Tag Archives: james bond

the secret russians

Is it strange for the cashier at the liquor store to ask you questions about what you’re going to use your purchases for? I mean, if I’m just going to go home and drink a bottle of vodka chased with a bottle of kahlua, maybe I don’t want to tell her. I understood the part where she was interested in the beer she hadn’t tried yet, but found the question about the colour of my Russians a bit invasive.

My neighbour here is an inventor/handyman and it’s kind of interesting. He’s very secretive about his invention which has the potential to “take down an industry” but not a big one like automotives. He borrowed my camera to take some pictures yesterday but didn’t want any help getting good ones and even bought his own SD card to put them on. Which makes me curious. He’s got a patent lawyer doing some searches for him. I don’t know at what stage it gets to pass out of the veil of secrecy. As soon as it does I will let you know.

I was terribly disappointed that Cloud Atlas didn’t make it to Campbell River. I hope that doesn’t bode ill for Django Unchained. Because they’re very similar movies, I understand. (I am not at all worried about the new Bond movie getting here.)

Oh hey, do you want to see what I look like without a beard? And without a hat? Boom.I was trying to figure out the last time I was that clean-shaven and I think it would have been spring of 2004. Of course, this was for a Halloween costume, which I don’t have any pictures of. I think they took a couple of me in costume doing storytime on Wednesday but I didn’t get a copy.

And thus concludes my blogging about whatever random things I thought of before making dinner.

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book review: league of extraordinary gentlemen black dossier

I read this because I decided I’m going to do a buy nothing kind of Xmas this year and don’t really want anyone to buy me presents. This means I no longer had to save the Black Dossier for the Xmas list and could read it for free at work. Hooray.

I was leery of this book beforehand because I loved the first two Extraordinary Gentlemen books, and this was different. The previous volumes were steampunky things where they foiled Moriarity and Wells’ Martian invasion. This one takes place in the 1950s. What cool literary characters could they do neat stuff with there?

Well, when you make James Bond a horrible little prick and do Jeeves & Wooster/Cthulhu pastiches in a world where Britain was actually Airstrip One and the big villain may or may not be Harry Lime (from the Third Man) yeah there’s a lot of coolness. There’s a lot of straight prose in here and varying formats (textbook treatises, memos, British sunday strips, pornographic tracts, the whole shebang) as Mina and Quatermain engage in a (pretty thin) chase to get the dossier talking about what they’ve been doing since 1898. It’s all about the backstory here and it was all pretty neat. I wish I knew more early 20th century British fiction because I think I missed a lot.

The only thing I really disliked was the Kerouac (Sal Paradyse) bit. That’s because it was over the top with the misspellings and stuff which obscured whether it felt like Kerouac at all. I felt it didn’t but it was hard to tell.

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