Heart of Oak

It’s late and I’ll pay for this when the alarm clock goes off oh so early tomorrow morning, but I saw “Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World” tonight & wanted to throw down a few lines while my impressions are still fresh.

As a longtime avid fan of the Patrick O’Brien Aubrey/Maturin series, I had waited for the opening of the movie version with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. Happily, I was much more pleased than disappointed by the results. Given the limits of what you can cram into one movie, I think they did a fair job of bringing an O’Brien book to the screen. But my pleasure was not unalloyed.

Other, less exhausted reviewers of the movie will go into detail of the subplots cut, the bits freely borrowed from other O’Brien novels, and the somewhat contrived ending. I’ll limit myself to these few observations:

1) I think they could have kept the original love triangle subplot with Midshipman Horner, the gunner, and his wife rather than making Horner out to be just another aging, inept midshipman who couldn’t pass for lieutenant. I suppose it made the film too long to add it in.

2) I’m a fan of Billy Boyd, but I found him somewhat incongruous as Barrett Bonden. I’d always pictured Bonden to be older and not as good looking.

3) Russell Crowe did a good job as Aubrey. I would have liked to see Aubrey a little more human and less permanently enrobed with the godlike authority of a captain, but that’s not what you get with Crowe, and all things considered it was an acceptable tradeoff. He certainly did a good job of the glee Jack felt when sailing Surprise into a storm or boarding a Frenchman’s deck, for example. And I loved the ‘lesser of two weevils’ bit.

4) Maturin. As with Billy Boyd, Paul Bettany is a good actor, but my mental image of Stephen Maturin was not in line with him. Bettany is too tall and too good-looking to be the small, scrawny, bewigged Doctor. And in the final battle, despite the fact that O’Brien does take pains to demonstrate that Stephen is a good fighter, there’s no way Maturin would have boarded the enemy. His place was in the cockpit with the wounded and he would not have left it.

4) Blakeney. I would have preferred meeting young Babbington.

Despite my quibbles, I do think “Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World” is a move well worth seeing and I suspect it will fight it out with “Lord Of The Rings” for a few Oscars this springtime.

Life’s Too Short To Hate Your Stuff

One of the things I have to do at my job involves once a month going through all the shoes, socks, and shoe care stuff that for whatever reason can’t be sold. So tonight as I was sorting out those that have to be trashed from those that get sent off to be fixed up and resold, I came to a realization. Life is too short to not like your socks.

Now, you might reasonably think that a grown woman would have figured that out at some earlier point in her life. But if I buy socks and then later decide I don’t like them, they stay in my sock drawer and get worn when I run out of the socks that I like. It’s probably some misplaced notion of thriftiness I inherited from my Depression-surviving grandparents. At any rate, I was wearing a pair today while I was sorting out the shoes, and decided to try on a pair. They fit weirdly, and I realized that my socks were twisted all around. Then I realized that I hated those socks, always had, and didn’t really want to be wearing them. And finally, the realization that despite the fact that I feel that I’d be throwing money away by getting rid of socks that were still wearable, life is too short too wear socks you hate.

There’s a lot of stress in my life right now. I recently started a new job, I had 2 people quit on me with no notice on Friday, and I’m probably not going to have a day off until Thanksgiving. I need to be kind to myself to get through that. I might as well include my sock drawer. I suppose the other lesson might be, I should be more selective about what goes into my sock drawer if I know they’re not going to get thrown out until they wear out.

Anyway, when I got home, I tossed the offending pair into the garbage can. I felt weird throwing them out, but you know what? I won’t miss them once the trash goes out.

Someone else who rocks

Way to go George Soros, for 1) proving that not everyone who is immensely wealthy is a Republican and 2) being willing to put his money where his mouth is.

Notable quotes from the Washington Post article:

“America, under Bush, is a danger to the world,” Soros said.

and

Soros believes that a “supremacist ideology” guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans.” It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit (“The enemy is listening”). “My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me,” he said in a soft Hungarian accent.

Not surprisingly, the Republicans have now accused Soros of buying the Democratic Party. Even if that were true, I’d rather have George Soros calling the shots than a bunch of Texas oil barons.

Lagniappes

“Lagniappe” is a word I first heard in New Orleans which I’m told more or less means “unexpected gift”. The lagniappe of my new commute is that my Saturn, which has consistantly delivered 30 highway MPG and 20-25 MPG in city driving, has somehow shot up to better than 35 MPG recently. I guess the intense highway time makes her happy. Either that, or someone at Jiffy Lube screwed up and put some pixie dust into her chassis at the last oil change.

I also gifted myself this week with a brand-new 20GB iPod and car kit. I’m still learning all the ins and outs of the thing, so I’ll save a full rundown for another blog post. But so far I’m enjoying it.

I Don't Like Donald Rumsfeld

While listening to ABC’s “This Week” this morning on my way to work, I started to hear echoes of Robert McNamara in Donald Rumsfeld. Look at what he said today: “It’s clearly a tragic day for America,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in Washington. “In a long, hard war, we’re going to have tragic days. But they’re necessary.” (source). Maureen Dowd wrote a great column on this very subject a few days ago. Her best line, and one oh so apt for Rumsfeld’s quote today: ‘In the Panglossian Potomac, calamities happen for the best. One could almost hear the doubletalk echo of that American officer in Vietnam who said: “It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.”‘

In the early days of the war on Iraq, my husband and I discussed whether we weren’t getting into another Vietnam. As time passes and the shadow war continues, I grow more sure that President Bush and his crew have not learned the lessons of history and have committing our troops to another multi-year battle against an enemy we cannot defeat in a land we do not understand.

I feel both sad and angry that who knows how many of our men and women will have to pay the ultimate price until this mess gets straightened out. I just hope our next president will be able get us out of there quickly and with some faint shreds of our honor intact.