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1. Conversation with mother on the phone after work about my twelve-year old niece's television viewing habits. (She lives in South Carolina, I live in NYC. Sort of akin to the distance between England and Greece. Or in other words, 2-3 hour plane flight, and about a day and a half in a car.)
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2. Wed Reading Meme

Nothing new to report, still slogging my way through The Palace Job -- which reads a little bit too much like a Dungeons and Dragons role playing game or video game. (Same issue I had with Ready Player One, too much like a video game. It should be noted that I'm not fond of games. So I'm guessing this book probably appeals more to video game enthusiasts and D&D enthusiasts than folks like me, who, well aren't into games.) I like the characters and their relationships, I just wish there was a bit more of it and less running about fighting people, which can get repetitious and confusing after a while. The fight scenes are confusing in this book, endless, and overly busy. In short, dear reader, I appear to have run into the same problem that I was running into with the romance novel genre, too much of this, and not enough of that. Except I've traded navel gazing/sex scenes for political banter/action sequences.

LOL!

I'm thinking I might like Lies of Lock Lamora better? I was flirting with Issac Asimov's Foundation series at lunch, but it's hard to get the original version...apparently they've copy-edited the hell out of it. Was also flirting with Arabian Knights as translated by Sir Richard Burton.

3. ETA: Found this New Yorker article on FaceBook: Batman vs. Superman is Democrats vs. Republicans.

Interesting take on how our media is reflecting our political campaign, which is grim and appears to be mainly fueled on fear and anxiety. I haven't seen the film, and I'm not sure what I think about what the critic states or if I even agree with him on any of it ...but it's definitely interesting and intrigues me enough to make me want to see the film.

In Snyder’s new film, Superman appears, from the start, as a hopeless naïf, a battler for good who doesn’t admit to his own capacity to do incidental evil, a blinkered warrior who deploys his nearly infinite powers according to his unquestioned moral intuition rather than to the prudent calculation of results.

Bruce Wayne isn’t alone in his disdain. Superman becomes the target of popular protest, editorial denunciations, and critical hearings in the Senate—a state of affairs that suits a clear-eyed villain, Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg). Knowing that Superman is the prime obstacle to his diabolical plot for world dominion, Lex acquires a trove of Kryptonite in order to create a weapon that will kill Superman—and he seeks to stoke public and official enmity toward Superman so that the actual attack on the archetypal superhero will be undertaken by others. The leading other, of course, is Batman.

Snyder parses the difference between the two superheroes with an inspired pair of special effects. Both Superman and Batman have eyes that glow with supernatural powers; Superman’s are red, Batman’s are blue. In effect, Superman is the Republican superhero, Batman the Democratic one. The classic distinction between the right and the left is that the right represents the uninhibited force of natural power, while the left represents a check on natural power in the name of an idea. Batman embodies that check—and, because he himself isn’t up to a mano a mano with Superman, he needs allies.

The movie’s one great line comes in the final showdown, when Superman tells Batman, “If I wanted it, you’d be dead already.” (It’s a “Godfather” riff.) The line announces the rules of the game: Superman is stronger than Batman, but his one great vulnerability renders him more tragically destructible than Batman’s multivariable modalities of death. It also explains, in one phrase, the entire plot and its implications: Superman may be able to kill Batman at will, but Batman, in order to combat Superman effectively, has to have help. He has to make an alliance, even an unwitting one, with other forces, which, in the event, turn out to be the forces of evil, at the command of Lex Luthor.

It’s a salacious political charge to suggest that the Democratic left is inclined to dubious and unwitting alliances with evildoers in order to oppose unwarranted authority at home. The notion has no relationship to contemporary politics (despite some Republicans’ claims of that sort). It’s a powerful metaphor, though, all the more so because Snyder realizes it in hectic images.