movies

Day three of my nineteen-day weekend

Another dreary, rainy day, although less rainy than yesterday. I even managed to take a walk this afternoon. I spent the rest of the day just puttering around the house, doing some reading and setting up the Christmas tree, which is itself a surprisingly time-consuming endeavor. (Even after getting the box out of the attic, each row of the tree is color-coded and has to be fanned out and added a bough at a time, for something like ten or eleven rows.)

This evening, I watched Octopussy, which turned out to be surprisingly not terrible, especially considering the not so great track record I’ve had with the Roger Moore Bond films. This was one of the few, if only, Bond movies I ever saw in theaters when I was younger…and that six-year-old me is probably still the movie’s ideal audience. But it was significantly better than the often tedious For Your Eyes Only, which is maybe all I can hope for this far along in the series. (Just one more Moore, then Timothy Dalton’s pair of movies. I’m not yet sure I want to revisit Pierce Brosnan’s four.)

And that was whatever this day was. Monday? Sure, let’s go with that.

A rainy day

Yesterday was a bit of a wash, really. I watched the disappointing James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only and just hung around the house, still kind of recovering from Friday afternoon. Today, though, my weekly writing group started back up again, at least for a little while, and I cobbled together this:

When the hurricane came through, the dead wizard came back to life and the ghost hunter was finally released from prison.

You probably have already heard this story, or at least a part of it. The governors of Eld were quick to classify what they could, to quarrantine the northern hills where the storm did its worst, but the basic facts escaped their net. There are few across the great expanse of worlds who have not heard about the wizard, Dead Man Jack, or about the woman, Maribel, the would-be hunter who was forced to kill her father twice.

And yet it’s a story that deserves to be re-told, I think, and this time told beyond the basic facts. I can’t pretend to any special knowledge; I wasn’t on the hills that day, and I wouldn’t even make planetfall on Eld for another week, by which point Maribel and Jack both would be long gone. I was not called here to investigate their crimes, nor to root out the cause of the still as yet unexplained storm. I was just another constable, young and naive and fresh from basic on Eld’s sister moon, Brahms — and yet, as a constable, I did have access to reports I might never have seen otherwise. Reports the governors have long kept secret. I know Jack’s real name, for instance, or at least the one that supposedly brought him back to life, and I think, after all these years, I know where he and his daughter disappeared to. The answers have been there all along on the page. It’s just that so few of us have been encouraged to look at those pages.

Dead Man Jack. He was called that long before the first time he died, long before he had even registered himself as a wizard. The official term, of course, is “technomage,” but I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound even sillier than “wizard,” which is what everyone on Eld knew Jack to be. He wasn’t much of one, from all accounts, either not given to show or incapable of it. If it wasn’t for his daughter, and the strange circumstances of her birth, it’s almost certain no one would have remembered Jack before the year of the hurricane.

Then I came home and watched The Stuff, which was interesting but also pretty disappointing.

And that, plus the crossword puzzle and some dreary rain, was my Sunday.

I the Jury

Jury duty was surprisingly not terrible.

I had to get a slightly earlier train this morning than usual, and to Brooklyn instead of to Manhattan, but that wasn’t too difficult. True, I’ve only ever been to Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn once before, and that was well over a year ago, and by mistake. But I didn’t get too lost, mostly because I asked someone in a ticket booth for directions, and I wound up at the courthouse sometime after 8 o’clock. (I couldn’t take my cell phone in with me, so I didn’t bring it at all, and it’s the only working watch I own.)

I went upstairs to the jury assembly room, checked in and grabbed a seat, and read for a little while — though for much less of a little while than I’d been expecting. We had a short information session about the whole selection process and about the federal court, some questions and answers, and before long they started calling people to go upstairs.

I was in the first group. We went upstairs to the thirteenth floor, all twenty or thirty of us, where the judge, his clerk, and the US attorney were waiting. They were selecting replacements for the grand jury. And, you know, under those circumstances, had I been selected, it might not have been so terrible. It’s one day a week, unlike a trial jury; and because these were replacement spots, filling in for jurors who, for whatever reason, couldn’t finish their service, it was only scheduled to run until the end of January. (Normally, while still only one day a week, members of a grand jury can meet for several months, or even a year.)

But I wasn’t selected. After a brief interview with ten people, they’d filled all the spots they needed to, and the rest of us were dismissed. We went back downstairs, got the paperwork saying we’d been there for the day, and then were free to go. I don’t know exactly what time I left — again, no wristwatch, no cell phone — but I quickly caught the subway back to Atlantic Terminal, then another quick LIRR train to Jamaica, and from there the 11:55 back home. So it was less than half a day, whatever it was.

I’m still on telephone standby for the next two weeks, which means I have to call each evening after 5 to see if they want me back in. But this morning they said that was unlikely, given the relatively small number of cases they had to fill, and I’m not required to be there tomorrow.

That doesn’t mean I’ll be in the office tomorrow, though, since it is Tuesday. And Wednesday, I have a number of campus visits scheduled at Hofstra, so I won’t be back into Manhattan until Thursday. But I actually managed to get some work done this afternoon, which was a pleasant — well, pleasant-ish — surprise.

And then this evening, kind of on a whim, I decided to watch Moonraker, Roger Moore’s fourth outing as James Bond. It’s not exactly what I’d call good, but it’s reasonably entertaining as ridiculous camp. (It might be tough to appreciate if approached at any other level.) Like jury duty, it wasn’t nearly as painful as I had been expecting.

Oh, and meanwhile it was like 60 to 70 degrees and sunny today. I don’t know what’s up with that.

Nobody does it better

It was kind cold and dreary out today, so I spent most of it just puttering around the house. After a week’s reprieve, I returned to James Bond and watched The Spy Who Loved Me. It wasn’t at all bad, although that may only be in comparison to the last few, which were pretty dire. And, as someone who’s more or less committed himself to watching all of the Bond films — I own them all now — I’m a little disheartened by the oft-repeated wisdom that this was Roger Moore’s best. (It’s not that good.)

I also watched Men in Black 3, which was pleasantly diverting. Mildly entertaining. I mean, Josh Brolin does a pretty great Tommy Lee Jones impersonation, and that’s worth something.

I also set up these polls to vote for your favorite Kaleidotrope stories and poems from 2012. I realize I may just end up exposing myself (and everyone else) to how few people actually read the zine, but it seemed like a thing to do.

I mean, it was that or watch Moonraker, and nobody wants that.