Gambit

For Thanksgiving weekend amusement, I suggest Gambit, a lovely 2012 caper movie, with Colin Firth playing the art curator for a rapacious, annoying, ill-mannered Rupert Murdoch billionaire played by Alan Rickman, and Cameron Diaz as the Texas rodeo queen who is supposed to in possession of a long-missing Monet from his Haystacks series. Diaz's Monet is a forgery, perpetrated by Firth's accomplice, and Rickman already owns one of the series, for which he outbid his Japanese business rival at auction. Much hilarity ensues as Rickman tries to put the moves on Diaz, and Firth ends up on the ledge of the Savoy Hotel without his trousers. Eventually, the painting is delivered and Rickman brings in a second expert, who authenticates the fake. Then things get complicated. It's not deep and it's not a great plot, but it's amusing nonetheless, with good performances all around.

Buzz

Following from Anders de la Motte's Game, we have the second book in the trilogy, Buzz, in which our ne'er-do-well slacker, having taken revenge on the organizers of the Game and after a long foreign holiday, finds himself in a Dubai prison on murder charges after a night of drug-infused partying. Meanwhile, his sister, the bodyguard, finds herself brought up on charges for waving off the arrival of a Swedish diplomat to a meeting in an African country. The slacker takes a real job, under an assumed name, infiltrates a company he thinks may be involved in the Game, takes up with an attractive woman, becomes a party to some insider trading. His sister fights the charges, argues with her boyfriend, carries on a clandestine affair, meets a long-lost uncle, finds a plot to invade the royal palace on New Years Eve. Like Game, quite the page-turner, with a lot of local color from Stockholm, a city which I wish I knew better.

Presentation Zen

Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (2008, 2nd edition 2011) is a fairly short, very dense book about constructing your public presentations with skill and care to get your message across. Because he's studied zen, and mostly lives in Japan, he takes a very introspective view of how to develop a presentation. Reynolds certainly has some interesting ideas about how to make compelling slides --- including not using any slides at all in some cases --- and echoes some of the points I made in a Toastmasters speech I gave a couple of years ago entitled "PowerPoint PitFalls". He also introduces a trick I want to try from Japan called pecha-kucha (Japanese for "chatter") in which you do a presentation by talking through 20 slides for 20 seconds each, with slides on a timer so you have to get your talk completely keyed and timed to the images behind you.

Despicable Me 2

A little while back, I favorably reviewed Despicable Me, and have now had a chance to see the inevitable 2013 sequel, Despicable Me 2, which is just as much fun. Former arch-villian Gru, now a devoted father, is recruited to join the Anti-Villain League. He and his partner, Lucy, succeed in finding the bad guy despite his secret identity. Unfortunately, a number of Gru's minions are kidnapped in the process, and they must be saved, too. And, because this is a fairy tale, Lucy and Gru fall in love. As much fun as the original, with Steve Carell continuing to display his breadth as the voice of Gru, Kristen Wiig hilariously playing Lucy, and Benjamin Bratt as the bad guy, El Macho.

(And I note from IMDb, it looks like the Minions are set to have their own movie.)

What If?

Randall Munroe is, of course, known for the often hilarious web comic xkcd, but he's also been answering odd questions on his web site for a number of years. The questions and answers are now gathered in What If?, subtitled "Serious Scientific Answers to Absurb Hypothetical Questions." Most questions merit a several page essay considering issues such as how a longbow archer is an arrow generator with a frequency of 150 millihertz and how many archers you need to shoot enough arrows to block out the sun. Or what happens if the earth suddenly stopped spinning. Or how much Force power Yoda can output. He uses a lot of entertaining footnotes, including a number of pseudo-Wikipedia [citation needed] notes, and some more-or-less accurate calculations. His explanations sometimes take notable shortcuts on clarity, but this is, after all, in the interests of amusement, not scientific rigor. There are also some interjections of questions he chose to not answer, like: "what is the total nutritional value (calories, fat, vitiamins, minerals, etc) of the average human body?" All-in-all it's a lot of fun, but may require a certain nerd sensibility to appreciate.

zen pencils

For a couple of years, the excellent Australian free-lance artist Gavin Aung Than has been producing a several-times-a-week cartoon, zen pencils, each illustrating an interesting quotation. Not only are the quotations inspirational, so is Gavin’s own story: he quit a regular job to do this because he was getting no emotional fulfillment out of commercial art. He landed a syndication contract with Universal Press, and now appears on their web site, though he's still available at his own site zenpencils.com. Now many of his cartoons are collected in a volume of the same name, which I bought not only because the work is good and the illustrations add amazing depth to the text, but to encourage Gav to continue doing this. I recommend it to you for the same reasons.

Superfreakonomics

Superfreakonomics is Stephen Leavitt and Stephen Dubner's 2009 sequel to the wildly interesting 2006 Freakonomics. They discuss the economics of prostitution, how tracking bank fraud can also help you track down terrorists, and how the number of automobile deaths went up up in the months after September 11th, not because people were afraid to fly, but (as you find if you look at the numbers more closely and notice that they were clumped in the northeast and showed a larger-than-usual number of alcohol-related accidents) because of post-traumatic stress.  Currently, they’ve followed up with Think Like a Freak, about the metaproblems of thinking outside the economics box, which is in the to-be-read pile.

Feed

I was wrong. I read the first bits of Mira Grant's Feed before the 2011 Hugo deadline, but not enough to actually get the feel of it. And so I voted for Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear first for that year's Hugo. However, now that I've finished it, I can report that Feed is just a killer book --- in both senses of the word. Grant managed to tell a really compelling story about life in the mid-twenty-first century after the zombies have come. She manages to get enough Joss Whedon-style snarkiness in, particularly in the interactions between our point-of-view character Georgia (as in "George Romero") and her brother Shaun (as in "...of the Dead"), and their sidekick Buffy. Together they run a web site where Georgia is in charge of the news (the "Newsies"), Shaun is in charge of exploring the outside world and occasionally chasing zombies (the "Irwins", who give out an annual award called the "Golden Steve-o"), [As a tossoff, she notes about Shaun, "A good Irwin can make going to the corner store for a candy bar and a Coke look death defying and suicidal." Those of you who have seen Shaun of the Dead will note that scene sounds eerily familiar.] and Buffy runs the poetry and story side of the house (the "Fictionals").

     Then she leavens it with some swipes at thinly disguised versions of current political figures, like the congresswoman from Minnesota running for president who is described as a "publicity-seeking prostitute who decided to pole-dance on the Constitution for spare change." But it's not all lightness: she provides an excellent political thriller as a base, in which people die badly. And she manages to write it with some gut-wrenching passages like the quote below from Shaun's blog.

        She rounded out the rest of the "Newsflesh" trilogy with Feed and Blackout, both also highly recommended.

"If you ever start to feel like I have a glamorous job, that maybe it would be fun to go out and poke a zombie with a stick while one of your friends makes a home movie for your buddies, please do me a favor: Go out for your hazard license first. If you still want to do this crap after the first time you've burned the body of a six-year-old with blood on her lips and a Barbie in her hands, I'll welcome you with open arms."

The Thirteenth Floor

The Thirteenth Floor was one of the computer-mediated-reality movies in 1999, the year which brought us The Matrix and Being John Malkovich, all of which foreshadowed Inception. Based on a Daniel F Galouye book, a software company builds an artificial-reality based in 1930s Los Angeles, and their chief scientist discovers that, in fact, they're in an artificial reality themselves. "Wait! You mean it's turtles all the way down?" Well, maybe. The casting and acting are excellent, since we have each actor playing a different version of themselves in each of the levels of reality. We have a very young Vincent D'Onofrio and the lovely Gretchen Mol and versatile Craig Bierko and Armin Mueller-Stahl putting characters on and off like cardigans. Not as well-known as its contemporaries, but a more subtle story.

$

For this week's light Friday fare, we put together Warren Beatty and a very young Goldie Hawn in a 1971 caper movie named $. Beatty plays a bank security consultant who figures out how to empty the safe-deposit boxes of folks who are hiding ill-gotten gain. He's in cahoots with Hawn, playing the spacey hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. Amusement ensues. Not great cinema, but worth an evening sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn.

Blackout / All Clear

I first heard Connie Willis reading pieces of what would become Blackout in the spring of 2002. It was one of the books I wanted to read on our fall vacation in Whistler back in 2010 shortly after it was published.  It might not have affected me as it did had I not spent the entire preceding week immersed in capturing my father’s memories of WWII as an Air Corps officer. To read her retelling (in part) of the stories of Londoners in the Blitz, of the guys who built a fake Army to convince the Germans the invasion was coming at Calais, of the ambulance drivers and air raid wardens and rescue workers is all pretty amazing. I timed reading Blackout carefully, knowing that it was only half the story, and that if I got sucked in at the cliffhanger, I'd only have to wait a few weeks for the second half, All Clear, to appear. I was and I did.

     Basically, a flock of time-travelling Oxford historians (see Willis' Hugo-winning "Fire Watch", et sequelae) are visiting Britain during the War. Things, of course, go wrong --- including the whole of the events in the "Fire Watch" taking place under their noses. Oxford don Mr Dunworthy traipses back into the past in an attempt to help and finds himself trapped, too. There was a point in the middle where I was getting frustrated with Willis for dragging us through day after day of the uncertainty of our time travellers dealing with the uncertainty of the Blitz. But then I realized: this is what it must have been like. Not just the uncertainty of the time-travelling historians, but the uncertainty of day-to-day life for Londoners in the Blitz, for everyone in southern England during the V-1 and V-2 attacks, for everyone while the threat of invasion was high. She manages to weave in the central mystery of why things are going wrong, with some surprising results. I blasted through the back half of All Clear on a Sunday afternoon, and when I was done and tears were streaming down my face, my first reaction was "How the hell did she do that!?" and my second was "I'm glad she did."

Manhood for Amateurs

Manhood for Amateurs is Hugo- and Pulitzer-winner Michael Chabon's 2009 book of essays, subtitled "The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son." It is, unfortunately, disappointing. While there is the occasional characteristic turn-of-phrase that makes me enjoy Chabon's writing, this smacks of little essays-as-writing-exercises that were tossed into a drawer and pasted togther to make a book. Some of them are interesting, to be sure --- his musing about how being elected President was going to take Barack Obama away from his daughters, his internal struggle about being honest with his children about smoking marijuana --- but overall, we expect far more from Chabon.

    As an aside, shortly after I finished this, there was a review in the December 2009 Atlantic for Ayelet Waldman's then-current book, Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace. I read the review, because it was by fellow Caltech alum Sandra Tsing Loh, though I did not intend to read the book itself. I note this only for the purposes of amused contrast, since it is out simultaneously with Chabon's book and Waldman is Mrs Chabon.