Lefty in Space

I received a lot more reaction to my story yesterday about my continued adventures with Buddy the Semi-Wonder Pooch. He apparently has quite a following down in Panama where his gastro-intestinal distress issues of yesterday were a hot topic with my wife having to explain to several relatives the story behind the story. Buddy does that to people, they come and visit us where he inevitably captures a piece of their hearts. It did not pass without notice that none of the calling Panamanians inquired about my emotional distress at heaving to deal with yesterday morning’s adventure. I think they figured if I can handle my favorite Panamanian, a gaseous (amongst other emissions) dog is well within my capabilities.

Date night called for a boxing drama with Southpaw. This tried to be more than it is but it’s interesting to see how irrelevant the sport of boxing has become because one of the hardest aspects was the believability factor. That being said, the movie has Gyllenhaal at his best which can be scary in its own right because he’s so damned good. He transforms himself into a monosyllabic boxing champ on the cusp of punch drunkenness who loses his wife, along with everything else, very early in the picture.

Gyllenhaal has undergone amazing transformations in his last two flicks, including this one, and truly convinces as the abused pug. I thought they spent a little too much time bringing him down and not enough on his trail to redemption, because you have to know that’s where it was headed. I might feel this way because the scenes with Gyllenhaal and Forrest Whitaker, as his new coach, are the meat of the redemption story and these two are so good together that it left me wanting more of this. 50 cent should really stick to rapping as he was totally outclassed in every scene he appeared but he was fighting well above his weight in this cast. A great date movie as my wife was in serious tears by the end (wait, does that make it a good date movie?).

I finished off my latest foray into science fiction yesterday with a book by an author I’d never read before, Chris Kennedy, with the book Janissaries. It was recommended by Chris Nuttall in the afterword of his last book and I thought the premise of earth facing invasion with some friendly aliens arming and equipping us for the fight was promising. It got off to a bad start with Kennedy proclaiming Janissaries were a Persian institution while every right minded student of history knows it was the Ottoman Turks taking Christian boys and turning them into fanatic soldiers; not the Persians. One I got past that faux pas I was entertained by the book as long as he stayed at the tactical level which he had a good feel for. His attempts at the strategic and national level characters were ludicrous and bordering on the unintentionally comical.

It was a fast read and the first in a trilogy about the promised invasion. This read like the first part of a story therefore and I’m sure the publisher turned a very good one-story book into a trilogy because that’s more profitable. I’ll eventually come back and read the next two but not right away because Kennedy didn’t capture my imagination as much as hoped for.