From Russia, With Love
I haven't read many of the James Bond books.
From Russia, With Love is said
by some to be the best one in the series.
It's striking how relatively little Bond actually does. Darko Kerim, the Secret Service's Head of T (Turkey) Station, seems to get a lot more done in terms of spying and killing and derring-do. It's as if Bond is his sidekick for this book instead of the other way around. Bond has the task of banging the Russian girl, but to no productive purpose: she doesn't reveal crucial information to him, for example.
Bond is swept along by events. He's easily fooled and generally goes along with everything SMERSH has planned for him. The excuse is that he wants to find out what SMERSH is up to. Bond doesn't figure anything out until it's too late and the villain is explaining it to him.
At a critical juncture, a gun disguised as a book goes "Click! Click-click-click-click." Apparently this is meant to indicate that the book-gun is actually firing bullets. I found this to be a confusing sound effect.
The book ends with a cliffhanger, which I wasn't expecting.
Match Point
From somewhere I got the idea that
Match Point would be surprising, and that it would be better if we went to see it without knowing anything about it in advance, other than what I already knew about it, which was that it is a Woody Allen movie, but not a typical Woody Allen movie.
In the past when I've made studious efforts to avoid spoiling movies, I've usually ended up
horribly disappointed. But this time I wasn't.
Match Point was very good. So I won't say any more about it and I suggest you see it without reading any reviews. Critics can't keep their mouths shut.
Scenes from Married Life 2
M: There should be a "Secret Life of Mrs. Walter Mitty," with little vignettes where he does all the same things that he did in the "Secret Life of Walter Mitty," except at the end of each one of them, he dies.
M: I'm just saying.
---
M: We should get these [Trader Joe's "Prelude to a Quiche" mini-snacks] because the box is cute. Actually, I just like the name.
R: I don't get it.
M: Prelude to a Kiss, silly.
R: Do they have Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fondue?
Hush hush keep it down down
At some point, possibly at the last operating system update, but I suspect at the last update of iTunes, my various Macs unexpectedly started using iTunes as the default application to open wav files.
The result is that my voicemail messages, which had previously opened in their own little Quicktime windows, suddenly started inserting themselves into my iTunes library and playing in the main iTunes window.
This is not the desired behavior.
It's pretty surreal to have the end of a work-related VoiceMessage fade smoothly into the beginning of Voices Carry by 'Til Tuesday.
Comment on Having Your Cake and Eating It Too
Benjamin Zimmer noted that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, preferred "can't eat your cake and have it too" to "can't have your cake and eat it too," and wrote:
But does "you can't have your cake and eat it" really lack the inherent logicality of "you can't eat your cake and have it"? Only if you consider the ordering of the two conjoined verb phrases to imply sequentiality: you can't eat your cake and then (still) have it, but you can have your cake and then eat it. On the other hand, if the and conjoining the VPs implies simultaneity of action rather than sequentiality, then neither version is more "logical" than the other: cake-eating and cake-having are mutually exclusive activities, regardless of the syntactic ordering.
But simultaneous cake-having and cake-eating are NOT mutually exclusive. On the contrary, generally I cannot eat something at any time when I do not have it. But I eat things when I have them all the time. Only when the object is entirely consumed do I no longer have it (and at that time the eating is also terminated). "Can't have your cake and eat it too" is logically indefensible.
To tell the truth, if not for its privileged status as a familiar phrase, "can't eat your cake and have it too" wouldn't sound very natural to me either.
If "have" were replaced with "keep," then I would agree that cake-eating and cake-keeping are mutually exclusive (someone in the process of eating something is not keeping it) AND I would agree that either order of the verb phrases would be equally logical AND it would sound better to my ear than "have and eat," for what that's worth.
Fame?
The UCLA Magazine article. I was late for the photo shoot for some reason-- I remember I made a side trip back to the apartment, and traffic was more horrible than usual-- so I didn't get to be in the picture.
Alternating Currents
Finished this 1956 collection of Frederick Pohl short stories. It's interesting how Pohl was preoccupied by a few particular topics:
- Manipulative marketing and obnoxious forms of advertising. Did Pohl perhaps work in advertising at some point? It's here in the stories The Children of Night and The Tunnel Under the World (which I believe became a Twilight Zone episode) as well as in his well-known novels The Space Merchants and The Merchants' War.
- Stories where protagonists try to change history to prevent the creation or use of atomic weapons, but only end up making things worse. In this collection, there are the stories Let the Ants Try and Target One. Pohl's collaborator C.M. Kornbluth had the same theme in his story Two Dooms.
- Overpopulation, which shows up here in the stories Target One and Grandy Devil. This also showed up in C.M. Kornbluth stories, e.g., The Marching Morons.
10.4 Good Buddy
I finally Tigered up...
I'm not sure it was very useful or necessary to upgrade the laptop (which had been running Panther) but I was more-or-less forced to upgrade the iMac, which was back on Puma. To my irritation, the Puma Mac couldn't use Blogger, it couldn't play Weboggle, and the final, most serious straw, since the iMac is intended to be our media center, it could no longer download music from the iTunes Music Store!
It's bad enough for third-party websites to be incompatible with few-year-old Mac operating systems, but for Apple itself to stop supporting the OS it sold less than four years ago is lame.
I had already ordered the Tiger upgrade pack before I discovered this, so there was no point in angstfully worrying whether buying Tiger was rewarding Apple for their bad behavior.
Bad Signs
At work:
Security Is Our Best Defense. No kidding.
Espionage Is No Sure Bet. You Will Eventually Lose. Eventually, huh? So how many times can you expect to get away with it, on average? Roulette table graphics promote the image of espionage as an exciting weekend getaway in Vegas.
Neighborhood Watch sign north of Montana Boulevard:
If I Don't Call The Police, My Neighbor Will. Guess there's no need for me to take an interest then, is there? Talk about Kitty Genovese syndrome.
Altered Carbon
Spot the typo:
"There, in the room full of mirrors, she threw her head down on the disarrayed sheets, lifted herself up, and I saw myself slide into her up to the hilt with a gasp, because now she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping me with the liquid entirely of hot bathwater" (
Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan, Del Rey edition, seventh page of chapter twenty-seven)
Ansible has been notified.
Altered Carbon is another Philip Marlowe detective story in a sci-fi setting. Lots of kung fu, grenades, computer viruses, monomolecular flechettes coated with spider venom. That sort of thing. Silly but fun.
