No Country for Old Men, Dick Francis, The Travellers

 books, movies  1 Response »
Apr 272008
 
Even in a contest between man and steer, the outcome is uncertain.

Ed Tom Bell from No Country for Old Men

I just got to see this movie and I really enjoyed it.

You know that crazy compressed-air bolt-killing machine that the Anton Chigurh character (played by Javier Bardem) used? Funny thing is that I recognized it almost right away. Not because I had seen one before, but I had read about them in a (fiction) book written by Dick Francis called Bolt. You can read all about Dick Francis on Wikipedia I’m sure but, in a nutshell, he is a great writer. He’s published lots of titles. As a younger man he was a jockey and even rode racing horses for Queen Elizabeth. How cool is that?

Speaking of the Anton Chigurh character – he is one bad ass, no? That scene where he exploded a car in front of a drug store to create a diversion so he could steal some drugs (including the lidocaine to numb his leg) and then he fishes out the slugs — eeewww! And at the end where the random car crashes into him and he has that shattered bone sticking out of his arm. Gross!

OH – gotta say this — you know in the scenes where Chigurh didn’t have a really compelling reason to kill the person in question so he flips a coin and lets them call heads or tails and if they get it right they live?

That really reminded me of something I read before…not in terms of a psycho killer or anything, but… There is this book that I read called “The Traveller.” It came out a few years ago and was written by some fellow named John Twelve Hawks. The author is very secretive in real life and lives “off the grid”. The heros in the book are these people called Harlequins who are sworn to protect Travellers. Travellers are folks that have the ability to basically do the astral projection stuff with their life energy and travel to other realms.

It’s a cool book. Lots of government conspiracy (big brother type stuff) and I enjoyed reading it. The part that reminded me of Chigurh was this: The Harlequins were major bad-asses. They used swords as their primary weapon and they lived off the grid. They used a random number generator to help them introduce extra elements of randomness in their lives. For example, as they are going from one place to another and they have a choice of routes to take they would use the random number generator to decide which route. They applied this element of randomness to many other parts of their life as well. If they didn’t have a sophisticated random number generator they would use a coin and flip it to make the determination.

It’s a jungle out there

 Society  No Responses »
Apr 222008
 

A friend of mine was robbed and shot only a few blocks from his home in Atascocita, Texas, on Friday. I don’t have much in the way of details yet. Just that the goblin was a young black man wielding a 9mm pistol.

Here is the general location where the attack occurred. The police have not caught the vermin who did this yet, so be vigilant!


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American Express Phishing Scheme???

 Life  No Responses »
Apr 152008
 

I got a call today on my mobile phone. As I fumbled to pull the phone out of my computer bag, I accidentally hung it up instead of answering it. Not wanting to be rude, I pulled up the call history, noticed that the phone number was 623-492-6031 and the caller ID was Arizona, and dialed the number back.

I was greeting with an automated voice system that said it was American Express. It instructed me to enter my account number.

Obviously, I had no way of knowing if this really was American Express or not, so I just pushed the # button. Eventually a person (Ms. Davis) came on the line. She could not tell me why they had called, but if I would give her my account and social security number, she would look up my information. I politely declined, partly because I still had no idea if this was really American Express and partly because Ms. Davis had a very poor command of the English language and it seemed unlikely that a large and prestigious company like American Express would hire someone like that to interface with customers.

Then I called the customer service number for American Express and spoke with Ms. Jones. She was not able to tell me anything and instead tried to ask me all kinds of personal questions about my employment and salary. Very strange! Oh, Ms. Jones didn’t sound much more literate than Ms. Davis.

So I still do not know if the first call was a legitimate American Express call. And I’m not at all impressed with the representatives of the company that I spoke with today.