Rapping With Given Politicians

Following my night of adventures with Louie I faced the monthly board meeting yesterday.  For the first time since I’ve worked here none of the Voices of Inappropriate Worth showed up to the meeting which is open to the public.  I thought I’d finally caught a break until inundated by one of the board members in the midst of a campaign to be a state senator.  He chose to speak repeatedly and pointlessly to demonstrate his gravitas and connection to “the people”.  He felt the need to pontificate on even the most mundane agenda items contributing nothing other than demonstrating his complete lack of knowledge on the subject.  It got so bad I was tempted to make a point of order and state that there were neither eligible voters from his district nor any reporters present.  Wiser heads prevailed and he was allowed to steal additional oxygen until even his fellow politicians got restless.

I finished Vince Flynn’s The Third Option yesterday which commences my odyssey through the remaining books in the Mitch Rapp series.  This is the fourth book in the series but this is the second one he wrote.  It was interesting since I started reading the series with books from when he was a much more polished author.  Mitch Rapp is still a very compelling hero and here is set up on what is supposed to be his final assassination mission by a group of self-serving Washington politicians (I know, kind of redundant).

Mitch emerges successful while also wooing his reporter girlfriend around her own kidnapping.  Flynn is transitioning Rapp out of his lone wolf personae and he’s required to play nice with others for the first time.  It’s interesting when an author takes chances like that with a successful literary hero.  I’m really going to enjoy the next few weeks as I read all too quickly the remaining books in the series.

Since the Maine Musquetera lived up to her reputation for timeliness again yesterday, my wife and I were free to take in another movie.  She was supposed to leave the Pennsylvania college after she dropped off her daughter for the first time yesterday morning and spend the night with us.  We got a call around dinner time that she hadn’t left campus yet.  The first one’s always tough.

Thus freed up the wife and I went to see The Giver since it had Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep (well and it was sci fi).  This is one of those movies that just miss.  It was kind of like Pleasantville meets Logan’s Run.  The hero is a young guy in a future where all emotions have been eradicated in a perfectly managed world.  Due to daily drug doses the pliable society sees everything is black and white. This was a perfect role for Katie Holmes who wasn’t required to show any emotion.  Unacceptable babies and the old are culled from the population.

The hero links up with Jeff Bridges, pining because he lost Taylor Swift a few years ago, who inserts some color into his life and hijinks ensue.   Streep consumes her normal amount of scenery as the evil, but very polite head elder.  The moviemakers took a pretty interesting concept and dulled it down to the point it was literally hard to stay awake.  A clear miss.