I just heard Fay Vincent speaking on KNBR, and it wasn't so much that he sounded like a genius...but anytime you hear or think about Vincent, or the late Bart Giamatti, you have to wonder at how much better the state of baseball would be these days. It's not so much that they were the end-all, be-all...but they just weren't this:
All while deciding that the tastiest Haribo might just be Fizzy Cola...
So, there was this list. A list of the best films adapted for the big screen. The jarring absence of the Lord of the Rings from this – all three should be here – makes me question whether the list has any validity, but for amusement sake, and because I want to try out putting a table onto the blog, I’m giving it a shot.
For the record, I've seen 33 movies and read 18 of the books. For someone who is considered by a lot of folks to be a pretty avid reader, I'm not sure that's such a good showing.
| TITLE | Seen Movie? | Read Book? | Comments | |
| 1984 | Yes | Yes | Set aside to read again soon. | |
| Alice In Wonderland | Yes | Yes | I’d like to read THIS again soon also. | |
| American Psycho | Yes | Yes | Both were decent. | |
| Breakfast at Tiffany’s | No | Yes | Hard to get past the Mickey Rooney character, but Audrey Hepburn…sigh. | |
| Brighton Rock | No | No | Never heard of it. | |
| Catch 22 | Yes | Yes | Book was great, movie was sort of creepy. | |
| Charlie & The Chocolate Factory | Yes | Yes | Saw both movies, prefer Gene Wilder | |
| A Clockwork Orange | Yes | Yes | If possible, the book is even more brilliant than the film. | |
| Close Range (inc. Brokeback Mountain) | Yes | No | I wish I could quit…hearing Brokeback jokes. | |
| The Day of the Triffids | No | No | Never heard of it. | |
| Devil In a Blue Dress | No | No | Is this the Denzel Washington movie? Cause…best EVER? | |
| Different Seasons (inc. The Shawshank Redemption) | Yes | Yes | All the stories were great, and I think all have been made into film, but this is obviously the best. | |
| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?(aka Bladerunner) | Yes | No | Dad owns it, maybe someday I’ll read it. | |
| Doctor Zhivago | Yes | No | Good film. Julie Christie is almost unimaginably HOT. | |
| Empire of the Sun | No | No | This is one of those films I permanently have at the bottom of my Netflix queue. | |
| English Patient | No | No | I don’t expect this to change. | |
| Fight Club | Yes | Yes | One of my all-time favorite movies and a phenomenal book. | |
| The French Lieutenant’s Woman | No | No | Though I did use to make fun of Meryl Streep wearing a blanket on her head. | |
| Get Shorty | Yes | No | That guy was a stuntman! | |
| The Godfather | Yes | No | Nice to see that the greatest movie ever snuck in here. | |
| Goldfinger | Yes | No | I have to assume this was included because it started the Bond films? | |
| Goodfellas | Yes | No | A great film, but no real interest in reading the book. Not sure why. | |
| Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now) | Yes | Yes | Sure…good stuff all around. | |
| The Hound of the Baskervilles | No | Yes | I actually didn’t know there was a film of this. | |
| Jaws | Yes | No | Despite what Dave Fear says, the film is an all-time great. | |
| The Jungle Book | Yes | Yes | Nagging suspicions that this book is now horribly racist. | |
| A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes) | No | No | Um…huh? | |
| L.A. Confidential | Yes | No | Great, underrated film. | |
| Les Liaisons Dangereuses | Yes | No | All I really remember are Uma Thurman’s boobies. | |
| Lolita | No | No | Both of these omissions embarrass me. | |
| Lord of the Flies | Yes | Yes | Though, I seem to recall the movie being pathetically bad…? | |
| The Maltese Falcon | Yes | No | Great movie, and I need to read some Raymond Chandler. | |
| Oliver Twist | Yes | No | But…it is in my Bookins queue. | |
| One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Yes | No | I think I started the book, but not sure why I wouldn’t have finished it. | |
| Orlando | No | No | It sounded interesting when the film came out, I should check it out. | |
| The Outsiders | Yes | Yes | Stay Gold, Ponyboy. (But…best ever?) | |
| Pride and Prejudice | No | No | I have heard some describe this as the best book ever written, so I guess I should check it out. | |
| The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | No | No | Really, hadn’t heard of it until the author died recently. | |
| The Railway Children | No | No | Never heard of it. | |
| Rebecca | Yes | No | Didn’t even realize there was a book. | |
| The Remains of the Day | No | No | I’d like to correct both of these omissions. | |
| Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List) | Yes | Yes | The movie was brilliant but the book was surprisingly flat. | |
| Sin City | Yes | No | The movie was insane – love to read the book. | |
| The Spy Who Came In From The Cold | No | No | I’ve heard of it, but not really sure what this is. | |
| The Talented Mr. Ripley | Yes | No | I assume the book(s) is better but the movie was a total snore. | |
| Tess of the D’Urbervilles | No | No | This is a girl thing…right? | |
| Through a Glass Darkly | No | No | Again, I’ve heard of it… | |
| To Kill A Mockingbird | Yes | Yes | Both are excellent. | |
| Trainspotting | Yes | Yes | The movie was great, the book…sort of annoying. | |
| The Vanishing | Yes | No | The original movie was terrifying, the remake gave it away in the preview. | |
| Watership Down | Yes | Yes | Great stuff, probably worth a re-read whenever I have kids. |
Ask me if I remember where I was when JFK was assassinated.
(For the record, I was six years away from being born.)
I haven't read Rolling Stone in years. They almost always tend to hype bands that are already irrelevant, and ignore the ones that are doing something interesting. (In short, exactly the opposite of what they used to do about thirty years ago.) But this cover makes me think there might be something worth checking out in the magazine all of a sudden...
OK, that was my Kanye West moment. But it's impossible to be Jewish, go through a Seder (I went to two this year, believe it or not) and not be troubled by how the Republican party can be mapped to the following text:
Each drop of wine is our hope and prayer that people will cast out the plagues that today threaten everyone, everywhere they are found, beginning in our own hearts:
The making of war,
The teaching of hate and violence,
Despoliation of the earth,
Perversion of justice and government,
Fomenting of vice and crime,
Neglect of human needs,
Oppression of nations and peoples,
Corruption of culture,
Subjugation of science, learning, and human discourse,
The erosion of freedoms.
Fomenting of vice and crime - CHECK. Good lord, check.
Of all the books I read while I was in Mexico - seven that I actually finished, two I abandoned -- Haruki Murakami's Kafka On The Shore was by far the most powerful and the one that has stuck with me. The novel is surreal - to sum up the plot in a few sentences is to miss what makes the book so strong, which is the language, the rhythym and tone of the story.
But, I'm nothing if not adventurous, so let's give it a try. The story takes place in Japan, where a boy, who calls himself Kafka, runs away from home. We learn this is to try to escape living out a horrific Oedipal curse his father has told him he has. Simulatenously, it is the story of an older man, horribly damaged as a schoolboy in an unexplained incident during WWII. Despite his mental limitations, he becomes a central figure in Kafka's life as he's drawn towards him in surreal, dreamlike encounters.
Like I said, summing it up is hard, even moreso if I mentioned that two characters are named Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders. You might think that makes the book funny, and you'd be right. It's also terribly sad, and poetic, and something else I'm not quite sure about. What I do know is that reading this book feels like I've found another writer whose work I wait for, and what's better is that he has a whole library I haven't explored yet. I could be disappointed, but Kafka On The Shore is clearly one of the better books I've read in years.
Rating: 9.5/10.0
And just because I was on vacation doesn't mean that the President isn't an insane liar. Now, there is proof. Remember this quote?
"I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action." [Bush Remarks: Chicago, Illinois, 9/30/03]
I'm not going to say I was freaked out this morning, but it was very odd. You see...it was bright outside. No water fell from the sky. I could see these white fluffy things up against a blue background. 
And there was this burning yellow orb, screaming out from the sky - what was it? It looked sort of like this image here.
OK, so it's been raining a lot lately. In fact, it was the wettest March in recorded history in San Francisco. (And you can say YOU WERE THERE WHEN!)Look, I'm the last one to complain - I was in Mexico for fourteen of those 26 rainy days, but it's just preposterous at this point. If I wanted to live in Seattle, I'd move there. (And, it's worth stating, be able to buy a house.)
The vacation is largely why I've not posted here in awhile. Other reasons are that I was too busy preparing for a few fantasy baseball drafts/auctions, and of course, wedding planning. Abby is on top of things, but I've been trying to help out as much as I can. After this weekend (cake tasting - something I must admit I'm genuinely excited about), we should have all our main vendors signed up, which means it should be a bit more relaxing in the next few months. I'm sure there are a million little things we haven't thought of, but I feel pretty good about where we are in the process. Plus, it's all been fun, cause I picked the right girl.
Aw.
In other news, Gmail is great - and one fun thing that it has are ads that are supposed to be relevant to your emails. In an email conversation with Abby about cake, the following link showed up for Diaper Cake. I'm not making that up. Diaper Cake. It's apparently actual diapers, assorted in a way to look like a cake that you'd give someone for a baby shower. Two things here - one, that might be the worst gift I've ever heard of. And two, Diaper Cake is going to be the name of my band.
