BillSaysThis

Back, back in a NY Groove

Well, I’m not, and haven’t been, in NY, but I was in New Jersey for about 20 hours and I am back from Italy. And Back in the New York Groove was the only decent song from Ace Frehley’s solo career. Dad and I had a great trip together, good times in Palermo (and elsewhere on Sicily) and Sorrento. The food was…different than I expected but still generally very tasty, the people were friendly, and some of the places we visited were totally awesome (Segesta, Agrigento, Pompei). I wrote a detailed journal (plus writeups on the vacation reading) and took two rolls of film, which I hope to have in electronic form and on this site at The Italy Trip within the week.

Set about 20 years after the end of the original movie trilogy, this collection of six short novels by Kevin Anderson and Rebecca Moesta features Jacen and Jaina Solo (Leia and Han’s twins), Lowbacca (Chewbacca the Wookiee’s nephew), and Tenel Ka (well, they needed someone to fill out the quartet) as they begin their studies at Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Academy. Great for (pre-)teen Star Wars fans only.

Another bad summer leading into an eventful, villainous third year at Hogwarts School. But author J.K. Rowling has maintained the humor and inventiveness so that the repetitive story elements provide a framework instead of leading to boredom. I’m certainly curious to find out how well she’s done in the fourth novel. Rowland also spends, to good effect, some effort on character development, so that we aren’t stuck in an unchanging Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew world.

After turning out nearly three dozen fiction bestsellers, Steven King recently wrote a non-fiction book on a topic he knows so well. On Writing isn’t a long book, nor is it obnoxiously short. The book is part memoir, to show us what life events and influences got him going, and part important rules for writers.

I quite enjoyed this book although I’ve only read one of King’s novels (The Stand) all the way through. He writes in a breezy, friendly style. I took it as meaning, hey, this works for me, why not see if any or all does you any good.

King doesn’t spend much ink retelling what Strunk and White covered so well but does strongly recommend that writers become familiar with that book. He’s also extremely anti-adverb while admitting that he can’t always force himself to remove all the adverbs that somehow still end up in first drafts, even after all these years.

What can I say? When I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I’ve avoided these books because I thought they were for kids, they generated so much hype, and they were fantasy. Well give J.K. Rowland her due (and believe me, the money has been flowing freely) because she’s written books that are just instant classics. The stories are like the best animated shows, they appeal to both kids and adults, there is broad use of humor, and our hero gets to eat a feast at the end.

These are books every kid (say around age seven to nine) ought to read along with The Hobbit and the Wizard of Oz to put a spark of creativity, of the fantastic, in their minds.

I really enjoy reading Roddy Doyle’s novels. Most readers are not familiar with him directly but may have seen one of the movies made from his novels: The Commitments, The Scrapper, and The Van. Doyle is considered to be Ireland’s greatest living writer and I can’t disagree.

A Star Called Henry, volume one of a planned Last Roundup trilogy, tells the tale of the first 20 years of an amazing baby. Making his way for himself on the streets of Dublin at age five, he becomes an important, if expendable, foot soldier of the Irish Rebellion in his teens.

Doyle’s story is good, he brings his characters to life through action and movement but what I truly treasure is his way with words, dialog and description. They just bounce and carry the reader along as if one were riding a raft down a strong river, here with rocks and rapids, now soft but running. For example:

“I was a broth of an infant, the wonder of Summerhill and beyond. I was the big news, a local legend within hours of landing on the newspapers.” This is Henry, who is both hero and narrator, describing the reaction to his own birth, which he claims to recall in full detail. Doyle keeps me straining to turn the pages, even though there’s the odd word here and again that isn’t American English and I have to puzzle over it.

Highly recommended. If you’ve never read any of Doyle’s novels, read them all.

Second book in the series written by the still uncredited Steve Perry. Interesting but if I didn’t already have one other book in this series I wouldn’t bother. Storyline is fairly similar to the first NetForce novel, only this time the villain is a too smart for himself political hack, chief of staff to a U.S. Senator with more money than brains. Besides the uninspired plot, Perry tries too hard to show how different the world will be in 2010.

Another one of the series co-created by Clancy, NetForce is the series’ name as well as the name of the series’ first novel. Written by, but not credited to, Steve Perry, this story introduces us to a new FBI unit called NetForce and is set 10 years in the future. Its also the novelization of a miniseries starring Scott Bakula.

Virtual Reality (VR) gear is standard, as is imposing your own visual metaphor for moving on the Worldwide Web (although driving a car or riding a motorcycle seems most common). The VR, so to speak, puts you in the driver’s seat.

Perry does a good job here and I’m looking forward to the second in the series, next on the queue. Someone is creating chaos on the web, lots of deaths (RW, or real world, deaths, that is) and pointing lots of misdirections at NetForce. Which (and this isn’t a spoiler as it happens in the first pages) is caught up in trying to solve the assassination of its first commander.

Decent reading but I will be looking to see if it gets stronger in book two. At this point, I prefer Clancy’s own novels and the Op-Center series to this one.

Robert Parker, best known for the two dozen or so Spenser detective novels (you may remember the mid ’80s TV series starring Robert Urich as Spenser and Avery “Captain Sisko” Brooks as the ultimately cool Hawk), takes a poke at retelling the Wyatt Earp/Shootout at the OK Corral western tale in this novel.

His writing is as strong as ever and of course he pays attention to the food being eaten but there is little new here. This story has been told over and over in movies, on TV, and in other novels. For a better recent take watch the 1994 Kevin Costner/Dennis Quaid movie Wyatt Earp. If you feel like reading some Parker, get one of the Spenser books like Promised Land or Pale Kings and Princes.

The eighth book in a series created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenk and written by Jeff Rovin, Line of Control takes the National Crisis Management Center into action to prevent a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. The dozen members of Op-Center’s Striker military team are en-route to work with India on a secret reconnaissance to find suspected Pakistan nuclear missile sites near disputed Kashmir when a Free Kashmir Movement cell blows up a police station. Oddly, the temple next door and a bus full of Hindu Pilgrims outside explode as well in the next moment. Everything changes and Striker must lead a race through the Himalayas.

I’m not sure how much involvement Clancy has with these books, one of these series he co-created but doesn’t write (Net Force and Politika are the others). Rovin, who was not given authors credit on the first Op-Center novels, does a good job with them. I’ve read most and while the subject matter does fall into expected Clancy territory, that is where politics meets intelligence meets military, there is less complexity than a typical Clancy novel with it’s dozen plus sub-plots and less explanatory digressions. In short, 350-400 pages instead of 1200-1400.

Entangling of macroscopic groups of atoms experimentally demonstrated

Well, if that isn’t a mouthful, what is? This link, pointing to an ars technica article, one of the cooler amateur techie sites around, covers a report on a paper submitted to Nature. As regular readers have seen, quantum physics is probably my favorite topic outside of Star Trek. In this paper, Brian Julsgaard, Alexander Kozhekin and Eugene S. Polzik report that they have been able to experimentally show quantum mechanical entanglement between “two separate samples of atoms containing 10¹² atoms each”. In plain English, a trillion atoms interacting for half a millisecond, which is far more, by several orders of magnitude, than any other researcher has previously achieved.

Countdown to Italy: Plane departs Newark Airport in 48 hours!!!

Last night’s movie: Swordfish

Travolta really knows how to play the hip, hip bad guy, to push the words of his character out of his mouth with menace even while he’s charming you. Swordfish got a mess of bad reviews but a few good ones including three stars from the SJ Mercury News. Hugh Jackman (Wolverine in X-Men) plays the innocent, sort of, good guy, a Kevin Mitnick type of convicted hacker, who only wants to have his 10 year old daughter back in his life. Dominic Sena, who also directed the bang a minute Gone in 60 Seconds, keeps the cameras moving here with very good pacing and the editing of the end of the opening scene is just excellent. Halle Berry (Storm in X-Men) isn’t bad either, but I think producer Joel Silver wasted $500k to get Berry to take her shirt off. Recommended for action film fans.

Have to See TV: Cartoon Network

Beginning this fall, most kid’s favorite cable network will air “Adult Swim”, a three hour bock of adult-oriented animated shows including the Space Ghost talk show, Sealab 2021, Home Movies (a 3rd grader captures his life on ‘film’), and two that I think will be really funny:

• “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” a cartoon that follows an elite group of detectives who are also human-sized food products;
  

• “Leave It to Brak,” a parody of the classic family sitcom featuring demented space alien Brak.

Yesterday’s movie: Best in Show

Christopher Guest has been making us laugh for around 25 years now, even if you don’t recognize his name or face. He wrote, directed, and co-stars in Best In Show, a pseudo-documentary about the Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show and some of its participants. Guest is best-known for the 1996 film Waiting for Guffman, in which he also wrote, directed, and co-starred, for playing bassist Nigel Tufnel in the hilarious This is Spinal Tap, and writing and performing on Saturday Night Live.

Best in Show has a lot of similarities to Spinal Tap, which he co-wrote, in that there isn’t a plot per se (just like most lives lack a nice, tidy, Hollywood-esque plot), and instead finds humor in the quirkiness of its characters and situations. For example, one of the funniest running gags is that husband and wife (co-writer and Second City TV alumnus) Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara (also an SCTV alum) make the trip up to the show from Florida with their terrier, discovering along the way that every man they meet is one of O’Hara’s former lovers.

Today’s book: Fountains of Youth

The third book in Brian Stableford’s trilogy, The Fountains of Youth, carries forward the story of humanity’s evolution into the New Human Race. This novel is posed as the autobiography of Mortimer Grey, or at least the first 500 years of it, as Grey can hope to live several times that long at least; his life is unavoidably wrapped up in his monumental, 10 volume History of Death. While Stableford paints a vivid portrait of human society over the 500 years the novel spans, he really uses this opportunity in order to give us a new philosophical overview of real history seen as the battle of humans to come to terms with death. “The only true enemy,” as he puts it. A good read for those who enjoy intellectual adventures and speculations and, don’t worry, even though humanity seems to have death beaten, the author comes up with a closer that dashes that hope (and leaves open the possibility of another book).

Suck.com: Another one bites the dust

For six years, the Sucksters have been blowing away the smoke being pumped up our asses. Whatever the topic raging across the American scene, they’ve been around to bite at the ankles and pour arsenic down throats, all in the quest for laughs. Now, though, Suck.com has been swallowed in the same cesspool they’ve targeted most frequently and have posted a (permanent?) Gone Fishing sign.

Humor: Who really rules the roost?

Need a quick laugh? Click here to watch a Flash animation and listen to its song about a married man’s ability to really be king of his castle. Really reminds me of some late ’50s/early ’60s comics like Tom Lehrer, before profanity and topicality became the mainstream of comedy. More recent comics might be Tim Allen and Ray Romano, although Romano seems to me to be a big whiner. Some sample quotes:

“I where the pants around here after I do the laundry.” “I don’t want to hear a lot of whining around here so I’ll shut up.” “I can have sex any time that you want because I’m a man who has needs but they’re not important.”

Will the Bay Area host the 2012 Summer Olympics?

I hope not since it will make living here miserable (traffic will be screwed, restaurants will be packed, security will be everywhere) but there’s a committee organized to make it happen, BASOC 2012. The site doesn’t have too much info yet and is poorly implemented in Flash but the committee is steaming ahead with fundraising, preparing the bid (the US Olympic Committee will select the American candidate city next March), and raising awareness (a couple of BASOC leaders were on NPR this morning). For example, the committee has partnered with Stanford University for a new 100,000 seat stadium on campus; they also hope to build a shooting facility in San Jose, which sounds like and oxymoron to me. All to the good, the bid’s success is doubtful; if Toronto doesn’t get the 2008 Olympics, that city will most likely get it for 2012.

Microsoft plays Big Bad Wolf Once Again

Are the web pages you read not heavily linked enough? As part of Windows XP (coming in October), the Evil Redmondians may solve this problem with Internet Smart Tags. Deborah Branscom has a properly snarky response in her weblog. Walt Mossberg has more details in a Wall Street Journal article, including a brief yet wimpy MS defense. So far the tags are in an XP beta but per MS no decision has been taken on whether they will be included in the commercial release.

What are Smart Tags? According to The Wall Street Journal, Smart Tags “automatically scans the Web pages that a Windows XP user browses, inserting links beneath certain types of words, such as names of the companies, sports teams or colleges.” Motley Fool says “If you think this sounds an awful lot like a hyperlink — one of those underlined blue words on a website that takes the user to another webpage — you’re right, except that whereas a webpage designer controls a hyperlink, Microsoft will control Smart Tags.” For a technical look at creating Smart Tags, you can check out this MS Developer Network article.

The Register has further XP bad news in an overview of the latest beta release.