A long way back, after trashing GM’s car designs, I said I would mention some GM products I do enjoy. I’ve been lazy about this blog lately but I haven’t forgotten about that. This will be a short post though because there’s only one car I can think of that I would seriously consider buying: the 2010 Buick LaCrosse.

That I would like a Buick is amazing because I am under 50 years old. The new LaCrosse is so different than the frumpy old man cars I’ve seen Buick churn out though. Technically Buick is a second tier luxury nameplate, like Acura or Infiniti. However I think this car is so well done it can be compared to low-end luxury cars from first tier nameplates like the Lexus ES350 or Mercedes-Benz C-Class.

Buick finally produced a body that looks modern and refined with the capability to dust a few at the line. It’s a huge departure from their past designs, which to my eye, looked like they were trying to emulate the 1996 Ford Taurus. Oh and that interior just sells me. Sumptuous is the word that repeats in my mind when I look at pictures of it.

To be fair, I haven’t seen the car in person. I liked the ES350 until I sat in it. So maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but it’s a huge leap forward for Buick to have a 30 year old Californian actually consider them at all.

But there’s a onion in the ointment. Actually two. What is the point of buying a luxury car if it won’t impress women? Last December when I told a woman I was looking to buy a Lexus, she swooned! Honest to God, she swooned. She became breathless and started peppering me with questions about it. I really doubt any woman is going to swoon over a Buick.

Second, GM has become Government Motors and I am far too angry over that to buy any GM. There is no way I will consider getting a GM car so long as the government owns a share. Hell, even if the government divests I’m not sure that will satisfy my anger.

I suppose it’s just as well that way. Since I’ve started hiking, I’ve been driving on a lot more country roads and gravel paths. I really shouldn’t bother getting a luxury car if I’m just going to beat them up with that sort of use.

My interest in this book was sparked by a passing mention in a Wikipedia article on the Gadsden Purchase.

As originally envisioned, the purchase would have encompassed a much larger region, extending far enough south to include most of the current Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas as well as all of the Baja California peninsula.

Uh, what? The Gadsden Purchase has always been this bizarre little appendage to the border that’s barely ever mentioned in history classes. For years I wondered why that chunk of land was added to the US. What was there that was so important? And if it was important, why wasn’t it included in the original Mexican Cession after the war? Knowing that the purchase could have been a much grander plan made more sense to me, but it also whet my appetite. Why didn’t this grand plan go forth, and why even bother with this tiny bite of desert if Mexico didn’t want to sell something bigger? So intrigued, I looked over Wikipedia’s footnotes and came upon Seizing Destiny by Richard Kluger.

This is also the first library book I’ve read in years. Usually I buy everything I read from Amazon. This time though I was feeling extraordinarily cheap. Lacking my own library card I had a friend pick up a copy for me.

I gotta say Kluger is an angry man. In the first chapter he basically insults everyone. The Europeans are greedy degenerates. The Spanish are especially inept and pompous. The Natives, who you expect would get off with some liberal coddling, sound like wide-eyed ignoramouses. Kluger calls Americans “land hungry” every chance he gets.

And why did we have this ravenous appetite? You might expect a Berkeley academic to answer that question with “greed” and feel satisfied. Kluger pins it on poor farming practices. American farmers rarely ever tried to maintain soil quality. They frequently exhausted their soil’s nutrients and moved on to new parcels. This migration is what fueled the ever constant demand for land.

I can accept that explanation. I can see the futility in convincing farmers to bear the expenses of changing their farming technique when North America was so empty. They knew that westward land was just sitting there thanks to French and Spanish incompetence. Those colonies were patches of land used to harvest furs or mine precious metals. Why not take their useful soil away when they never bothered to use it. This attitude also explains why that thirst for land petered out at the end of the 19th century. America moved from agrarian to industrial. Farming was no longer the prime driver of the economy. America no longer needed more land to grow because its citizens found opportunity in other jobs. After the Civil War territorial expansion was justified as protecting or enhancing American trade. Alaska was purchased because it would save American vessels time crossing the Pacific by resupplying there. We held on to the Philippines and Puerto Rico because we wanted naval bases that would protect American trade. Even though we defeated Spain, we rejected annexing Cuba. If Americans really desired to expand the country for the sake of expanding the country, that would never have happened.

That argument is still very interesting but that’s not why I picked up this book. I was hoping to hear all the little details that surrounded each territorial expansion. As Wikipedia hinted, the Gadsden Purchase could have been a much larger transaction that swallowed up a lot more of northern Mexico. Well why didn’t it happen? Why was it proposed? What happened in the negotiations? Was the US close to forging a deal for a huge chunk of territory, or was it never really realistic? I imagined the Mexican Cession, the Texas Annexation, the Louisiana Purchase, among other land transactions also had such interesting but little known details surrounding them.

In this respect I was disappointed in the book. There just wasn’t enough detail to satisfy me. It was fascinating to know that the Louisiana Purchase’s legality was quite dubious and that had nothing to do with any constitutional doubt about whether the federal government could purchase land. When Louisiana was transferred back to France from Spain, the Spanish insisted that France return the land if France decided not to move forward with colonization. Instead Napoleon backstabbed Spain and sold the territory to the US. Unlike what you see in textbooks, the borders of Louisiana were not neatly circumscribed either. The US spent a lot of time negotiating the borders with Spain, at least once Spain gave up demanding the land be returned.

All of this fascinates me, but I still wanted more. What the book also lacked was any mention of failed schemes. I would have loved to read about plans the US had for acquiring territory that failed, and who had plotted to detach land from the US but never succeeded. It’s those what might have been moments that really make my imagination run.

Seizing Destiny was generally a good read though. Kluger kept the book mostly free of that liberal Berkeley vibe. He saved it for the last half of the last chapter where he’s writing about the Panama Canal, and it still wasn’t as harsh as any characature you can come up with.

Last Friday I finally finished reading The Forgotten Man. This moment was a year in the making. In December of 2007 I took a trip to New York to visit family and friends. I bought two books to enjoy during that vacation. I polished off Paris 1919 easily (and loved it), but The Forgotten Man was harder. The chapters were longer than Paris 1919 so I really had to dedicate time to reading it. That wasn’t easy to do when I could barely stay awake while in my Mom’s house. When I came back to California I was only half way through it. Three days later I was raising a new puppy and life got very busy. So I put the book down and it collected dust until Saturday, January 10th.

What lit a fire under me was hearing about another book. I don’t like to leave books unfinished so before I could permit myself to get this other book I had to finish The Forgotten Man. Letting it sit for a year turned out to be a serendipitous choice. I got so much more from this book reading it after our financial crisis took hold. At the end of 2007 we knew the housing bubble was bursting but I think most of us believed it wouldn’t hurt the wider economy. Things would slow, but we would still grow. Now after the collapse of 2008 I can see so many parallels with the past year and the 1930-31 period. It seems the scapegoating of business is universal and politicians pandering to it a guarantee. Disbelief and shock are also universal. In those two years before FDR was elected, the public expected the US to come out of this latest recession quickly. Most people remembered getting through a recession in the first few years of the 1920s, and expected this to repeat.

Perhaps the business cycle would have repeated if the US followed the same policies as in 1923 and our “Great Depression” would have been another footnote to financial history. Somehow the lessons of that decade were lost on the 1930′s generation. Your high school history class tells you, FDR was the groundbreaker who took office and implemented a slew of new programs that represented a completely new economic policy for the US. It was a break from Hoover’s ‘do-nothing and let the market sort itself out’ attitude. It’s completely wrong though. Hoover was pushing to spend more government money to stimulate the economy (sound familiar?). Hoover pushed for public works projects and a bank holiday to restore confidence in the system. Hoover actually created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, not FDR.

I’m going to quote Rex Tugwell from page 149 of the book because I think it sums up Hoover’s real legacy nicely. Tugwell was a member of the famous FDR “Brain Trust”. He had a lot of influence in the beginning of the New Deal, but fell out of favor at the end of the decade. Tugwell was outspoken and made himself into a lightning rod for New Deal criticisms.

‘When it was all over,’ Tugwell would later write, ‘I once made a list of New Deal ventures begun during Hoover’s years as secretary of commerce and then as president…The New Deal owed much to what he had begun.’

FDR rode Hoover’s coattails and stole his thunder. Not that Hoover had any ideas I approve of, but they were his. FDR was not a groundbreaker. He was certainly callous. He showed such disregard for the US economy. If Hoover’s real contribution to the New Deal was increased government spending, FDR’s contribution was fear. He’s famous for that “nothing to fear” line, but FDR did more than anyone to strike fear into American business and consequently paralyze the economy for the entire decade. He demanded more regulations (sound familiar?) and engaged in class warfare. He singled out utilities companies for destruction. He prosecuted businessmen on tax charges for using income tax loopholes that were entirely legal. A frozen economy suited FDR though because then he could claim America was in permanent crisis. That would justify any grab for more power to the federal government.

The Forgotten Man is a fascinating read for our times. We just lived through the same sort of economic shock as that generation and now we’re groping for a return to growth as they did. The mistake that era made was accepting that an activist government would save them. Hoover and FDR thought the government could spend America out of recession, and government should be the central player in the economy. Today we’re hearing a lot of talk about the need for the government to stimulate the economy and that it’s the only entity with the power to pull the country out of recession. That disturbs me so much, but this book has given me a lot of hope for our future. The difference today is that hardcore socialism has been discredited. It wasn’t in 1930 so FDR could embrace many of those ideas. Obama still can push our economy closer to the left, but he’ll never push for the government to become the nation’s primary source for growth. There won’t be any farm collectivizations or subsidies to stop growing food. No one will stand for tax rates in the 70% range.

I do want to warn you about the prose. The book is a little long winded. It would have been easier to read if the sections were shorter and snappier. There aren’t enough chances for your mind to rest and digest the information you’re taking in. However I did manage to read the entire book in seven days so if you’re properly motivated you can get through it. I think you’ll be better off after reading it.

I whiled away my Saturday afternoon with a very new experience. I visited my first auction. About a week ago I saw a flier in the mail announcing an IRS seized property auction. I’ve seen similar announcements but I always dismissed them because they were inconvenient to attend. This time though the auction was being held at a hotel that was a mere five minute drive, so I could hardly resist. I kept tight lipped about it this week because, frankly, I was worried I would jinx it. What if I overslept? What if some work emergency came up and I couldn’t go? I was way too excited to risk missing this.

Fortunately everything was fine today. I arrived with friends at about noon, in time for the pre-auction preview. I had never been inside this hotel, but I believe it underwent a renovation about three years ago. It’s across the street from a Wendy’s I visit every so often. The hotel management must not have renovated the meeting rooms because the whole area looked very tired. It wasn’t filthy or dingy. Rather, the materials simply showed their age. The popcorn ceiling had some stains. The paint looked faded. The halls were very dim. ‘Shabby’ conveys it all. But who cares! I wasn’t there for the amenities. I wanted to see some bargains!

I wasn’t totally sure what sort of merchandise to expect at auction. The ad was clearly geared towards jewelry and watches, but it did picture other items like electronics. I guess I expected a mix; Maybe a handful of electronics and miscellaneous items, but mostly jewelry and watches. I didn’t seriously expect to find the drug boat of my dreams. I arrived to find the auction was almost entirely about jewelry. The handful of watches they had were all Rolexes, and only half were men’s.

The items were displayed in the standard glass display cabinets you see in any department store. They were chockfull of rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings and the few Rolexes they had. For an hour we circled tables, looking over the items and checking their descriptions in our auction book (really just a stapled printout). The vast majority of items were so gaudy. The most hideous item was a ring made of different colored sapphires that looked like a rainbow version of the Cadillac crest. It had to be 2 inches across at a minimum. I can’t believe someone would wear that.

The items chosen for auction actually depended on people showing interest. The auction company didn’t bring every single item up to the podium. During the preview, you had to request items be brought up. A staffer would affix a green sticker to items people weren’t interested in. After the preview, those items were brought up.

Most of the people there looked as shabby as the hotel. Like the Cadillac ring, there was one couple that really stood out. To start with, they were elderly. I feel very sure the man was German. Something about his face told me so. He was short at around 5’6″ with a potbelly and gray hair. He wore a stained t-shirt that was a size too small, and the sleeves looked like those on a football jersey. He also worse some nylon athletic shorts that did a poor job of hiding his bright blue underwear. His wife was in a similar disheveled state but instead of looking at her clothes, I spent most of my time trying to figure out if she was Asian. I still don’t know. Clearly, as a friend whispered to me, these were trailer park people. No one else really stood out as much as these people. Sitting in front of me there was a middle aged couple. I suspect the woman was a bit of a golddigger. The man, who I suspect was from Eastern Europe, said nothing that I ever heard. The woman though sounded rather aggressive when she spoke to him. She also sounded pretty demanding when I stood near her at the preview tables.

The auction itself started out fine. The auctioneer, Julian, was a funny guy. He told some good stories and kept everyone very entertained. This was at the beginning when he was auctioning the loose gemstones. Then we got on to the set piece jewelry. Things went downhill there. He started off with the Rolex watches. I never realized how ugly Rolexes are. The most hideous one at the preview was a gold watch with a red face. By the way, having diamonds in the wrist band is tacky. Also at the preview I noticed a black guy, probably in his 20s, admiring a different Rolex. I’m pretty sure he put one into the auction. I guess he was as surprised as me to find that the minimum bid for a men’s Rolex was $14,000. I suppose when you consider a new Rolex can be $50,000 or more, you can argue it’s a bargain, but i was expecting a bargain under $10,000. I remember not too long ago I watched an episode of the Suze Orman show where one guy called in asking if he could afford a $5000 Rolex. What does a $5000 Rolex look like?

I guess that was the first sign this crowd was not full of big spenders. One Rolex didn’t sell. Then a second didn’t sell. When the third one up for bidding elicited no response from the crowd, the auctioneer put three together in the auction and said the winner would have their choice of them. Still no response. This seemed to leave the auctioneer slightly shaken. He said this was the first auction he’s held where he hasn’t sold at least one Rolex. If that’s true, I’m pretty damn surprised. Every auction actually has one person willing to spend over $10,000 on a watch?

I think another two pieces went by without a bidder when Julian brought out a really exquisite piece. It was a diamond and ruby tennis bracelet. It was really beautiful jewelry. The diamonds and rubies sparkled so brightly. I don’t care much for rubies but I was really taken with this. Well with a starting price of $30,000 of course no one bid. Soon after, three necklace/bracelet sets of emerald, ruby and sapphire were brought out. Julian combined these into a single auction, lowered the start bid to $8000 and still got no response from the crowd. His annoyance was pretty clear. No one bid on these sets, so he takes out the sapphire set to show us “how to break down jewelry”. As he said, the necklace is long so he could easily remove a link containing one sapphire and turn the stone into a ring. How much would you pay for a sapphire ring? $1000 would be cheap, while the bracelet alone had eight stones. Eight stones could make eight rings which should cost $8000. That would make the necklace practically free. Well no one bought that argument or a jewelry set.

It was painfully obvious no one was buying today, so Julian decided to cut to the chase and have people call out the item numbers they were really interested in. Also, that trailer park couple had left and he said they must have put stickers on half the stuff they had up for auction. I guess he was hoping the silence was a problem of demand. People weren’t interested in what was being offered. As it turns out it was a problem of sticker shock. I guess no one in the crowd expected jewelry at these prices. I sure didn’t. Even the item numbers called out didn’t sell. One really nice diamond ring came up for $20,000. Someone shouted out $5000, but of course Julian wouldn’t take that.

Finally the one item my friend was waiting for came up. This was a “Cartier-style” (whatever that means) ring with diamonds, amethyst and aquamarine. The diamonds were collectively only a half carat so we were hoping this would be a relatively cheap ring. Our max bid would have been $500, but the item started at $1500. No one bid and we left after that.

I know it sounds like a disappointing day, but it wasn’t. It was tremendous fun! Everything you hear about the auction atmosphere is true. It’s exciting and thrilling. Even today when no one was buying, you could still sit there and talk about how no one was buying. I had no intention of bidding on anything but it was still a great experience. I will definitely be on the lookout for more auctions coming to this area. It’s a fantastic way to spend a day!

A website was brought to my attention at work. CarOffer.com, run by Lane Logic, is a website that gives people an offer to purchase their car. You fill out a form with some questions about your car – make/model/trim, physical damage, paint condition, mileage, etc – and they send you their offer by email. It’s perfect for today’s Internet culture where people can’t be bothered to actually speak to others.

I did discover one sleazeball practice. CarOffer requires you to enter a new car lead. Of course they don’t say it like that on the website, but question 9 asks you what new car you would consider buying after selling your car. There’s no way to say “none”. You pick a car there and you’ve just generated a new car lead.  

So I complained to our affiliate managers about the practice and hopefully in a few days we’ll get them to change it. After my job well done, I got curious. As you know I’ve been torturing myself with fantasies of getting a new car. The prospect of selling my car turns me off though since it will certainly be a pain doing it while it’s financed. But then CarOffer will give me an offer within a day. I had to try this out.

I know it has to be a lowball offer because doing this means the car has to go through two middlemen. I sell my car to CarOffer, who turns around an auctions it off to a dealer who will try to sell it to another person. CarOffer and the dealer both have to make a profit off of this so I can’t get top dollar. But maybe I don’t need to. If I were to sell my car privately I would first list it at $18,500 and negotiate from there. I’m curious to see how far CarOffer will lowball me. Would it be worse than the trade-in I would get from a dealer?

So I filled out CarOffer’s form. I made up a new email address because I didn’t want to risk getting spammed at my real one, and I gave them my office phone number because I never bother answering that. Oh and for my forced new car lead I chose the Honda Civic hybrid. I still can’t get 45 mpg out my mind. Now let’s see what sort of service I get from them.

*** Time Passes ***

The weekend has gone by and I checked that dummy email address. CarOffer offered me $11,000. Just wow. That’s way lower than my expectations. I was actually figuring on $13,000. I could definitely do better at a dealership. I see no reason to use this website.

I finally saw I Am Legend’s alternate ending. It really sucked. YouTube has a copy of it, so watch that if you haven’t seen it already.

I can see this from two angles. And remember, how ever you interpret this, it has to be God’s plan because of that butterfly thing.

1. The disease was God’s plan to create a vampire race.

By handing over the girl vampire he was experimenting on, Neville was forced to discover that the vampires have the same feelings and emotions as humans. That was really hammered home when Neville takes that long, hard look at his wall of pictures. He feels like he’s a monster for killing those vampires. He must have brought lots of anguish to Manhattan’s vampire culture. With this realization Neville will never again experiment on vampires. He rides away in search of any surviving humans and leaves the vampires in peace. Vampire Jebus be praised!

2. This was God’s plan to give Neville a new life.

Neville was determined, to put it lightly, to find a cure. Even after his whole world crumbled around him, he refused to flee to relative safety because he thought it would hinder his work. The only way God was going to get him out of Manhattan and back with the remains of civilization was to destroy everything he had built. That Brazilian woman was sent by God to trigger the end. She caused the destruction by leading the vampires to him, but also gave him an escape route.

The alternate ending left everything hanging. Neville knows he found a cure at the end, but does he know how to create it again? All his documentation was destroyed. We don’t even know if there is a survivor colony. I Am Legend 2 may only last five minutes. Neville runs out of gas in Vermont, gets surrounded by local vampires, and gets eaten.

I was disappointed with the theatrical ending when I first saw it, but this alternate ending has given me a new appreciation for it. At least it provides closure for the story.

By the way, why are they able to drive across a bridge to leave Manhattan? Didn’t the Air Force destroy all the bridges in 2009?

I finally got around to watching I Am Legend. What a depressing movie! I understood the gist of the story going into it, but still it was really a downer. I suppose any movie about the end of civilization is going to be dark. I guess I expected more action. There were a couple of cool scenes but not enough to shake me from my funk.

Still though there were some issues about Will Smith’s life on Manhattan that bothered me. The biggest problem that jumped out to me is gasoline. Gas for his Mustang and SUV didn’t seem to be a problem. Neither was it a problem for that woman from Brazil. I think the writer made the mistake of thinking you can scavenge gasoline from abandoned stations and cars. Not so. Gasoline goes bad. There’s no way any of it would last from 2009 to 2012.

The other problem was Smith’s water supply. City mains water isn’t going to work with no maintenance for three years. While it’s possible for him to rig up a power supply that would pump water through his house, I don’t think there would be any water for him to pump.

The “zombies” have a pretty confusing nature. I think we’re supposed to understand that they feed on normal human blood. So what are they eating for the years that Will Smith is the only person left? Maybe animals but if there are hundreds of thousands of these zombies on Manhattan, I’d be surprised to see wild herds of deer there. It seems more likely they would be hunted to extinction.

That survivor’s colony in Vermont bothers me too. Why aren’t these survivors hunting down the zombies that plague the world? Instead they’re cowering behind those concrete barriers, hoping the problem will go away. There’s no shortage of ammo for them. I’m sure they brought lots when they started the colony, and they’re smart enough to create more. Their smaller numbers are more than made up for by their better technology.

Even with those problems it was still quite watchable. I actually got pretty emotional. That scene, where Smith’s dog was cut and bleeding after he defends him from those zombie dogs, was so hard for me to watch. A good and faithful dog is a special thing, and to see him come to that sad end was rough for me. My eyes actually welled up. If I had to kill my dog, even to save my own life, I don’t know how I could handle it. I think I would probably lose my will to live like Smith did.

The ending really put me off though. Smith suffers for years to create that cure, and because of that butterfly thing we’re clued in that this is apparently God’s plan. But God can’t give the guy a break and save him from the zombie gang? All his dedication is rewarded with death. Way to go God.

Unfortunately Blockbuster didn’t give me the bonus disc so I never got to see that alternate ending the commercials mentioned. I’ll have to hunt that down somewhere online. I hope it’s better than the real ending.

Whenever I run out of cold cuts at home and I can’t bring a sandwich to work, I drop by the Jack in the Box that’s just a block away. On my last trip I gave the new Sirloin Steak Melt a try. I had high hopes. I’ve eaten those Sirloin burgers already and I hold them in high regard.

As an idea the Sirloin Steak Melt hits a lot of the right buttons. Jack’s ad campaign has already placed “sirloin” as a sort of premium cut of meat, somehow set above standard burger fare. “Steak” didn’t need an ad to get people thinking it’s good. Saying that you’re eating steak in your meal already gives it a premium feel. Finally that “melt”, at least in my mind, harkens back to the diners of the 1950s. That’s the golden age of this fatty food and by recalling that period people will think this burger is somehow authentic to that period.

So as I said I had high hopes when I bought this. The reality was downright shocking. I understand a melt, by definition, is swimming in melted cheese, but there wasn’t enough steak in my melt to bind it all together. The meat-to-cheese proportion was off. When I picked it up, it was a soupy concoction that was impossible to keep stable in my hands. To eat it I had to hunch over my desk, take a quick bite and immediately place the melt down on the wrapper so the cheese wouldn’t leak out. An even bigger flaw is the choice of bread. Those thin slices cannot handle the melted cheese and steak grease. Even after I was so careful, the melt still fell apart. I had to scrape the remains off my wrapper to eat.

But the messiness isn’t even the worst part of it. The Sirloin Steak Melt just didn’t taste all that good. There was just too much grease. This would be vastly improved if the cooks let the meat drip on a rack for 30 seconds after taking it off the griddle. Plus the steak pieces were tough and rubbery. We’ve all had bad steak at some point. No one wants to put up with that. Anything else at Jack in the Box is better. I’ve had this once and will not again.

One night when I was resting during my trip, I turned to channel 9 and saw a commercial for Miracle on 34th Street coming up next. I hoped it would be the classic 1947 version, but I was sure it wasn’t. That would probably be too expensive for a local station to buy the rights to air. Instead channel 9 showed a version I never knew existed. As I looked at the clothes and hairstyles I guessed it was an early 80s version, but now that I’m checking IMDB I see it’s ten years older.

I don’t want to pull punches here. This 1973 Miracle on 34th Street was dismal remake. Let me start with that stilted and unnatural acting. The 1973 “Mr. Gailey” lacked the urbane charm of the 1947 character. This guy had an indecisive, fish-out-of-water screen presence. I suppose it was fitting that the character was renamed in this version. Instead of Fred Gailey, the name of Karen Walker’s love interest became Bill Schaffner. I guess I should describe him as the one who would eventually defend Kris Kringle in court, but I’m not sure now. If they changed his name maybe they changed his profession as well. I really don’t know because the movie was so bad I didn’t make it to the end.

I suspected bad things during the scene where Karen Walker and Bill were getting acquainted. There wasn’t much chemistry between them, but the real problem was when Bill’s “friend” shows up. In this version of the movie Bill had recently moved to New York and was still getting settled. His friend (whose name I can’t remember, but I think it was Celeste) shows up at his apartment with groceries from the organic market. Then in front of Karen, Celeste proceeds to mark her territory all over Bill. I was just stunned. I don’t want my Christmas movie sullied with this blatant sexual posturing.

Later my fears were confirmed in the scene that introduces Alfred to Kris Kringle. That was the worst acting in any movie ever made. The actor playing Alfred had this zombie-like approach to the character. He sounded like he was reading his lines for the first time. I suspect the actor that was originally cast for the part dropped out suddenly so the director merely gave a script to a janitor in the studio.

As if the bad acting wasn’t enough, the sets were poorly planned and made the movie look cheap. Perhaps this really was a budget problem. This was a TV movie after all. I remember thinking that Bill’s apartment looked nothing like any New York City apartment I’ve seen. Remember the apartment is along the Macy’s parade route so I would think the building has to be pre-war. Yet the interior, even allowing for the interior design of the day, looked like it was a single family home in Anytown, USA. Then the scenes in Macy’s toy department came but you would never know it. I can’t imagine this was actually filmed in Macy’s. The place looked like an office with toys scattered about.

This movie was simply horrible. I didn’t even make it to the halfway point before I quit. I don’t understand why anyone tries to remake classic movies. It only leads to disappointment because they never live up to the original. The network that made this would have done better to pay for a brand new Christmas themed script because anyone who actually tuned in to watch back in 1973 would just have changed the channel when they saw it wasn’t the real Miracle on 34th Street. I know there was also a 1994 remake too, but I’ll never make the mistake of giving that one a chance.

While those Democratic candidates were practicing for last Thursday’s debate, I was finishing my first audiobook. I’ve never listened to one of these before. I was actually a little skeptical of it. I worried that an audiobook was just another step towards laziness. Now I could read a book without the bother of having to move my eyes!

The audiobook was put into my hands by a friend who borrowed it from the library. I was actually a little put out at first. I didn’t ask for any books and I haven’t read any fiction since high school anyway. I gave it a chance though and I’m glad I did. The Devil of Nanking is a chilling mystery. It was ten CDs long and I became so hooked I listened to five on the first day.

The Devil of Nanking follows two stories. One involves the efforts of a mentally fragile woman dubbed Grey to cling to her sanity. She read rumors about a film of the atrocities of the Japanese occupation of Nanking. Grey must find that film to prove she didn’t imagine what she thought happened in Nanking. If she can’t find it then all those people who accused her of being warped and sick in the head for imagining such things would be right. Running parallel with Grey’s story is the tale of a Chinese professor who was failed by his faith in Chiang Kai Shek and modern China, and was trapped in Nanking when the Japanese took the city.

Grey, quickly stymied by the unhelpful academic Shi Chongming, drifts into the lifestyle of a nightclub hostess in Tokyo. This unplanned detour becomes fortunate but dangerous for Grey. It’s in Tokyo’s clubworld Grey makes contact with organized crime, and becomes a useful agent for Professor Shi’s investigation. Professor Shi knows the whispered stories about the aged Yakuza kingpin Jinzo Fuyuki and his medicine for eternal life. If Grey can find out what this is, Shi will get her the film that will confirm her sanity.

Grey’s storyline is gripping and scary. Listening to an episode of gruesome torture alone in the dead of night is not the best way to get to bed. I probably shouldn’t have done that. The Nanking storyline was tense and frightening, but it really pulled at your heart too. I don’t want to give away too much of this storyline. If you’re already familiar with what happened in Nanking, then you know what to worry about already. If you don’t, you should do some research online. Search for ‘the rape of Nanking’ and you should find some hideous real-life stories.

This was a great mystery, and this comes from a person who doesn’t really go for these stories. It’s definitely worth buying.