Month: November 2006

Mary points out this site, which is taking votes on the “New Wonders of the World”. The whole “Seven Wonders” concept has been applied in a lot of ways, actually: here’s the Wikipedia page, which lists a number of such lists, starting with the traditional, and probably most famous, list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

But all of these kinds of lists always revolve around built things, don’t they? How about made things? How about Seven Wonders of the Artistic World? I’m going to think this over a bit. Maybe after the hiatus I’ll have something to say about it.

(Lots of other good linkage at Mary’s post, by the way.)

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It looks like the US Mint is going to try something again that didn’t work the first two times, because they never did it right: dollar coins. The reason the Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea dollars never took off wasn’t inherent in the coins, but in one simple fact: the Mint left the dollar bill in production. Get rid of the bill, replace it with a coin, and voila: acceptance of the dollar coin. Duh!

(And for those who are going to complain about the weight of their pockets, come on! Other than servers in restaurants, who walks around with large amounts of singles? I rarely have more than five or six on me at any given time, mostly because I gain them in the course of a few transactions for coffee and such — and I spend those fairly quickly. And if we go the Canadian route and have a two-dollar coin as well, that would ease the coin burden too. I just don’t understand the affection for the dollar bill, especially when a coin makes far more sense.)

Anyhow, apparently the new dollar coins will rotate through their images, using the Presidents at a clip of four Presidents per year, until we get to the living ones, because a President has to have been dead at least two years before he or she can be on a coin. So it’s unlikely we’ll see the Clinton or GWB dollars when we’d expect. And another quirk in the coinage law states that a President who serves more than one term, but non-consecutively, gets a coin for each term. So we’ll have two different Grover Cleveland dollars! Weird, eh?

Here’s a MeFi thread on this item, which contains, as do most MeFi threads, some info and some snark. This line made me laugh out loud:

Envision, for a moment, the religious fervor with which Republicans will greet the Reagan coin. I susect we’ll never actually see one in circulation. Unless, of course, they trickle down from somewhere . . .

Heh. Indeed.

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In this grab-bag post from the other day, I noted that I’m starting on George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows, but that my memory of the events of the first three books was pretty hazy; I further requested any readers to send along any sites that may contain synopses of the first three books so I could get back up to speed. Well, a reader named Daniel came through, alerting me to this site, which is exactly what the doctor ordered. Thanks, Daniel!

(And you know, just reading the summaries makes me want to punch Joffrey in the mouth. What a shit he was!)

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Ahhh, what a wonderful week for high weirdness on the Interweb! Here are the two best things I found:

:: PZ Myers points out this heretofore unknown collaboration between Stan Lee and Jack Chick.

:: Warren Ellis links this montage of David Caruso moments from CSI: Miami. I love this show, mainly because it’s so unimaginably campy that it’s amazing fun. I have a hypothesis that David Caruso is his generation’s William Shatner, and that his CSI: Miami work parallels Shatner’s TJ Hooker phase.

And here’s a bonus David Caruso moment, one of my favorite things he’s ever done on CSI: Miami. In the course of crime scene investigating and whatnot, they find a car that’s wired to explode in four minutes. Horatio (the Caruso character) can’t defuse it, but he can certainly drive it to where it can safely explode — like, say, a vacant beach in Miami. Because Miami abounds with vacant beaches where cars can be exploded without fear of injuring the vacationers or the drugrunners whom the show seems to indicate constitute well over half of that city’s population. Watch this clip, even though the sound slips out of sync slightly about halfway through. This is awesome stuff, folks.

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UPDATED 11-29-06 with Answers! Highlight the yellow text after each question for the answers.

The Indestructible Mr. Jones reports on this James Bond quiz, on which I too scored a double-0 score. (Meaning, I would be a Double-0, not that I got 0 questions right.) I found the quiz slightly unsatisfying, though, so I figured, hey, why not come up with one of my own?

Answers to come…oh, when I feel like it. Ha!

1. Name the first Bond film in which M travels out into the field to brief Bond on his mission details.

You Only Live Twice. After faking his own death, Bond is brought onto a submarine in China where M briefs him. At least I think it’s China, since Bond was actually “killed” in China — but then Bond is fitted in Scuba gear and fired out a torpedo tube, so are we to believe that Bond swims all the way to Japan?

2. Which is the only Bond novel to be written in the first person?

The Spy Who Loved Me. (I should have specified the Ian Fleming novels, since other authors have written Bond books since then, and I have no idea about them. I never read Spy Who…, but I know that like many of the books that were “filmed” late in the series, the film bears almost no resemblance to the book.

3. We all know that James Bond is based in Europe, so: name the first films in which he is shown doing spy stuff in Asia, North America, South America, and Africa respectively. (There may be a little wiggle-room for the Asia answer, actually.)

Asia: You Only Live Twice (although I’m not certain if Bond does any work on the part of the Istanbul region in From Russia With Love that is across the water, on the Asian portion of Turkey).

North America: Goldfinger. (Unless one counts Jamaica as part of North America, from Dr. No, but I don’t.)

South America: Moonraker. (The location for the Goldfinger precredits sequence isn’t directly identified, as I recall; I take it to be one of the Central American banana republics, which are technically in North America.)

Africa: Diamonds are Forever. About fifteen seconds of that film’s precredits sequence takes place in Cairo. The first film that has Bond spending a significant amount of screen time in Africa would be The Spy Who Loved Me, which also takes place in and around Cairo.

4. What rank does the first M hold? (The M played by Bernard Lee. I have no idea if Robert Brown or Judi Dench, the subsequent M’s, hold the same rank.)

Admiral.

5. What rank does Q hold? (The Desmond Llewellyn one.)

Major.

Complete the following code phrases:

6. “Do you have a match?”

“I use a lighter.” (Which is followed by, “Better still”, to which one finally says, “Until they go wrong”.)

7. “The snow this year is better at Innsbruck.”

“But not at San Moritz.”

8. “In London, April is a spring month.” (Wiggle room here.)

“But in St. Petersburg we’re freezin’ our butts off.” (The scene makes clear that Bond’s ally here isn’t terribly concerned with giving proper responses to British agents, whom he thinks should just “drop it”.)

9. At whose hands did agents 002, 006, and 009 all die, respectively? (One of these has two possible answers that I know of!)

002 was killed by Francisco Scaramanga, the “Man with the Golden Gun”. I had thought that the next 002 was killed by an unnamed assassin on Gibraltar during the precredits sequence of The Living Daylights, but upon further review, 002 isn’t killed in that film: he’s shot with a paintball by an SAS officer, removing him from the simulated wargame.

006 is thought to have been killed during a mission to a Siberian munitions factory with Bond, but it’s later revealed that he survived and turned villain, whereupon Bond himself kills him.

009 is killed by one of the two knife-wielding twins in Octopussy.

10. True or false: James Bond is a fan of the Beatles.

False, at least as far as Goldfinger indicates, when Bond indicates that drinking Dom Perignon at the wrong temperature is like “listening to the Beatles without earmuffs”.

11. Excluding Dr. No and From Russia With Love (since those two tend to stand apart from the later established formulae), what is the first Bond film in which a woman Bond beds doesn’t later die?

Diamonds are Forever. In Goldfinger, Jill Masterson is killed after Bond beds her. In Thunderball, Bond does the dirty with Fiona, who later dies in his arms (good thing, too, because she’s a bad one!) In You Only Live Twice, Aki takes poison that is meant for Bond and dies. And, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Tracy Bond dies. Yes, in Diamonds, Plenty O’Toole is killed, but Bond never sleeps with her. (He’s interrupted before he can.)

12. Who calls James Bond a “stiff-assed Brit”, a “back end of horse”, a “limey”, and “Boy”, respectively?

In order: Wade in GoldenEye, Kara in The Living Daylights, Felix Leiter in Dr. No, and that irritating sheriff in The Man With the Golden Gun.

13. Only three Bond film have not featured a song whose lyrics contain the title of the film. Name them.

Dr. No, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (although the film’s instrumental main theme carries that title), Octopussy (for obvious reasons). It turns out that Casino Royale also fits the bill, but I hadn’t seen the film at the time that I wrote this quiz.

14. For which film was a version of the James Bond Theme recorded by Eric Clapton, and then not used? (This has never been released, dammit! I’d love to hear it.)

Licence to Kill, with music by Michael Kamen, whose scores for the Lethal Weapon movies featured a lot of Clapton.

15. Which film’s title contains a word in its British spelling, as opposed to the American English spelling?

Licence to Kill (“Licence” versus “License”)

16. In The Living Daylights, Bond and Kara take in an opera. What opera is it?

The Marriage of Figaro.

17. What Bond girl appears in two different films?

In Dr. No and From Russia With Love, Bond has a “girlfriend” back home named Sylvia Trench. She’s never seen again.

18. What actress plays different Bond girls in two different films?

Maud Adams is the ill-fated Miss Anders in The Man with the Golden Gun, and then Octopussy in, well, Octopussy.

19. For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy both feature an assistant in Q-branch named Smithers. The actor playing Smithers actually played a much more famous role around that same time frame. What role was that?

Jeremy Bulloch played Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Bulloch also appeared in Revenge of the Sith as “Captain Colton” (no idea who that is) and has a blog!

20. The actor who plays Bond accomplice Vijay in Octopussy would later appear in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home as the Captain of what Starfleet vessel? (The fact that I know this may make me the biggest geek of all f***ing time.)

The Yorktown. Geez.

21. Plenty of women Bond sleeps with eventually die (see related question #11). But how many times does Bond himself kill a woman he’s already bedded?

Two, that I count: Fiona in Thunderball (yes, I count whirling her into the path of a bullet meant for himself as killing her, but he had to do it eventually anyway) and Elektra in The World is Not Enough (which might have been a great Bond film had Denise Richards not been involved with the project in any capacity).

OK, that’s it. I may have answers tomorrow, or I may wait until next week when I come back from hiatus.

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I know I’ve posted this before, but I know it’s been a while and it’s a cooking tip that’s always worth revisiting, so here goes: the easiest and tastiest chicken recipe I know.

Just marinate your chicken in a mixture of the following ingredients, using equal portions of each: sesame oil, soy sauce, and honey. Then grill or roast the chicken as you see fit. That’s it. This is astonishingly easy, and it’s astonishingly good. I generally use a quarter cup of each ingredient, which makes plenty for a package of chicken containing two split breasts and two leg quarters, but if you’re doing an entire bird, you might want to up that to one-third or even one-half cup. Basting during cooking isn’t necessary, but I do it anyway.

Oh, and don’t salt the chicken before marinating or cooking. The soy sauce will make it pleasantly salty enough.

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OK, I’ve got to nip this in the bud, because I’ve seen it twice in twenty-four hours: For Your Eyes Only cited among the worst and most cartoonish of Roger Moore’s run of James Bond films. Lance tags it as the “worst”, actually, which I’ll grudgingly accept as a matter of taste, but Harry Knowles cites FYEO as “cheese” along with The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker, and dammit, Knowles should know better.

It may be a matter of opinion that FYEO is the best of the Roger Moore films, but it’s a simple fact that the film is far less cartoonish than the Bond films of the 1970s. Gone are the freakish henchmen like Jaws, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, and Nick-Nack. The film is almost devoid of Q’s gadgets. The villains aren’t just evil for the sake of being evil, or possessed of bizarre motivations to rule the world; instead the plot revolves around cold-war intrigue (for just the second time in the series, surprisingly enough when one really thinks about it), in which the identity of the main villain isn’t even known until about two-thirds of the way through the movie. The various supporting characters around Bond — the girl Melina, the ally Columbo — all have histories, and genuine motivations for their various allegiances. Sure, there’s some broad humor (mostly involving the annoying figure skater), but there’s broad humor in every Bond film. FYEO puts Bond in some very real predicaments in which he can’t just survive by pushing a button on his wristwatch or by flipping a switch on the dash of his Lotus, and there’s a scene in which Bond executes an assassin in which Roger Moore is as ruthless as Sean Connery ever was.

It’s also worth noting that the turn towards cartoonishness didn’t start with Roger Moore: Sean Connery’s last Bond film (until 1983’s “outside the franchise” Never Say Never Again), Diamonds are Forever, is as cartoonish as anything that Moore would do in his first four films as Bond, which I think makes it clear that maybe it’s not Moore who played Bond as a cartoon character, but the people who wrote and directed the Bond films of the 70s who made things that way.

Oh, and Octopussy is a very good film too. And A View to a Kill even has its moments, much more so than Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, both of which are truly bad (although LaLD does have a nice moment when Bond thinks he’ll get out of a scrape by the use of his gadget-of-the-week, only to be thwarted).

(On the topic of Casino Royale, I’m hoping to see it next week while I’m on blog-hiatus. But welcome back, Mr. Bond!)

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I found this on a message board the other day, and I just had to link it here, because I just love stuff like this: the little things that used to fill the peripheries of our lives, tiny details that companies would incorporate into their products for no other reason than it was cool to do so: beer bottle caps with puzzles printed inside them. I love the idea of some working-class guy sitting on a stool at the bar of his preferred watering hole after his shift had ended, sipping a cold one and solving the rebus printed on the liner of his bottle cap.

Of course, today if some warm body from the marketing department actually suggested something like this at a meeting of the execs of today’s mega-breweries, that poor soul would almost certainly be laughed out of the room.

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Stuff:

:: I’ve spent much of the past week or so getting over a cold that wasn’t particularly nasty as colds go, but has packed a particularly annoying punch in the “lingering congestion” department. And it turns out that phenylephrine decongestants, which have replaced pseudophedrine in OTC remedies like NyQuil and Sinutab and the like, suck. I spent three days listening to the world as though I was at the bottom of a diving bell before I realized that phenylephrine sucks, and that I was going back to pseudophedrine. So, anyway, Mucinex is my new best friend.

(Yes, I still do the Neti pot religiously, but it can only do so much.)

But I’ve passed the time reading blogs a little and reading books and magazines, some of which turn out to contain blog-like material! Who’da thunk it! I read A Night to Remember, the classic book about the sinking of the Titanic. Somehow I’d never read it before — but it’s a riveting read. I still love the James Cameron movie about the sinking (fashionable backlashes be damned!), but A Night to Remember fascinates by not only putting the small details from the actual tale of the sinking used in that film into context, but it’s also a surprisingly taut read, with almost no preamble before the horrible events begin to unfold. (The lookouts spot the iceberg on page two.)

Now I’m reading a new book of essays on food and restaurant life by Anthony Bourdain, The Nasty Bits. This is my first exposure of any sort to Bourdain, who comes off in this book as a fascinating soul. A representative passage:

But is fast food inherently evil? Is the convenient nature of the beast bad, in and of itself? Decidedly no. Fast food — which traditionally solves very real problems of working families, families with kids, business people on the go, the casually hungry — can be good food. If you walk down a street in Saigon, or visit an open-air market in Mexico, you’ll see that a quick, easy meal, often enjoyed standing up, does not have to be part of the hideous, generic sprawl of soul-destroying sameness that stretches from stip malls in San Diego, across the USA, through Europe and Asia and around again, looking the same, tasting the same: paper-wrapped morsels of gray “beef” patties with all-purpose sauce. The unbelievably high-caloric horrors of beef-flavor-sprayed chicken nuggets, of “milkshakes” that contain no milk and have never been shaken, of “barbecue” that has never seen a grill, “cheese” with no cheese, and theme monstrosities for whom food is only a lure to buy a T-shirt, is not the way it has to be.

Preach on, brother!

:: I’ve also started in on George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows. I found Storm of Swords a bit grim for my tastes, although the shocks came fast and furious — the Red Wedding was a particular jolt. I haven’t read any of the Song of Ice and Fire books since Storm came out, and that was four years ago or more, so my memory of what’s going on in Westeros is a tad hazy. Can anyone recommend an online synopsis of the first three books, so I can get up to speed again?

(Tyrion’s not in this book. Bugger.)

:: The comic strip For Better or Worse will end next year. I read it every morning, mainly because I enjoy the characters on a soap-opera basis. The strip is rarely funny, but it’s generally endearing in a way, even though I sometimes perversely wish that the Pattersons would have to deal with some real shit, like having Michael lose his job without blundering into a better one, or something like that, but that’s just mean, eh?

:: A new review of mine ran in GMR, of The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana. Read the review, but better yet, buy the book. It’s amazing.

:: Can’t remember where I saw this linked, but it’s a list of the ten most racist TV commercials of all time. Some of these are awful.

:: NBC’s doing that “Supersize comedy shows” thing again, in which they basically stick even more ads into their shows. NBC sucks.

:: Verify range to target, one ping only. Check out these photos! They’re amazing. (via)

:: Screw you, ABC! I didn’t spend all those years hating Emmitt Smith and everything he stood for as the star running back of the Dallas F***ing Cowboys just so I could end up rooting for him on some dancing show! But I could not, in good conscience, root for the guy who once tried to steal Kelly Kapowski from Zack Morris. Betrayer most foul!!!

:: A brief Office liveblog: Jim and Pam are back in the same office. All is right with the world. Kum-bay-yah…. And oh God, Dwight has a rival. This is awesome.

:: People are camping outside stores for a new PlayStation? Huh? Come on, folks. Camping outside for a videogame system is just lame. Acceptable things for camping outside are: Sabres tickets, new Star Wars movie tickets, Super Bowl tickets, and the latest models of Dewalt power tools. PlayStations? Feh!

:: If you’ve ever wondered what the greatest cat toy ever is, look no further: it’s a laser pointer. Seriously. They chase that red dot everywhere.

:: Finally: I will be going on a blogging hiatus beginning next Tuesday, and probably ending a week later. This Monday’s posts will be the last for that duration — but I’ll probably solicit posting suggestions for my return, along the lines of the old “Ask Me Anything!” game from a while back.

:: Oh yeah, since I never posted anything about the Bills game the other day: I’m rapidly coming to the view that JP Losman may be a bust, and the O-line still sucks major rocks. And I didn’t even get to see Peyton Manning light it up. Ugh.

Oh well, at least the StuPats lost in a game in which the last play was Tom Brady fumbling. That was a nice consolation prize!

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