Truisms (a)

• a positive attitude means all the difference in the world
• a relaxed man is not necessarily a better man
• a sense of timing is the mark of genius
• a sincere effort is all you can ask
• a single event can have infinitely many interpretations
• a solid home base builds a sense of self
• a strong sense of duty imprisons you
• absolute submission can be a form of freedom
• abstraction is a type of decadence
• abuse of power comes as no surprise
• action causes more trouble than thought
• alienation produces eccentrics or revolutionaries
• all things are delicately interconnected
• ambition is just as dangerous as complacency
• ambivalence can ruin your life
• an elite is inevitable
• anger or hate can be a useful motivating force
• animalism is perfectly healthy
• any surplus is immoral
• anything is a legitimate area of investigation
• artificial desires are despoiling the earth
• at times inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning
• at times your unconsciousness is truer than your conscious mind
• automation is deadly
• awful punishment awaits really bad people

Interesting facts

• The word "queue" is the only word in the English language that is still pronounced the same way when the last four letters are removed.
• Of all the words in the English language, the word 'set' has the most definitions!
• What is called a "French kiss" in the English speaking world is known as an "English kiss" in France.
• A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off!
• Horatio Nelson, one of England's most illustrious admirals was throughout his life, never able to find a cure for his sea-sickness.
• The skeleton of Jeremy Bentham is present at all important meetings of the University of London
• Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people
• Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin!
• The present population of 5 billion plus people of the world is predicted to become 15 billion by 2080.
• Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and had only ONE testicle.
• Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey found in the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs has been tasted by archaeologists and found edible.
• Months that begin on a Sunday will always have a "Friday the 13th."
• Coca-Cola would be green if colouring weren’t added to it.
• More people are killed each year from bees than from snakes.
• The average lead pencil will draw a line 35 miles long or write approximately 50,000 English words.
• More people are allergic to cow's milk than any other food.
• Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
• The placement of a donkey's eyes in its' heads enables it to see all four feet at all times!
• The six official languages of the United Nations are: English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish.
• It's against the law to burp, or sneeze in a church in Nebraska, USA.
• You're born with 300 bones, but by the time you become an adult, you only have 206.
• Some worms will eat themselves if they can't find any food!
• Dolphins sleep with one eye open!
• It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open
• Queen Elizabeth I regarded herself as a paragon of cleanliness. She declared that she bathed once every three months, whether she needed it or not
• Slugs have 4 noses.
• Owls are the only birds who can see the colour blue.
• A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 69 years!
• A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue!
• The average person laughs 10 times a day!
• An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain

The new James Bond. A masterpiece? Reviews

It seems that there is a consensus that the new Bond film is really good. I post parts from the NY Times and Washington Post film reviews.


November 17, 2006

MOVIE REVIEW | 'CASINO ROYALE'

Renewing a License to Kill and a Huge Movie Franchise

By MANOHLA DARGIS

The latest James Bond vehicle — call him Bond, Bond 6.0 — finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker. Now played by an attractive bit of blond rough named Daniel Craig, Pierce Brosnan having been permanently kicked to the kerb, Her Majesty’s favorite bad boy arrives on screens with the usual complement of cool toys, smooth rides, bosomy women and high expectations. He shoots, he scores, in bed and out, taking down the bad and the beautiful as he strides purposefully into the 21st century.

It’s about time. The likable Mr. Brosnan was always more persuasive playing Bond as a metaphoric rather than an actual lady-killer, with the sort of polished affect and blow-dried good looks that these days tend to work better either on television or against the grain. Two of his best performances have been almost aggressively anti-Bond turns, first in John Boorman’s adaptation of the John le Carré novel “The Tailor of Panama,”

Every generation gets the Bond it deserves if not necessarily desires, and with his creased face and uneasy smile, Mr. Craig fits these grim times well. As if to underscore the idea that this new Bond marks a decisive break with the contemporary iterations, “Casino Royale” opens with a black-and-white sequence that finds the spy making his first government-sanctioned kills. The inky blood soon gives way to full-blown color, but not until Bond has killed one man with his hands after a violent struggle and fatally shot a second. “Made you feel it, did he?” someone asks Bond of his first victim. Bond doesn’t answer. From the way the director, Martin Campbell, stages the action though, it’s clear that he wants to make sure we do feel it.

“Casino Royale” introduced Bond to the world in 1953. A year later it was made into a television drama with the American actor Barry Nelson as Jimmy Bond; the following decade, it was a ham-fisted spoof with David Niven as the spy and a very funny Peter Sellers as a card shark. For reasons that are too boring to repeat, when Ian Fleming sold the film rights to Bond, “Casino Royale” was not part of the deal. As a consequence the producers who held most of the rights decided to take their cue from news reports about misfired missiles, placing their bets on “Dr. No” and its missile-mad villain. The first big-screen Bond, it hit in October 1962, the same month that Fleming’s fan John F. Kennedy took the Cuban missile crisis public.

The Vatican later condemned “Dr. No” as a dangerous mixture of violence, vulgarity, sadism and sex.

Ka-ching! The film was a success, as was its relatively unknown star, Sean Connery, who balanced those descriptive notes beautifully, particularly in the first film and its even better follow-up, “From Russia With Love.”

In time Mr. Connery’s conception of the character softened, as did the series itself, and both Roger Moore and Mr. Brosnan portrayed the spy as something of a gentleman playboy. That probably helps explain why some Bond fanatics have objected so violently to Mr. Craig, who fits Fleming’s description of the character as appearing “ironical, brutal and cold” better than any actor since Mr. Connery. Mr. Craig’s Bond looks as if he has renewed his license to kill.

Like a lot of action films, the Bond franchise has always used comedy to blunt the violence and bring in big audiences. And, much like the franchise’s increasingly bloated action sequences, which always seem to involve thousands of uniformed extras scurrying around sets the size of Rhode Island, the humor eventually leached the series of its excitement, its sense of risk. Mr. Brosnan certainly looked the part when he suited up for “GoldenEye” in 1995, but by then John Woo and Quentin Tarantino had so thoroughly rearranged the DNA of the modern action film as to knock 007 back to zero. By the time the last Bond landed in 2002, Matt Damon was rearranging the genre’s elementary particles anew in “The Bourne Identity.”

“Casino Royale” doesn’t play as dirty as the Bourne films, but the whole thing moves far lower to the ground than any of the newer Bond flicks. Here what pops off the screen aren’t the exploding orange fireballs that have long been a staple of the Bond films and have been taken to new pyrotechnic levels by Hollywood producers like Jerry Bruckheimer, but some sensational stunt work and a core seriousness. Successful franchises are always serious business, yet this is the first Bond film in a long while that feels as if it were made by people who realize they have to fight for audiences’ attention, not just bank on it. You see Mr. Craig sweating (and very nice sweat it is too); you sense the filmmakers doing the same.

The characteristically tangled shenanigans — as if it mattered — involve a villainous free agent named Le Chiffre (the excellent Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen), who wheels and deals using money temporarily borrowed from his equally venal clients. It’s the sort of risky global business that allows the story to jump from the Bahamas to Montenegro and other stops in between as Bond jumps from plot point to plot point, occasionally taking time out to talk into his cellphone or bed another man’s wife. Mr. Craig, whose previous credits include “Munich” and “The Mother,” walks the walk and talks the talk, and he keeps the film going even during the interminable high-stakes card game that nearly shuts it down.

If Mr. Campbell and his team haven’t reinvented the Bond film with this 21st edition, they have shaken (and stirred) it a little, chipping away some of the ritualized gentility that turned it into a waxworks. They have also surrounded Mr. Craig with estimable supporting players, including the French actress Eva Green, whose talent is actually larger than her breasts.

Like Mr. Mikkelsen, who makes weeping blood into a fine spectator sport, Ms. Green brings conviction to the film, as do Jeffrey Wright and Isaach de Bankolé. Judi Dench is back as M, of course, with her stiff lip and cunning. But even she can’t steal the show from Mr. Craig, though a human projectile by the name of Sébastien Foucan, who leads a merry and thrilling chase across Madagascar, almost does.

An Agent Of Change
With 'Casino Royale,' Blond Bond Hits the Ground Running

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 17, 2006; C01

Nobody does it tougher.

Reinventing James Bond as a kind of Navy SEAL with an attitude problem, "Casino Royale" turns out to be cracking good entertainment, as well as a fresh start for the perdurable 21-picture franchise.

Daniel Craig kicks major maximus as a Bond who'd never use a computer where a punch will do; he's lean and athletic and fast, and the movie takes great advantage of his beauty in motion, particularly his on-the-dead-run. Besides being the first blond Bond, the first Bond under 40 since George Lazenby, and the first Bond to look like Steve McQueen, he's seemingly the first Bond to actually bleed. His face frequently looks like it had a close encounter with a lawnmower; fights leave him sodden in unpleasant liquids of his own manufacture as well as physically spent and far into oxygen debt.

That stands in direct counterpoint to the majority of post-Connery Bonds, especially Roger Moore but also toward the end Pierce Brosnan, who always seemed such lightweights that you suspected all that hair spray had soaked into their brains and turned them into fashion models. Hmmm, you mow down 400 Russian border guards with your trusty AK-47 and you don't even muss your mane?

That hair symbolized everything that was wrong with late-issue Bonds: Beyond their unbelievability, they stood for a figure completely unrooted in any sort of reality. The movies had become almost decadent in their removal of Bond from the physical world: He was a kind of male fantasy conceit grown stale and prissy, sited amid big, dull special effects that were always right up to last year's standards.

Director Martin Campbell's version astutely restores Bond to a real world -- note I say, a real world, not the real world. This movie is set, say, one remove from the possible, instead of, like those last few, 20 or so removes. Thus, this Bond fights and bleeds and can be tortured, but his pain endurance is a fantasy, as is his recovery time. He moves like a running back on sinews of steel -- fast, evasive, believable -- but he makes a few inter-building leaps that ignore the rude physics of gravity. He shoots well (much gun stuff), but it would have been nicer if he missed once in a while. Just once in a while.

Yet the movie also has a number of extremely shocking moments -- shocking, that is, in their tenderness, their tragedy, their human dimension. The scenes between the cool Craig and Iron Mistress M (the brilliant Judi Dench) really crackle with hostility; did Edward Albee fly in for secret rewrites? There's a moment where a young British agent is first exposed to the incredible violence of the world she's elected to enter, and she collapses in her clothes in the shower. Gently, Bond goes and holds her, not because he's on the make but because he loves her and knows she's in pain. Later there's a drowning death that has a tragic, nightmarish quality, a so-close-yet-so-far sensibility that will haunt you just as it haunts Bond.

Maybe these human moments exist because the film is derived from Ian Fleming's first 007 novel, published way back in 1952. It is said by many to be the most "realistic" of his books, the one in which he was a real novelist as opposed to the later ones where he was sticking to his highly profitable formula. Regardless, they do make this Bond slightly human; you care about him, as the movie -- essentially a kind of origins piece even though it's set in 2006 -- watches the new 00-level promotee find his place in the world, his style, his voice and possibly even his pathologies. "You're not much on empathy, are you, Bond?" notes the acidic M. Craig makes you believe in a supremely confident physical animal, more athlete, really, than agent, who ultimately turns into a seasoned, dependable professional -- without, by the way, saving the world.

The plot, in fact, is short on saving the world, as it is on magic gizmo boxes (okay, a big airplane is saved by attaching a magic gizmo box to the terrorist trying to blow it up; but on the other hand, a Venetian palazzo sinks into the canals, so in a cost-benefit analysis, it probably comes out the same).

Now, about that plot. Hmmm, wish I could explain it to you, but first I'd have to explain it to myself. It makes some sense, though a number of the connections were made so fast you more or less have to take them on faith.

Now, as a man who isn't sure if two of a kind beats a queen and a jack, I can say I had some problems following the intense card-playing sequences. The millions of poker fans out there won't, and I'm guessing they'll see the movie six or more times. During this period, it should be added, numerous other things are going on: Bond falls in love with British agent Vesper Lynd (Eva Green, fabulous, beautiful and intelligent), has a heart attack (induced by drugs) and has a machete fight with two African assassins. Still to come are a car chase, a torture sequence (tough, but it gives the director another chance to rip Craig's shirt off), that sinking palazzo, as well as a final shootout.

Half an hour too long (it drags when Bond and Vesper go off on a lark) and with a few too many villains we really can't place in the plot, "Casino Royale" nevertheless proves that you seldom go wrong if you make a movie that leaves you stirred, not shaken.

Art is big business now

Landmark De Kooning Crowns Collection

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: November 18, 2006

As records were being broken at contemporary art auctions this week, the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen privately scooped up a de Kooning “Woman” painting for roughly $137.5 million, adding to the prestige of a personal collection that is fast becoming one of the world’s greatest.

Mr. Cohen bought the 1952-53 oil on canvas, “Woman III,” directly from the entertainment magnate and megacollector David Geffen, who in the last two months has emerged as equally prolific in selling his contemporary masterpieces.

It is the last painting in de Kooning’s “Women” series still in private hands. “This is arguably the most important postwar painting that is not in a museum,” Sandy Heller, an art adviser to Mr. Cohen, said yesterday. “We were in the right place at the right time. It’s our good fortune.”

Mr. Cohen, 50, has amassed a vast collection over the last six years that ranges from a Manet self-portrait to one of Jackson Pollock’s classic drip paintings to Damien Hirst’s infamous shark submerged in a tank of formaldehyde. Only last month he purchased a different de Kooning from Mr. Geffen, a 1955 landscape titled “Police Gazette,” for $63.5 million.

Mr. Geffen, who has been collecting art for decades, is known to have raised about $421 million in four private art sales since the beginning of October. The rapid-fire deals have fueled speculation that he is considering a bid for The Los Angeles Times.

Reached by telephone yesterday, Mr. Geffen declined to make any comment.

In October he sold Jasper Johns’s “False Start” (1959) to Kenneth C. Griffin, managing director and chief executive of the Chicago-based Citadel Investment Group, for $80 million. More recently he sold Jackson Pollock’s “No. 5, 1948” for $140 million to the financier David Martinez, experts familiar with the transaction have reported. (Last week Mr. Martinez denied through his law firm, Shearman & Sterling, that he had bought the painting, but art world experts have repeatedly reaffirmed that he was the buyer.)

Mr. Heller said the price tag for “Woman III” was $137.5 million and that the sale was brokered by the Manhattan dealer Larry Gagosian. It is unclear whether that price included Mr. Gagosian’s commission. If a commission were still to be added to that figure, “Woman III” could possibly have fetched the highest price on record for a painting. The current known record was set this month when Mr. Geffen sold the Pollock for $140 million.

The female figure was a theme to which de Kooning returned repeatedly. He began painting women regularly in the early 1940s and did so again later in that decade and more seriously in the 1950s. Often they are depicted in an almost graffitilike style, with gigantic, vacuous eyes, massive breasts, toothy smiles and clawlike hands set against colorful layers of paint.

“Woman III,” measuring 68 by 48½ inches, is one of six “Woman” paintings he numbered. The other five are all in world-class museums, all but one in the United States.

“Woman III” comes with a rich history. Mr. Geffen acquired it in 1994 from a Tehran museum in a quiet trade with the help of Doris Ammann, a Zurich dealer, on the tarmac of the Vienna airport. In return, Iran obtained the remnants of a precious 16th-century painted manuscript detailing the ascension of Shah Tahmasp of Persia to the throne.

Because Mr. Cohen is known as a supporter of both the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, his purchase is likely to stir speculation about whether “Woman III” will one day go to a museum.

“Steve is a young man; he just recently celebrated his 50 birthday,” Mr. Heller said. “So it’s bit early to say. He has not made any ultimate decision on the fate of his collection.”

Pride and Vanity quotes

"Big egos are big shields for lots of empty space." — Diana Black

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.” — C.S. Lewis, 20th-century British novelist and scholar

"Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.... They do not mean to do harm.... They are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." — T.S. Eliot, Nobel Prize-winning 20th-century Anglo-American poet

"When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity." — Dale Carnegie, 20th-century American motivational writer

"Nothing is so commonplace as to wish to be remarkable." — Unknown

“If you let your head get too big, it'll break your neck.”' — Elvis Presley, American rock 'n' roll icon (1935-1977)

"A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." — Adlai Stevenson II, 20th-century American politician, presidential candidate

"When you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." — Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), 19th-century American humorist, author and journalist

“I value solid popularity — the esteem of good men for good action. I despise the bubble popularity that is won without merit and lost without crime.” — Thomas Hart Benton, 18th/19th-century American writer and U.S. senator from Missouri

“He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals.” — Benjamin Franklin, 18th-century American Founding Father, inventor and statesman

“When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.” — H. L. Mencken, 20th-century American journalist and humorist

"Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory." — Joseph Conrad, 19th/20th-century Nobel Prize-winning Polish-English author

“No man is a hero to his valet.” — Mme. Cornuel, 17th-century Parisian hostess

Blame is a waste of time

"All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much blame you place, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty of something, but you won't succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy." — Dr. Wayne Dyer, author (Your Erroneous Zones)