Puttering in the Study

Grayson's first baseball game

Grayson's baseball career started Saturday with his first game with the 7-8 year old Braves.  While he didn't get a hit, the important thing is that we got the following pictures of his first time at bat (his brothers were sitting in the bleachers with us cheering like mad).  What was (also) cute was that after he swung and missed at the first two pitches he turned around and waved one finger at the crowd to let us all know that he had one more ball coming.

Casino Royale

Finally got to watch this last night, and really liked it.  The movie includes much of what's in the original Ian Fleming book - right down to dialogue in some instances - and was in many ways a very different Bond movie.  The gadgets and humor are gone, as is the entire concept of a mature, suave, sophisticated Bond.  This Bond is not only a throwback to the cold, hard killer of the books - he's actually in pre-double-oh status as the move begins.
Although there were a couple of rough spots in the editing, and Craig could not carry some really schmaltzy dialogue towards the end (no one could) I thought the movie was solidly entertaining.  Eva Green is a favorite of mine and while I didn't think she was as beautiful or glamorous as Bond girls typically are, she underscored the film's new realistic tone - she was more than just a piece of scenery - she was a real character.
The real issue is Daniel Craig - where does he fall in the Bond pantheon.  I'm probably in the minority in thinking Pierce Brosnan is the best Bond ever - with Sean Connery a close sceond.  What does it for me is the cold, cruel tone he gives the character - which is straight from the books, and missing from every other Bond (including Connery).  Craig is phenomenal in this area - he's as cold and cruel as you could askk for, and far grittier.  That's why I can't pick one over the other - because these are two Bonds - Brosnan plays the mature, sophisticated Bond, and probably does it better than Craig could (although Craig's "Bond - James Bond" at the film's end indicates that the change has begun, and he's probably up to the task).  But Craig is playing a different character - a younger, almost completely unsophisticated Bond, and it's hard to picture Brosnan doing this one.
Bottom line is that I really liked the movie, and admire the movie's ability to completely reboot the character like this.  The gadgets and humor and world-threatening villains in the old ones were getting to the point that the films were almost fantasies.  These are a lot more realistic, and it'll be interesting watching the character develop (who would have though anyone would be writing that about a James Bond movie).

The Prestige - Christopher Nolan

This is one of the Christopher Priest books I have not read, and I didn't make it to see the movie, but as soon as I got a chance to watch it on DVD I did.  I liked it okay - the leads and the director are favorites of mine, and I thought it clicked along pretty well.  But nothing special.  The biggest surprise was probably how well David Bowie did as Tesla.  He had this distracted, almost constipated vibe going on that I thought was very good.  And it was good to see Andy Serkis actually get to act!

How Can You Tell If Collin Liked Space Center Houston?

I think he liked it.

2007 Spring Break - Space Center Houston & Kemah Boardwalk

We just got back from our first family spring break trip.  This year we went to Houston after I finished work on a brief at the office Thursday afternoon with the boys and Jamie's parents Jim and Marie, all in our car.  We spent Friday at Space Center Houston (which, when I was growing up was referred to simply as "NASA") then Saturday at Kemah Boardwalk.  We'd done this same trip with Grayson in September of 2001 when Jamie had a treasurers' school at Galveston.  We came back this afternoon, and I just downloaded all the pictures to a new photo album (at right).

A Time of Gifts: on foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube - Patrick Leigh Fermor

Kevin Priestner, who I work with on the Texas Bar Journal editorial board, recommended this book after reading my review of On Foot to the Golden Horn, and coincidentally a few weeks later it showed up on a Folio circular just as I was looking for an excuse to order some more books.   (Nobody tell my wife, okay?)
A Time of Gifts is an account of a 1930's trek by a young Englishman across Europe from Holland to Constantinople.  While Fermor's writing often falls into almost impenetrable prose describing the marvelous sights of nature or architecture, most of the time it is pretty readable (I've never seen so many new adjectives), and you learn a lot about what there is to see along the way - especially when you're staying at castles every second or third night, hearing stories about the glorious past of Central Europe before "the war" - in this case World War I - Hitler has just come to power in Germany as Fermor is traveling.  In this, the first book, he works his way down the Rhine and Danube through Holland, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and is just crossing into what Woodrow Wilson thought should be Hungary on Easter eve of 1934 as the book ends.  (There's a sequel that I have to go get now - The Wrath of Fermor or something like that).  The prose and the things he carries on about are not unlike Tolkien in Lord of the Rings, by the way, although Tolkien is never as hard to follow.  Fernor frequently just floats up into the air, language-wise, and you just have to wait a few paragraphs or pages for him to come back down and resume the story.
Two things struck me about this book.  First, Fermor's opening account of his troubled upbringing makes me think all too much about how close he was, due to bad behavior growing up, to falling completely out of any sort of productive life.  He was kicked out of schools, university, and a military career, and was floundering as to what he could do with his life when the thought struck him that if he could just do something interesting - like, say, walk across Europe, he would have something interesting to write about.
The second is how incredibly educated this marginal student is.  Articulate in Latin, Greek, English, and a number of other languages as the need arose, he has a stunning reservoir of learning, including the ability to recall apparently hours of memorized passages in various foreign languages, an encyclopedic knowledge of various playwrights, including Shakespeare (although he thinks he's woefully unread on many authors, such as, for example, Proust, at the time of his travel), history, and so forth.  I had seen something similar in C.S. Forester's account of the education that English schools literally beat into him in his formative years, so the idea that, under pressure, the very young mind can absorb a phenomenal amount of information, was not totally new to me, but still, I am amazed that such a marginal student could know so much that required a technical faculty, such as Latin and German.  (Of course this evening I was amazed that my second grader can unerringly tell when to use "a" and "an" and the proper choice betwee "large" "larger" and "largest" so I'm easily impressed).  Still, this guy seems almost superhuman in what he knows, although he clearly thinks that he's inadequately educated to mingle with the ancien regime nobility that entertain him in their mountaintop schloss along the way.  Admittedly, part of that is because he's writing this forty years later and knows now how much he didn't know then, but  the point is that he does not take pride in what he knows - it is just part of the classical education that he expects he should have, and regrets that he has not completed.
Overall, I enjoyed the book - especially in this beautiful Folio edition - enough to start looking for the sequel.  Anything that ends in Constantinople I am all about.

Texas State Student Association (TSSA)

Was just browsing the Internet looking for an old friend who had worked for the incoming Harris County judge and learned that the old TSSA that I was president of in 1987-88 dissolved in the early 1990's, but some student at St. Mary's started to revive it a couple of years ago.  I wanted to get this post up so that anyone browsing the Internet and looking for information on TSSA or the Texas State Student Association (or its predecessor TSA, or the Texas Student Association) can contact me.  The year I was president I had compiled a year-by-year list of the officers from 1949 or so forward (we had the first president speak at our convention in 1988) and a history of the organization, plus bylaws, etc., all in a discrete set of publications that I still have copies of (and can easily scan).
Just post to this link and I'll get in touch with you.

Grayson's 2007 Pinewood Derby - "Herbie"

Grayson competed in his second Pinewood Derby with Cub Scouts last weekend (the pack) and yesterday (the district).  While he didn't win anything higher than second place in his den, he had a great time building his car, a miniature "Herbie" VW bug. 
Another thing you might be able to see in these pictures is Grayson's new "Wolf" cub patch, which is, incidentally, something I earned as well about 35 years ago, and still have on my red Scouting patch vest.
In a really odd coincidence, when we left the mall from the race, they were having a car show in the high school parking lot, featuring a real Herbie VW - so we swung by and let the boys see the latest favorite car. 

Star Trek: Remastered

This past weekend I discovered Star Trek: Remastered, which is a current program to remaster the original 1960's StarTrek episodes with new special effects to bring the series up to current technical standards.  The original film prints are used to maximize image quality, and new effects and paintings (such as that of Vulcan from Amok Time to the left).  See http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/TOS/article/28095.html for details on the episodes.

I located which station was showing them locally and caught Amok Time last weekend, which is the episode where Spock gets into a rut (literally).  The new effects are terrific - you don't get distracted by bad or dated effects work now, and the image quality is terrific.  Actually that's almost a problem because I don't think they ever intended the original film to be seen in HD format, which is what is almost is.  For example, I'd never seen an original episode where Spock actually looked green.  But here the green makeup is always noticeable, and in one scene it is almost pea-green, and really distracting (which is fascinating, I must say).  I really enjoyed the episode, and was surprised how good it was.  Shatner is a bit of a ham strutting around much of the time, which isn't a bad thing in that role - I think it is entirely correct for a starship captain, and when he is off-stage in a scene, his acting reduces down and he does well.  DeForest Kelly is always a bit off on his acting, it seems to me (although not as much as a remembered), but Leonard Nimoy is just terrific most of the time.  He's focused, serious, and really brings some serious acting chops to the role.  I enjoyed the episode, and look forward to watching more.

(I also saw Paradise Syndrome last weekend, and although it was not the remastered version, it was amazingly clear.  can't say I thought much about Shatner's Kirk in that episode, but it was a pretty goofy story line, and I suspect the director had him take it over the top a bit.  The parts on the Enterprise between McCoy and Spock were quite good, though.)