Moliere (2007)

Laurent Tirard saw Shakespeare in Love and decided to do the same for the beloved French playwright, only this film might be even more beautifully constructed. It's amazing that they were able to reproduce the exact qualities that made Shakespeare in Love a pleasure to watch without it being simply another insufferable remake.

Definitely worth watching.

Marooned in Realtime (Vinge, Vernor) 1986

Another pleasure of reading books 22 years after they were published: page 162 of the paperback (2003 printing?) states:

He glanced at his mail. [...] The other items were from Yelen: megabytes of analysis on the party.

Oooh, really? Whole *megabytes* of analysis? Vinge is otherwise fairly careful to make his references to technology vague or fantastic/magical enough so that this particular slip jumps out and demands to be kindly giggled at from our terabyte-desktop-hard drive world. The novel is an interesting extrapolation of events from the Peace War, with references to some of our favorite characters (mention of Paul Hoehler/Naismith is notably absent) and a full *three* of them make appearances, and it's the last one that's a little weak, but sadly crucial to Vinge's construction of the novel. Also, while structured as a murder investigation, the novel unfortunately fails as a mystery because there simply aren't enough clues revealed to the reader for us to have anything more than vague guesses as to what's going on. There's nothing more frustrating than important information being hidden from us by the "Wil found what he was looking for, and I'm not gonna say what it was" technique. Overall it's still a good read, with some very well written passages when Vinge is making an effort to write his characters as if they're from a potential earth future, and not from the mid-80's.

The Peace War (Vinge, Vernor) 1984

One of the pleasures of reading books 24 years after they were published is coming across references to "Lucas' Lord of the Rings" films and being thoroughly confused for a second before remembering that the book was written post-Return of the Jedi and pre-Howard the Duck (though Willow might be a fairer insertion here). Speaking of which, why the heck hasn't the Peace War been made into a movie? The book is well-paced with cool gadgets and begs for creative visuals and special effects and has a fair amount of action, and wouldn't really suffer in translation.

At any rate, here's my primary gripe: For reference, page 180 of the December 2003 printing says: '

"Everything seems consistent. There are a lot of things that were barred under you old theory, that are still impossible: It's still impossible to burst a bobble before its time. It's impossible to generate a bobble around an existing one..."

and then

Simply carrying a small bobble was a kind of defense against bobble attack--a very risky defense, once noticed: It would force the attacker to project smaller bobbles, or off-center ones, trying to find a volume that wasn't "banned."

All right, bobbles can't be created around other bobbles. So why wouldn't the Peace Authority simply create a small bobble underground next to their own bobble generator? Boom, now their generator is much more secure against enemy bobbles ("trying to find a volume that wasn't banned" would be too time and energy expensive for any Tinkers trying to embobble the PA generator in the middle of combat) and most of their fretting goes away. This was my first thought as soon as I read that first passage. Isn't this the sort of thought Della Lu would have while scanning the land for firing lanes in her interview with Avery?

Completely missing the point on Tiger vs. Federer

In a June 16 article for ESPN the Magazine, Bill Simmons (the Sports Guy) lays out his theories on why tennis lags behind golf in popularity and what can be done to bring the sport back from the dead. Unfortunately, he completely misses the single most important reason why the casual American fan won't be watching Wimbledon (or any other major tennis tournament) this year is that Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic -- the only players with legitimate shots to win a major -- aren't American. I guarantee that:

• if Tiger and Mediate met in the (tennis) U.S. Open finals while Federer and Nadal meet in a playoff to decide the (golf) U.S. Open, most Americans would watch Tiger and Mediate, not because Tiger is a "better personality" than Federer (they have roughly the same personality, to poke at another of his theories), but because Tiger and Mediate are Americans and Federer and Nadal are Euros.
  
• if no American had won a golf major since 2003 (the year Roddick won the U.S. Open), while Americans had dominated major tennis tournaments during that time period, Simmons would be writing about why golf was "once a successful mainstream sport"

It's really as simple as that. That's really the only substantive point I have to make, but just to rub it in, SG also makes the "the game of tennis has gotten too fast for the equipment" argument, saying

When John McEnroe and Björn Borg had their "Battle of 18-16" at Wimbledon, it wasn't serve-and-volley, serve-and-volley, serve-and-volley

...which was a valid concern 10 years ago when "Pistol Pete", Patrick Rafter, and their ilk were on top of the tennis world, with Agassi as "the counterpuncher", but the top players have largely not been serve-and-volley players for several years, so the points are lasting longer (than 10 years ago; with today's conditioning, I don't think we can go back to the pace of the Wilander-Lendl Finals).

As far as the claim that

succeeding at tennis lends itself to being an exceedingly boring person. You need to be calm, focused and diligent, 24 hours a day

...apparently, he's never seen Djokovic doing imitations. Next!