Man of Steel (revisited)

For the record, we went back and watched the part of Man of Steel after Kal-El gets off Krypton.  I’d heartily objected to the first part of the movie earlier. While Kevin Costner as Clark Kent's Earth dad is a little over the top, and Zack Snyder's direction means the fight scenes go on forfreakin'ever, on the whole, the thing didn't suck. Alexandra Katherine, my local speaker-to-comics-fans, tells me that this is all in service of starting a Justice League movie franchise, since the Marvel Avengers movie was so successful.  [Spoiler warning] I note that we will start that franchise with an interesting retcon: Lois already knows Clark’s secret identity. 

The Inside Ring / The Second Perimeter

The Inside Ring is the first of a series of thrillers by Michael Lawson, recommended by the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. An attempted assassination of the President is tied up too neatly and the Homeland Security secretary has some suspicions about what actually happened. Our main point-of-view character is Joe DeMarco, the “fixer” for the Speaker of the House, who --- like Robert B Parker's Spenser --- runs around asking questions, stirring up the waters, trying to find answers. However, unlike Parker, the writing is vivid, rather than snarky. The chapters are each reasonably self-contained, many of them written almost like stand-alone flash fiction. The third quarter of the book is predictable and gory, but overall, it's a very, very serviceable thriller.

        In the second of the series, The Second Perimeter, Joe and his friend Emma investigate some shady consulting contracts at a Washington state naval base. (This allows Lawson to give his own Congressman, Norm Dicks, formerly of Washington's 6th, a cameo.) It turns out that the shady contract is, in fact, a cover for an espionage ring, run by a Chinese agent who has past dealings with Emma. After Emma is kidnapped and the action bloodily moves across the border to British Columbia, things get more and more complicated. Our various plot threads are resolved in a shootout at a yacht basin on the Potomac River. I had great fun this time, not only with Dicks's cameo, but aligning various fictional politicians with their real-life counterparts. Again, not great literature, but a perfectly servicable thriller.

Particle Fever

Particle Fever is a lovely little documentary about the work of bringing CERN's Large Hadron Collider on-line. The point-of-view bounces back and forth between the theoreticians at Hopkins and Princeton and Stanford, and the experimentalists up to their hips in hardware at CERN outside of Geneva. We get to see the ups-and-downs of bringing the LHC beam on-line and the failure of super-conducting magnets that cause a delay in bringing the LHC to full power. At the climax, we get to see the seminar in which the two interlocking experiments searching for the Higgs boson present their results, both seeing the same energy peak. During that seminar, as the second team announces the confirming results, the filmmakers turn their camera to the audience breaking into applause and a shot of Peter Higgs, dabbing at the corners of his eyes with his handkerchief.

        One of the things that's only touched on here is one of the eternal struggles in scientific research, the struggle for funding. The question from those in Congress who ask, "what good is it? will it help us make better weapons? why should I spend money on this rather than on tax cuts, social programs, the war on drugs?" The answer is never easy, but it's pretty simple:

        The reason for doing basic scientific research is to understand our world. Learning things is what makes us human. Finding the Higgs boson is what we want to know next. To the reluctant Congressmen, I'd add, this is what makes America great: asking a big question, striving to find out something new, to bring new knowledge to light. It's things like this that bring students to our shores. The answers are ones that won't bear economic fruit tomorrow, or the next day, and perhaps not even directly, but they will make us richer both in spirit and in means.

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.)