Incidental Waves

Hard to Stay Depressed When I wake up to Pictures like This Each Day

Despite the prevailing opinion of most Patriots’ fan (myself included), the sun did rise yesterday. Going back to work was a marvelous salve for the wounded spirit so heartlessly pummeled in Denver on Sunday. It’s a true comment on how spoiled we are as sports fans in New England that we consider anything less than a Super Bowl title an abject failure. What a turnaround from the bumbling Patriots of my youth.

Or This

Since I’m going to have my heart stirring tonight under the influence of bagpipes and British martial music, last night was movie night (too depressing to keep calling it dateless date night). Not as depressing or disappointing as the 5^th Wave was. I’ve been a huge fan of Chloë Grace Moretz ever since she burst on the scene as ‘Hit Girl” a few years ago but she was clearly incapable of carrying this movie. I’m told this is yet another example of young adult science fiction brought to the screen. Maybe (hopefully) this will be the death knell for the genre because this was just a bad movie.

Moretz plays a typical Ohio high school girl who’s fighting hormones as well as aliens when they inconveniently interrupt her senior year with a full scale invasion. Moretz is making her way through the wilderness helped along the way with appropriately hunky heart throbs (you know young adult kind of stuff). I know this is science fiction but even that milieu requires credible plot lines. You have to ask yourselves why an alien invader capable of wiping out all technology and 98% of the human species would resort to the silliness that composes the latter ¾ of the movie. I’m told this is the first in a series of films. I certainly hope not.

A much more upbeat and decidedly more exciting adventure was reading The Incident by Lars Emmerich featuring the stalwart Sam Jameson and pathetic Peter Kittredge. Sam is rapidly approaching status as the first female member of my pantheon of literary heroes, usually reserved for the likes of Jack Reacher and Luca Davenport. She continues to Jack Bauer her way through the pages of this very long book which was originally published as a series of short novels. Kittredge, a bi-sexual traitorous state department flunkee is an odd choice for the other point of view for the book; he’s anything but heroic. It makes for an interesting transition when you leave the uber-competent Sam cutting a swath through the bad guys and pick up the story from the hopelessly victimized Kittredge.

Sam is trying to track down why certain D.C. police officers are trying to assassinate her along with a bevy of Venezuelan hit men and tracing the conspiracy back to both the CIA and her own Homeland Security headquarters. I simply cannot get enough of Ms. Jameson. Kittredge on the other is drawn into a plot to assassinate the president of Venezuela while simultaneously acting as the most incompetent double agent in literary history. Along the way he discovers he’s not as gay as he thought he was which lends some needed humor to the almost non-stop action. I cannot say enough nice things about this series of books, especially Samantha. Here’s some of Emmerich’s words as Sam reacts to killing yet another of her pursuers off:

“Relief overtook her. She felt the overpowering, ancient joy of survival, the humbling exhilaration of cheating death yet again. Overcome, she sobbed with exhaustion, with the horror of yet another deadly encounter with pure evil, and with the frightening, accusatory knowledge of the angry, deadly rage inside her soul. She had won, had prevailed against evil incarnate, had killed the walking demon. She had survived. But a new realization settled. It’s still not over.”