House of the rising Moonglum

My wife just pointed out that al-Zarqawi’s wife claims that he was sold out by al-Queda in exchange for a promise to stop looking for bin Laden. I don’t believe this for a second (rather, I don’t believe that they would actually stop looking for bin Laden), but then I saw an article that pointed out that the CIA has closed the unit assigned to capturing bin Laden. I actually do think it is a coincidence, but it is odd to see two related articles like that so close together.

But I can’t believe they are closing that unit down. I can’t believe that they haven’t ever caught bin Laden. It will soon have been 5 years since September 11th 2001, and the one person possibly most responsible is still not behind bars. I just wish that we had finished the job in Afghanistan before we moved on to Iraq. I used to claim that we were not forgetting about Afghanistan when our eye moved on to Iraq. But the truth is the chaos we have wrought in Iraq has diverted funds that are needed in Afghanistan to finish that mission and find bin Laden. And to add insult to injury the violence continues unabated.

Perhaps, like Pablo Escobar, he will be found one day. Our government does tend to have a long memory for people it declares criminals.

So we went and saw “DaVinci Code” finally. I loved it. It was very true to the book in both plot and feel. The book is a trashy beach read work of fiction and the movie follows in that line. I don’t understand why it got such bad reviews. Tom Hanks was wooden, but you know what… he played a professor of history! People didn’t like the chemistry between Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, guess what? They were being chased by the police and murderous monks, no time for love Dr. Jones!

One thing that the movie really did which was nice was actually let you see the buildings and pictures that he talks about in the book. Since they were all real buildings and paintings it was nice to get to see them in the context of the story.

The other thing I found interesting was that they spent a lot more time on the (blue eyed) albino’s back story than I expected. All the flashbacks were really interesting: un-narrated, interesting film work, and not totally clear what was happening. You actually had to think for like 15 seconds.

All in all a fun summer action movie. If you haven’t read the book and want to know what all the fuss is about, you can see this and get an idea.

footnote: For the past 24 hours I seem to have been making names for movies inspired by “Snakes on a Plane”. King Kong? Monkey on a Building. DaVinci Code? Jesus Has A Kid. Fellowship Of The Ring? Hobbits Leave Town. My lovely wife said I had to put this here to explain the blog title.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. Work has been keeping me very busy and when I haven’t been working I have been packing getting ready to move into our new place. Having said that, I have found a little time now and then to do a little reading. I have been reading The People of Sparks, by Jeanne DuPrau and just finished it. It is the sequel to City of Ember and picks up directly where that one left off.

Possible spoilers…

This book starts with our heros, having told the rest of the city how to escape, as refugees wandering the wasteland. One main feature of the book is the lack of knowledge about the world these people who have lived their entire lives in a cave have. The people of sparks take pity on them though and let them stay, hoping to teach them what they need to know and then send them on their way. This book spends more time on the larger happenings in the town and so has less time for internal dialog of the characters that made the last one so intriguing to me.

Having said that, Lena does get a hero’s journey, which allows her to travel a road of self discovery and provide the readers with the hope for the future. Pretty much every other arc focuses mainly on the folly of man, but hers transcends that and allows us to see a better world.

In the end of course we are shown that people of “today” are still people and can do bad things, and that disagreements will happen. You just need a way to work through them. It does not gloss over the fact that doing the right thing is often the more difficult path. This book has plenty of moralizing, possibly aimed at current events, but the plot is actually pretty good and carries it along. The point counterpoint of events in the village to events on the journey is especially poignant. Definitely worth a read.