Song of the Week - Summertime by Janis Joplin

Last week I featured the top 5 summer songs as compiled by a local TV station. I wasn't very happy with that list so I decided to compile my own from songs I have in iTunes.

#5 - Summer Skin by Death Cab For Cutie
#4 - Hot Summer Day by It's A Beautiful Day
#3 - Girls in Their Summer Clothes by Bruce Springsteen
#2 Summer in the City by The Lovin' Spoonful
#1 - Summertime by Janis Joplin

Thursday Night at the Movies - Inception

Inception may be the best movie we've seen this year. It's a difficult movie but that's part of what makes it good. It deals with dreams and reality and the difficulty in telling them apart.At it's heart, Inception is a heist movie. Leonardo DeCaprio plays Cobb, a man in possession of technology which allows him to insert a team into another person's dream. Even better, it allows him to script the dream as well. The purpose of this is generally extraction, stealing of information from the subject. In the film, Cobb agrees to take on an assignment to plant an idea in someone's mind, something generally considered impossible.

Here's where it starts to look like a heist movie as Cobb assembles his team of experts. In order to pull this off, the team will have to go deeper into the subject's mind than usual. It will be a dream within a dream within a dream. Once the team is together they have to design the dreams and assemble the tools they will need. This is also where the movie gets harder to follow. For the bulk of the film, the characters are acting in three levels of reality (the separate dream levels) at the same time. Time passes at different rates in each dream. What is minutes in the highest level dream is weeks in the lowest. Director Chris Nolan really messes with our (and the cast's) perception as the story moves forward. The main complication is that the subject has been trained to resist extraction so things happen that the team can't control. The other is that Cobb has unresolved issues surrounding the event of his wife's death which causes his subconscious mind throw up obstacles. If you've seen the trailers, the scene where the freight train is barreling down the middle of a street is one of those obstacles.

I can't tell you how the movie ends except to say that people in the audience actually cried out at the ending. My son saw the movie separately from us and he said the same thing happened where he saw it. I'll also say that there are at least three different ways to interpret the end of the movie and that the three of us who saw it hold two of the interpretations.

Roy O to the Phillies?

Reports are saying that the Phillies and Astros have reached a deal to trade Roy Oswalt to the Phillies. All that is needed is an agreement by Roy to the trade.It's been no secret here in Houston that Roy wants to go to a winner. The Astros are pathetic and need to get serious about re-building. Oswalt is one of their best players but by the time the Astros can get back into contention, Roy will be past his prime. So they should get what they need for the future (which is everything) for him now. He is my favorite Astro. It would be nice to see him going to my favorite team.

The Phillies sem to have regained their hitting mojo, and have won their last 7 games. With three top startes, Hallady, Hamels and now Oswalt, they will be hard to beat.

War Cards

I learned about these cards from the book Mint Condition by Dave Jamieson.

This first set was called Horrors of War and was published by Bowman (under the Gum, Inc, name) in 1938. This is pre-War World II and featured paintings depicting the various wars going on around in the world, such as The Japanese in China, the Spanish Civil War, and the Italians in Ethiopia. The cards were quite controversial at the time but also very popular with young boys. There are guite a number of them available on eBay. One of the controversial aspects was their brutal depiction of war. Many of the cards show very bloody scenes. I chose on which wasn't so bloody but is still pretty horribe.Twenty Naked Chinese Nationalists Charge Foe. The worst one I saw on eBay showed a decapitated head flying through the air trailing blood.
Bowman added the "To know the HORRORS OF WAR is to want PEACE" in order to claim that the cards were meant to be educational, not just sensational. I found a web site, Deke's Collections, which shows all the 288 cards.

This second set is generally called "The Civil War News" set due to the heading on the back of the cards. Long time Woody Gelman (the patron saint of Capewood's Collections") got the idea for this set from the Bowman Horrors of War set. The 88-card set was published in 1962. The official name of the cards is "The Civil War bubblegum set".
A pack cost 5 cents. Included in random packs was a Confederate Civil War bank note. I doubt they were real but I don't really know. There several sites which feature these cards. Try this one.

Book Club - Mint Condition by Dave Jamieson

One of the great things about having a daughter who works at the library is that I often hear about new acquisitions by the library long before the book hits the shelf. Knowing my obsession, my daughter sent me a text message when she finished cataloging this book asking if I would like her to put it on hold for me. "Of course", I said.Overall, I think that this book is must reading for any baseball card collector who collects for pleasure. If you're just in it for the money (if there in fact is any money in this), the history of card collecting may not be of interest.

Jamieson covers the past 100 or so years of baseball card collecting. The history is pretty light on the years 1920 through 1950 but not a lot was going on then. Parts of the book are duplicative of "The Card" by Michael O'Keeffee and Teri Thompson but Jamieson nas a broader focus. I particularly liked the chapters on the history of Bowman and long-time Topps card designer, Woody Gelman. Because of this book I bought on-line a card from Bowman's 1938 "Horrors of War" set and one of Topps "Civil War News" cards from the 1960s. I'll feature them in a later post.

I got into collecting in 1985, just as the 'baseball cards as an investment' craze got started. Since I never believed that baseball cards were a good investment, I kept at it through the bust of the mid-1990s (although my love of baseball, and collecting, was really tested in the 1994 strike). My collecting peaked in 1994 and I've not purchased as many cards in any year since that I did in 1994.

The investing craze chapter is another good one in the book. Jamieson describes a guy who bought $75,000 worth of cards in the early 1990s thinking the return on this investment would pay for his daughter's college. I guess this can be called the 'baseball card bubble'. Not as destructive as the housing bubble of a few years ago but maybe the same mentality. Cards are worth more this year than they were last year and this trend will continue forever.

Jamieson paints a grim picture of the future of the baseball card market. Unlike me, most collectors got into this as a kid. They may have stopped collecting for awhile, but something reconnects them and they start again. This is what happened to Jamieson. His mother was threatening to throw out his cards from the 1980s. He picked them up and got interested again. Interested enough to write this book.

The problem today is that kids aren't buying baseball cards. The secondary market for vintage cards is still strong, but one dealer confided in Jamieson that when the current generation of adult collector's (in their 40s to 60s) passes on, the next generation will be much smaller. And there may not be a generation behind that.

Song of the Week - California Girls by The Beach Boys

One of the local TV stations runs a Top 5 feature every week. This week it was the Top 5 Summertime Songs. I don't agree with this list but here it is:

#5 - "Summer Wind" by Frank Sinatra
#4 - "Schools Out" by Alice Cooper
#3 - "Sunshine Superman" by Donovan
#2 - "Summertime" by DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince
#1 - "California Girls" by The Beach Boys

So here's their #1 pick:

Thursday Night at the Movies - The Sorcerer's Apprentice

This movie was a light bit of fluff that my wife, daughter and I enjoyed. Nicolas Cage, pretty much as himself, plays a 1,000 year old wizard, Balthazar who's been locking up evil wizards in something looking like a stack of nesting Russian dolls. The thing is called a Grimhold, I guess because it holds grim contents.In the deepest level of the Grimhold, is Morgana, a witch so tough she was able to kill Merlin himself. In addition to locking up wizards he doesn't agree with, he's also been searching for Merlin's successor, the Prime Merlinian, the one to become the Sorcerer's Apprentice. The Prime Merlinian turns out to be geeky physics student, Dave, played by Jay Beruchel. In an event that could only happen in the movies, Dave has just accidentally bumped into Becky (Theresa Palmer) the beautiful blond he's been in love with since the 4th grade but hasn't seen in 10 years.

Through a series of plot devices, Balthazar's enemy, Horvath, escapes from the Grimhold with plans to release Morgana so together they can raise an army of evil dead wizards and, well, it's not clear what for except it can't be good.

So Balthazar has to get poor old Dave, who's more interested in mooning over Becky, trained up so he can defeat Morgana.

The movie was fun with pretty decent special effects. It doesn't pay to look too closely at what is going on however. We think the movie was poorly edited. For example, there is a scene in the trailers, where Dave shows Becky that he can throw plasma balls (apparently a prime wizardly weapon). That would be sufficient enough to convince me that Dave had otherworldly powers, but this scene does not actually appear in the movie. Becky's acceptance of Dave's powers, based pretty much on incoherent mumblings on his part, really doesn't make sense. This is important because Becky actually plays an important roll in defeating Morgana and she seems to have zero motivation to do the crazy stunt that Dave asks of her.

There is also a dog in this movie for no apparent reason. We think that the dog played some important role based on dialogue which went nowhere but the dog just vanishes with no explaination.

If you haven't already seen it, it's probably too late to catch it. It would make a good choice for a rental or just wait until it shows up on cable. If you like Nicolas Cage you're in for a treat. For reasons known only to the director, Jay Beruchel does a Nicolas Cage impression through most of the movie.