Some poetic thoughts on Thanksgiving courtesy of the Academy of American Poets.
And James Carroll of The Boston Globe, one of America’s best newspaper columnists, offers some thoughts on the holiday, as well.
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I have to agree with this. I watched part of Comic Relief last night and was glad to see someone step up to speak on behalf of the victims of Hurricane Katrina and Republican neglect. And I was pleasantly surprised that the comics were not shy about going after the administration. (And many even gave their own cash to the cause.)
So, thumbs up for the funny men and women.
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The Asbury Park Press offers another reason why we need paper trails for electronic voting machines.
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The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cubs are certainly spending a lot of money. The question is whether it will do anything to make them better.
Their latest signing was the top name on the market, but the contract raises eyebrows — $136 million over eight years for a 30-year-old power bat (31 when the season starts) who is still learning to play the outfield.
Alfonso Soriano had a great year in 2006, hitting 46 homeruns and stealing 41 bases. But his strikeouts were up and he is, at best, a mediocre fielder and he hit just .231 with men in scoring position. The issue, however, is not the average $17 million annual salary, but that he will be getting that money through his 38th birthday — a lot of cash for someone who will spend the better part of this contract in decline.
That’s not a knock on Soriano, just a statement based on history. Batters peak at 27 or 28 and maintain that level for a few seasons before age starts to catch up. Some continue to hit homeruns, some don’t, but nearly all are forced to watch as their skills fade. Of the 21 batters in the National League who were 35 or older in 2006 and had at least 300 at bats (just five had more than 500), none hit more than 27 homeruns or drove in more than 83 runs. And only two had more than 20 steals. These kinds of numbers should give every team pause before they commit guaranteed dollars to players in the latter half of the 30s.
Soriano might just beat these Given that a good portion of Soriano’s worth is his speed, that means that the second half of this contract could be a problem for the Cubs.
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I went to see the new James Bond film last night, “Casino Royale” — a fast-paced action flick of the like we have not had from the Bond franchise for too long.
I am a longtime Bond fan who, sometime midway through the Roger Moore years, thanks to the obsession with gadgets and a softening of bond’s character — he became a bit of a snarky, effete spy whose vicious streak was on the wane. I missed the Dalton years — which was lucky, from what I’m told — and caught most of the Brosnan films on TV. Brosnan somehow brought back some of the Connery edge (that biting will to violence, that bit of sadism that allowed Connery to be more than the dandy that Moore became), but not enough — and the increasingly dopey stories strained credulity even more than the Roger Moore-era.
All that is water under the bridge now. The new Bond rocks. Flat out rocks. This film is stripped of gadetry, relying on brute force and speed. Daniel Craig is the most physical Bond going, full of menace, and the movie is loaded with chase sequences and explosions.
Bond sweats and bleeds; he runs, jumps and fights. There is dust and mud and a vicious torture scene in which a knotted rope is used to do the damage (compare with the cockamamie contraption to which Brosnan was strapped in… in … I can’t remember which film, but that should say a lot by itself).
The film also nods at its predecessors — turning the cliched punchlines into new jokes, giving the audience a glimpse into how Bond’s personality develops. This is an origin story, more psychologically complex than the previous movies, the dark edge, the mistrust, the gleeful sadism — you can sense it coming.
There are flaws — the love sequence that covers a chunk of the back end of the film, while necessary, is too long and could have been tightened — and the plot stretches the limits, though it never crosses the line in the way that the Brosnan movies did or that Moore’s Bond did in “Moonraker.”
Overal, this was one thrilling ride and should re-energize the moribund franchise. It did for me.
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Hank Kalet 