Well, kids, this is it... my suitcase is sitting on the bed waiting to be stuffed, and in only a few hours, I'll be breathing the sunny, ashen air of SoCal. (Those fires had great timing, didn't they?) Play nice while I'm gone, remember to be excellent to each other, and Happy Halloween. Here's a little something to remember me by:
Is it just me, or was Belinda Carlisle a lot hotter when she was chunky and using drugs than when she cleaned up and went solo? Maybe it's me...
As you may have heard, Paramount is hoping to revive its venerable -- and highly profitable -- Star Trek franchise with yet another feature-film adventure for the original Enterprise crew, i.e., Kirk, Spock, etc., only this time there will be a whole new gang of young actors playing the iconic characters. J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias, is writing and directing, and the final member of the core cast was announced just last week. Here's the run-down:
The photoshopped image above (courtesy of ScreenRant.com) provides an idea of how the newbies may look in their roles as well as how they compare to the original actors. As usual, give it a click it to blow it up larger.
In addition to the core cast above, Eric Bana will be playing a villain named Nero, who is rumored to be a Romulan (plausible, considering the name and the fact that the Romulan culture of the original Trek was modelled on ancient Rome), and Leonard Nimoy is said to be appearing as a more, ahem, mature Spock in a brief cameo. That last bit suggests we can expect either a time-travel story (another one? Ho-hum...) or a frame story of some kind, no doubt intended to help legitimize the new cast by having one of the classic actors "identify" them as his old friends.
Based on what I've seen out there on the blogs, people seem to be generally positive about this effort to reboot Star Trek, with opinions ranging from flat-out enthusiastic to cautiously optimistic. I, however, am far more dubious of the whole -- forgive the pun -- enterprise.
You ever wake up with a song already stuck in your head? Yeah... mine this morning is "My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don't Love Jesus," by Jimmy Buffett. Make of that what you will...
Give it a few seconds to get going.
I'm going to try and find a way to use the term "piss-midget" today...
I've been looking for some video from Salvage 1 to try and refresh my memory. I didn't find very much, but there is this:
Honestly, more of my circuits fired in response to the ABC Sunday Night Movie graphics than the footage from Salvage, the TV movie that became the series Salvage 1. Remember TV movies, kids? Or the days when feature films ran on regular network TV about a year after they'd been in the theaters, back in the dark days before home video rentals, cable TV, or "on-demand" anything? Can you believe there was once a time when you could make a movie about a homespun junk dealer with a preposterous notion about flying to the Moon in a rocket made out of a cement mixer and a tanker-truck trailer, and it would actually garner enough viewers to justify a weekly TV series (admittedly a short-lived one, but still...)
Yes, we were all a lot more innocent then...
I guess the old TV series Voyagers! must be selling reasonably well on DVD -- either that, or studio execs are running out of product to release and still have a bunch of blank discs they want to burn -- because the rumor mill says two more obscurities from the early '80s, Salvage 1 and Tales of the Gold Monkey, may be coming next year. Of the two, I'd say Gold Monkey is more likely, if for no other reason than the opportunity to ride the coattails of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and maybe make a few more bucks than this series would on its own. For me, it's also the more desirable of these two possibilities. (If you'll recall, I wrote about Gold Monkey a while back; I always loved that show.)
As for Salvage 1, I remember watching it and can easily recall the basic premise -- a post-Mayberry, pre-Matlock Andy Griffith builds a backyard rocket ship so he can go to the Moon and retrieve all the equipment left behind by the Apollo astronauts -- but the details have gotten pretty hazy. I didn't realize this show had enough of a fan base to support a DVD release, but I could be wrong.
The way things are going, I guess everything will become available for us crazy collector-types one of these days...
Finding that bizarre-o Budweiser commercial earlier got me thinking about some other '80s-vintage beer ads that made quite an impact on me: Michelob's "The Night Belongs To..." campaign comprised several atmospheric, one-minute-long masterpieces that featured music by actual rock stars instead of the usual generic advertising tracks. The best known of these was probably the one that featured Eric Clapton playing an updated version of his 1970 hit "After Midnight."
The Internet amazes me. Here we have a technology that is as revolutionary a means of storing and disseminating information as anything we've come up with in a couple of centuries, and what do we mostly use it for? Preserving the media detritus of our childhoods in the 1970s and '80s. Case in point: I mentioned pirates in the previous entry, which started me thinking about other pirate-y things I have loved in the past, which called up a dusty old file somewhere in the adolescent stratum of my personal wetware memory bank (that'd be my brain, kids). I did a bit of searching on Ye Olde YouTube, and behold, a Budweiser commercial that I saw at some point in high school and which has remained lodged in my head ever since:
As best I can recall, this ad only ran during Friday Night Videos and other late-night programs, and I don't remember that it ran for very long... a few weeks maybe. I've thought about it from time to time over the years, and tried to describe it to friends who have invariably responded with blank looks. But now, thanks to this wondrous, science-fiction thing we call the Internet, I can finally shout to the heavens, "You see? It did exist! I'm not mad! I'm not!"
Seriously, though, isn't that a weird commercial? I don't know about you guys, but it doesn't make me want to go for a Budweiser... maybe go plunder some booty or something, but not drink beer.
So, if you've been following along with the home version of our game, you're no doubt aware that (a) my job has been a real drag lately, and (b) the only thing that's been keeping me going has been the promise of an upcoming vacation. As of today, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel... I just hope it's not the California Zephyr.
Sorry, old joke. Probably wasn't very funny even when it was new.
Seriously, though, I'll be leaving a week from yesterday for the first real vacation I've had in several years... "real" meaning something longer than just an extended weekend somewhere within easy driving distance of Salt Lake. This won't be one of my dream journeys -- instead of a trek through Europe, I'll be spending a week in southern California with The Girlfriend and her entire family, visiting Disneyland and SeaWorld, among other touristy locales -- but I'm nevertheless looking forward to it. I desperately need the break, and I'm curious to see the Johnny Depp-bots that've been added to Pirates of the Caribbean (my favorite ride at Disneyland, FYI). Also, as much as I love my home landscape, especially in the fall when the leaves are bright and the snow is beginning to dust the mountains to the east of town, it'll be nice to have a change of scenery. Oh, and as a bonus, my good friend Cranky Robert, who lives in LA, and I are planning to get together and paint the town, too.
People are often puzzled by my attitude leading up to vacations. Unlike, say, The Girlfriend -- who has had a countdown to this vacation running in the corner of her cellphone display for weeks now -- I'm just not one to express a lot of obvious, bouncy enthusiasm, even for the bigger travel experiences I've had (England and Germany). To be honest, I tend not to think much about an impending holiday once the arrangements have been made, and my default habit is to pack my bags at 11 PM the night before I leave. This time, though... well, like I've repeatedly said, I need the break, and I am willing to admit that I'm feeling... moderately restless...
I finished the Harry Potter series back around the end of August -- I meant to write a nice long entry about the experience and my reactions to the whole Potter phenom, but, as you may have noticed, I haven't been able to write many nice long entries lately; the short version is that I liked these books, far more than I ever anticipated -- and I've got to admit, it never occurred to me that Dumbledore was gay. His sexuality never entered into my conception of him at all, actually, just as I never really wondered what kind of trouble Gandalf got himself up to after smoking a big old bowlful of, ahem, "hobbit leaf," or whether crazy old Ben Kenobi occasionally liked to visit the famous "Bantha Ranch" House of Hospitality in Anchorhead's red-light district. The respective texts simply don't provide -- nor do the stories require -- this level of characterization for these guys, who we all know are little more than archetypal mentor figures, no matter that we love them so much. But hey, if Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, then so be it. She would know better than us, and it doesn't trouble me in the least if he is. It's just not anything I imagined, and I personally don't see any hard evidence for it within the story. (I will grant that Dumbledore is probably the best fleshed-out of the three mentors, in terms of having a detailed backstory that the reader is allowed to experience as part of the book's main plot, but there's still nothing there that suggested any kind of a sex life, gay or straight, in my opinion.)
That doesn't mean, of course, that other people won't see whatever they want to see now that the idea has been planted. I imagine this will only add fuel to the fire for those busybody whackjobs who are already down on the Potter books because they've got our kids thinking about that evil, nasty witchcraft. Um, yeah... and all the other beloved classic stories that people have been exposing their kids to for generations, from the Brothers Grimm to The Wizard of Oz to, yes, Star Wars, have absolutely nothing to do with magic or the supernatural...
How wild is this: investigators with the Salt Lake County Sheriff's office have recovered several items that are believed to have come from Adolf Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" chalet and may even have been personal possessions of Der Fuhrer himself! The items were apparently brought home from Germany as souvenirs following World War II, and they eventually ended up in a storage locker in West Valley City, from which they were stolen in 2005.
Okay, this is a bit silly, but I couldn't resist: via Scalzi, who ganked it from Boing Boing, it's The Monster Initial Stickers Name Generator! What's that, you say? You don't know what that means? Well, Monster Initials were these these things you could buy at the 7-Eleven back in the days of shag carpet and bitchin' custom vans:
Released in 1974, the idea behind this collection was simple: create stickers for all the letters of the alphabet, but feature monster scenarios inside each letter. Alphabet letter stickers with monsters inside them that the kids will all want to collect until they can spell their own names with 'em? Brilliant!
As the blogger I'm quoting above goes on to explain, actual Monster Initial sticker sets are pretty tough to come by these days, so he and a programmer friend have cobbled together this generator thing to let you spell out your name in electronic facsimiles of those uber-rare '70s-vintage collectibles. Cool, huh? Here's my name:
Click 'em to see 'em big and admire the groovy artwork.
You know, I've got to be honest, I don't remember these stickers. If they came out in '74, I was probably just a shade too young to have had any experience with them. But the artwork reminds me a lot of stuff I do recall, specifically a series of monster-themed Slurpee cups that I always loved, and also a series of collectible stickers that featured gross-out parodies of various grocery items. You bought them like trading cards, in a pack with a stick of gum. Anyone remember what those were called?
So, I walked over to the bank on my lunch and hit the ATM for this weekend's allotment of cash. No big deal, I do it all the time, right? But this time as I retrieved my debit card from the slot on the cash machine, my fingertips detected a sharp point along the edge of the card. Odd, I thought... never felt anything sharp on the card before. A brief examination revealed that my card is developing a longitudinal crack that runs right along the bottom edge of the magnetic stripe. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, my debit card is coming apart.
I'm thinking maybe I need to reconsider just how often I use the damn thing if I'm literally wearing it out. Strange to think that just 10 or 15 years ago, I was extremely uncomfortable with the very idea of a debit card. Because they can track you with every purchase you make, you know.
Apparently, I got over that fear at some point. Probably when I realized that if some mysterious them really is tracking my purchases, they're getting the worse end of the deal. It must make for incredibly tedious reading. "Good lord," they must be thinking, "doesn't this guy ever go to a different coffee shop? Always the same damn places..."
My parents maintained a pretty liberal movie policy when I was growing up. Unlike a lot of Utah households, "R" movies weren't automatically prohibited from our home simply because of their rating. Instead, my folks -- well, my mom, since Dad was never much interested in movies -- would do a little research and maybe a preview screening to find out exactly why the movie was rated R. Bad language was no problem, since she correctly assumed that I'd already heard every naughty word in the book (and quite a few that no one's bothered to write down) while hanging out with my dad in the garage. Violence was likewise allowable, once I got old enough to stop having bad dreams brought on what's now euphemistically called "intense content" by the MPAA. (For example, she flatly refused to let my uncle take me to see Alien on the big screen when it first came out -- I was around nine, as I recall -- but she gave her blessing for me to see it on video a couple of years later. Looking back, I think that was a wise decision. I love the flick now, but at nine... well, I probably would've had nightmares for years.)
Sex, however, was a little more complicated. Mom generally didn't get upset at brief flashes of nudity or Benny Hill-style innuendo. (I guess her thinking was that if I was laughing, I couldn't be getting too many ideas, or maybe she just liked the fact that Dad and I, who generally had so little in common, both enjoyed Benny's hijinks.) But she became very uncomfortable with anything more, well, educational. This, of course, made such movies intensely appealing to me. However, being a good boy who always followed his mother's wishes -- i.e., a kid who was prone to fantastic bouts of guilt at the thought of "getting in trouble" -- I never tried to sneak around behind her back like some kids would've. If Mom didn't think I ought to see something, I didn't see it. And that's how I missed out on a landmark movie called Porky's.
Via SFSignal, a new meme to start the week, inspired by this list of the Top 50 dystopian movies of all time. Quick now, how many have you seen?
The usual: work is crazy, no time to write a proper blog entry, but I really need to take a break before I kill an account manager or three. What to do? I know: I'll gank a silly Internet quiz from Puffbird...
| Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code
Hm. How interesting that this is exactly what I would've wanted to be if you had asked, "Hey, Bennion, what musical instrument are you?" Results bias? Discuss quietly amongst yourselves while I get back to the never-ending hunt for missing commas and trademark symbols...
Sigh.
Some of my favorite books growing up were the so-called Martian Tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the pulpy adventures of a Civil War veteran from Virginia named John Carter who is magically transported to the dying planet Mars (Barsoom, to the locals), where he encounters all manner of creatures, monsters, beasts, villains, lunatics, arcane technology, ancient civilizations, and, of course, beautiful, scantily clad women as seen in the wonderful artwork above. (That painting by Michael Whelan was used for the cover of the first book in the series, A Princess of Mars, during the 1970s and '80s, and is the imagery I automatically associate with these stories. Click to embiggen.)
For an adolescent boy who had moved beyond childish things but hasn't yet hit the full flush of puberty -- say around 11 or 12 -- those books were like catnip for the imagination, amazing, swashbuckling stories in which swordplay mingled with anti-gravity technology, and adventure and feats of derring-do were always in the offing. Oh, and did I mention the scantily clad women?
There has been talk of a movie version of Princess of Mars for years, but nothing has ever come of it, probably because special effects technology just wasn't up to the task of depicting what Burroughs described without coming off as impossibly cheesy. At least not at a halfway-reasonable cost. And an animated Barsoom movie, while always possible, probably would've been prohibitively expensive, too, certainly if it was going to be as eye-popping as it deserves to be.
That's no longer a problem, however, and it looks like a John Carter movie may finally be happening. Even better, it's being developed by Pixar, a film company with what I would consider to be a flawless record.
In response to a thought-provoking WaPo article about the future of museums in our ever-more digitized and entertainment-driven world, this guy asks:
If we can access a white-laser virtual model of the Mona Lisa at a resolution of 10 microns from our personal computer, why bother getting shoved around and consumed by the crush of tourists at the Louvre only to get no closer than 3 feet? ...What's the point of going to a museum today?
Um, to see the actual painting rather than a picture of it? Isn't that astoundingly obvious?
So, it seems that X-Wing wasn't the only craft from a galaxy far, far away clawing its way toward the sky over the weekend. A model Y-Wing also went up at the same model-rocketry event, with much the same results. Hey, nobody ever said those ships could really fly, only that they're cool-looking. There's a video clip of the flight -- including some footage from an onboard camera -- at Gizmodo. (I couldn't figure out how to embed the clip, and none of the clips I found on YouTube were as good as the Gizmodo one.) Go check it out! And have a look at the construction gallery, too!
In the last couple of days at work, I have proofread 29 -- that's twenty-nine -- two-page documents that are all composed of the same damn blocks of standardized text, just arranged in different patterns. Which means I've been essentially reading the same document -- and marking the same damn mistakes -- over and over and over.
At this point, I'm thinking it's a good thing that the New Proofreaders' Cave is on the first floor, instead of up on the fourth where we used to be. Management should be commended for being so insightful...
It's been a while since I found a good meme, so naturally when I spotted one over at Byzantium's Shores, I had to gank it for myself. It's a fairly unique one, too, with no odd-ball questions about my underwear or most embarrassing childhood secret or whatever. Nope, this one is all about my epicurean habits. That is, it's about what I like to eat...
Read on, loyal readers, and find out all kinds of useless trivia about my narcissistic self!
A good way to make fun of someone who loves the new, super-serious remake of Battlestar Galactica: tell them the show inherently makes no logical sense to you without Muffit, the robot dog. Sci-fi fans are so pissy and serious these days they become infuriated at the mention of anything cute.
Next time I'm called upon to defend my love of the old Battlestar and my utter indifference to the new one (which seems to happen fairly often, sadly enough), I'm going to give this strategy a try. If nothing else, it should be fun to watch those smug Neo-G fans splutter incoherently for a little while...
(Incidentally, if you decide to backtrack to the source of that quote, be warned that SamuraiFrog can get a little... off-color... at times. Not that there's anything wrong with that...)
Following up on that item from last week about the half-size X-Wing built by some model-rocket enthusiasts, here's some video of its spectacular (if short) flight:
Looks a lot like what happened to poor old Porkins...
(Porkins: "I've got a problem here."
Biggs: "Eject!"
Porkins: "I can hold it."
Biggs: "Pull up!"
Porkins: "No, I'm alrigh---yeaaaaaargggg!")
Update: Here's another clip from a different angle. Looks like it launched with the S-foils in attack position (i.e., the wings open in the X-shape), something I wasn't clear on from earlier information. Wonder if that made any difference with the tumble?
An exchange between myself and The Girlfriend at my house Saturday night:
Me: Want something to drink?
The GF: What've you got?
Me: The usual... Coke Zero, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Sprite, water, milk...
(beat)
Me: I don't know if the milk is still good, though. It's been in there for a while. The cat seems okay with it.
The GF: The cat licks his own balls.
You can't argue with logic like that. Anne had a Caffeine-free Diet Coke.
So, I'm just plugging away at today's stack o' work in the New Proofreaders' Cave as a cold front sweeps into the valley and paints the sky the color of lead. I'm listening to ye olde iTunes, a little of my man Rick, and I thought I'd share the one I coming back to:
I look around me and I see what I wanted and what I settled for
Yeah, I've got the heart of a Joan of Arc but the soul of a gigolo.
I've been good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Anytime I stopped to smell the roses they drew blood from me.
Do you know what I mean?
You never ever get away clean. But it's alright,
Yeah, touchdown, turn around, flag on the play.It's always something, you know it is, it's always something,
It's always something, everyday, it's always something.When I was a kid the teachers and the priests said,
"Why do you let him run around like that?"
My father said, "If the boy wants to play guitar, I say we let him."
Through the hard years he was my rock
when I just could not win.
So it goes y'know my father died
just before my leaky ship came in.Do you know what I mean?
You never ever get away clean. Oh, but it's alright yeah.
Down one, homerun, your dog steals the ball.I step up to the table in the middle of my life
and I take my cards and I check them twice.
I've got a killer hand and I'm ready to stake my claim,
the cops raid the game....it's always something
That's a great song, "It's Always Something" (sometimes rendered as "itsalwayssomething"), from the 1999 album Karma. It's heavily autobiographical, and not nearly as melancholy as the lyrics alone probably make it sound. The image it conjures in my mind is of a middle-aged guy who's been seriously knocked around by the universe but is still standing and somehow managing to soldier on. Which is what Rick Springfield is, and I guess it's what I am, too, at the moment. It certainly seems to fit my mood this afternoon.
My day job has been slightly less overwhelming recently, but I'm still feeling pretty frazzled, and like I'm not accomplishing much outside of keeping the bills paid. Not much of any substance anyhow, as my recent blog entries no doubt demonstrate. There are so few hours in the day, and so many projects both at the office and at home that need my attention, and my attention span seems to be down to about a tenth of a second these days.
None of which anyone cares about, probably. Welcome to the grown-up world, Bennion. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's a great song, anyhow. Give it a download, or whatever you kids do these days.
My dad isn't a particularly well-educated man, but I think he is, in his own way, something of a genius. Over the years, I've seen him modify ordinary tools to fit difficult jobs, rather than spending the money on a specialized gadget; improvise repairs to things that everyone else would say are impossible to fix; and, most impressively, build wild flights of fancy for no other reason than he thinks they will be cool and make people smile. There was, for example, the year he transformed my '63 Galaxie into a reasonably good replica of the RMS Titanic, complete with Ken-and-Barbie versions of Jack and Rose out on the bow, for a Halloween party.
Then there are the ideas he's had but for one reason or another never brought to fruition. He was always going to cobble together a Headless Horseman outfit and ride Thunder, our old gray nag, through the subdivisions just to see what the trick-or-treaters would do. And when I was a young fanboy, he often thought about making a float with a life-size X-Wing on it for our small-town Fourth-of-July parade. (The idea was that I'd be dressed as Luke Skywalker, riding the float alongside my "ship.")
I was reminded of Dad's unfulfilled X-Wing scheme this afternoon when I ran across this:
That's a 21-foot-long (half-scale?) X-Wing built by a group of model-rocket enthusiasts; they intend to launch it next week, with four solid-fuel rocket motors mounted right where the engine pods would go on a "real" Incom T-65. And here's the wild thing: the wings are motorized. If all goes well, the ship will "lock its S-foils in attack position" as it ascends. Or maybe the ship will start off with the wings in X-configuration and fold them closed during the flight -- the two websites I've seen contradict each other on that. Either way, there's a good chance the whole thing will come apart, but I hope it doesn't. And I also hope the video of its flight makes it to the web; my three loyal readers know I'll be posting it if it does!
Read an overview and see lots more pictures here, or go here for an obsessively detailed construction log.
Via Wil Wheaton, the very cool news that George Takei, a.k.a. Sulu in Classic Star Trek, has had an asteroid named in his honor:
An asteroid between Mars and Jupiter has been renamed 7307 Takei in honor of the actor, best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the original "Star Trek" series and movies.
The celestial rock, discovered by two Japanese astronomers in 1994, was formerly known as 1994 GT9. It joins the 4659 Roddenberry (named for the show's creator, Gene Roddenberry) and the 68410 Nichols (for co-star Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura). Other main-belt asteroids have been named for science fiction luminaries Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.
I've had the honor of meeting Mr. Takei on two occasions. The first time was at one of those "meet 'n' greet"-style conventions I've written about before, those impersonal things where you pay an outrageous admission fee for the privilege of standing in line for an hour or three so you can experience 20 seconds of face-time with your celebrity hero, snap a personal photo (if you're lucky, anyway; some stars -- Shatner, for example -- don't allow those), and walk out with an autographed 8x10 glossy.
The second occasion was much more interesting and satisfying. It was intended to be a big meet 'n' greet with a lengthy roster of genre talent, but it wasn't very well organized or advertised and, well, nobody showed up. To be honest, I wouldn't have gone myself if a friend of mine who knew the promoter hadn't gotten me some freebie tickets. My buddy seemed so pleased with himself for doing me this huge favor that I simply couldn't find a reason not to at least check it out.
At first glance, it was one of the most depressing events I've ever attended.
Here's a sad note on which to begin the week: Lois Maxwell, the elegant lady who bantered with three iterations of James Bond over a period of 22 years and 14 films, died over the weekend. She was 80. The LA Times obit is here.
Maxwell, who played the ever-hopeful Miss Moneypenny alongside Sean Connery, George Lazenby, and Roger Moore, was replaced by a younger actress for Timothy Dalton's first outing as 007 in The Living Daylights. Maxwell was 58 at the time, and I, for one, have always seen the change as something of an injustice. After all, Desmond Llewelyn played Q until he was quite elderly. Surely it wouldn't have been too far-fetched for M to have an older executive secretary for a few more installments in the series? Rather than recast her with someone younger, wouldn't it have been more interesting to change how Moneypenny relates to Bond as Maxwell aged, to make her more of a mothering presence than an object of flirtation? (Or, for that matter, why not be really daring and do both?) Sadly, the producers of the Bond series have rarely shown any true daring in the 40-plus-year history of the franchise, mostly preferring to stick to rote formula.
Nevertheless, I think it's telling that Maxwell's face is the one that immediately comes to mind when you hear the name "Moneypenny." No doubt that can be attributed, in part, to the fact that she played the character for so long and in so many entries in the series. By contrast, her two successors, Caroline Bliss and Samantha Bond (ironic name, eh?), have played Penny in only two and four films, respectively. But I think you can also argue that Maxwell stands out because of a something you don't see much anymore, an old-fashioned strain of genuine class. No disrespect to Bliss or Bond, but Maxwell simply had that civilized, grown-up, cocktails-and-jazz sort of quality that defined the movie stars of the early Cold War era. You just knew that if Moneypenny smoked (I can't recall if she did so in any of her Bond movies, but I could be wrong), she would keep her cigarettes in an enameled wooden box and light them with a crystal desk lighter. No crumpled paper packs or disposable Bics pulled from the bottom of a cluttered purse for her. And if you could manage to seduce her, the sex would be anything but casual, even if there were no strings attached.
Maybe Maxwell's interpretation of Moneypenny is passe now -- Bond himself has been reinvented for the 21st Century, and he doesn't bear a lot of resemblance to the character JFK was reputed to have enjoyed -- but her version will always be, for me, the definitive and classic one, just as Connery remains, in my mind, the one true 007. Even if Daniel Craig was damn good...
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