Being sick has been a great opportunity to catch up on my reading. And I’ve been wanting to get into Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” for a long time. For one thing, he’s from my home state of New Hampshire, so that puts him right up there with my other favorite New Hampshire novelists, like John Irving, ____, ____, and ummm _____… okay I can’t think of any others. ...
The next movie based on a Philip K. Dick story is to be called… “Next”. I haven’t read this story (or don’t remember it), about a mutant product of a radioactive war who is gold-colored, sexually irresistable, impossible to kill and a Threat To Humanity. I wonder how the presumeably soon-to-be-released animated “A Scanner Darkly” is coming along. I loved the book when I first read it, long ago, but couldn’t get through it on a recent re-reading. ...
So you’re meeting some Japanese friends for the first time. And you want to make a good impression and show you are aware of other cultures. Do you shake their hands, or bow and exchange business cards? This bugs me when I watch movies. In the SF Channel version of “Dune”, when William Hurt meets the Fremen leader for the first time, he uses the Fremen gesture, but later pretends not to understand the water-sharing ritual. Who had power in this scene? Who was taking it, and who was giving it away? ...