D's Notebook

Month: February 2012 (Page 1 of 2)

The Meaning Of Peyton

February 28, 2012 /

Another really interesting piece on Grantland about the end of the Peyton Manning era in Indy.

People don’t want to lose him, but they are not about to test the boundaries of the First Amendment on his behalf. People would like Peyton Manning to stay, if he feels so inclined, but in Andrew Luck they see a younger and healthier iteration of the same quarterback, and they wonder if the tradeoff is an inevitable fact of life in the NFL. They are attached to Manning the Symbol, but they are not so attached to Manning the Person that they are willing to approach this situation with blind loyalism. This is business, after all, and in the end they feel that the Colts’ business is really none of their business.

I keep saying that last season is going to make his eventual departure much less controversial than the rest of the nation seems to think it will be. Sure, some will howl in protest. But no one wants the Colts to go back to being how they were pre-Peyton.

Bond: The Dalton Years

February 28, 2012 /

I suppose it says volumes of the Timothy Dalton era that it’s taken me nearly three months to watch his two movies. In my defense the holidays, and the Christmas movie season, were right in the middle of that stretch. And the copy of The Living Daylights our library has is scratched so badly the disk does not play after 45 minutes. But still, there was not much enthusiasm about getting through these two films.

A quick refresher on how we got here. Roger Moore finally retired, even though EON wanted him back for two more (!) Bond films. I’m not sure what the hell they were thinking.

Eventually Welsh actor Timothy Dalton was selected to take over the role. The same man who turned down the part in 1967 because he felt he was too young to play Bond, and again in the late 70s because he didn’t like the direction the series had taken. Dalton was the first choice to replace Moore again in 1987, but turned it down a third time because of previous commitments. That led EON to Pierce Brosnan, who accepted the role, only to have to renege after NBC refused to let him out of his contract. By the time the Brosnan drama had played out, Dalton was free of his obligations, and finally accepted the role of 007.

Whew. Now on to the movies.

The Living Daylights

The producers took pains to drive home the point that Bond was still Bond as Timothy Dalton took the reins. He parachuted. He skied. He rode horses. He flew planes. I’m not sure how they didn’t get him into the water, but that would come soon enough.

What struck me most about Dalton’s first effort was how he was indeed taking Bond a new direction. Gone was the easy, eye-winking humor of the Moore era. It was not, though, replaced with a return to the brutal masculinity of the Connery era. He was still a secret agent, licensed to kill. But he seemed more vulnerable. And, in contrast to Daniel Craig’s Bond who is also vulnerable but hard and dangerous as well, Dalton comes across as soft. He stares, doe-eyed at his love interest. When he is angry or direct with others, it feels forced. I think Dalton was probably too nice a guy to play a cold-blooded killer like Bond.

The only truly memorable scene is late in the movie, as Bond fights bad guys on a Soviet cargo plane flying over Afghanistan. When he and nemesis Necros are hanging out the back on a cargo net, it’s pretty spectacular. But that’s kind of it.

Bond Girls

Maryam d’Abo as Kara Milovy. If you’re going to pin the Bond Girl hopes on one actress, she better be a doozy. In all ways. D’Abo is pretty, intelligent, and I’m sure a fine actress and person. She lacks the chops, though, to carry the tradition of the greats who came before her. Trivia: her cousin, Olivia d’Abo played Karen Arnold on The Wonder Years.

It wasn’t the worst of the series, but in The Living Daylights, Dalton does not offer much hope that he’s going to return it to its glory days.

License to Kill

OH NOOOOEEESSSS! James Bond has gone rogue!

Or so they want us to think. After buddy Felix Leiter is horribly maimed, and Leiter’s new wife murdered, by a Latin drug lord, James Bond has his 00-status yanked as he refuses orders and instead marches off to bring Franz Sanchez to justice.

Ugh. It’s one thing for a Bond movie to miss because of a bad story. It’s another when the whole thing feels half-assed. And that’s the case here. The acting from most of the secondary actors is horrendous. The plot feels ripped from an episode of Miami Vice, which was well past its prime by the time this came out. The stunts stray far into unbelievable territory. There are hackneyed moments, as when a bunch of locals just happen to be walking down the road when Bond and the bad guys come barreling down the hill. They might even have the fakest looking stunt shark in the history of stunt sharks.

It was so bad that I began questioning every part of the movie.

Why the hell is Bond Felix Leiter’s best man? Aren’t they just professional acquaintances?
Would they really divert from the wedding to help catch a drug dealer rather than let the DEA take care of it?
Would a drug dealer really flew from authorities in a plane that could be caught by a Coast Guard helicopter?
Would a factory containing a highly volatile mix of cocaine and gasoline be be constructed so a single match in a laboratory would send the whole thing up in flames?
Would someone really shoot a Stinger missile at a plane that was ten feet away and hope to survive?

Oh, and we get submarines and underwater action!

It’s a train wreck.

Perhaps no other actor looked the part of a Latin drug kingpin more than Robert Davi, so kudos for bringing him in.

A young Benicio Del Toro exudes menace as Davi’s main enforcer.

Any Wayne Fucking Newton as a televangelist! I admit, that was inspired.

But everything else about this movie sucks.

Here’s the other thing I found odd. There is a graphic shark attack. A man’s head explodes on camera. Another drops into a pulverizing machine, spraying Bond with a bloody mist. And somehow this only got a PG-13 rating. In 1989. I bet if they showed some tits, though, it would have been slapped with an R. Because breasts are way more damaging to people than violence.

Bond Girls

Carey Lowell as Pam Bouvier. And now we’re back to the Bond Girls who can kick some ass on their own. Bouvier was an army pilot and can handle a weapon. She also has has very long legs. Which we get to see often. Kudos.

Talisa Soto as Lupe Lamora. Lloyd Cole & The Commotions have a song called “Perfect Skin” I believe it was written for Soto.

A solid 1-2 punch on the girl side of things.

Trivia: this movie was originally titled License Revoked, but producers worried that Americans didn’t know what revoked meant. I’m not sure I buy that, but that’s the story.

Dalton was contracted for two more movies, but because of various delays, he was able to escape from his contract after License. Which is probably a good thing. I don’t think you can say his run was a disaster, a la George Lazenby’s. There are moments in The Living Daylights that work. But Dalton seemed ill-suited for the role, despite his physical appearance. He did have his moment in the sun, though.

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The Last, Greatest Game

February 27, 2012 /

And thus, it ends.

This isn’t going to be another post rehashing the hows and whys of the end of the Kansas-Missouri rivalry. I’m not going to advocate for the continuation of it, nor argue who is more at fault for its demise.

No, this post is about that special feeling you get each year when the schedule comes out and you circle the dates your school plays your arch rival. It’s about dreading going to school in fourth or seventh or tenth grade the day after your team loses a rivalry game. It’s about trying to contain your grin and not gloat too much when your team gets the win. It’s about your group of high school buddies getting together to watch games, separated by rooting interests on the couches. It’s about that same group of friends going off to college and sending each other smack-talking letters and filling up each others’ answering machines before and after games.1 It’s about visiting those friends and sitting alone amongst the enemy, quietly celebrating as your team pulls ahead. It’s about getting into arguments with strangers in bars in the middle of June about a game that took place six months, or even six years, earlier. It’s about walking with pride along the streets of Kansas City with your team’s gear on. It’s about bragging rights over Thanksgiving break after a football win, or all summer after a sweep in basketball. It’s about re-watching games two, three, four times because you beat the team you hate the most. It’s about spending an entire day reading every article you can find on the Internet after a huge win. It’s about commiserating with friends, complaining about officiating and how that other team always gets all the lucky breaks. It’s about making lunch bets with coworkers, woofing at your neighbor as you’re collecting your morning paper, or avoiding a loved one who happened to go to the wrong school for a few days after a loss. It’s about an endless list of things like that which make rivalries fun and maddening and different from every other game on the schedule.

And now that’s all gone.

Kansas has a terrific rivalry with Kansas State. The rivalry with Texas that has grown since Rick Barnes arrived in Austin has been more important than the Missouri rivalry most years. But neither of those is as nasty, bitter, stomach-churning, and, yes, fun as the Missouri rivalry.

If the rivalry has to end, even if temporarily, this year’s two regular season contests were a fantastic way for it to go out. In both cases the visiting team had the game won. Kansas led by eight with 2:00 to play in Columbia. Missouri led by 19 early in the second half in Lawrence. Each time the visitors failed to make the one, last, winning play. The hosts rallied, and when the teams walked off the court for the final times, the home crowds were delirious with joy, not just for beating their arch rival, but for doing so in an odds-defying, jaw-dropping, gut-punching manner. It’s as though the basketball gods, knowing there is no absolute right and wrong in the dispute between the schools, wanted each set of fans to leave feeling as good as they could about their team.

After Saturday’s game, people shouted, “The rivalry must go on!” One epic game hid two truths: the rivalry hasn’t been close for most of the last decade2 and what we saw Saturday was about a lot more than just two schools from neighboring states ending a long-term relationship.

This year’s Missouri team is fantastic. Every once in a while a team that looks like it shouldn’t work on paper defies the odds. Missouri is one of those teams. Despite lacking size and depth, they are a terrific combination of talents that fit perfectly together. Last year’s team was entertaining. This year’s is powerful and dangerous. While perhaps not as well balanced as the teams from the early 2000s, to me they seem like the best Missouri team since the early 90s.

And while KU’s season gets lost in the history of the program, a team that relies on two players for almost everything and has no margin for error will at least share the conference title, open the final week of the regular season in the top five, and are in position to claim a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament. Little of that seemed possible 12 weeks ago.

Fans of both teams are going to look back on this year’s editions fondly, independent of who is and is not on next year’s schedule. I’m not sure a lot of fans appreciate that yet in the wake of the emotions of Saturday.

My relationship with sports is changing. I’m preferring sports and games where I can watch more casually, less emotionally. I have a harder time controlling my mood swings during games, and find it easier to not watch. From a certain perspective, the rivalry could be ending at the perfect time for me. It’s easier to step back when something you love is disappearing. And while I’m comfortable with and supportive of KU’s choice to not pursue a non-conference meeting with Missouri for the time being, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to miss those days, and the feelings that came with them.

Rock Chalk, SEC bitches.

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  1. Or today sending emails, texts, and leaving voice mails. ↩
  2. Since 2001, KU has won 20 of 26 games, by an average margin of 13.8 points. Missouri’s six wins have come by an average of 4.3 points. To be fair, it’s 7-4 Missouri in football over that same period. ↩

App Review: Kingdom Rush

February 24, 2012 /

I don’t spend a lot of time playing games on my iPad or iPhone. I’ll buy a handful each year and maybe get really interested in a couple of them. It’s rare that a game captures my imagination for more than a couple days.

But for the last three weeks, I’ve been loving Armor Games’ Kingdom Rush. I bought it despite several Internet warnings that it was hopelessly addictive. I can report, after three weeks or nearly constant play, that is absolutely true. If you buy this game, you will get hooked.

What’s so great about it? At first glance, it’s just another Tower Defense game; i.e. you face waves of attackers that you must arrange defensive forces against. Kingdom Rush comes with the twist of being set in a medieval/fantasy environment. It’s basically a D&D spin on classic TD games. You fight off orcs, goblins, trolls, gargoyles, spiders, and other assorted magical creatures.

Your defenses are a combination of infantry, artillery, magicians, and archers. Using your initial budget, you set up your defenses, summon the attackers, and start earning more gold to buy additional structures and upgrade your original ones. As long as you keep killing the attacking forces, you keep earning exciting new ways to destroy them.

It’s a pretty basic concept and, honestly, I never understood why this type of game is so addictive. And then I played Kingdom Rush. There’s something about those rolling waves of attackers, those brief moments of rest, and the ability to see your weak points and correct them during the game that sucks you in. Also, you get a bit of a rush from dropping a Rain of Fire spell on a swarm of attacking monsters. Just when you think you have it set up the way you want, a zombie slips through, you die, and you think, “OK, one more game.” Two hours later you’re still doing that.

That’s been me for the past three weeks.

There is also the clever combination of strategy and tactics, neither particularly heavy, that makes the game difficult to ‘solve’. The game gets tougher as your skills improve. It never gets boring because there is always something new popping up. There are 12 basic levels that can be played at two different difficulty settings. Solve those and two bonus levels pop up. In addition, there are a pair of one-off scenarios at each level.

Put it all together and there are weeks of fun packed into this game. Oh, and the 99 cent price tag makes it a terrific bargain.

Thus, I highly recommend Kingdom Rush. But be warned: once you start playing, you may find it difficult to stop.

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Firsts

February 22, 2012 /

It’s been a big few days for C..

Last Monday she lost her first tooth, her upper left incisor. It had reached that crazy, almost sickening level of looseness when S. finally reached over and yanked it out. There was a scream of surprise then much happiness. Even more happiness the next morning when she found the Tooth Fairy’s gift.

The upper right incisor looked to be about ready, too. It hung in a few more days, and when I picked C. up from school on Tuesday, she big an even bigger gap in her smile. This time she yanked it out on her own. Tough girl.

In partial celebration of that and partially because it’s been long enough, we went to the pet store Tuesday and she picked out a new Betta to replace the late Spike. She wanted one that didn’t look like M.’s, so she selected a small, blue female this time. She named the new fish Isabella, which is not a shock. That is C.’s (And L.’s) favorite name, and we’ve had about 1000 Isabellas in the house in recent months. Dolls, drawings, imaginary friends. Isabellas out the ass.

M. had a first last week, too. Her first sleep-over. One of her buddies from school called and invited her over Friday night. Everything went great. I’m sure there will be many, many more of these over the next dozen years or so, and eventually it will be our house that hosts not just one, but several goofy, wound-up girls at once.

L. doesn’t have any great, new accomplishments, but she has been making us laugh with her language. She’s been dropping little phrases she’s picked up from others that sound ridiculous coming out of a three-year-old into her conversations. Examples:

“What the…?” Fortunately she does not complete this one.
“That’s not what I expected at all!”
“I can’t believe it!”

She delivers each of these with much gusto, and always with a smile, as if she knows how funny she sounds.

She also gives me a thumbs-up all the time. The best is when she’s chasing the big sisters around, looks at me, grins wildly and flashes me a thumbs-up as she runs by. Makes me laugh every time.

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The Good Life

February 21, 2012 /

Yes, I’m biased, but I love Nick Collison. He’s pushing ten years in the NBA and, while he was a great college player, I’m not sure anyone expected that kind of pro career for him. And I’ve always enjoyed his thoughtful take on things.

He is blogging for GQ magazine on what life is like for a role-player in the NBA. His latest entry addresses finding your niche. It’s something every player who gets drafted should read, because not everyone turns into the next LeBron.

This is where a little perspective and being secure in yourself can go a long way. If you have perspective, you will realize that your job totally rules. You get paid a huge salary to play basketball. You will be part of the 1 percent. You will get your summers off. You will be encouraged to take naps most days.

Something New And Apple News

February 21, 2012 /

You may recall that I took a crack at running a separate blog dedicated to my musings on Apple and technology. Like many of my Internet dreams,1 it seemed like a great idea but in practice wasn’t such a huge success. Turns out it’s hard to write every day about the same subject, especially when there are about 1000 people out there doing the exact same thing. I admire those who can find something to focus their writing each day. And I’ll let them do it.

So I shut the Mac Daddy site down awhile back.

That doesn’t mean I don’t still have the urge to write about Apple-related stuff. And just because I only have a personal blog doesn’t mean I can’t share those thoughts here, right?

Thus, coming soon will be the first of my occasional reviews of iOS apps. I’ve been obsessed by a fun little game over the past couple weeks. So keep an eye out for that in the next day or so.

But, while I have your attention, a few thoughts on the surprise announcement last week of the next iteration of the Macintosh operating system, Mountain Lion.

Like many people, when the news first broke Thursday morning, I thought it was some kind of joke. After all, when Apple wants to surprise the world, they have a big event. They don’t talk to a select group of journalists and writers and let word trickle out. But, as they said, they’re doing things differently now.

After reading a number of the insider scoops, I’m left with a single impression: the operating system wars really are over, at least on the desktop. Apple, Microsoft, Intel, and the PC manufacturing community are far more interested in what’s happening in the portable device space. Desktop/laptop computers are still important and won’t disappear any time soon. But OS X and Windows are so advanced and the payoff for pushing them further is so little that all sides will scale things back dramatically there.

What makes that apparent to me is Apple’s announcement that they will now be doing annual updates to OS X, as they’ve done with iOS since its introduction. No more massive rewrites. No more starting from scratch. No more 18-24 month cycles that bring dramatic changes to the core OS. Every year they’re going to tweak some things, upgrade the security features another notch, refine some of the differences between OS X and iOS, and ship an update.

Along with the end of the massive update, we will also never again see a $129 price tag on the update. At least from Apple. The last two updates have both been in the $20 range. I expect that to remain the case. As iPhones and iPads have become the biggest components of Apple’s business, gone is the need to turn desktop OS upgrades into money makers. It’s better to keep the growing installed base on the latest iteration for a modest upgrade fee than try to goose revenues every couple of years with a major release.

And while it’s obvious Apple2 is pushing their desktop and mobile operating systems closer together, I think this is a clear sign that while they may share more common elements over time, they will always remain distinct. The annual updates will keep the desktop side of the business as fresh as the mobile side, from a software standpoint, and make the overall experience even more similar. But running the same apps on your MacBook Air and your iPad is not happening any time soon.

Finally, you can’t help but look at this announcement and how it was handled and speculate on the changes in the company since Steve Jobs’ death. Maybe he signed off on this and it’s been in the works for a year or more. But it’s a very good sign for the Tim Cook era at how the company is moving forward. Execution is always the hardest part of any business plan, but so far it looks like Apple will not miss a beat in the new era.

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  1. See also my brief Indiana Pacers blog and the occasional ‘anonymous writer’ blog I’ve started over the years, often just to test out different blogging platforms. ↩
  2. And Microsoft with Windows 8 and Metro ↩

Whatever It Takes

February 20, 2012 /

There was a common theme to the basketball games I cared about over the weekend. Friday the team I covered won their game by 35 points. In an amazing comeback over the past three weeks, my teams are now up to a +7 TMF. I get to cover the #2 team in class 2A this week, so hopefully that improves some more.

Saturday KU won by 33.

And Sunday, in the first NBA game I’ve attended since 2003 (I think), the Pacers waxed Charlotte by 35.

I sense a common thread.

The Pacers game was fun. They kicked it off with a 21-2 spurt. Charlotte scored 10-straight points but after that, it was over. Charlotte is not a good team, but they really seemed to quit at a couple points in the game. The old man in me wants to say, “Play for pride. You’re making too much money to mail it in like this.” The realist in me sees a team that sucks playing a Sunday night road game and has some understanding for why they were just trying to get off the court as quickly as possible.

I’ve been watching at least parts of Pacers games this year. They’re pretty young, full of (seemingly) good guys, and tend to play hard every night. Danny Granger is a third-tier NBA star. Paul George is a budding star who can be brilliant at times. Roy Hibbert is awkward and limited and likable.

But I most enjoy watching 12-year veteran David West. He still has some game, but relies mostly on old-man moves these days. He’s the perfect crafty veteran to lead this team of youngsters. In 22 minutes Sunday, he went for 14 points on 7-10 shooting, eight boards, three assists, three blocks. It’s fun to spend a few minutes just watching him. Focus on him working away from the ball, getting into the perfect help-defense positions, sneaking in for rebounds from the weak side. He’s a craftsman.

No real fun stories from the game. We were sitting in the upper deck, which felt a long way away after sitting in high school gyms most of the time. But it was still a good view. Banker’s Life Fieldhouse is a fine place to watch a game. We did see some scalpers screaming at each other before the game. One threatened to shoot the other, but pointed out that he wasn’t worth the bullet. That’s a fun conversation to walk through, believe me.

Official attendance was 11,600. I’m not sure it was quite that high. With the remake of the roster and them playing more competitive ball, the city is slowly re-embracing the franchise. But a Sunday night game against a bad opponent doesn’t fill the seats. While not in as bad of shape as New Orleans, this is still not a healthy franchise. It would be great if George, or some future draft pick, turned into a franchise cornerstone along the lines of Reggie Miller and the team could again be beloved and safe in Indy, rather than a prime prospect to end up in Seattle or Kansas City.

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Friday Grab Bag

February 17, 2012 /

This week kind of went off the rails yesterday, so I’m going to throw some bits-and-pieces that could have turned into longer, individual posts into a single grab bag to end the week.

The biggest obstacle we faced this week came Thursday morning at approximately 3:30 am. I woke to hear the smoke alarms and cable backup box chirping and seeing strange flashes of light out the windows. After a few moments I realized the power had gone out. I waited a few more minutes until it was apparent this wasn’t just a quick flicker because a squirrel touched two power lines, and then took a flashlight into C. and L.’s room so if they woke up they wouldn’t freak out. A few minutes later there was another pop in the distance and some more flashes of light. “Great,” I thought, “transformers are blowing up.”

The weather was fine, so my hope was that this would be a quick fix. But at 7:00 the power was still off so we scrambled to get M. ready for school in the dark. When we left, a police car was blocking one way out of our neighborhood. That direction you could see one of the main power lines that is usually 40 feet in the air down on the ground and several of the utility poles had broken cross-supports. Greater still.

C.’s school was first delayed and then cancelled, so she, L. and I sat at home, them watching movies on a laptop and me reading in the light from the front window. Eventually I checked the Indy Star’s website and learned that a drunk driver had a run-in with a utility pole. Initially 6000 people lost power, but after some work, only about 300, all in our neighborhood, remained in the dark. And, according to the power company, it was going to take most of the day to fix it.

We went out for lunch, went to the library, and after getting M. went to my in-laws’ until we learned the power was back on after 5:00 pm. Good times. The girls were well-behaved and, fortunately, the temperature was in the 40s. By the time we left the house to get M. it was getting a little chilly, but it obviously could have been much worse this time of year. And yes, we have a fireplace that we’ve never used. I suppose if it was freezing we could have kicked it on, but I’d hate to be one of those people who used a fireplace for the first time in eight years and then their chimney caught on fire because there are birds nests in it or something.

And who drives drunk at 3:30 am on a Thursday?

OK, that was longer that I thought. I’ll keep the rest of this brief.

I covered a rousing comeback Tuesday night. My team, GHS, which had only won three games all season, dug out of a 13-point hole to beat a team with two Division I recruits by 11. GHS has, obviously, struggled this year but that was their third-straight win. It was great to not only see the comeback, but see a team developing confidence in the last couple weeks of the season. It’s unlikely they’ll make any kind of run in sectionals, but at least there is a glimmer of hope now.

Plans may change, but I am scheduled to attend my first Pacers game in six years this Sunday. They broke a five-game losing streak last night, but had been one of the surprises of the early NBA season before that. I wouldn’t say I’m getting back on the NBA bandwagon, but for the first time since before the Brawl, I’m at least paying a little attention to them.

Since my power outage rant went longer than planned, I’ll cut this off here. Have a great weekend.

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Check Out The Big Brain on M.

February 15, 2012 /

A few weeks back we donated an aging piece of furniture to AmVets. Hopefully they’ve made good use of the ugly but insanely comfortable, 40-year-old corduroy chair that my wife was finally able to purge from our home.

For some reason, M. thought of that this morning as she was getting ready for school. She asked who it was that came to pick it up. Here is our conversation, as I remember it.

“It’s called AmVets. They help people that used to be in the military.”

“What’s the military?”

“The armed forces. The army, navy, air force, marines. They help those people find work, places to live, to buy things.”

“Like weapons?”

I’m not sure whether I should be proud or concerned about her inductive reasoning.

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