Thursday, October 3, 2013

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

THE SHARKNADO OF HOLIDAYS:  Continuing this blog's round-the-clock Thanksgivukkah coverage, Buzzfeed has a proposed nine-dish menu and links to swag (including a turkey-shaped menorah) to celebrate our once-in-70,000+ years convergence of Thanksgiving with the start of Hanukkah.
I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO HAVE VISITED MONTANA: Tom Clancy, author of four terrific pot-boiling action novels, two good ones (and a slough of tedious ones) and the godfather of the techno-thriller, has died at the age of 66.  It was said by Bruce Sterling that an technothriller is merely a science fiction novel where the President of the United States is a character but, oddly, it was only when his main character became the President of the United States did his novels really go off the rails.

I think his great genius was that he knew folks still wanted to read something that was built on plot, on good guys fighting external bad guys with specific, revealed motives (are all of the new Mission Impossible movies about fighting internal plots within the organization?), a heroic view of the American military, and on the promise of success by the protagonist.  Eventually, as he went beyond Red October, Red Storm Rising, Patriot Games and Cardinal of the Kremlin, and no longer submitted himself to any sort of story editing, his work suffered from rather a great bit of bloat (the entire domestic terrorism subplot in Debt of Honor - 100 pages or something - was stopped cold on an Indiana byway without a single effect on the rest of the plot).

I don't think Jack Ryan is a particularly memorable character.  Indeed, I don't think Tom Clancy wrote a single memorable character (John Clark perhaps excepted).  He instead would just toss in bits of someone's family's CV and call it a day.  "Joe Smith was a 30 year veteran of the FBI married to a woman who broke her back in an abseiling accident nine months before her first schedule space shuttle mission.  Their daughter was a second year law student at the Yale. 'Jack, I am worried that Libya is building a hydrogen bomb,' he said."

But plot and action he did well.  I was terrified for the United States when they were about to lose Iceland in the early weeks of the Third World War.  I was rooting for Prince Charles to help get revenge on the Maoist offshoot of the IRA.  I thought that, somehow, that atomic bomb was going to turn Denver into slag.

With the exception of Red October, which holds up very well 23 years later, the movies are pretty soft stuff.  But for all of it, I never regretted giving the man my time and my money for a few hours of well-crafted fun.

He never seemed to be in the best of health.  But I always hoped he'd get back to form.


Tuesday, October 1, 2013

SHUT THIS DOWN:  Surely there's a better way to run Amtrak Union Station operations than to have passengers queueing up 30, 45 minutes ahead of train departures, isn't there?  At New York's Penn Station, they solve this by not announcing the departing train's gate until boarding time. Why must DC departers be subject to this nonsense?

[The author is schvitzing, and just finished a two-day CLE, and is particularly aggrieved by the thought of having to stand around right now.]

Monday, September 30, 2013

WE'VE COME A LONG WAY FROM AOL: He's Tom Hanks.  Ask him anything!
NEXT UP, A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF PRESS YOUR LUCK:Yes, the fine folks at the American Statistical Association have analyzed Plinko and concluded that your best chance of hitting the $10K center slot is (unsurprisingly) to drop in the middle slot. 
JUST TAKE ME HOME:  Again, there's far better analysis of Breaking Bad elsewhere than that which I can provide.  I thought it was going to end in a giant revenge play.  But Walter White stayed in character and figured out how to solve his biggest problem, namely providing for his children. I'm not sure any cosmic justice was dispensed to Walter White but -- wow -- that really was the most entertaining show I've ever watched.

I thought it a terrific ending.