Author Archives: Bob Evans

The Tragic Failure of The GOP

The long awaited Muller Report is out and there is no doubt that it holds news that is of a concern to everyone. It is a relief that the investigation did not find that Trump or his campaign actively coordinated with a hostile foreign power to win the presidency. Make now mistake Trump in my opinion is by far the worse president in the modern age and perhaps ever in our history but we should be grateful that he not an asset or agent though he is a weakness that our enemies exploit.

Due to the diligent investigation we know a number of things as fact.

Russian efforts to manipulate the election were not confined to just he general campaign but also worked to push forward Trump candidacy during the GOP primary. For the Kremlin Trump was the preferred candidate.

Russia launched a sweeping, expensive, and targeted operation to manipulate the election in Trumps favor. This was no passing fancy aimed at simply sowing confusion or tainting a possible Clinton administration, though it would have had that effect had Trump lost so from a Russian perspective it was nearly a win either way.

Trump, though he lied about and attempted to keep it secret, extensively sought to build a massive tower in Moscow. The Trump Tower Moscow project required positive assent and cooperation from Putin and his circle of criminals, assistance that the Trump organization and family courted and pled for.

Trump personal, familial, and company financial exposure in the Moscow project is, because of hidden tax information, unknown which means Trump vulnerability to manipulation through his finances at the hands of the Russian is also unknown.

It is likely that the Russians wanted Trump in office not because of some grand ‘Manchurian Candidate’ style conspiracy but simply because due to Trump susceptibility to flattery and greed makes him particularly vulnerable to skilled manipulation.

At no time during the primary, though he leap to the lead with the electorate, was Trump the preferred candidate if the Republican establishment. These disturbing facts and shadowy connection to Russian oligarchs and criminals were as evident to them as it were to everyone else who cared to look and when Trump won the Presidency the GOP could have still acted as a patriotic party. I am not suggesting that the GOP should have abandoned their core goals of tax cuts and massive deregulation, though I do not agree with those aims. With President Trump the GOP could have their license to pollute and their deficit exploding tax cuts of more than one and half trillion dollars without surrendering so much of the administration to Trump. They could have held the line against grossly unqualified cabinet secretaries, they could have held the line against ignoring the Russian operation attacking our democracy, they could have kept true to the country while pursuing their ill-conceived and self-serving goals, but they did not. Terrified of the base that they created with decades of hyperbole and divisive campaigning, a base that embraced Trump the moment he arrived upon the scene, they folded, cowered from the monster of their own creation, and surrendered all their honor in exchanged for thirty pieces of silver. I only hope that their destruction and reconstruction takes place before it is too late for my beloved nation.

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The, as of yet, Unrealized Full Potential of Gemma Whelan

Photo credit HBO

Photo Credit: The Independent

Gemma Whelan is not a name that sparks anywhere near universal recognition. If you know this actress it is almost certainly because of her terrific performance as the unstoppable and steadfast Yara
Greyjoy in HBO’s Game of Thrones,  but her talents run further afield than the tough and dramatic Queen of the Iron Islands.

Photo Credit BBC

About a year ago my sweetie-wife and I began watching a British comedy program Upstart Crow a sit-com that centers on a highly fictionalize version of William Shakespeare’s life. (Though it has enough crosses with reality that it brings forward a number of interesting takes on other historical characters including a fabulous version of Christopher Marlowe.) Gemma Whelan plays Kate the daughter of the landlady who rents Will his London’s residence. Book-smart, inquisitive, and deeply compassionate, whose utmost desire if to be an actress, illegal for women in Elizabethan England, Kate is about as far from Yara as two character can possibly be. I admit that when Gemma first appeared in the Upstart Crow  I did not recognize her as the same actress as the hard Greyjoy but my sweetie-wife did. Gemma’s comedic talent and timing is impeccable often stealing scenes away from much more established comedian/actors. I do hope that the massive global success of HOB’s series launches this talented actor on a flight path for fame and endless interesting roles.

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A Dreaded Task

This weekend I will be undertaking a difficult and unpleasant task related to my recent victory in selling a novel. No, I am not talking about responding to an editorial direction, reviewing copy edits, or even languishing in the doldrums of the ‘what do I write now?’ blues but rather it is time to take and select — an authorial photograph.

Like many people I am nearly always unhappy with any photo of myself. I have never learned the model’s skill of an easy and natural smile and yet I am also unable to produce on demand the solemn and serious looking of deeply thoughtful person. With the assistance of my sweetie-wife we’re going to use my DSLR, which I got just recently and I am thoroughly enjoying, and see if we can produce, at least to me, a least objectionable photograph.

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The Last Ringbearer – Final Thoughts

Yesterday I finished the massive apocryphal novel The Last Ringbearer  which retells the War of the Ring with the premise that everything you learned from The Lord of the Rings  is  the victor’s propaganda.

Man, I really enjoyed this book!

To the terror of many a Tolkien purist I enjoyed this book much more than I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings.While to book is not without it’s flaws, towards the middle the plot becomes quite tangled with a vast cast of characters working on wildly different agenda. In its themes, the love of reason and science over magi and superstition, it’s commitment to competence over heredity and lineage, and it’s steadfastness to the reality that wars make monsters of us all, this tale spoke to me and many of my core philosophies. Written by Kirill Eskov a Russian scientist who started with his dissatisfaction at Tolkien’s geography and geology he explored his own world building albeit via revisionist version of Tolkien’s grand construction. I found Eskov’s interpretation of the likely type of interaction between immortal Elves and mortal men much more ‘realistic’ than Tolkien’s smug and wise benefactors. It was quite amusing that in many ways the author painted the Elves, their methods, and their motives much like the Communists that rule the USSR.

Depending on how deeply beloved The Lord of the Rings  is to you will be the principal factor in how much you may enjoy this novel. There are those, and I an no way disparage these people, who adore tales of the ‘chosen ones’ like Aragorn who is who is destined to be out unquestioned ruler by right of birth, or who despise the reveal of Rey’s parentage in The Last Jedi  because she comes from no noble bloodline but I find such ideology    at odds with my passion for equality and that brings The Last Ringbearermuch more inline with my commitment that all persons can be great or greatly evil and that the heroes and villains lie within us all.

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Classic Noir Review: Woman on the Run (1950)

Sunday night after a hectic, busy, and fun-filled weekend playing games at Kingdom-Con I relaxed by watching Woman on the Run  a film noir  currently streaming on the service Kanopy. This is a film I had never heard of and pretty much decided to give it a go on a whim.

Ann Sheridan plays Eleanor Johnson and her husband Frank, while waling the dog late in the night, becomes witness to a mob murder of a witness and informant. Frank, a target for the killer because he can identify him, and because the police proved incapable of protecting the murder victim, is unwilling to trust his life to the police, takes to the streets of San Francisco hiding from both the authorities and the killer. Though their marriage is failing Eleanor starts hunting for Frank with the police and the killer dogging her heels aided only by Legget, a nosey yellow journalism reporting looking for a scandalous story. As Eleanor sifts through the clues of her husband’s life trying to work out where he might be hiding she discovers that their marriage is not what she had assumed it to be.

Woman on the Run,  though she is more hunting than running, is a terrific, taunt, thriller with a second act twist that puts the entire second half of the film onto a roller coaster of suspense. The real star of the movie is the sharp dialog that is filled with character and style. Carried principally by Ann Sheridan and Dennis O’Keefe as Legget, the film has more character development and transformation than many movie today and while it suffers from some ham-handed medical fantasy issues to create an additional sub-plot the main story holds together and is populated with colorful memorable characters. (I was quite pleased that the producers and director avoided ‘yellow face’ for the few Asian speaking parts.) The climatic ending is truly engaging and had me, late Sunday after a packed weekend, night fully awake and involved.

Apparently this film at one time had been thought to have been lost but now thanks to the Noir Foundation it has been restored, though at one point a still is used for a reaction shot, and I can heartily recommend this movie to anyone who is a fan of this classic genre.

 

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Convention Report: Kingdom-Con 10

Kingdom-Con is San Diego gaming convention and sadly this year, the tenth, is the final year as the organizer has decided to cease operation while he still loves doing it. Held in a hotel in Mission Valley Kingdom-Con.

While the convention boasts nearly every style of gaming available my sweetie-wife and Is tuck to the board game room where you can check out games from their library and play with other attendees, of which I am told there were in total about 1300.

Here’s a quick run down of the games we played.

Epic Roll:This game was terrible. The theme is adventurers in a D&D setting racing to the top level. It supports only three players, doesn’t understand its theme, (really Skeletons are a tougher monster than Mummies?) and the outcome is entirely luck driven.

Elder Sign:A game of adventurers desperately attempting to stop the rise of a great old god. It’s a dice game but with much more strategy than Epic Roll however I did not quite understand the rules when my Sweetie-wife and I tried it so the game was not a success. I’d like to give it another go with a better understanding of the mechanics.

 

Invader Zim: Doomsday Dice Game:My sweetie-wife and I played this just the two of us and while I enjoyed it she did not. Based upon the popular cartoon players either are working as Zim and Gir trying to destroy the Earth with an outlandish devise or the players are either Dib or Agent Darkbootie trying construct an equally outlandish device to shield the Earth.

 

Betrayal At The House on the Hill/Baldur’s Gate: Two variants of the same game mechanic but with different themes. Collectively players explore either an old Mansion or a fantasy town and its catacombs encountering events, gathering item, and uncovering Omens. Eventually enough omens trigger a ‘haunt’ and one player becomes the monster or villain and has their own victory condition while the other players as, a team, win by stopping the villain. This was decently fun.

Lords of WaterDeep: A worker placement game that takes place in a D&D setting with the players battling to become the power behind the secretive factions controlling the city of Waterdeep. My sweetie-wife and I played two games and I player a late night game with another attendee. I thoroughly enjoyed this game and find that the worker placement mechanic is quite fun.

Hogworts Battles:This is a massive game with seven sub-games. Set, obviously, in the Harry Potter books and movies, the players are the
young heroes cooperatively battling to stop the forces of evil from taking over the magical school Hogworts. Each sub-game is a year at Hogworts and gets progressively more difficult. We played 5 of the seven games, losing to the forces of darkness in year five. This was quite fun but the 5 years took about six hours to play out and had we won years 6 and 7 would have had to have been played the next day.

And finally

Thanos Rising:A cooperative dice game thematically set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each player leads one of four super hero teams, Avengers, The Guardians of the Galaxy, Wakanda, or Earth’s Sorcerers as they attempt to prevent the mad Titan Thanos from collecting all six Infinity Stones and killing half of all life in the Universe. A game with a simple mechanic Thanos Rising is a surprising tough game with a fair amount of tactical thought required. I lost about half the games I played in with the wins being mostly down to the wire affairs.

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Movie Review: Hotel Mumbai

Based on the terrorist attacks launched into Mumbai November 2008 Hotel Mumbai, is a taunt, emotionally draining film reliving those attacks from a very personal character oriented point of view. As with any narrative film that is ‘based on real events’ or a ‘true story’ it is important to understand that fiction film is a terrible way to learn anything about history. What really good historical film can do is capture the emotional reality of an event, a place, or a time, allowing audiences to connect as human beings to the people who lived though the depicted events and hopefully come away with a better and more empathic understanding of what those events meant.

With the exception of the Raj Hotel’s chief chef Oberoi, played perfectly by Anupam Kher, the characters of the film are either entirely fictional or loosely combined from multiple sources however the characters themselves were not given and significant ‘Hollywood’ treatment and allowed to exist within a sphere of action that retained a strong sense of reality about them.

For those unaware of the history on November 26th 2008 a terrorist group, the Lashkar-e-Taiba, launched into Mumbai a series of murderous attacks. Arriving by boat they coordinated across 12 locations attacking crowds and landmarks with gunfire and explosives. The series of attacks lasted three days until November 29th when the last of the terrorists was killed. Killing 166 and wounding over 300 the Mumbai attacks represents one of the worst and most prolonged terrors incident. Lashkar, unlike many other Islamic-inspired terrorists organizations, held the belief that taking ones life by one’s own hands was always sinful but that dying at the action of the enemy was a path to martyrdom. These terrorists never intended to survive their operation and intended to kill as many unarmed, innocent people as possible before being killed by police or military. PBS’s Frontlinehas an excellent documentary from 2015 about the attacks and the critical role one American played in its planning and execution.

We witness the events of Hotel Mumbai  through the eyes of several characters, Arjun, a waiter and devote Sikh played by Dev Patel, The married couple David (Armie Hammer) and Zahra (Nazanin Boniadi) who have arrived at the hotel with their infant son and his nanny (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) and Vasili a rough Russian played by one of my favorite actors Jason Isaacs. This is not a story of unarmed people taking heroic action to overpower armed evil men. It should be said that the violence of the movie is handled quite expertly; never so graphically as to numb the viewers nor so distantly that it ceases to have emotional weight. There are heroes in the story and there is great tragedy but it is not one of thrilling action set pieces but rather horrific encounters with unrestrained hate and violence. The terrorists murdered with remorse and witnessing the recreated events I was moved to hatred of the attackers, terror for the victims, and emotionally wrung out as no one in the film has a cloak of invulnerability provided by neat story arcs and act structures. The film works, it is a powerful piece of art that conveys an emotional truth about these events while staying in some areas of the historical record. For example the movie compresses events down to a single night instead of the protracted siege that took place at the Hotel Raj, but the film’s deviations from the records are not of the sort that would make the project into propaganda or empty honorifics.

I can heartily recommend Hotel Mumbai if you are the sort of person who can endure a film that uncompromising depicts evil and expects a lot emotionally from its audience.

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The Day has Come

Sorry for the couple of days missed at this blog but things have been a little hectic. Good hectic as I am about to tell you but hectic all the same.

So after sitting on the news while I wait for all the details to be finalized and all the signatures collected I can now announce that I sold my SF/Noir novel ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ to Flame Tree Press and it is currently slotted for publication May 2020.

This has been quite a road and there have been a number of lessons learned as I traveled it. I won’t go into too many details as I think some of them will be better served in dedicated posting but here are a couple of highlights of lessons learned.

One: write what you love. I did not write ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ with any sort of an eye to the market, rather it was my own desire to see a blending of science-fiction with noir that spoke to my sensibilities. There are plenty of fine SF stories that blend with the noir traditions but the vast majority of them do so through the lens of the private detective and I wanted something that came at it from more a James M. Caine perspective where ordinary people get in over their heads in the sordid criminal life. When I outlined and wrote the novel my plans were to self publish it because it was more for myself than anyone else.

Two: Never self reject. I mentioned my plans were for self-publication but I still examined the publishing market and Flame Tree who publishes both crime and SF novels seemed to be the kind of house that might publish my cynical noir. If I had not submitted the book and self published it I would have never discovered that there are others who share this taste that I explored.  Always submit the material.

I am thrilled to be working with Flame Tree Press and I am over the moon excited about bringing ‘Vulcan’s Forge’ to market next year.

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All Too Predictable

Perhaps what I read was a terribly April Fool’s jest but given the history that is an outcome I find highly improbable. I generally spend some of my mornings doing political reading, news and opinion pieces from left and right to get a sense what may but on the active discussions and minds of political actors. This morning I read a piece by Rod Dreher titled ‘The Little Steps In Between.’ Quoting from a non-fiction book ‘They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933 – 1945.’ a survey of ten German citizen that lived through the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and published in 1955. The long quote pulled recounts how the decent into a murderous hate filled ideology did not happen suddenly but in gradual steps, bit by bit the people were brought along until it was far too late.

If you are familiar with Dreher’s work you undoubtedly see the twist coming to the foundations of his argument. Dreher is not speaking about the corruption of the conservative movement, a movement that professes a devotion to morality, often an explicit Christiane morality, a movement that professes a commitment to the value of each individual, a movement that professes a commitment to the notion of Truth, and yet this same movement has in steps accepted and embraced bigotry, lies, and torture. This is not the gradual steps towards Nazi’s that concerns Dreher but rather the ‘intolerable’ condition that public institutions are no longer allowed to engage in bigotry under the cover of ‘personal religious convictions,’ a fiction used the justify bigotry in the nation throughout its history. No the United States is not being submerged into hatred ideology by the rise of the alt-right, by openly white supremacist representatives, or a bigoted president that praises a gather of neo-Nazis as containing ‘very fine people,’ but rather by the mild insistence that public institutions are not allowed to discriminate.

To be clear I think that there is a clear difference between individuals and institutions, particularly public institutions that exist and gain tangible benefits from legal structures that derive from our common governments. A company or a corporation exist because we created the legal framework for them and they confer protections to the individuals that band together to create them, such as shielding personal assets from corporate misdeeds. Companies and corporation are not their owners and should not have the same rights and privileges as persons. Oh course the Christian Right has been hypocritical on this point. I recall quite clearly when California’s Prop 8, seeking enshrine in state constitution a legal definition of marriage as one man one woman, was fought in the public sphere and the Christian Right objected to boycotts of businesses whose owners had donated to the campaign to pass the amendment. They argued that private political actions and personal beliefs had no connection to their businesses and such linkages were unjust. Now that they have lost both the political and cultural battle over marriage they argue the exact opposite, that a business such as a hobby shop or bakery are extensions of their owners’ personal beliefs and sacrosanct under their personal religious freedom.

No Dreher is of course terrified if equality, engaging in the perpetual Christian Right fantasy of modern martyrdom. Like Jordan Petersen and his delusion of the ‘Murderous Equity Doctrine’ there is no end to the right playing themselves as the victim which not only makes them look ridiculous, encourages violence from their unbalanced members, but also robs them of genuine sympathy when their rights are under assault.

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The Last Ringbearer

Upon my sweetie-wife’s recommendation I have begun reading The Last Ringbearer. A 1999 fantasy novel the central conceit of the book is that because history is always written by the victors to make the victors look good that events of The Lord of the Rings  as told in that set of books is quite untrue. The Last Ringbearer skims over the events of the war of the ring, providing context and removing Elvish propaganda and then commences with the heroic struggles to avert the coming domination of the world by the unearthly elves.

Yes, if you are a lover of elves then this book is very far removed from what you are likely to enjoy. Also if you secretly dream of being a wizard then this too is not a book for you, nor if you long for the strong hand of a king, born to rule over you with his divine right. This book is truly for those who love freedom, the freedom of thought, the freedom to live without bending the knee to supernatural and un-chosen rulers, and most of all, the book if those who love science.

Told from the point of view of a Human and Orc who have escaped the destruction of Mordor’s armies and then joined by a lord of Gondor disgusted by the war crimes of the elves, they embark on a quest that will removed magic from the world and allow the learning and science of men to flourish.

I haven’t yet finished the novel and it may fall apart by the time I do but for the moment I am thoroughly loving this ride. As heretical as this statement may be for someone who has played Dungeons and Dragons  for more than 30 years, I like The Last Ringbearer  much more than I like The Lord of the Rings.

Unauthorized in the English language world, and I do not begrudge the Tolkien estate in protecting their intellectual property, The Last Ringbearer  is available as a free download from numerous sites and best thought of as professionally executive fan fiction.

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