The World is Not Enough

There's nothing like objective, measurable results to encourage you to keep going. Although having a cold this past week kept me from jogging much; it seemed a bad idea to do strenuous physical exercise when congested and consistently dehydrated. (I was drinking about twice as much water at work each day as I usually do.)

Yesterday I drove up to visit CJ and David, to give CJ a birthday gift, a couple of Mutts cartoon collections. We went out to dinner, and afterwards they showed me a new PC game they've been hooked on. I think the game is called Half Life, but they were playing a version over the net I think called Fortress America. It's a first person shooter game, with a high degree of realism and very inventive images for the maps. Yes, you walk around and blow people away, and work as one of nine different character classes, with different capabilities. I ended up playing it alongside David for a while (okay, until 2 am!), and started off doing pretty well, but got steadily worse (in terms of my kill count vs. my death count) over time. It's a tough game, and David thinks that some people have an advantage if they have better control mechanisms on their computers (though I'm not sure what sort of controls would be better).

It was fun. But there isn't a Mac version, which is perhaps just as well.

And CJ liked the books.

Today I went up to the East Bay to visit my old friend Rob and his wife Kristen. Rob is a lawyer and he works an awful lot. I'm not sure I know anyone who works as much as Rob, not even John. But with a 4-day weekend he decided to take a day off today.

I wanted to meet their new dog, Otto, while he's still a puppy, but he's now a 7-month-old German Shepherd, and is almost as big as their adult Shepherd Hannah! He still has some puppy-like attitudes, but doesn't look like a puppy; he's missing that tiny, adorable cuteness. He was also highly suspicious of me as a visitor, and spent much time barking at me and staying just out of petting range. He finally did warm up to me in the evening when I'd been around most of the day and was giving Hannah a lot of attention.

Rob and I took the dogs out to a dog park and threw Hannah's kong (basically a chew toy with a rope attached) for her. We got them nice and worn out, and met many other dogs as well. Rob pointed out that dog owners have the interesting social experience of chatting with other dog owners just because they all own dogs. It was a cloudy, cool, but basically nice day, and I had a great time wearing out the dogs.

On the way back we stopped at a downtown area in Berkeley (I think called Fourth Street) which is a relatively new commercial development, designed as a pedestrian mall of many small shops, as opposed to the Bay Area standard of mega-malls or shopping centers with "anchor stores". It was really nice, and seems like something that developers elsewhere in the area should try to emulate. Apparently it's been outrageously successful on all fronts: Restaurants, coffee shops, galleries, retail stores, etc. etc. It's rather like Telegraph Ave in Berkeley in that regard, only more upscale. (Rob says he's not wild about Telegraph Ave, finding it a little 'seedy'.)

The real find of the day was Hear Music, a record store with branches in the Bay Area, Chicago, and Canada. Like some other music stores, they have booths set up where you can listen to whole CDs selected by the employees. The difference here is that they have lots of such booths, each with a different theme, and you can take any CD in the store up to the "Music Bar" and they'll unwrap it and put it on for you to listen to. If you decide not to buy it, they put it on a stack to be re-shrinkwrapped and put back in the bin. The overall selection is not amazing, but they do stock interesting stuff - going for quality rather than quantity, I suppose - and for myself it seems like I always have a list of CDs that I'm interested in but uncertain if I really want them, and it's useful to be able to check them out beforehand.

So, for instance, I bought Wayne Shorter's jazz album Speak No Evil which they had on display, and decided after listening to them to buy Gil Evans' The Individualism of Gil Evans over Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. (I quite like the Shorter album, by the way; it has Herbie Hancock and Freddie Hubbard, although it isn't quite as strong as Hancock's Maiden Voyage.)

If you have a chance, this is a store worth checking out. It's smallish, but makes great use of its space. Apparently there's a branch in the Stanford Shopping Center, which is more convenient to me.

After shopping we collected Kristen and went out to see a movie. There weren't any that any of us seemed especially interested in, so I railroaded us to go see the new James Bond film, The World is Not Enough, which is the first Bond film I've seen since The Living Daylights (there have been three in between).

The plot of the film involves destroying a major port for the oil pipelines which send the black stuff to the west, as well as a rather twisted romance between villains, one of whom (Robert Carlyle, playing a terrorist) is insane, suicidal, and (literally) feels no pain. Along the way, Bond (Pierce Brosnan) meets Elektra King (Sophie Marceau), daughter of the late oil baron Sir Robert King (who was assassinated in an impressive explosion), and Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), a young nuclear physicist. The story also involves a revenge plot against M (Judi Dench), and we also meet R (John Cleese), the future replacement for Q (Desmond Llewelyn, who's been in nearly every Bond film) in a brief aside.

Pierce Brosnan makes a pretty decent James Bond, being more suave than Timothy Dalton, but not so far to that extreme as Roger Moore. He brings just enough edge to the role in certain situations, which was basically Sean Connery's strength. The rest of the cast is erratic. Marceau does a good job as King, while Richards plays the lightweight role of Jones with all the impact of window dressing - which is, after all, what she is.

But who cares about the acting? The film barrels along rather nicely, starting with a most impressive speedboat chase on the Thames, with the obligatory skiing sequence, a sequence inside the oil pipeline, and finishing up with a battle in a submarine. It's all very flashy and well-done, even if certain plot points don't make sense (such as the ultimate fate of Bond's adversary in the speedboat chase). But, as someone recently pointed out to me, the basic problem with the film is that it's trying to be a BIG BUDGET ACTION-ADVENTURE FILM rather than the "cartoon for adults" that the earliest and best Connery films tried to be (along with the two best Moore films, Live and Let Die and For Your Eyes Only). Some of the seduction scenes actually get perhaps a little too bluntly explicit which seems a little out-of-place in a Bond film.

Overall: Entertaining film. About as much fun as Sleepy Hollow, and for similar reasons. Worth seeing if you're a Bond fan.

I've recently been lobbied for more cat photos. I have one of myself with Newton as my new photo on my home page, which Tracy took when she visited me earlier this month. I think it turned out well. I look less goofy when I'm not mugging with a toothy grin.