Kitchen Sink: Books, Trains, and TV....

1. Finished reading The Other Guy's Bride by Connie Brockway, which was okay. I agree with shipperx's assessment of it. The ending was a bit silly. And the love scenes felt like satire...or just fell out of nowhere. Brockway isn't good at building a sex scene or writing one, they are unintentionally humorous. I think sex scenes are really hard to write well. Few men can do it, so they avoid or they deliberately right bad ones. *cough*ThomasPynchon*cough*. I think The Last Hellion by Loretta Chase was a tad more subversive though. The heroine is smarter and tougher in that romance, she saves the hero. Actually in most of Chase's novels the heroine saves the hero...which I found interesting. Spent a good portion of the morning reading it. Then watched the abysmal The River - people find this show scary? I don't find it scary. Maybe in a tepid sense. Somewhat grating and silly, but not scary. Also oddly predictable. I baked brownies and made icing during it. Not because I want to eat the brownies or the icing, I don't really. I just wanted to make them. Now I need to figure out what to do with it. If they weren't gluten-free I'd take them to church and to work. I could, but I'd have to lie to people. Because people who aren't on gluten-free diets refuse to try gluten-free baked goods. Weird, I know, but there it is.

2. I love trains. Was thinking about this the other day...I'm in the wrong country or continent. I should have been born European - they have cool trains. Did you know one of the fastest trains in the world is in France?

Isn't that cool? And still safer than driving or buses.

Compare to the 1955 World Speed Record - also France.
( 1955 video of fastest Locomotive...also entirely in French )

The reason trains are safer is that they are more controlled. Set brakes, lots of safety mechanisms in place. While cars and buses really don't have any. You can't control the other drivers, or road conditions etc. While with trains, the tracks are maintained, checked continuously, and if an engineer falls asleep or is drunk, it isn't a major problem, because there are automatic brake and control mechanisms in place. Is it perfect? Of course not. Are there derailments? Of course. But far less than car accidents or bus accidents. I work in the field of transportation, and I spent hours discussing this with a switch signal engineer.
( more reasons why I prefer trains to cars. )

3. How to know you are a geek?

* You can list off the top of your head every Star Trek series that has been on TV and all of the movies...and well you know all the characters more or less by name.
* You know who Joss Whedon is. More importantly you can tell people all the shows he wrote.
And list your favorites.
* You have a weird knowledge of arcane facts and trivia that blows people's minds.
* You actually identify with the cast of Big Bang Theory and Community.

There are others...but my neck hurts and I want to watch Merlin and I'm not sure anyone is really reading this anyway. If so, feel free to list at will in comments or not as the case may be.

4. I'm about to give up on Ringer. I don't like anyone but the poor husband, Andrew, who I am starting to feel really sorry for. The poor guy is being scammed by everyone in his life, talk about your schmuck's. His daughter, his wife, her twin sister, his business partner, his friend, and the new head of one of his companies. Sad. I can't think what he has done to deserve this. Except that he has really bad taste in women. Oddly misogynistic series. It wants to be femme noir, but isn't quite cutting it.

Revenge on the other hand is a lot of fun. Don't have a great deal to say about it, except that it entertains me. And ( spoilers for last episode )

This show unlike Ringer is written tightly and does achieve a noirish tone, also all the characters are interesting, somewhat likable, and complex.


The Vamp Diaries - a bit slower this week, but some nice cliff-hangy moments. ( spoilers )

* Secret Circle - ( spoilers )

Moneyball - Film Review

Just finished watching Moneyball the film based on the best-selling non-fiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning and Unfair Game by Michael Lewis and it is a brilliant film. By the end of it, I was sitting hands on knees, forward in the armchair in rapt attention. At the beginning was knitting, and then suddenly, I was enraptured.

It's a story about how Bill Beane the General Manager of the Oakland A's used an economics whiz to help him figure out how to build a winning team without going broke. He didn't have the money the Yankees did. And in the process they changed how the game is played - not the game on field, the game behind the walls - in the head. Not sure any one has played Fantasy Baseball? It's basically a game in which you trade players, and watch the baseball games, track their scores, how they play, and the winner, is the one who has the best overall average. It's a complicated game.
My Dad played it briefly in the 1980s, and I sort of played it with him - briefly. Neither of us like games very much, so it was brief. You only have so much money. Can trade so many players. If one isn't doing well, you might be able to trade again and it based closely on the actual game.
Baseball fascinates me because there is a science to it, it has layers, it's a thinking man's game.
A game of bluff. Of patience. And miracles.

I started disliking the game when the free agents took over and caused the price to sky-rocket. During that period the Yankees constantly won - because they could afford to spend 1.4 billion for
the game. Teams like the A's, Red Sox, and KC Royals couldn't. But Moneyball changed that. It looked at how you can find different strengths, how each player's strengths and weaknesses build on other players. And how you can do it at much smaller price.
( Read more... )