Bond. James Bond.

In my book, there's only one Bond. Sean Connery.  He was the first James Bond I ever saw, and the best.  Mr. Connery has been in poor health lately and hasn't been on film in several years, but it is good to know he's doing voice work for an animated short, the second in a series, which takes place in his beloved Scotland.

Connery's Bond defeated a lot of bad guys over the years, and it's interesting to note that he's outlasted all the actors who played the bad guys as well.

 Last month, Julius Wiseman, who played Dr. No, passed away. Donald Pleasence (Blofeld in You Only Live Twice) died in 1995, Gert Frobe (Goldfinger) in 1988, and Adolfo Celi, Largo in Thunderball, back in 1986. I'll ignore the unofficial Never Say Never Again that Connery appeared in -- Max Von Sydow (Blofeld) is still quite alive.

Connery has also outlived all of the guys who played his CIA counterpart, Felix Leiter.  Cec Linder (Goldfinger) passed in 1992, Rik Van Nutter of Thunderball in 2005, and, most recognizable of the American spooks, Jack Lord, who died in 1998.

Time has also not been kind to Bond's MI6  brethren. Bernard Lee (M) died in 1981, Desmond LLewelyn (Q) in 1999, and sadly, the lovely Lois Maxwell, Miss Moneypenny, in 2007.

Bond girls may not have great screen careers following their appearance in the series, though the fabulous Pussy Galore of Goldfinger, Honor Blackman, continues to work at the age of 82. As far as I can tell, all the other lesser Bond girls are still alive and kicking.

So let's all raise our glasses (shaken, not stirred) to Connery Bond, and the fun we had at the movies.

Short Description = Short Attention Span.

Somewhere, in some cubicle, in Hollywood, or New York, or Cleveland, or Bombay, for all I know, there's some guy tasked with boiling down the plot lines of movies into fifteen word summaries.  These little summaries end up as the TV listings on my cable guide.

They suck.

Just the first few words turn me off. They tell me "Forget it, Dave, you're going to hate it. This movie is crap. It's trite. It's tasteless.  It's a waste of time."

Those words have exactly the opposite effect that the networks want to create -- they drive me away from watching the movies.  Most of the time, I don't get through the description before I've moved on to the next listing, only to find myself again reading no further than the first few words and moving on, yet again.

Let me give you some examples.  I won't tell you the names of the movies that the description is meant to illustrate.  Just read, and decide if you would continue to read the rest of the synopsis,  much less watch the flick.  Perhaps you will agree with me. Perhaps not. After all, somebody bought tickets to these gems.


A simple Missouri farmer...


A liberal adaptation of the life of Jesus...


In medieval Korea...


In ancient Rome...


After causing St. Nick to have a fatal accident...


A career-minded architect...


Rebel forces gather...


A martial arts teacher...


A small town is brought together...


A single mom becomes pregnant...


When a man is mugged...


A tyrannical Roman leader...


A brilliant scientist is horribly disfigured...


A reporter awakens...


In the 1980's, a former rock star...


A family gets a police dog...


A soldier is released from prison...


After serving in WWII...


An enthusiastic computer programmer and his girlfriend...


Two brothers find a downed spacecraft...


An updated telling of the classic tale...


An IRS agent with a mysterious secret...


Two weed-smoking friends...


A former US soldier...


An aging transsexual...


NASA discovers an enormous asteroid


Two brash fighter pilots...


Two brothers with a history of conflict...


A martial arts expert enters a tournament...


A model and a car dealer team up...


Scientists train genetically altered sharks...


A reclusive and awkward man...


A famous rapper is denied membership...


An unemployed single mother resorts to...


A disgraced former FBI agent working as...


A cantankerous female FBI agent...


A struggling young artist receives inspiration...


After a detective's wife is murdered...


A girl returns from a mental hospital...


When a submarine goes missing...


A young pregnant woman discovers...


A depressed man is urged to enroll...


Psychotic killer returns...


A high school student dreams...


Un mercenario que transporta mercanicia ilegal
(just thought I'd throw that one in...)

Maybe some night I'll drink a lot of beer and combine all of these into the ultimate bad movie.

It will be about tyrannical, depressed, weed-smoking pregnant Roman soldiers who find a craft from outer space after being released from prison while psychotic aging transexual Korean rebel forces gather to train genetically engineered sharks that once worked for the FBI.  All will die however when the asteroid hits in a liberal interpretation of the life of Jesus.

I'm summarizing here to save the guy in the cubicle some work.

It will probably make millions.

Let's Get Animated For A Minute...

Knowing that lots of people will be stuck around the house on the long Thanksgiving weekend, the TV networks pulled out some of their grade "A" stuff to watch.  (Not enough, but enough.)

Having just rented Disney's Up the other day, and remembering how terrific it was to see a genuinely creative story told, I was delighted to see three other animated films on TV.  The Incredibles remains one of the best movies released in the past decade, and loses nothing in multiple viewings. Cars, another one of Pixar's hits, is sheer genius, especially to anyone who has loved anything automotive or who has traveled Route 66 / Interstate 40 multiple times, as I have.  Finally, I got to see a recent release that didn't get as much attention as the others, but none the less is a fine film in its own right -- Bolt.  


All of these films combine outstanding animation with (pardon the pun) three dimensional characters, a well thought out story, and great voice acting from some of the best people in Hollywood... and I just don't mean the "stars" whose names we all recognize.  There are some incredibly talented people roaming around Hollywood whose faces you will never see, but who's voices you have heard perhaps hundreds of times on film and television.  To them, I tip my hat.

Lately, all we seem to get on the big screen are cheap comedies and big CGI films lifting characters from comic books.  Maybe the studios ought to turn the creators of the above films loose on live action movies. Then again, maybe not.  I want to see more great animated films in the future.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Today is the day we should all remember our ancestors who shared their blessings with the natives.

As such, the wife and I will be dining at home on Fajitas and drinking Mexican Coca-Cola.

It was either that, or going to the Indian casino and playing the slots.

I'd Laugh, But It Ain't Funny.

The New York Times reported today that many newspapers around the country, including the San Bernardino Sun and the Riverside Press Enterprise, will boost the price of their Thanksgiving (or in case of the PE, day after) newspapers to the Sunday rate.

Traditionally, the Thanksgiving day newspaper is physically one of the largest, if not the largest issues of the year due to the enormous amount of Christmas advertising.  Street sales of the paper from vending machines also spike as people want to know what's going to be on sale the following day.

How sad it is that newspapers can't draw readers based on their news content any longer, and at last are admitting that people are buying the paper just for the ads.  That being said, ad revenue continues to decline because of the generally piss-poor economy and more so because newspapers fail to provide reasons for people to subscribe.  Typical of the brain-dead publishers and owners who run these businesses, they're taking the tactic of punishing their buyers (both readers and advertisers) on the one day they want the paper most.

Imagine if retailers operated this way... Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sears, et al all raised their prices the day after Thanksgiving,.. ridiculous, huh?  You'd tell them to shove it, and find somebody else to buy from.  Maybe somebody online.  Maybe somebody who mailed you a catalog.... Gee, let me think, who are newspapers competing with these days? Online news compilers (and their ads) and direct mail.

Idiots. Idiots. Idiots.

Oh, and in other news, the Washington Post is closing all its US bureaus.  Goodbye New York, Chicago,and  Los Angeles Post writers.

When The Dead Refuse To Die.

Go figure.....


Item 1) New Moon, the sequel to Twilight, has set a record for an opening day box office -- $72.7 million.  While I haven't seen it, longtime movie critic Roger Ebert, whom I trust, reports the movie seriously sucks.  Apparently people don't care that it sucks, as even here in Redlands, people camped out days before the movie opened to insure they'd be the first to see a sucky sequel to a sucky pop-culture phenomenon.  Lines stretched all the way from the theater to Redlands Blvd. and on down the block.

Item 2) Going Rogue, Sarah Palin's autobiography, has sold 300,000 copies on its day of release, and the initial print order of 1.5 million copies has been upped by an additional million. The one-day sale exceeds Hillary Clinton's book by fifty percent.

Is there something I'm not getting here?  A vampire drama swamps the theaters -- and the vampire is a vegetarian?  That Sarah Palin is still in the news, despite often looking like an idiot during her vice-presidential run, and subsequently quitting the governorship of Alaska?

Is it that a vampire and a folksy politician are both too cute to lay down and die, metaphorically?  One movie, and one election, are one too many for both.

An Apple A Day...

...sends the dentist my way.

Friday, a nice crisp apple separated one of my front teeth from its home of half a century.

 Shit...

I've never liked my teeth. My teeth have never liked me.  I'd rather go into battle in Afghanistan, armed with nothing more than a BB gun, than visit a dentist.  The only way I'll go is if a) the dentist hands over a double dose of Ativan, a tiny little pill which knocks me cleanly on my ass for 18 hours, and b) provides me a heavy mixture of Nitrous, which I will huff like a twelve year old trying to get high on airplane glue.

Once sedated, I will resist the temptation to kick and scream like a little girl, and instead surrender to the mind-expanding power of the chemicals swirling about in my brain.  Hours pass quickly, and I will find myself outside trying to remember the brilliant insights I'd had under the spell of the drugs. I do suspect, however, the last dentist I visited has not yet been able to remove the claw marks from the arms of his chair while I waited for the good stuff to kick in.

Once home, I will sleep like the dead for a solid 12 hours, and remember nothing at all from the experience, or the entire previous day, for that matter.  This can be something of a problem at work if you're required to, say, know what you did before you headed for the exam.

Perhaps I'll just look for work in Hollywood as a character actor.  It is, after all, about time for a remake of Deliverance, and what with my missing tooth, I can play hillbilly #3. Cue the banjos, please....

Dave vs. Dobbs -- My Ongoing War With The Redlands Daily Facts

My wife cringes when I sit down each evening to read The Facts, our little community newspaper here in Redlands.

She cringes because she knows that on any given night, I will find something that will turn me into a raging, vein-popping, bug-eyed, up-close-and-personal local version of Lewis Black.

It's not that there's no news in The Facts. I'm accustomed to that; I resigned myself to the new realities of community journalism a long time ago. What stirs me up like a turbocharged Oster blender set on warp drive are the typos, pagination errors, style absurdities, and just plain amateurism I find on a routine basis.

When it really gets to me, I grab the paper and head for the computer. My wife will go "uh-oh" and ask to see what I write to Facts editor Jennifer Dobbs. I suspect she wants to know if she should be dialing the phone for a defense attorney.

I felt compelled to fire off one of my famous Nastygrams again just a few hours ago. It seems that they have hired a reporter who, I suspect, never finished middle school, much less journalism school. I have never seen an article printed in any newspaper (even The Facts!) with such poor sentence structure, misspelled words, or bad grammar. I'd give you examples, but I'm trying hard to keep my blood pressure below flash point.

I practically demanded that editor Dobbs email a reply, and she did. Here's what it said:

I looked at the piece after receiving your e-mail and agree it should not have run and it wasn't scheduled to run. I need to talk to staff and find out why that happened.

Thank you for bringing it to my attention.

I'm glad that the article should not have run, but it begs the question: Why was Ms. Dobbs not aware of the story until I alerted her to it?

I just don't have it in me to ask.

Small steps, David. Small steps...

Now I Know Where The Term "Finish Line" Comes From

This is amazing video. These Finns make anybody, in any American motorsport, look like a bunch of pansies. And did I mention the spectators? I can almost see them holding scorecards, ala Dancing With The Stars, each time a car crashes in a ditch, flips three times, mows down a telephone pole and half a dozen pine trees: "8!" "9!" "8!" Golf claps all around, please.

Now, mind you, these cars all look like stockers with roll bars added. Look at the bottoms of the cars, and you'll see no shiny race bits, just stock exhausts with mufflers and skinny tires. So, in all probability, these cars have seen a decade's worth of road use (and road salt, this being Finland) so they're probably rusty as all get out. Perfect for bending around Aspens.

While this is a compilation of lots of races, there's at least one sequence where not two, not three or four, but at least 10 cars crash at the same spot in the same race. Remind me never to get in a bar fight with a Finnish rally driver -- these guys are tough.

Click the link!

Crazy Finns Crashing - with pure crashing sounds

If you think that's fun, check 'em out in the snow...

Rally crash compilation special snow rally

There's dozens more rally videos on You Tube from all over Europe, but I think the Finns have the market cornered on Crazy. Enjoy!

Obama and the Afghanistan Decision.

The President has been taking a lot of time making up his mind about what to do about the level of troop deployment in Afghanistan. His leading general tells him he needs 40,000 more people to make progress, and by progress he means securing the villages from attack, not wiping out the opposition. Others close to the President, so the leaks/rumors have it, are telling him to send 20,000 guys and just blow the hell out of anything that moves.

The recent elections were a farce and it revealed the true face of the current Afghan leadership, which is to say their isn't any, at least in the democratic sense. Karzai looks like he tried to steal the election, and it's been well publicized that Karzai's own brother is a crook, and apparently on the take from the CIA as well. Not a really good endorsement of our efforts so far, wouldn't you say?

So, here's my two bits on the topic. I think Obama is stalling because he wants to see if Karzai can get his shit together. If he can't, Obama is going to pull the plug on the whole mess and walk away, saying "we did what we could", to the extent that the coalition will let him/us get away with it. I think that would just be fine, though Hillary would cough up a hairball.

Not a bad solution, since Al Qaeda and Bin Laden are well holed up in Pakistan, not Afghanistan anymore, and the Pakis have their own problems that ultimately are more far reaching than their own region -- I'm talking about their stockpile of nukes, which a whole bunch of terrorists would love to get their hands on.

I hope the CIA has done their homework on that one. Oh, and did I mention the mess in Iran?