Scott Lyerly

Book Review: “Third Rail” by Rory Flynn

October 1st, 2015

I was on a reading tear this past summer. I went through something like six books in four weeks, which, if you knew how slowly I read, you would understand what an unbelievable pace that is for me. And so, without further ado, here is the first of a couple of reviews that I’m going to offer for some of those titles.

The first book that I devoured was called “Third Rail“. Written by Rory Flynn, it tells the story of one Eddy Harkness, a cop in a small town who used to be part of Boston PD’s narcotics intelligence division. After being set up as a fall guy for a crazy fan death that came during the crazier celebrations of the first World Series Red Sox win in eighty-six years, the best job he could find is being a meter maid in the fictional small town of Nagog. He’s not a happy camper with this and, when he’s not spending his time drinking in bars and romancing twentysomething artists with underworld ties, he’s tying to find a way back to narco-Intel,

Then somebody steals his gun. Or maybe he lost it. In the morning-after haze of a boozy hangover, he can’t really remember what happened. But it looks like it was stolen, especially when somebody starts sending him pictures of it. This kicks off a desperate search by Eddy to find it, while at the same time, he starts looking into a deadly new drug called third rail that’s making people act cuckoo for cocoa puffs before they inevitably die.

The thing that works the best in “Third Rail” is geography. Flynn, a Massachusetts native, has a vice-grip lock on the voice of the region. From the moment the book opens the reader is plunged into the seedy scene of the Boston underworld. Flynn’s spot on here, from language, location, and the Southie “I don’t caah who the f*ck you think you ahh” attitude.

The book is a study in the economy of words without veering into the iceberg philosophy of writing. Flynn’s tight prose almost dares you to read it. It’s tough and terse, like a character in and of itself growing up in Dorchester.

This is not to say that the book is flawless. The language, used well enough to drive the book forward at an almost propulsive rate, comes with a price. It is written in an increasingly popular style called “third person present tense.” So, instead of reading “he did, he went, he said,” the prose is instead “he does, he goes, he says.” This style movement (I’m not sure what else to call it) makes me bananas. There are few books I’ve read in this style that I’ve enjoyed. Chuck Wendig uses this, and his Miriam Black series works well as a result. Jody Shields used it to her advantage in The Fig Eater.

The book also has an “everything but the kitchen sink” feel. There’s cops, robbers, sex, drugs, rock n roll, mobsters, drugs, corrupt cops, a damsel in distress, a child in distress, and familial twists that leave you thinking “huh”?. If you took all the pieces of some of your favorite hard-boiled detective fiction and put it all into one book, what you’d have is “Third Rail”. There is a moment deep in the book where it teeters on becoming a parody. It skates by, just managing to avoid that, driving past the cliff edge, but just barely.

In the end, though, the books is far more satisfying than annoying, something which many books cannot claim. Another Eddy Harkness book comes out next June. I’ll be checking in with narco-Intel then to see whether Eddie’s first adventure was a one trick pony, or whether Flynn can beat the notorious sophomore slump.
The Problem with “Game of Thrones”

September 30th, 2015
There’s a joke I read online somewhere that starts this post beautifully: “GRR Martin, JJ Abrams, and Joss Whedon walk into a bar, and everyone you’ve ever loved dies.” Yeah, that sounds about right.

The Emmys were on a few weeks ago. “Game of Thrones” won big with a capital B. And I couldn’t help but think “why?” When I finished the past season, I sat back and wondered whether I would watch it anymore. The end of every season always finds the internet all atwitter with the various “shocking” deaths of certain characters. Why anybody is shocked by a character death, or at least maiming, in this show by now is beyond me. George RR Martin makes a regular habit of killing of whatever character strikes his fancy. So I knew what was coming when I finally watched the finale of season five.

Was I shocked by the deaths? Not really. I’ve come to expect it. I’ve come to expect that any character that I might grow fond of is probably going to get the ax (figuratively and literally). And that illustrates the fundamental problem with “Game of Thrones” the show and “A Song of Fire and Ice” the book series.

Before we go on, let’s be up front, shall we? There WILL be spoilers below. Oh yes, there will be spoilers.

You’ve been warned.

Let’s get the problem on the table right now. GRR Martin has left us with nearly no character with which to emphasize. Every time we begin to get close to a character, that character meets and untimely and often ugly end. Let’s recap everybody who got killed off in the last episode of season five, shall we?
- Selyse Baratheon, who hangs herself with guilt of what she let her husband Stannis do to their daughter
- Stannis Baratheon, defeated in battle by Lord Bolton, and, after fleeing to the nearby wood, is discovered by Brienne of Tarth, who avenges her former sworn lord, Stannis’s brother Renly, whom Stannis killed
- Myrcella, Lannister or Baratheon, depending on your allegiance, the young daughter of Queen Cersei who was sent to Dorn to be betrothed to a Dornish prince, but who is murdered by poison by the vengeful consort of another Dornish prince, who himself was killed by a man of the Lannisters
- Jon Snow, Commander of the Night Watch (and fan favorite and apparently the biggest shock of the night, though I don’t know why since he meets this fate at the end of the fifth book)
That’s four major characters in a single episode. So major that two of these deaths, Stannis and Selyes, effectively close off an entire subplot, with Stannis’s effort to claim the throne for himself ending in utter bloody defeat.

I don’t mention Arya Stark, youngest surviving daughter of Ned Stark, (Ned, who you might remember was beheaded by Joffery in an act of malicious cruelty that Joffery reveled in). In the finale, she kills a man out of vengeance for that man’s killing of her first sword master. She’s been training to become a Faceless Man, which is akin to a ninja, a stealthy assassin that does his work then disappears. Except she didn’t have permission to kill the man she killed, so her punishment is…blindness.

This doesn’t begin to cover the other deaths that happened this season, the most brutal of which was the death of Shireen, Stannis’s daughter. Stannis, in a moment of blind faith to the new god he worships, sacrifices his only daughter by burning her at the stake, believing the sacrifice of king’s blood will bring him victory. Did I mention that Shireen is (was) eleven, maybe twelve?

Are you catching all of this?

It’s insane. And this is just the show. The books have a far greater number of characters. It’s a cast of well over a thousand characters. It’s a huge amazing epic that I’m not sure has ever been attempted in modern fantasy novel/series history.

And I won’t bother to read it.

And by the way, I might be done with the show as well.

Why? Because as I watched the season five finale, it dawned on my why I’ve felt less and less interested in investing time into this brilliantly complex story. It’s all about empathy.

Let’s baseline a little bit before we go on. What is the primary purpose of a character driven story? To make you empathize with the protagonist so that you care what happens to him/her. Think Harry Potter. There was another large series, lots of characters, several deaths (though rather bloodless compared to “Game of Thrones”). Kids, and adults, gobbled these books up. They would pick them up at midnight on release night and swallow them whole, unhinging their jaws like starving python. Why? Empathy.

The simple fact is that Martin, in his sprawling epic, has repeatedly given us characters for which he elicits from us empathy. He lets us get close to these characters, let’s us see their struggles, gives us a brief amount of hope that they will persevere…then he kills them. Sometimes gruesomely.

(Oh, who are we kidding? Most times its gruesome.)

I understand that Martin is basing a fantasy series of a real-world morals. The War of the Roses was the initial basis for the first war we see in GoT. Yorks versus Lancasters in England became a template for Starks versus Lannisters in GoT. It’s not that hard a stretch. In England, the Lancasters won, and so in Westros the Lannisters won. So I get it. High fantasy without the clear cut definition of black and white, good and evil. This is not the Lord of the Rings.

And yet, without some character around with whom the audience can rally and put their hopes for a win for the good guys, what are we left with? We’re left with twists and turns and plot yanks that no one sees coming, to the often fatal demise of its characters. We’re left with maybe two characters for whom we can empathize, Daenerys and Tyrion. For now. There’s no guarantee that they’ll survive the series. In whom should we out our feelings? Who will be left at the end of this sprawling epic, and will we even care? As all others perish, so too does our patience and interest. Why should we continue to invest in a show that promises us nothing but pain and misery? So we can talk about it over the watercooler the next day?

No, thank you. I think I’m watercoolered out.
Excel Geeking: Using Special Characters in ListObject Column Names in VBA

August 18th, 2015
This is a short one, but a REALLY specific one.

Recently (i.e., today) I was tinkering with some List Objects, a.k.a. “tables” in VBA. All I was trying to do was to clear the contents of a column. Easy enough. It looked something like this:
```
Sheet1.Range(&quot;Table1[# Resource Req'd]&quot;).ClearContents
```
No Excel love. It kept throwing me an error. Specifically, error 1004, “Method ‘Range of object ‘_worksheet’ failed”.

What could I be doing wrong?

I started with the two best posts on Excel tables. First the Spreadsheet Guru’s post giving an introduction to tables. I couldn’t quite find what I was looking for, so I jumped over to Jon Peltier’s post on tables. It’s a little more detail than the overview by the Spreadsheet Guru. Unfortunately I couldn’t find what I needed there either, but it did give me an idea as to the problem.

You see, I have two “special” characters in the column header. Specifically, the hastag (#) and the apostrophe (‘). I figured my error had something to do with these, but neither post, nor a cursory Google search turned anything up when using them in VBA.

So I went the old school route. I recorded a macro wherein I highlighted the column in the table and then used Right-Click > Clear Contents.

What I found was that the code added an extra apostrophe before each special character. I’ve never seen this or needed to use it in any other code I’ve written for Excel, so maybe it’s specific to List Objects only. Then again, maybe not. Truth be told, I wasn’t interested in the history behind the extra apostrophe, I just needed the damn thing to work.

So now the code looks like this:
```
Sheet1.Range(&quot;Table1['# Resource Req''d]&quot;).ClearContents
```
And it works beautifully.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation

August 17th, 2015

Ahhhhhh, vacation. Nothing else like it. Especially when all you have to do is get up, roll out of bed, and roll yourself onto the beach.

Every year, for about a week in the summer, we go up to Wells Beach, Maine. It is one of our favorite places to go, ever. The sun, the sand, the fried food, the ocean breeze…

Yeah. It was awesome.

You want the proof? See below.

Once you get to Wells, you have to drive a mile down, what else, Mile Rd, in order to get to the hotel. It’s a beautiful view of marshlands on either side of the road that fill to the brim with water during high tide, and empty down to sand and mud during low tide.

The view from the balcony at the resort where we stay is nothing but ocean and clouds and sun.

After dinner that first night, we went to the end of the spit of land that Well Beach is a part of. There’s a harbor at the end where, on the harbor-side, I taught my girls how to skid stone.

When the sun comes up in the morning, it’s hard not to feel the sheer raw beauty of nature all the way through your bones.

My younger daughter and I went for a walk that morning. She perched on one of the quarter-slot viewer to get a better view of the beach, waves, and sunrise.

Breakfast that morning was a healthy dose of sugar, courtesy of Congdon’s Doughnuts. What’s funny is that we realized two days later that the word “doughnuts” was spelled wrong on the box, and it took an eleven year old to point it out to us.

At a beach, you never know what kind of cars you’ll see. On this trip, we saw what could be described as the Griswold’s Family Truckster…

…as well as a car straight out of a ZZ Top video.

Because half of the fun of a vacation is eating all the food you normally wouldn’t, we hit Mike’s Clam Shack for dinner. My younger daughter ordered her first lobster. I’ve always found lobster to be overrated, but she loved it.

And because what dinner isn’t complete without dessert, it was time for ice cream at the Scoop Deck.

At night, as the parking lot emptied out, you’re left with a feeling of satisfaction, simply watching the evening crowd mosey up to the windows at Forbes for ice cream or frapps, as the sun sets and the sodium lights come on.

The next day was forecasted to rain, and rain it did. But before the rain started, we went for another walk on the beach. The fog coming in from the ocean drifted slowly and swallowed whatever it touched.

The breeze was chilly without the sun to warm you, and so we ambled along the beach in new sweatshirts.

We stumbled across a sandcastle that had survived the evening high tide.

The sky that morning was simply amazing.

That day saw us spend a lot of time indoors. Summer reading was caught up, some TV was watched, but later in the afternoon, during a break in the rain, we went to the beach again to stretch our legs. It was there that we found a large group of rather bored seagulls, who began to take a great interest in my daughter.

Every year when we go, the trip doesn’t feel complete unless we go see “the lighthouse”. And so, on Wednesday, we drove down to York and out to the point where you can walk to the edge of the rocks and see the Nubble Lighthouse.

It’s not a beach, so you typically don’t think about swimming when you’re visiting the lighthouse, but that’s not to say that you can’t go in the water. That point was proven to us as a set of three scuba divers emerged from the deep.

While we were sitting there, enjoying the view, we watched as a fog bank rolled its way toward us. It would eventually devour the large house in this picture, completely obscuring it from view.

Walking around downtown York is fun, especially if you have money to burn. There is always Goldenrod’s which is famous for its candy, especially the salt water taffy. It’s also almost always a zoo to get in and out of.

There’s palm readings, if you’re so inclined.

And there’s a popcorn place that specializes in unique flavors of popcorn. This was one of our selections, and damned if it didn’t taste like buffalo wings.

The following day, we made a return trip to the Scoop Deck with our friends, who were headed home that day. The ice cream was still fantastic. Perhaps, just as fun, are the signed they have in the and around the shop. For example, they have (somehow) the old Wells Beach sign that used to sit out on US1.

Then there are the rules for the ice cream shop…

…and the extras if you’re carrying a little something extra.

The afternoon brought us back to the beach, with the mile high sky above.

The sea chickens are a bold group, having long grown used to the presence of foolish humans who might throw them a bread crust or two.

There were kites to be seen…

…and shells to be collected.

Then came the last morning, which dawned magnificently in the east.

It was yet another phenomenal trip that had us sad to leave, but eager to return next year for more.

Excel Geeking: Extracting Outlook Address Book Information To Excel Using VBA

July 17th, 2015

Yeah, I know there are a lot of posts out there about this already. So here’s another.

Truth be told, when I first went searching for items on this topic, I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Granted, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that I simply suck when it comes to a decent Google search. But even when my word choice did happen to land me luckily on a site with information on this topic, I still never really found what I was looking for.

What I really needed was a way to extract some particular columns of data from the Outlook address book. I was looking for Job Title specifically, and Alias if I could get at it. After poking around the web for a bit, and finding some snippets of code here or there, I finally wised up and decided to just follow the Outlook object model.

I love a good object model. Knowing the parent/child relationships from one object to another makes navigating through the application a cinch. For me, the thing I like most about knowing those parent/child relationships, and knowing what the various collections of objects are, is that it lets me iterate through all of the items in those collections.

That’s what I ended up doing with my routine. Once I found the right object that held the properties I was looking for, it was pretty easy to walk back up the model and make sure that I had all the necessary objects in the code.

In this case, because my company is on the Exchange Server, the Outlook object I needed was the ExchangeUser. It has all of the properties I would need, and then some. In addition to what I pulled, you can get address, phone numbers, manager, all kinds of good things. From there I just needed to work backward to figure out what collection did ExchangeUser belong to, and then back up from there. Once that’s been figured out, a simple For..Next loop does the trick.

The only other nuance here is that I need to run this from Excel, so that I could write the data to a worksheet from which I could slice and dice. No problem. Microsoft includes the ability to run other application object models from Excel. All you need to do is to set a reference to the MS Outlook Object Library, and then the Outlook object model is available to you in Excel. The rest is history.

The code for extracting the data is below. The list of properties the ExchangeUser offers can be found here. Enjoy.

Public Sub GetOutlookExchangeUserInformation()
'   This goes into the Global Address List for the MS Exchange Server
'   and returns a selection of data to a worksheet.
'   To get a view off all the potential data poitns that Outlook contains,
'   see the following URL:
'   https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.office.interop.outlook.exchangeuser_properties.aspx

    ' Variable declarations.
    Dim olApp           As Outlook.Application
    Dim olNameSpace     As Namespace
    Dim olAddrList      As AddressList
    Dim olAddrEntry     As AddressEntry
    Dim olExchgnUser    As ExchangeUser
    Dim sh              As Worksheet
    Dim lCnt            As Long

    ' Set the Outlook object variables
    Set olApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
    Set olNameSpace = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")
    Set olAddrList = olNameSpace.AddressLists("Global Address List")

    ' Create a new worksheet.
    Set sh = ThisWorkbook.Worksheets.Add

    ' Add some headers for our data.
    With sh
        .Cells(1, 1) = "NAME"
        .Cells(1, 2) = "FIRST NAME"
        .Cells(1, 3) = "LAST NAME"
        .Cells(1, 4) = "ALIAS"
        .Cells(1, 5) = "JOB TITLE"
        .Cells(1, 6) = "DEPARTMENT"
    End With

    ' Start the counter in the second row.
    lCnt = 2

    ' Iterate through the address entires in the address list.
    For Each olAddrEntry In olAddrList.AddressEntries

        ' For each entry, set the an exchange user object.
        ' I'm using t exchange user object because I find that
        ' most companies using Outlook are set up on MS Exchange Server.
        ' You can also use the GetContact whcih will return the
        ' the same information from the Outlook Contact Address Book
        ' (as opposed to the Global Address List).
        Set olExchgnUser = olAddrEntry.GetExchangeUser

        ' Turn off error handling, because occasionally you hit a
        ' record with nothing in it and it throws an error.
        On Error Resume Next

        ' Write the Outlook data to the worksheet.
        With olExchgnUser
            sh.Cells(lCnt, 1) = .Name
            sh.Cells(lCnt, 2) = .FirstName
            sh.Cells(lCnt, 3) = .LastName
            sh.Cells(lCnt, 4) = .Alias
            sh.Cells(lCnt, 5) = .JobTitle
            sh.Cells(lCnt, 6) = .Department
        End With

        ' Because an exchange server could have tens of thousands of entries,
        ' which will cause this routine to run for several minutes,
        ' update the status bar to let the user know that we are in fact
        ' still running and not hung up.
        Application.StatusBar = "Processing record " & lCnt & "..."

        ' If we did not hit an error, increment the counter.
        ' (If we did hit an error, we skip this because if we do not,
        ' we'll get a blank row in the middle of the data set.)
        If Err.Number = 0 Then lCnt = lCnt + 1
        ' Clear any error.
        Err.Clear
        ' Reset the error handling.
        On Error GoTo 0

    Next olAddrEntry

    ' Clear the status bar.
    Application.StatusBar = ""

    ' Prompt the user that we've finished.
    MsgBox "Extract done."

End Sub

Excel Geeking: Counting Recurring Instances of the Same Value Using a Formula

July 9th, 2015

A coworker of mine, who works in another department, had a spreadsheet her group uses to manage what gets pushed out to the stores and when. If you’re in retail, and retail IT especially, you know you don’t mess with the stores anymore than necessary. They are the moneymakers, and you don’t want to be the guy responsible for bringing down their systems to where they can’t sell anything.

This spreadsheet has several columns of dates, with each date corresponding to a specific piece of software that will get rolled out or to which a new release gets pushed. These dates should never overlap. No store gets two pushes in the same day.

This leads me to the challenge they had. With so many multiple columns of dates, they wanted a flag of some sort that would pop up if the same date was entered more than once for that record.

Yeah, I can solve that, I thought. And I did. Here’s how.

Using a mock-up file as a playground, I created four columns of dates. Next I added a fifth column called # Fields Used. In this column I added just a straight count formula. If for some reason any of the columns does not have an entry, I don’t want it counted. It’s always possible that some stores have some software that other stores do not.

The last column is the Overlap column. Into this column I inserted the following formula:

=IF((COUNTIF(B2:E2,B2)+COUNTIF(B2:E2,C2)+COUNTIF(B2:E2,D2)+COUNTIF(B2:E2,E2))>F2,”OVERLAPPING DATES”,””)

Essentially what I’m doing is counting each instance that the value in each column occurs using a COUNTIF. Then I’m adding them all together to be certain I account for all instances. Granted, that creates a double count, but who cares? I’m already over the limit, so over by a little or by a lot, it’s all the same.

If the count for all the columns where the value equals the first one is more than one, which we want it never to be, then it triggers the TRUE part of the IF statement, in which case I’m writing text to the cell that says “Overlapping Dates”. You could also add some conditional formatting to give it some pop, but I skipped that part in the screen grab below.

There is probably a better way of doing this, maybe utilizing FREQUENCY. Truth be told, I didn’t have a lot of time, and this one involved a pretty easy formula to modify, so I went with it. If any had a better method, I’d love to hear about it.
How Was Your Weekend

July 7th, 2015
If you’re American and like a lot of Americans, you probably celebrated the Fourth of July in something like a stereotypical All-American style. There was family and friends and cookouts and parties and drinking and reds whites and blue everywhere, and of course fireworks.

I decided to go against the grain. I decided to remodel my bathroom. By myself. Why? Cause I’m insane.

The truth of the matter is that the assembly inside the toilet was broken so badly that the water wasn’t filling the tank so much as it was exploding out of the assembly, hitting the top of the tank, and thus leaking down the outside of the tank and onto the tile floor.

Know what else? Those tiles in the bathroom floor started to come up. Mainly around the shower. Since I knew I’d need to take the toilet off to replace the tile, and since I was about to take the toilet off to replace it, I figured I might as well just bite the bullet and redo the whole shabang.

(Caveat: I didn’t touch the tub, which is a vinyl wall tub built right into the sheetrock. I may be insane, but I’m not stupid.)

How’d it go? Short answer: not too bad.

Shorter answer: ouch. I haven’t been this sore in a long time. There was so much up and down, squatting, kneeling, hammer, sawing–I was popping Aleve like a madman.

The truth is, the job itself is not so complex that you can’t wrap your head around it. In a nutshell, it’s just a series of basic steps:
1. Remove old toilet
2. Remove old tile
3. Remove old vanity
4. Check plywood for rot
5. Apply thinset, then lay down and screw in the concrete backer board (called Hardiebacker)
6. Lay out one row over and one row down of tile to determine the arrangement
7. More thinset and lay down the all the tile
8. Grout
9. Install new vanity
10. Install new toilet
11. Caulk
12. Install new baseboard
Easy, right? Looks like a lot of steps, and yes, it will take several days, but no step is so crazy it doesn’t make sense, right?

Well, easy as it may appear, there are a lot of subtleties to doing this job. I’ll spare you the pain of taking you through every little thing I did. This isn’t a how-to blog, and since I’ve done this exactly once and I will likely only do this exactly one time, I’m by no means an expert. What I will offer are a couple of tips I learned (or was told) while doing this:
1. Ask the folks at Home Depot for advice. They can be incredibly knowledgable and helpful. They like to give advice about this stuff, since they’ve done it thousands of times before.
2. Write out all of the steps to do that job. Make a detailed list/plan so that you don’t miss anything.
3. When hammering up the old tile with a hammer and a Wonderbar, make sure you wear goggles. You’ve only got two eyes. Googles saved my eyes multiple times.
4. If the plywood under the tile is waterstained but the wood is not spongy, you’re safe. Lay the new backer board on top of it.
5. The Hardiebacker board may feel like you can break through it easy, but you can’t. Use a saw.
6. Measure three times, then measure again. Then cut. If you dare.
7. Make sure your drill is fully charged. Drilling corrosion resistant screws into the Hardiebacker goes through a lot of juice quickly.
8. Be aware that, if you’re replacing a vanity that predates your ownership of the house, when you pull it up you might just find the former owner’s teenager son’s porn stash in the false bottom (I kid you not).
9. Use your level when setting the tile.
10. When cutting the tile with a tile cutter and not a wet-saw, make sure you score the tile well and put the breaker bar as far up on the tile as possible for a clean break. Or misery will ensue.
11. Marble is frickin expensive (see number 9 above).
12. Clean the grout with a sponge as often as possible. Don’t wait for all the grout to be in before you begin cleaning the excess off the tiles. Otherwise, cue the misery.
13. Make sure you have enough space at the back of your new vanity for your plumbing, especially if your vanity has drawers (and these days, they all do). You will be cutting out part of the back of the vanity. You do not want to be cutting through any part that the ball bearing glides for the drawers might need.
14. Check the caulk before you check out at Home Depot. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that some idiot returned a half used tube of caulk to the store you shop at, and that Home Depot restocked it without checking it first, only to have you buy it without checking it first.
15. However long you think something will take, double it. Then your halfway there.
In the end, the bathroom turned out pretty well. There is still work to do. It needs a coat or two of paint. I still need to get new caulk and finish that up. Once the caulk is done, I can put the baseboard trim on. I need to scrape the ceiling and repaint it since its peeling. But this is minor stuff compared to what I spent two and a half days doing.

I’m pretty proud that I was able to accomplish it, especially considering I had no prior experience with this kind of work. In my mind, of course, I can see all the little things I did wrong. In my head all the little things I botched are huge glaring errors. But they’re not really. And I really do like how it looks.

Below you can see the before, during, and after pictures.

So, how was your weekend?
Road Trip 2015

April 27th, 2015

School vacation week was this week. This year we decided to take a trip back down to the Maryland/Virginia area to visit family. We hadn’t been there in four years. It gave us the chance to catch up with family and a few old friends.

We started in Frederick, got the chance to both chill at my mother’s house and walk around the historic section of Frederick. On the side of one building is a pretty nifty mural of a man looking out an open window. We ducked into an antique market where there were, among other things, endless jars of old silverware.

After a few days we headed to Virginia, staying just over the line from Washington DC. From there we got to catch a Nats game one day, and revisit the National Zoo the next. Took the Metro both times, which was an absolute madhouse after the ballgame let out. The zoo had some great exhibits we hadn’t seen before, especially now that they’ve opened the Asian Trails section. This exhibit gives the Asian elephants a lot more room to roam than I remember them having the last time.

In addition, I got the chance to play my father’s new Martin guitar, which has an amazing sound.

All told, lots of fun was had by all. Observe the proof:
Thoughts On The New Star Wars Trailer

April 17th, 2015

My wife suggested I start this post with the following disclaimer:

If you don’t want anyone to harsh your Star Wars mellow, do not read on.

Still there? Good.

Yesterday, a number of people I know lost their minds. You see, at a Star Wars Celebration yesterday, JJ Abrams and company revealed a new teaser trailer for the next Star Wars film.

And the crowd went wild.

I, however, did not.

First, let’s go to the videotape:

Okay, now you’ve seen it. And yes, it looks snazzy and polished and action filled and ohbytheway did you notice Han and Chewie? That was, naturally, what sent the crowd at the celebration over the edge.

So why am I not all tingly inside, along with everyone else? Why am I filled with more excitement over the trailers for the new Mad Max film than I am Star Wars? Have you seen the trailer for the new Mad Max movie?

Sidebar:

Okay, had to get that out of the way.

The truth is, the Star Wars trailers don’t show us anything yet to be excited about. We have a number of new characters, none of whom we have any emotional attachment to. Contrast that with the trailer for The Phantom Menace, where we saw images of old favorites from a different era. In TPM trailer, we get glimpses of Anakin and Obi-Wan, characters we have deep deep connections with. In the new trailer we have glimpses of Rey and Finn. To which you have to ask yourself, “Who?”

To be fair, we do get a glimpse of Han and Chewie at the end, with Han saying, “Chewie, we’re home.” But that’s it. That doesn’t show is anything. In TPM trailers we get to see Anakin and Obi-Wan doing stuff, racing across the desert, using lightsabers, being introduced to each other, rather than a elderly Han waxing philosophical. It’s true we see the Millennium Falcon being chased by a TIE Fighter and flying into the superstructure of the ~~Death Star~~ wrecked starship, but is Han flying it? Perhaps not, given that he and his now 240 year old fur ball friend appear to be coming home to the Falcon itself.

Another aspect that’s generated endless speculation is just who is this Kylo Ren, the apparent villain of the film. We’ve now seen a masked visage and we’ve previously seen an improbable lightsaber, but little else. As far as trailers go, he’s been boring. Boring to watch, boring to look upon. Contrast that with the coolest looking and ultimately most boring villain in the pantheon of Star Wars movies, Darth Maul. He looked like the devil himself, and turned out to have one line in TPM. With nothing to ground us as to why we should invest emotional energy into this character, he was the Sith equivalent of a special effect without a storyline: a pretty boring thing.

Some folks have gone gaga over the image from the opening shot of the trailer, namely a Star Destroyer beached and half buried in the sands of the desert world ~~Tattooine~~ Jakku. (Why we need a different desert world I’m not sure. There are doubtlessly more than one in the galaxy, but maybe the need will be revealed in the film.) It’s a cool image, I’ll give you that. Almost as cool as this one from one of the now discarded former canon of Star Wars literature. Yes, that’s a wrecked Millennium Falcon crashed on (if memory serves) Kessel.

Okay, that’s perhaps enough badmouthing for now. Because I don’t want to come across as a total geeked-out asshole. If I’m being truthful with myself, I really am looking forward to seeing the new film. I grew up with Star Wars and was the quintessential geek about it when I was younger. But if I keep in the truthful vein, I, like millions of other fans, was extremely disappointed at the new trilogy. All of the magic and mysticism that made the first three so enjoyable had vanished in the new three. Yet, before anyone knew how underwhelming they would eventually be, there were trailers that made all of us self proclaimed nerds wet our pants. Sadly, as a friend recently pointed out, often times the trailers for movies exceed the movies themselves.

I’m hopeful about the new three. But for reasons other than the trailer. I’m hopeful because Lawrence Kasdan worked on the script. I’m hopeful because JJ Abrams is good at rebooting things. I’m hopeful because he won’t be continuing after this one, which, if you’ve seen Star Trek: Into Darkness, you’ll likely agree that’s a good thing. I’m hopeful because Lucas, who should have known better when he made the new trilogy but clearly didn’t, isn’t really involved in this new movie.

Time will tell.

In the meanwhile, let’s go for a ride down Fury Road and say hello to this handsome fellow:
Movie Review: “Furious Seven”

April 14th, 2015

I actually made it out of the house to see a movie last week. This is a pretty rare occurrence since I have a pretty active home life and, quite frankly, most movies that come out I’m only passingly interested in. Certainly not enough to spend $12 to see them.

So, you may ask, why did I waste hard earned money of Furious Seven?

As Mallory once proclaimed regarding Mt Everest: “Because it is there”.

(Also, a friend asked me to go see it with her husband so that she wouldn’t have to.)

Before we even begin, let’s level set some expectations. This is not high cinema. No one expects it to be. If you go into this anticipating Gone With The Wind on wheels, you’re going to be unbelievably disappointed. This is B-movie popcorn fair, period. As such, it hits all the right notes.

Everything about Furious Seven is overblown and overdone. The opening sequence (some minor spoilers follow) featuring Jonathan Statham as Deckard Shaw sets the stage for the rest of the film. The film opens with him talking to his younger brother who has been put in the hospital by Vin Diesel’s F&F crew (see the sixth installment for the details). As the camera begins to pull back and we see the state of the hospital, we gain a dawning understanding that the chaos that Shaw is capable of delivering. Even as parts of the hospital fall down around him, he remains completely unscathed. It’s the kind of over the top opening that sets the character up as a villain to be feared and reckoned with, while simultaneously letting us know that this film is going to be nothing short of over ridiculous, with each sequence trying to top the sequence before it.

By and large, the movie is full of this level of absurdity. The car chases are physics-defying. The dialogue is so cliché that you come to expect it, and that any dialogue that doesn’t fit into what is essentially a movie comic book feels out of place. The fight sequences are bone shattering, without any bones actually being shattered. The sound effects when The Rock hits Statham should have its own sound effects bubble. THWOK! KA–POW! (The best fight sequence in the movie actually belongs to Michelle Rodriguez, who is forced into a mano-e-mano with Ronda Rousey.) The finally sequence requires the most suspension of disbelief I’ve needed in the past decade. How is it that Shaw, the F&F crew, and an out of control terrorist, played by Djimon Hounsou (he seems to be playing a lot of villains recently) can destroy most of downtown LA and I only counted three cop cars before the final fight was over?

But this is why we go to these movies. We don’t go to see reality. We go to be entertained, and as such, Furious Seven is one of the most entertaining films you’ll see all year. Well, at least until the next Avengers movie.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the gray cloud hanging over the movie, and my guess as to why it’s made a bo-billion dollars in the first few weeks: Paul Walker.

Walker’s death was a shocking blow to this franchise and its players, all of whom had grown very close. His death sent Michelle Rodriguez into self-destructive nosedive she has only recently pulled up from. The curious are flocking to this movie to see how they finished it without him. I was no exception to the curiosity. The verdict: seamless. The vast majority of the principal photography must have been complete at the time of his death, with body doubles (played by his surviving brothers) filling in occasionally. The end sequence is particularly affecting, scripted as if a decision had been made to write Walker out of the film franchise prior to his death. It ends up being a fitting coda for his involvement in the series.

In short, this movie is nothing but silly fun. If that’s what you’re looking for this April, look no further.