markings, as the fighting buddy. Grant Heslov played his usual lovable, weak-willed, vaguely Arabic sidekick (like his True Lies role without the computers). Chuck Russell is workman-like as the director; his previous history is all over the place including an Ah-nuld film as well. The script by David Hayter (X-Men) was solid and smart.

Overall, much more enjoyable than expected.

On this day in 1961:

– The author was born in a small cabin deep in the mountains of West Virginia, the child of a Martian and a Man in Black. Oh, wait, he was born in a nice Jewish hospital in the middle of Newark, NJ to a nice couple whose families came from Eastern Europe. Fortunately, no pictures exist either way. Also on this day:

– JFK established the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

– On The Edge of Night, Judy and Margie worry about Ed as he and Mike track killer Tersa Vetter to a deserted mine shaft.

– Thirteen young people set out from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana, to test a new federal law against segregation but these Freedom Riders never made it to New Orleans.

Thanks Mom and Dad!

You knew I was seeing this smack flick on opening night. Preceeded by sushi dinner with six pals, just love those 911 rolls, and a well-managed line outside the theater (thanks, Fandango). Did I enjoy the movie? Perhaps not as much as the bulk of the geek audience I saw the show with, they gave a standing ovation, but I thought the movie was really good, really cool.

The weakest point was the Green Goblin’s costume. The mask especially was far too rigid and ’70s Saturday morning cartoonish. Tobey Maguire was, Saturday Night Live goofs aside, a really good choice for the hero role since he can actually act. Willem Dafoe is always good as the slime although it’s too bad he had to wear that stupid mask for much of the show. Kirsten Dunst can act but I think they must have used some serious special effects on her breasts because she didn’t look anywhere near as large in, say, Bring It On. Yowsa!

Sam Raimi mainly directed genre flicks but steps up to the plate big time. David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Panic Room) gets a good balance between the original comics and the needs of a $100 million movie production. The studio has already signed off on the next Spider-Man movie, for release in two years and the entire cast and Raimi have been firmed although the writing duties are going to Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, the guys behind the current TV version of Superman, Smallville, and the recent DeNiro/Murphy comedy Showtime.

Highly recommended!

I need to start checking earlier on Thursdays cuz dammit I want to win!

Science is our friend:

Mutant viruses order quantum dots – Virii force the dots into ordered structures which will eventually allow them to be used in circuits that are far smaller than anything possible with optical or electron beam lithography.

From Fields to Factories: Plant-Based Materials Replace Oil-Based Plastics, Polyesters. Uses include packagin materials and even drink cups at McDonalds.

Using Robotics, Researchers Give Upgrade to Lowly Rats – Bionic rats towards what end?

The Hilarious:

Bush Declares Judiciary ‘Crisis’ – Politicians have an amazing ability to selective experience reality. When Clinton was president and the Republicans controlled the Senate, he couldn’t get a judicial nomination out of committee, leading to the vast majority of the current vacancies, but now that Bush faces similar circumstances he feels free to blame the Democrats. What a doofus we elected!

For a non-employed man who spends an awful lot of money on games, Adam Vandenberg sure talks big

Nick Hornby (and why do I always think there’s an S missing from his name?) has tended to write what might be called male romance novels (High Fidelity, About a Boy), stories about men and their modern lives, all arch, somewhat comic, and, except for the power of love, empty. This time out he’s strayed a bit off that path, which is good, don’t want to get repetitive, and written about a female version of his protagonist characters. I’ve quite enjoyed his other novels but feel he didn’t quite meet the mark with How to Be Good. I don’t think it’s just the gender change, though, but more that Hornby has apparently aimed at the Great Novel target and not hit it.

The title is square on to that purpose. Katie Carr is, to the eye of anyone except herself, a good person, a doctor, a wife, a mother. Okay, she starts out by having an affair but it’s brief and she realizes she’s done the wrong thing quite soon. In any case, she is married to an angry, bitter, unloving man named David. Quite literally, his job is writing a newspaper column called “The Angriest Man in Holloway,” and he never has a good word for anyone, even former friends and family, all of whom he’s managed to drive away (not counting his wife and young children). Then he meets DJ GoodNews, a man who is called that for no good reason he can explain, who lays his hands on David and somehow cures him of all the bile.

This is the key to Hornby’s purpose, turning normality and convention upside down, prompting David and daughter Molly to question the basic premises of suburban life. Why do we have a spare bedroom? Why do some people sleep in the street? Why are some classmates slow and, well, needing a good punch? David and GoodNews plot ways to change peoples’ attitudes, holding a neighborhood party to appeal for the use of spare bedrooms to house street kids, debating details for days to be put down on paper in the book they plan to call How to Be Good.

Everyman stand-in Katie, of course, is going bonkers over her inability to reconcile the feeling that David has gone over the edge but that maybe it’s her whose lost humanity. His questions are superficially straightforward (for example, why shouldn’t everyone donate any earnings over the national average to charities?) and impossible to answer without appearing selfish or uncaring or stupid. Even though she can’t put her finger on why, she is driven to her own edge, and finally surrenders to a life that is simply lived and not understood.

So far, so good. This, though, is where Hornby leaves the Great Novel approach vector and veers off into the Land of Not Quite. There are passages along the way that had me thinking the target was in view and would be reached in due time. He is in the end, though, unable to find an ending that teaches anything, that shows us something new, or even has left his characters wiser. One thinks, after reading Katie describe her surrender, that Hornby will find his way to a meaningful ending but he doesn’t. Perhaps he should have had the ending focus on Molly and her brother Tom, or Katie’s depressed loser of a brother Mark, but he doesn’t. I would recommend either of his other novels over this one, sorry.

If you check the California Lottery – SuperLotto Plus Draw Results (before 8:00 p.m. PST Saturday 4 May 2002), you will see that the winning numbers for last night’s draw were the oddly clustered set 39 40 45 46 47 Mega 11 and that one person won the top prize of $35 million. Unfortunately, that person was not me. I do have, however, one of 69,047 tickets with three matching numbers (but not the Mega) and have therefore won the estimable sum of $10. Homer says Woohoo! I will not reveal how much I have spent over the past few months to win this princely amount but let’s just say you ought to be on the floor laughing about this point.

Definitely an excursion into chick flick territory, Angelina Jolie takes a strange ride in Life or Something Like It and most men will enjoy the ride as well, even if she doesn’t show off her hot naked body. Edward Burns reminds me of someone here, another actor from years past, with the wisecracks and the big smiles, but I can’t quite put my finger on who. Tony Shalhoub is turning into one of the great character actors of our time (Men in Black, The Man Who Wasn’t There, TV’s Wings) and his streetcorner prophet sets Jolie off with his vision that she will die in less than a week. Since the first scene is Jolie on an operating table, the odds that she will seem reasonable. Then again, this is a Hollywood movie.

Director Stephen Herek does a much better job this time around than he did on last movie, Rock Star, getting strong performances and keeping the pace flowing. So does writer John Scott Shepherd, whose only previously produced script was last year’s Tim Allen clunker Joe Somebody, giving Burns a son as to foil his hard edge.

A big shout out to my homeboy Byron for making the movie and a terrific dinner at Don Giovanni my first birthday present of the year. For those of you still waiting, there are only four more shopping days until the Big Event.

Last year, one of the ‘cool things’ in the weblog world was “getting Scobelized.” This either meant reading Robert Scoble’s weblog or being mentioned in it, I can’t remember now, but everyone was mentioning it and the vibe only got more intense when he did the really interesting and far too short-lived Talking Moose weblog. I actually read and was mentioned in both and this website still get hits from a TM discussion forum message I posted, although I never claim to have been Scobelized.

Robert is generally cool guy, even if he is having a self-described midlife crisis, but he seems to have fallen into one of the Internet’s hidden traps and gotten himself NetFlixed. This word, which I am claiming right here and now to have coined myself, refers to falling in love with a service/company called NetFlix that seems to good to be true. Like most everything else in this life that seems to good to be true, NetFlix doesn’t measure up although it often takes afflicted individuals a few months to realize the trap in which they have been ensnared. I myself fell for it. I was able to break free from one side of the trap but am still occasionally afflicted by the other.

NetFlix, for the uninitiated, is a service that provides one with DVDs through the mail for a monthly subscription fee. There are several different levels of service but the main offering costs $19.95 and allows subscribers to have three DVDs out at any one time. Once you sign up, you build a list of wanted DVDs and they are sent to you with a pre-addressed, stamped mailer in which you return them. There is no limit on the length of time you can keep a DVD. However, the next disk on your list will not be sent until the company receives one back from you. The library is quite extensive and I went through it with gleeful abandon for awhile, using them as a way to see old films I’d never seen before and seeing others long before they got onto HBO or Showtime. The warehouse was (still is?) in San Jose so the turnaround time was very short. For months I was quite happy.

Until I hit the big problem, the one that cost them my business. Eventually your backlist has been viewed. You’ve seen every Hitchkock and Ford, all the Monty Python TV shows, every newish release. What you’re left with is a list that only gets added to when a new DVD is released. Instead of getting a real deal and watching 10-12 a month, you’re only seeing four or five and starting to question the cost. And some films on your list just never seem to get sent your way even though they’ve been on it for months and even though no others are being sent to you. This is simply because NetFlix actually only has a small quantity of some disks and whenever these do come back to stock someone else gets them first. Complain away, as I did, but it won’t help.

The other side is that NetFlix is a spammer. Maybe not directly, perhaps the unwanted mail comes through some associates or partner program. But come it does, at least a couple of times a week. And we all know that businesses that benefit from spam suck and should be punished. Severely! A minor problem is that the company requires you to let them set a cookie before accessing the site. If you won’t, all you can see is a page cleverly named entryTrap.html.

So Robert, enjoy the disks while you can. Perhaps some of the availability issues, which after all are only exacerbated when more people sign up, have been fixed in the year since I was a subscriber. I think, though, one day you’ll agree with me that you’ve been NetFlixed.

I just want one: Line6 Guitar Port Guitar/Computer Interface

Good thing about having 500 cable channels: Bravo’s series Musicians hosted by “Rolling Stone” Contributing Editor David Wild featured Elvis Costello tonight, presumably in support of his new record When I Was Cruel. You can see some decent streaming video featuring Tear Your Head Off from the new record. Ann and Nancy Wilson, Heart by another name, are the guests next Monday (10 p.m. PST).

Tear Your Head Off (It’s a Doll Revolution), which he performed with electric guitar and drum machine to emulate his home demo process, was from an attempt by Elvis last year to create a TV series. Didn’t quite make it to the fall schedule but he described a very subversive plot. Four women form a band and come to America to bankrupt the country. In every way! I noticed in this setup he was using a Line6 POD 2.0 effects system, very cool box, similar to the Line6 Flextone amp I use.

Picture Elvis sitting on a comfy chair onstage with the interviewer and an acoustic guitar. Takes something to just let loose and sing his songs just sitting there! Recounts his career, telling stories around the songs. Some of the performances: Allison, What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding, Mystery Dance, Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes, Radio Radio. Closed out the show with an excellent electric version (bouncing bass on tape) of Watching the Detectives! The show barely covered his first few career years, could have gone on for a couple of hours more easily.

Check out Elvis’ music in the OLGA archive to get some guitar music and lyrics. And don’t miss Elvis hosting the “Elvis Costello Hour” on MTV2 Saturday May 4 at 10pm EST!

You know I love the egoboo! The non-virtual Indian newspaper Hindustan Times’ New Economy column QuiteATake linked to my February post on the Nigerian email scam back in March although today was the first time anyone clicked over to my site. Nice to see BillSaysThis get picked up and mentioned globally and professionally!

Blah blah blah. New paradigm. Find your inner blogger. Aim for the stars, hit for the fences. Yadda yadda yadda. Use the force, Luke. The check is in the mail. Location location location. There was a young man from Nantucket. I’ll pull out. Johnny B. Goode, some day your name will be in lights. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Vote for the honest politician.

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your’s. Why, God, why? I feel your pain. The truth is out there. Clapton is God. Elvis has left the building. The proof is in the pudding. How can I believe you when your hand is in her pants? Don’t give up on us baby. I love you. Keep your tongue in your own mouth. Hands off. Denial is a river in Egypt. I wanna hold your hand. Lay lady lay.

Baby we were born to run.

A tall brown horse clops along, half on the shoulder,

Half on the narrow road in front of a row of tall

Trees. Behind them stand houses and wide green lawns

Drinking in the afternoon sunshine, dimensions sprawling,

Organic fields nearby growing fruits.

The rider wears a tan leather coat over blue jeans and

Black, irridescent boots, curly hair spilling down shoulders,

Smiling as she looks back to her trotting dog. One hundred

chanting pilgrims sit in the field the rider comes abreast of,

lifting their voices to praise the living universe.

My coffee cup is jostled by cracks in the old pavement

As we ride up and down the soft hills surrounded by

Mansions of the wealthy but no hot coffee comes out and over.

Fortunate for me as brown does not go at all well with the

Sky blue shirt I’m wearing, new today.