Friday was supposed to be Pulp Adventures, but Doyce begged off the regulars, suggesting it might work better later on. So Margie and I had a nice Friday evening to ourselves.
Well, not entirely. There was an Orientation/Picnic/Open House at Kitten’s preschool (Dry Creek Elementary). Lots of milling around outside and kids playing on the extensive playground equipment (the doors, which were supposed to open up at 5, didn’t open up until closer to 6:30).
I got to meet the two teachers in her class, and they seem like very nice ladies, just the sort you remember from your own kindergarten days.
The classroom looked fun — an odd wedge shape, given the school’s semi-circle layout, but full of cool toys and play areas and little miniature tables and chairs for the young’uns.
(My teacher’s eye probably gave me a different view of it than most of the visiting parents, but I gave it a thumbs-up.)
There are three pre-school tracks — the 3ish kids TTh a.m., the 4ish kids MW a.m., and the not-quite-Ks M-Th p.m. Same teachers for each. Each track is color-coded on the nametags, the files, the paperwork sent home, etc. Katherine’s group is green.
All sorts of paperwork to fill out — emergency slips, and video permission slips, and field trip releases, and other emergency slips … Have to figure out people to be called if we can’t be reached, people who have permission to pick up Katherine, etc. Interesting and new extensions of our family life.
Looked at the names of the kids on the board. Over half of one of the tracks has names starting from A-D, including four or five As. What, they were lazy looking in the Baby Name books? A smattering of oddly spelled names (Ahlysce will be so happy to have a unique name all her own!)
Anyway, afterwards, we went off to Chik-fil-A, and Katherine got to play on more equipment. Listened on the way to Lileks guest-hosting Hugh Hewitt. He was going on about his 10 Best (or Favorite) SF Films, of which we only heard the bottom three — 2001, Fantastic Voyage, and Them!
2001 and Them! are reasonable — both were seminal influences on any number of subsequent films (though I infinitely enjoy watching the latter to the former). Fantastic Voyage has some fine effects, but it’s kind of a goofy techno-thriller, with the same sort of understated scientifiction feel to it as The Andromeda Strain, where you leave it feeling like you’ve watched a high school science film with good production values.
Lileks was describing FV, and the cohost noted the parallel to the much later Inner Space with Martin Short.
“But Fantastic Voyage had one thing that Inner Space doesn’t,” Lileks replied.
I turned to Margie. “Raquel Welch in a form-fitting white wetsuit.”
“Raquel Welch in a form-fitting white wetsuit,” Lileks echoed.
Wish I’d heard the rest of the list.
(Lileks referred to it as based on an Isaac Asimov story. Untrue. Asimov did a very fine adaptation of the movie, along with a sequel. The actual movie story was written by Jerome Bixby, et al.)
So then we went home, put Kitten down, and had a quiet evening watching The World Is Not Enough, which has a few moments, but is so far the low point of the Pierce Brosnan Bond run. (We haven’t seen Die Another Day yet — that’s the last one, obviously, on our list.) I don’t know quite what the problem with the flick is — it just never quite gels. It has some goofiness akin to the Roger Moore era (notably the Attack of the Giant Buzzsaw Helicopters). It has an oddly sympathetic/unsympathetic pair of Bad Guys. It both relies too much on previous supporting cast members, and introduces one who just simply doesn’t fit (John Cleese). It gives Judy Densch a chance to do something beyond sternly glower at mission control screens — and she comes off as a lesser character for it.
I dunno. Just not very happy with it. Much prefer the previous Brosnans.
Saturday involved shopping in the morning, then watching Margie slave away in the kitchen in the evening, whilst I stood by and made supportive noises.
Sunday was tentatively scheduled for the Pulp game follow-up. As we were returning from our morning outing, Margie called Doyce to get the scoop.
She chatted for a moment, laughed, and said to the cell phone, “Okay, do you want to ask him or shall I?” Never a promising sign.
She turned to me. “He wants to wait on the Pulp module until version 2.0. Do you want to do Spycraft?”
Eep.
I’m a control freak and a planner and an introvert. Being asked to GM at the drop of a hat is … stressful.
But, still — the module was still prepped, so I could hardly beg off. Besides which, it was something I wanted to do, right? And I’d had fun, and that folks wanted to do it was encouraging, and all that …
… and besides, I knew this job was dangerous when I took it.
So that’s what we did, and managed in the three hours of play to make our way through another 1.5 scenes of the 4-scene “3-5 hour” module, leaving 1.5 scenes to go. And folks seemed to have fun.
And, yes, I am neurotic about the whole thing. I’m working on it. So there.
Margie and I ran out the door in a flurry around 6 to deliver the dinners she’d made, and came back and cooked burgers for the assembled crew. Then folks eventually left, we got Kitten down, read a bit, synced our schedules for the week, and called it an early evening.
All in all, not bad a bad weekend.
Yeah, but The World is not Enough had Sophie Marceau and Garbage doing the theme song. Moving it up a bit in points.
Golden-eye is still the best of the Brosnan Bond’s so far.
I agree about Goldeneye.
The World Is Not Enough‘s music was … okay. The theme was fine, but the interior soundtrack was dull. I miss John Barry.
The Attack of the Giant Buzzsaw Helicopters was also in the one with Michelle Yeoh — they have to run away from someone doing that sort of cuisinart attack on an entire city street. Really Stupid.
Didn’t realize they they’d gone and used a similar schtick again, because that was the last one I’d watched.
No, no, no — you’re thinking of Tomorrow Never Dies, where Bond (and the Chinese agent played by Yeoh) face … well, it’s a Giant Weed-Whacker Helicopter (a chopper angled forward so that its plades are scything the street like a giant weed-whacker).
That’s very different from the Giant Buzzsw Helicopter, which is a helicopter carrying, um, a series of giant buzz-saw wheels beneath it, as a forest-clearing (for roads/pipeline routes) mechanism, but which also, of course, can be used to saw through cars and building.
Eh. You haven’t missed all that much.
I presume that you, like me, saw the GBH’s obligatory introductory shot and immediately said “Bet we’ll be seeing that again!”
I used to love the 007 movies, but they’ve become so pedestrian in their attempts to “out-Bond” each other (does that make sense), that I haven’t really enjoyed one in about 20 years. Witness the invisible car in the latest offering. While I’ll accept that from SHIELD agents in a comic, I have a significantly lower threshold of suspension of disbelief for movies.
Ah, well. Entropy.
I plan on making some observations on the State of the Bond after we (finally) watch the most recent flick.
Good luck. I found it to be an ordeal. (And this from the guy who’s seen all but one of the series on the big screen!) The beginning’s nice, though.