Movie Review - Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

The one review I saw of this said it was the best Mission Impossible movie so far. I don't know if I agree with that but it was pretty enjoyable. The keynote of these movies is, of course, the action. The story really doesn't matter much, except as a device to get them from one exotic locale to another. So it you're expecting a coherent story, you're in the wrong bay of the multiplex. On the other hand, if you enjoy seeing Tom Cruise being belted around (who doesn't?), hanging off impossibly tall buildings, driving fast cars faster than physics will allow, then you're in the right place.

The other hallmark of these movies is gear. This movie has plenty. If you've seen the trailers than you know the basic plot. Tom, I mean Ethan, and the IMF crew have been set up. A rather elaborate set up that involved getting the team inside the Kremlin so the bad guys could blow a hole in the side of it and blame it on the IMF. After this, they are operating on Ghost Protocol, which apparently means they have to concoct wild schemes without the help of headquarters. Isn't this the plot of every IM movie? Being without help means, apparently, having access to a railroad car, parked in Moscow, full of guns, electronic equipment, clothes, guns, computers, and guns.

We've been seeing the actors from the last Star Trek movie a lot recently. Before the film we saw a trailer for the Blu Ray edition of Colombian with Zoe Saldana (Uhura) and an upcoming movie called This Means War with Chris Pine (Kirk).  This Means War looks absolutely atrocious.  And Simon Pegg (Scotty) is in Ghost Protocol. Pegg is also one of the voices in The Adventures of Tintin, which we're going to see this week.

Baseball Birthdays - December 18-24

December 18

Ty Cobb - 2005 Upper Deck ESPN Sports Century #SC-4

The Georgia Peach was born in 1886 in Narrows Georgia. He played for 24 years, 22 of them with the Tigers. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1936. He is often remembered as a surly and aggressive player but he is also recognized as one of the best baseball players of all time.

December 19

Al Kaline - 2007 Upper Deck Goudey #206 (short-print)

Another Hall of Famer and another Tiger. Al retired in 1974 after a 22 year career with the Tigers. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1980. He was a 'bonus baby' signing by the Tigers in 1953 and went directly from high school ball to the major leagues. Al hit 399 home runs and had a career batting average of .297. He still works in the Tigers front office and is often referred to as Mt. TIger.

December 20

Branch Rickey - 2004 Topps Cracker Jack #133

The Hall of Fame theme continues. The Mahatma was born in 1881 in Flat OH. Although he was a player for 4 seasons and a manager for about 9 years (St. Louis Browns and St. Louis Cardinals), he is mainly known as a baseball club owner. I'm going to just quote directly from his Wikipedia entry "He was known for breaking Major League Baseball's color barrier by signing African American player Jackie Robinson, for drafting the first Hispanic superstar, Roberto Clemente, for creating the framework for the modern minor league farm system, for encouraging the Major Leagues to add new teams through his involvement in the proposed Continental League, and for introducing the batting helmet." He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1967.

December 21

Dave Kingman - 1976 Topps #40

No Hall of Famers born this date, and none likely to ever get there. Dave "Kong" Kingman was born in 1948 in Pendleton OR. He was the Giants #1 draft pick in 1970. He was one of the most feared hitters in the 1970s and 1980s. In his 14-year career he hit 442 home runs, good for #38 on the all-time career list. But he also struck out 1,816 times, good for #12 on the career list.

December 22

Steve Carlton - 2003 Flair Greats Classic Numbers Game Used

There were several Hall of Famers born on this date but I decided to go with Steve Carlton. He was a Phillie and one of my favorite Phillies of all time. Lefty was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1994, with a career record of 329-244 with an ERA of 3.22. His 4,136 strike outs is 4th on the career list and he won 4 Cy Young Awards.

December 23

Jerry Koosman - 2004 UD Legends Timeless Teams #58

Not a Hall of Fame player but a pretty good pitcher just the same. He pitched for 19 years with the Mets, Twins, White Sox and ended his career with the Phillies. His record was 222-209.

December 24

Andrew Romine - 2011 Topps Heritage #209

Future Hall of Fame material? Way too soon to tell. He had 11 at bats in 2011, batting .091.

Book Club - Readme by Neal Stephenson

The last Neal Stephenson book I read was his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. I always look at his books but didn't think I'd like them. I may go back and look at his past catalog now.

This is a 1,082 page novel that just hurdles from front to end. I'll tell you that it is hard to read because there are a lot of characters and a lot happening. But it never drags and is really hard to put down.

Richard Forthrast has become very wealthy by creating a massively multiplayer online role-playing game called T'Rain, with millions of players around the world. Being so popular, the game is a natural target for hackers. A Chinese hacker, nicknamed The Troll, has come up with the Reamde virus. It infects the hard drives of T'Rain players and encrypts their files. In order to get their files back, the player has to travel to a certain location in the T'Rain universe and leave some gold there. The genius of the T'Rain game is that players can amass gold in the game universe and somehow get it into the real world. The Reamde virus turns into blackmail on a world-wide scale.

Peter is a low-level hustler and computer security expert who has a stolen list of credit card numbers to sell. He's also a T'Rain player. He sells the list to someone working for a Russian mobster but the flash drive he used for the transfer is infected with Reamde. Worse yet, the buyer's hard drive also gets infected and he has files which are very valuable to his boss. They go into the game only to find that the place they need to drop the gold and get the decryption key is a free-for-all of thousands of players trying to do the same thing and thousands of other players trying to rob them.

Peter and his girlfriend, an African girl named Zula, end up kidnapped by the Russians who take them to China to find The Troll. Zula just happens to be the adopted niece of Richard Forthrast.

In China, the Russians plan an assault on the The Troll but end up in a fire-fight with a Muslim terrorist group headed by the notorious Abdulla Jones a black Welshman, turned Muslim, who is being tracked by the British secret service. Then the story gets complicated.

Although Stephenson is primarily a science fiction writer, this book is not science fiction. It is a thriller set in today's world. The computer game stuff is a bit beyond what is actually doable on today's Internet but not so outlandish you won't accept it.

There is also a lot of humor in the book. It's not meant to be funny but Stephenson has a lot of clever ways of describing a scene which help to make the read even more enjoyable. There are also some situations which are meant to be funny, or at least ironical. There is a section where Richard is telling about the early days of T'Rain. They had had a fantasy writer involved to set the original story rolling. They later hired a second writer who was also a language expert. He wanted it explained to him why so many place names and character names had apostrophes in them. There was no explanation of course, it just looked cool to the original writer. The new writer got rid of as many names with apostrophes as he could. In game history, this was forever after known as the Apostropocalypse.

2011 Panini Americana

This set by Panini (formerly Donruss) has been around for a few years. I've even bought a few packs before. It never fails to disappoint. Obviously, Panini wouldn't have trotted this out in 2011 unless it has made money in the past. Who buys this set? I only bought 2 packs ($2.99 for 5 cards) so I don't have a good sample, but it looks like other years. The set is a random collection of minor actresses and actors posed in front of a dull gray background. There were two cards featuring former astronauts in my packs to provide a bit of variety. The collection of people on these cards is so random, I wouldn't have been surprised to find a card featuring me.

Last week I showed some Topps American Pie cards. I like those cards a whole lot better than this Panini set. The Panini cards are a bit shiner and have some gold foil on the front. But the American Pie cards are a much nicer design and actually feature people and things I might want to own.

Here are the 10 cards I have.

First up in this Americana set is British (?) actor John Hurt. You may remember him as the Elephant Man. Me, I always confuse him with William Hurt.

My first astronaut. Personally, I think being an astronaut is one of the top five careers in the world. But there have been a lot of astronauts. What is so special about Barbara Morgan? Apparently she is the third most known woman astronaut, which is too far down the list for me to know her. She was a mission specialist on STS-118 in August 2007. She was also the back-up for Christa McAuliffe and it you don't know who she is, look it up.

God help us, it's Pamela Anderson. Are we tired of her yet?

Randal Kleiser is best known as the producer of the movie adaption of Grease. That was in 1978. As in over 30 years ago. Not exactly a household name, unless you last name is Zuko.

Walt Cunningham, my other astronaut. He was the pilot of the Lunar Module on the Apollo 7 mission, the last Apollo mission not to go to the moon. He's now a talk-show host.

It's that super kid from the TV show Heroes! As near as I can tell he hasn't done much since. But he's only 16 years old so he's got plenty of time to learn how to be an ex-child star.

Linda Evans. Wasn't she on the TV show Dallas? No? Oh, she was on that other big 1980s prime time soap opera I also never watched, Dynasty.

James Duval. I was completely stumped until I looked him up on Wikipedia. He played Frank in the 2001 movie Donnie Darko. I happened to see this movie for the first time a few months ago but still didn't recognize him. He has appeared in a remarkably long list of movies that I never heard of since then.

Hey, Hey, I'm a Monkee! Or at least a Monkee's daughter. According to Wikipedia she is a producer and actress with a long string of obscure (at least to me) credits.

This Linda Hamilton card is from an insert set called "Prime Time Stars". This is one unattractive card, not any fault of Linda. All the empty space on the left is for either a relic or an autograph.

I can imagine that there are people out there who might want one of these cards. Perhaps you are just gaga over the space program and you collect anything even remotely having to do with it. Or if you collect Monkees memorabilia, stuff featuring children of the Fabricated Four may be hard to come by. But really, except out of curiosity, why would anyone buy a box of this stuff.

Night at the Movies - Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

There haven't been many movies lately in the theaters we've wanted to see. But between now and Christmas there are a few we want to see but probably won't have time. We kicked off the holiday movie season with the new Sherlock Holmes movie. We all liked the first movie in the series and the trailers for this release looked pretty good.

It is not a real great movie but if you liked first one, you'll most likely like this one. The story is confusing, at best, and not very original. I really didn't like Downey's portrayal of Holmes in the first movie and don't much care for it here either. If you haven't seen the first movie, the opening scene will be meaningless. If you didn't see the first movie, or didn't like the first movie, I'd stay away from this.

There are some good set action pieces, although I'm a bit tired of the slow-mo in these scenes. The scenes where Holmes plays the outcome of his actions in his head were even more confusing than in the first movie.

If they make a third movie they should feature quite a bit more of Dr. Watson's (Jude Law) new wife (Kelly Reilly). She was engaging in what little they gave her to do. She was apparently in the first movie but I don't remember her.

The end of the movie takes place in an improbable castle built on the side of an improbably mountain with an improbable waterfall gushing out of it. If you've read the Sherlock Holmes stories, you can guess what's going to happen as soon as you see the waterfall.

Random Cards of the Week

 2011 is rapidly coming to a close. I've been doing a feature all year where I feature baseball birthday's of the week. This was really just an excuse to show off my collection. I need another gimmick for 2012. After not being able to think of anything better, I thought of this. Just featuring 10 random cards from my collection. My card images are basically numbered in the order they were put into my card images database. I scan all my cards at a resolution which results in an image about 50% larger than the actual card. So you can click on any of the images and get a closer look.

My other thought was to do a weekly post featuring debut dates. I could probably do both. Does anybody have any thoughts?

Card #20947
1994 Fleer #584 Wes Chamberlain

Card #23956
2001 Topps Gallery #67 Moises Alou

Card #25108
2010 Bowman Platinum #57 Martin Prado

Card #25265 
2011 Topps #176 Daniel Hudson

Card #31034
1994 Ultra Award Winners #20 Barry Bonds

Card #12211 
1993 Upper Deck #253 Jeff Bagwell

Card #25657
2011 Topps Heritage #7 Carlos Beltran

Card #29892 
2011 Topps Update #117 Michael Stutes

Card #4725

2005 Donruss Team Heroes #113 Todd Helton

Card #2234 
2004 Bazooka #50 Albert Pujols

Song of the Week - Road to Cairo by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger & Trinity

I've featured Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger before. I was actually looking for something else by them but found this instead.  The song was written by a guy name David Ackles. I actually have the Ackles first album David Ackles which features this song. I love this version by Driscoll and Auger.  From 1968.