Month: May 2005

Look! Pretty….

The longtime reader of Brewster’s Millions will notice a few new things here.

“Wow!” you will be saying about now. “Look at all the cool pictures.”

After a few moments of bewilderment, you will probably start thinking along the lines of,

“Why do the pictures link to Amazon.com? Has Brewster’s Millions sold out?”

The answer, of course, is a resounding YES.

In reality, I recently discovered that Amazon has a cool feature to help website owners, and themselves, out. Basically, I get free use of their artwork, by linking directly to their site. Anytime someone purchases something from one of my links, I also get a 10% of the asking price. Now, I really expect to make a big pile of nothing out of this deal. I don’t generate enough hits to believe for a second I’ll make a dime from people linking over to Amazon and buying a bunch of crap. I mainly signed on because I can use the artwork for my reviews, and whatnot, without having to worry about copyright issues. And if I happen to get a couple of dimes out of the deal, who am I to complain?

So, I would appreciate it, that if you plan to buy something from Amazon, click over through one of my links. Heck, drop me a line beforehand and I’ll set up a link to that specific item 🙂

I have also added one of those flashy link thingies to the sidebar for blogexplosion. It is a site designed to boost the traffic to your blog. It is based on the principle that everyone involved wants more traffic. But, in order to get more hits, everybody has to view more blogs. So, I spend a few minutes checking out other people’s blogs. In doing so I earn credit for my blog. This credit is used in putting my blog in the line of blogs that everyone else is looking at. I’ve only been doing it a few days, but I’ve already seen a big increase in traffic. So, if there are any bloggers out there looking for a few readers I would recommend it.

The only problem is that the hits you’ll get are most likely not going to be long-time readers. The system works so that you have to view a blog for 30 seconds or more. But it is easy to have the blog up while you’re doing something else and check back every half minute in order to punch through to the next one. I’ve viewed a whole bunch of blogs lately, but have read very, very few of them. Unless the blog has something really catchy right up front, I’m likely to jump back over to playing Spider Solitaire. All of which makes me really want to spend more time making my blog look better. Hence, the Amazon pictures.

I am also looking to change the overall outlook of the blog. I’ve already put in a request to a friend to give me a cool banner to run at the top, but I have yet to get a response from him. I hope, within a few months, to really redesign the whole thing to make it a little more mine, and a lot less blogspots. If anyone has any design skills and wants to help out a lonesome blogger, drop me a comment.

I’ll officially have my one-year anniversary as a blogger towards the end of the month. Unofficially, it is a few months later since I really didn’t start blogging until I made it to France in September.

Create Your Own Title

Once upon a time, Amy and I both purchased monthly tram passes. The idea was that we were both riding the tram enough to justify buying a pass. It was cheaper that way, instead of buying a ticket for each ride. The monthly pass is a driver’s license kind of deal; with pictures, electronic devices for to validate the pass for each ride, and a nice little plastic casing. Anyways, due to the sunshine and warmth of the season, I have opted to not renew my pass. I walk pretty much everywhere now. Amy has kept hers though, because she gets a student discount which makes it still worth the cash.

To renew the pass you simply have to find one of the ticket machines, insert your card and pay for a new month. The other day while she was doing this, we noticed an option in which you could buy 30 tickets for 30 Euros. This is a rather good deal since normally the tickets cost 1.20 Euro per ticket. We decided to go ahead and make this deal a reality figuring I’d use up the 30 tickets by the time we need to leave France. We were quite surprised when, after paying for the 30 tickets, no tickets came forth. It turns out the 30 tickets are actually not tickets at all. They loaded Amy’s card with 30 passes. This does me absolutely no good because the card is in her name. We are not sure yet whether or not the 30 passes will forward themselves into next month since she has already paid for the month of May. My suspicions are that they will not and that even though she is paid up for May, each time she validates the pass it will take another ticket off of her stockpile.

That’s 30 Euros out the window.

In better news, spring is back. After a week of rather cool, rainy weather, the sun came back out and the temperature rose. My tan is getting darker.

I went to a screening of The Wild Bunch last night. The local art house is doing a month of classic westerns. Amy was unable to go due to some poor planning with cooking a chicken. Instead, I went with my friend Flore. I had never seen it before, and it was great to catch it on the big screen. A review, will no doubt, be forthcoming.

As I have mentioned before on Mondays we often go to the local Irish pub to sit around with the English students and Amy’s coworkers. Last Monday was the best time I’ve ever had there. I’m usually not a big fan of the event. I don’t really know most of the students, and though it is an event meant for everyone to practice their English, it usually happens that everyone speaks French. So, I sit, sipping my Coke, feigning some kind of interest. This past occasion was different. Oh, there was still quite a bit of French spoken, but it didn’t bother me so much. Now that I am but weeks away from leaving France, I have gotten to know a number of French students fairly well. Or at least well enough to converse with them without much awkwardness. In moving from state to state over the last several years, I have found this to be the way of life. You spend the first several months living in a new place feeling kind of bummed out that you don’t know anyone, only to really enjoy yourself amongst friends right before you leave.

Maximum Bob by Elmore Leonard

maximum bob

Reading an Elmore Leonard novel is a lot like watching a good, not great movie. There is a lot of style, dialogue that demands to be spoken out loud, and interesting and twisting plots, with great ease in being read. Maybe that’s why so many of his books are made into movies. They read like screenplays.

Maximum Bob was actually made into a television show starring Beau Bridges, but it didn’t last past a season.

What we get here is a breezy, fun novel about Bob Gibbs, a conservative, hard-nosed judge nick-named “Maximum Bob” for his tendency to deal out the full force of the law. Bob begins to fancy a no-nonsense probation officer, Nancy Baker, who is busy tangling with a couple of low-life losers. Things get complicated when a giant alligator shows up on Bob’s front porch scaring his former mermaid-turned-new-age-psychic wife into leaving him for good. Add into the mix Dale Crowe Junior, one of the aforementioned losers, who is plotting to flee from an oncoming prison sentence, and Owen, Dale’s uncle, and recently released ex-convict. The outcome is a wild ride, which is enjoyable to read, but without a lot of depth or staying power.

Leonard is a good craftsman. He has a real knack for creating interesting plots. He is often praised for his dialogue, but I can’t say that I was too impressed with it here. It has that screenplay feel to it, and would probably sound a lot better coming out of an actor’s mouth, than lying flat on the written page. Actually, that’s a good idea. Next time I read a Leonard novel I’ll act out all the parts.

I read the novel in a couple of days while basking in the sun at the local park. It was a good novel for that purpose. It was easy to pick back up after being distracted by the Frisbee players, and the ball-chasing dog, without having to think about what I had just read. It was entertaining enough to get me occupied while loafing for several hours as well. It is also forgettable enough that once I’ve written this review I’ll pretty much never think about it again. Well, at least until I browse the L-N shelf at the library.

28 Days Later (2002)

28 days later poster

The zombies are fast.

It’s true that in Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later the crazed, flesh-eating villains aren’t technically zombies. In fact, Boyle has gone to great lengths to qualify them as humans infected with a virus known as RAGE. Yet, to this reviewer at least, the differences seem moot. In traditional zombie pictures, and in this film the creatures are mindless, they carry a real zeal for human flesh, they have a predilection for turning everyone else into their like, and they are fairly easy to kill. Whether the creatures are the living dead so to speak, or infected by an incurable virus doesn’t make much of a difference. Though the zombies here, seem updated from their cinematic ancestors.

These zombies are fast.

Traditional zombies are a slow-moving lot. Having been rotting in their own graves for untold years, their reanimated flesh is a little atrophied, causing them to move at a slow, sluggish pace. This has always been a helpful plot point for the heroes in zombie films, for they are easy to run away from. In fact, zombies are generally able to kill their victims through sheer numbers. Individually they are easy to destroy, but as an oncoming onslaught, the sheer numbers win every time.  Boyle circumvented this convenience by allowing his monsters to run at normal human speeds. It is an excellent update to the genre, giving the ability for more scares.

Man, I dug the first half of this movie. Well, except for the very, very beginning. The opening scene gives us the origin of RAGE, with a bunch of Clockwork Orange-inspired monkeys. I’ve never really dug origin scenes in zombie flicks. I think it’s much scarier to just have the zombies running around eating brains, without any reason for their existence. Origins, generally, just seem dumb. And here, with the infected monkeys being freed by some Green Peace types doesn’t really inspire any other feelings. Though, I suspect it was another move to plant this film outside the zombie track.

But after the scene of the dumb origin, things get really good. We’ve got a naked guy named Jim (Cillian Murphy) hooked up to various tubes in a hospital bed. I always like it when there is a bit of male nudity in a flick since there is always so much of the female variety. Anyways, Jim gets out of bed and wanders the streets of London. There are plenty of shots of Jim (fully clothed now) walking by big famous London monuments without another soul around. It seems London has been vacated. It is creepy and effective.

In a bit, Jim clamors into a church figuring to find some sanctuary, or at least have a few questions answered. What he finds is a bunch of dead folks piled up. In a good holy crap moment, Jim says, “Hello” to find a couple of the dead guys not so dead and jumping up. From there until the second half of the film, it is a constant run from the zombies.

The zombies really work in this film. They are fast, furious, and vicious. Jim eventually teams up with some other survivors and they set about trying to figure out what to do. Boyle really does a great job of adding tension to the film and keeping the scares up.

Then the film changes.

The group is rescued by a gang of all-male military types, living in a compound. Turns out the military types are a bunch of psychos and the film turns from being a zombie flick into being a stranded-in-a-compound-with-a-bunch-of-psycho-military-types kind of film. To make sure we know this is no longer a zombie flick, a big group of zombies launches an attack on the compound only to be massacred with machine guns and land mines.

In this half of the film, I don’t dig nearly as much. Zombie flicks always have trouble filling out their whole hour-and-a-half time slot. Even with a good introduction of characters, and a slow build to zombie free-for-all, there is still plenty of filler time. Here, the filmmakers seem to have decided that they might as well dump the zombies and give us some other tension-filled concoction. But, there isn’t really enough time to develop the military end of the story and it feels wrong.

It’s too bad too because that first half was really promising.

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

for whom the bell tolls

What can I say about Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 masterpiece For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Read It.

I’ll have to give it a little time to settle, but I suspect this novel will officially enter my favorite top 10 novels of all-time list.

It is written in Hemingway’s usual terse style. Descriptive adjectives are few, replaced by verbs. Lots of verbs. This is not to say that it is a book filled with action. For, in fact, much of the novel consists of waiting, sitting, and talking. In the nearly 600 pages, there are only three scenes of real action: Pillar’s retelling of the beginning of the revolution in her town; El Sordo’s last stand, and the bombing of the bridge. The remaining pages consist of the relationships between those involved in the war.

The war is the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Instead of focusing on the larger aspects of this war, Hemingway decides to focus on a single guerilla outfit fighting against the fascists. The main character is Robert Jordan, an American Spanish professor, who has volunteered to fight against the fascists as well. He has been ordered to destroy an important bridge and enlists the guerilla band of Pablo. In doing so, he details the experiences of the average, normal citizens of a country fighting for its destiny.

With the exception of World War II stories, most retellings of war, come from a perspective that all war is terrible and unjust. Here, Hemingway shows not only the horrors of fighting a war but also the sometimes necessity of it. Yet, he is also able to show the confusion of its participants.

Anselmo, a trusted companion of Jordan, midway through the novel ponders what he would be doing had he been raised with fascist ideals. He truly believes in what he is fighting for but realizes that under different circumstances he would be fighting on the other side of the lines. Many wars are fought by soldiers without any true sense of the ideals behind them. For Whom the Bell Tolls is often called a novel on the death of ideals. And it is true, nearly every idealized truth that is held up by the band seems tarnished and destroyed by the novel’s end.

It is impossible, within the confines of a review, to fully expound upon the greatness of this novel. It is a piece of literature, of art, that should be read, reread, studied, and made mandatory reading for every human being.

Read It.

A Day In The Life

It is amazing how with nothing to do, I still struggle to write for this blog. To demonstrate I’ll break down today’s activities.

I awoke at 8:30 this morning. I then spent the next hour or so checking my e-mail, having breakfast, and generally shaking the sleep out of me. Around 9:30 or so I got a shower and dressed. Amy and I then went to the library to return some books. Even though I had promised myself I would not check any more books out in order that I would concentrate on finishing Les Miserables, I check out three more books. We returned home around 11:00. I read for a bit and then fixed lunch. Post lunch I continued my reading because Amy was busy researching our next trip on the computer. I did manage to write out a rough sketch of my For Whom the Bell Tolls review. I also played a little Gameboy. Then it was to the grocery store to pick up the next several day’s meals. Fixed supper and then watched the X-files on DVD. Around 7 I finally got on the computer to start writing a review. It’s not almost 9 and I am just now getting to blog, the first time in several days at that.

I don’t know if that’s bragging that I get to spend my days reading, lounging, and writing, but to me, it seems like the days just fly and I can’t get what I want to do accomplished.

It has been clouds and rain the last several days, so I have been unable to walk to the park. It has been a good time to clean up the house though! There is a new AIMer here in Strasbourg, Kailyn. We had her and Pamela over for dinner last night. She is a very nice, sweet girl fresh out of high school. Her youth and nativity are both refreshing and a little unsettling. It’s been so long since I was so fresh and not cynical that it surprises me when I find someone so buoyant.

Million Dollar Baby, Misbehaving, and Flowers

My wife is currently out seeing Million Dollar Baby without me. The louse! She had class all day today, and my memory said that she isn’t usually home until around 5 or so. So, a little after lunch I took off to the park, once again. I seem to be quite addicted to park strolling. I hate to rub it in again, but I really love not working and living in France. Anyways, I returned home to find a note from the wife explaining that she had gone to see the film. It’s a movie she didn’t really want to see anyway! Why couldn’t she wait for me? I guess that’s what I get for not being home. Actually, I think it is payback for yesterday.

Yesterday, I woke up feeling rather nauseated and dizzy. I laid in bed awhile, and by lunch time the nausea had turned into just an upset stomach, and the dizziness was a pounding headache. A little later, I felt rather fine. We were going to church at 2 in the pm, but I decided to skip it. You see Sunday was another French holiday, and the trams were not running. Daniel had agreed to pick us up and drop us home afterward, but I didn’t want to get there, only to feel ill again and have to make someone take me home early. So, Amy took off to the supposed meeting spot without me.

Twenty minutes or so later and I was feeling rather good, and rather bored. I decided some fresh air would do me good. As always, my feet led me straight to the park, where I spent a good two and a half hours sitting in the shade. I came home to find a very upset Amy asking me where I had been. Apparently, she never met up with Daniel because I got the meeting place wrong. After 45 minutes of waiting she came home expecting a sick husband, and finding an empty apartment. She called Daniel, who sent Tammy because Amy broke down on the phone. Tammy sat with Amy calming her down and then left her here at home. Needless to say, she was not pleased.

I felt like a boy with his hand in the cookie jar. I tried to explain that I had felt better and decided to take a walk. I hadn’t meant for it to be such a long absence, but there it was. The doghouse is where I stayed for a good while. And now she’s seeing the movie without me.

I have so many pictures of flowers, it is ridiculous. As stated I travel to the park often. I always take my camera with me and I always take a ton of pictures. Even though I’ve pretty much covered the entire park in pictures several times over, I can’t help but take more. I’ve always been a flower fan, and the ones at the park are so gorgeous I get swept up in their beauty and take more and more pictures. Maybe I’ll post another one here.