Smoking Aces

I went to see the new film Smoking Aces this afternoon. It had an incredibly talented cast with Jeremy Piven, Andy Garcia, Ryan Reynolds, Matthew Fox, Ben Affleck, Peter Berg to just name a few of the participants. Unfortunately, there was not script, plot, or characterization. It really looked like someone said, "Hey this studio will give us umpteen million dollars to make a film so lets all have a huge party while we do it."

Someone had to have been drunk to make this piece of drek.

Skip it.

Amtrak tales

I had the Midwinter meeting of the American Library Association this past weekend in Seattle. I took advantage of crossing the country on the company nickel so to speak to go a few days early and visit my brother and his family who live outside of Portland, OR. So I flew into Seattle and took the train south.

Everything was moving along smoothly until the moment arrived. I was reading the Philosophical Strangler by Eric Flint, an amusing book that I can recommend to those of you with slightly bent senses of humor, with my headphones on when I noticed to two high school age girls sitting across the aisle from me jump up and stare at something out of the window. This attracted my attention. Almost immediately the conductor came on the intercom and informed us that the train had just hit a car and we would have to stop while the crew checked for damage. So there we sat for about an hour and half waiting. It turns out that after the serious snow storm that had hit the Pacific Northwest a few day earlier some black ice had developed on the railroad crossing which had caused a car to become stuck. The people had all abandoned said car prior to the train coming along and smiting it.

While this delay almost doubled my travel time, it did leave me with this not so interesting tale to tell.

John Grisham's The Broker

I picked up a copy of John Grisham's fairly recent work entitled The Broker to read during my time locking in Northwest Airlines Torture Chamber of Doom. Grisham seems to be trying to get beyond courtroom dramas and into spy thrillers. He failed rather miserably in this endeavour. The book was boring and poorly plotted and the end came to a wimpering blob.

Not a book to read.