Deane Barker

Syriana Plot Diagram

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Syriana from 2005 is my favorite kind of movie: it has lots of plot threads that overlap and come together in different ways. I learned that this style has name: hyperlink cinema.

Unfortunately, a side effect of this style is that the film was wildly complex and hard to understand. While I was watching it for the first time, I was only barely understanding the overall plot mechanics and why everyone was doing what they were doing.

Over a decade ago, I found an interactive “plot explorer” tool for the movie that let you visually follow different threads on a digital surface. It’s here, but it was created in Flash, which hasn’t been relevant or supported on the web for years, so it doesn’t work on my browser.

Helpfully, the creator also converted it to a static image. It shows all the different groups and how they intersect, explaining what their individual motivations are which can help you figure out the plot.

(It’s worth mentioning also that Syriana has an awful torture scene which is probably the biggest impediment to me ever re-watching it.)

Ronin Car Chase

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Chases are all over the place in spy movies, but the second car chase in Ronin is one of the best on film. It’s a BMW and a Peugeot through the streets of Paris.

It’s very realistic (except maybe for a weird amount of sparks). There’s no musical soundtrack for most of it, just more than seven full minutes screaming engines and scraping metal. Robert DeNiro looks like he’s on the verge of a stroke from start to finish.

Honda Del Sol Commercial

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Here’s a commercial for the Honda Del Sol from 1995.

It’s very Bondian, from the music to the casting to the theme. So much so, that MGM sued Honda and made them pull it off the air.

The lawsuit accuses Honda of copyright infringement and falsely implying that the car is endorsed by MGM and Danjaq.

Fortune Hunter

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Back in the mid-90s, there was a very short-lived primetime show called Fortune Hunter. I can’t find a full episode (only five of them actually aired), but here’s a short promo video.

Carlton Dial was a literal fortune hunter — he did jobs for money. I vaguely remember that he was searching for treasure or other valuable items. (There weren’t even enough episodes to totally flesh out the concept.)

There was also a weird plot device where he had cameras in his contact lenses linking back to a computer geek at home base… or something (I might be foggy on that). And, of course, Dial’s gun shot tranquilizer darts, because this was primetime and he was a good guy.

The show did not succeed, but I remember it being mildly interesting, and borrowing heavily from the Bond canon (see the video: “…Dial. Carlton Dial.”). This was right in the middle of Bond’s legal turmoil and exile from the theaters, so the time was right to fill the gap.

The show was so fleeting that I couldn’t even find a decent image for this post. And tragically, the star, Mark Frankel, died in a traffic accident just a couple years after the show aired.

Bond’s Use of the Word “Penny”

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

In a prior post, I mentioned the scene from Casino Royale where Vesper Lynd says, “I’m the money” and Bond responds, “…every penny of it.”

I suddenly started wondering why Bond would say the word “penny,” given that it’s a name for a unit of American currency. Shouldn’t he of said… “pence” or “quid” or something?

Well, it turns out I’m pathetically uncultured and American-centric. AI set me straight:

Your instinct has it backwards — "penny" is about as British as currency words get. It's Old English (penig), it's the name of an actual British coin (pre-decimal pence, and the 1p piece since 1971), and it's woven through the idiom: in for a penny, in for a pound; a penny for your thoughts; the penny dropped; penny-pinching; spend a penny. Americans use "penny" too, but only colloquially — the US coin is officially a cent. So if anything, "penny" reads as the Anglophone-original and the American usage as the borrowing.

I’ve embarrassed myself.

_stats

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Spy Briefing PowerPoint Syndrome

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A few days ago, I posted about M’s speech to Bond in GoldenEye. Go watch that again: at a certain point, she quickly presses some buttons to reveal a TV and a ….PowerPoint (?) about General Orumov.

This is what I call “spy briefing room PowerPoint syndrome.” No matter what happens, someone always has these presentations ready to go.

It’s is a trope in spy movies that has always fascinated me. They always seem to have these ready-made presentations about the bad guys, complete with pictures, videos, and detailed stat sheets. They then immediately start talking over them, reciting statistics and detailed histories, or they have someone else in the room do it, as if it was rehearsed. They must prep these in advance because no one is ever seen fumbling for the information or trying to share their desktop — it’s always one button and voila!

In my other life, I work in the field of content management and enterprise software. I can tell you that I’ve never seen things go as smoothly as this.

Some guy is compiling all examples on screen of the “photographs connected by red string” trope. Some other guy wrote an entire book about how science fiction interfaces can be used to learn about how we should design for today.

I feel like there are lessons to be learned about how well fictional spy agencies manage their PowerPoints.

6 Underground

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

6 Underground is a guilty pleasure. It combines Michael Bay with Ryan Reynolds — maybe the two most un-subtle people in Hollywood.

The movie is unapologetically ridiculous, but I always thought it did a great job with exposition. There’s a lot of backstory to get through, and it nicely weaves that through a set of flashbacks.

The plot isn’t terrible, but it’s essentially just a framework to hang 4-5 action set pieces on.

This is a not a “good” movie, in the traditional sense, but it’s wildly entertaining. Every shot is visually stunning and the action is well-choreographed.

I shut my brain off and re-watch it a couple of times a year. I just don’t tell people about it.

Timothy Dalton on Charlie’s Angels

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Back in 1979, Timothy Dalton guest-starred on Charlie’s Angels as cat burglar Damien Roth, described as “a man with James Bondian tastes, means, and charm.”

Someone has helpfully compiled all of his scenes in this YouTube video.

Daniel Craig Screen Test

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Here’s a short video about Daniel Craig’s screen test for Bond (it says 2006, but Casino Royale was released in 2006, so it had to be earlier than that). There’s a voiceover from Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson about how much they wanted Craig for the role.

Then, towards the end, you see and hear the scene they’re doing — it’s the “I’m the money” scene between Vesper and Bond (”…every penny of it”) that was on the train in the film but is being done on a hotel room set for the screen test.

Vesper is played by someone other than Eva Green. I’m not sure who is playing Craig’s haircut.

_data

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I sent a copy of this to my son, who — like the last person I sent it to — I also hope will read it with me again.

I had been talking with a friend about this book, so I sent them a copy. I’m hoping he’ll read it with me when I go back through it.

I have a friend who lives in the Hamptons who has been very hospitable to me on a couple occasions. I decided that anyone who lives on Long Island needs to have a copy of The Power Broker in their house. After he received it, he sent me a lovely picture of it on display in his living room.

I met a guy about my age at Wind River Ranch and had some nice conversations about books with him. He seemed interested in the same type of books as me, and these two books had really meant a lot to me in terms of figure out the last third of my life.

A twenty-something girl working at Wind River Ranch named Reagan was talking about how she was enjoying a book by David Brooks. I was encouraged that a young person was reading Brooks, so when I was down in a bookstore in Estes Park, I bought her another Brooks title that I had enjoyed.

M’s Speech to Bond

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

M’s speech to Bond in GoldenEye has to go down as one of the great monologues in the Bond movies. Pierce Brosnan was the new Bond, and we had a female M in Judi Dench, which people weren’t so sure about, but this one scene likely laid every concern to rest.

I especially love it when Bond says “point taken,” thinking that would defuse the situation, but M just goes right on to tell him how she’d be perfectly happy to “send a man out to die.” And this was after she deliver the now-classic, “sexist, misogynist dinosaur; a relic of the Cold War.” And let’s not forget the symbolism of when M summarily dismisses Bond’s suggestion about the bottle her “predecessor” kept in the office.

Bond’s responses are key to the exchange too. Beyond the dialog, he has some facial expressions and pauses that really sell the idea that he’s dealing with something completely new.

The scene is utterly brilliant, and it launched one of the greatest character portrayals in the Bond movie canon. I’d never say GoldenEye was one of the top-tier Bond films, but it was exactly the film that the series needed at the time it came it out, and Dench was exactly the supporting actor that Brosnan needed to land on his feet.

Annotated Link: Ordinary Abundance

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

An interactive website explains all the things we take from granted that prior generations would have been amazed by.

Espionage Degrees

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Did you know you can get an advanced degree in actual intelligence? Here are some options:

Master's in Global Security Studies at Johns Hopkins
Master of Arts in Counterintelligence Studies at the Institute of World Politics
Master of Arts in Intelligence Studies at American Military University
Master’s in National Security and Intelligence at Northeastern University
Master's in Applied Intelligence at Georgetown

Staged Conductor Assassination

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Just before starting in on the James Bond theme, the Danish Symphony Orchestra had their conductor “assassinated” live on stage. That visual, followed immediately by the opening bars of the Bond theme is just legendary.

Trump’s Flight Out of Turkey

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

This NY Times article about how Trump was spirited out of Turkey reads like a real-life spy novel in places:

President Trump hid in an airport catering container and was taken to a military jet for a secret flight out of country after the NATO summit last month.

Reminds me a bit of Georgi Koskov leaving Czechoslovakia in the oil pipeline in The Living Daylights (…which was one of the few plot points of that movie which I clearly understood).

Chris Parnell Rap

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I was reminded of this great rap by Chris Parnell back in 2003 when Jennifer Garner was hosting SNL at the height of her Alias fame. It tells a globe-hopping story about how they're spies and lovers, doing missions for the CIA.

The joke at the very end is worth waiting for.

The Moneypenny Diaries

Sun, 9 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I was previously unaware of The Moneypenny Diaries which is a short book series that tells James Bond adventures from the perspective of Miss Moneypenny (did anyone know her first name is apparently “Jane”?).

It doesn't seem like the series got too far, but there some short stories published in British magazine. One of them is entitled For Your Eyes Only, James which sounds vaguely like Bond and Moneypenny might have consummated their flirtation.

(I did some looking, but that particular installment seems to be hard to find. Several people are trying to find reprints of it.)

NY Times Crossword Clue

Sun, 9 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A clue in today's New York Times Crossword was “Bond between Lazenby and Dalton.”

The answer was “MOORE”.

Cheese Plate: August 8, 2026

Sat, 8 Aug 2026 06:11:16 -0500

My friend Mark is telling me that they have a “cheese service” that delivers to their house. (Also, that little mouse cheese knife has made a couple of appearances here before.)

007 Barber

Sat, 8 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Seen in downtown Montreal.

Briefcase Gun

Sat, 8 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Found this short Reddit video of a “briefcase gun” from the 1970s.

Book Review: Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

Sat, 8 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “As a memoir, interesting; as self-help, probably not helpful”

This is a biography/memoir of a guy named David Goggins. He had a tough life, abused by his father then growing up as the only black kid in small town Indiana. He didn’t do well in school, was very overweight, had a dead-end job, and a marriage that was on the rocks.

Then he decided to become a Navy SEAL. That sounds kind of anti-climatic, but that’s the truth: he just one day decided to lose 106 pounds in three months and go to SEAL school (technically, “BUDS,” for “Basic Underwater Demolition School”).

He had to do Hell Week three times, because he kept getting medically disqualified – first for pneumonia, then for a broken kneecap. When that happens, they drop you and you can start over, but you have to do it all again.

He finally graduated, and then got into ultra endurance racing while he was serving as a SEAL. And let me be perfectly clear about something – David Goggins is an absolute freak.

His idea of racing is running for 24 hours – he covered 101 miles. Or doing an “Ultraman,” which is something like a double IRONMAN. Or doing the Badwater 135, which is some insane race for 135 miles through Death Valley (I think the guy from Fitness Confidential talked about this same race). Or doing some hike that took him 36 hours to cover five laps – the last of which he had to walk and which took him eight full hours.

His description of these things is kind of disgusting to read. He urinates bloody sludge. He defecates on himself. He vomits regularly. Toenails are temporary.

The level to which he pushes himself is insane. At one point, he has shin splints so severe that they’re essentially two broken legs. He goes to a marathon to watch his wife (second wife; he married and divorced the first one, twice), and then literally at the last second, decides to run it… on two broken legs.

He tries to break the 24-hour pull-up record. He fails twice (once on the Today show), but eventually does 4,030 dead-hang pull-ups in 24 hours. To prep for this, he was doing 1,500 pull-ups per day in the weeks leading up to it.

And somewhere along the way, the Navy figures out he actually has a hole in his heart. He has surgery on that twice, because the first one didn’t work.

…and don’t forget, he’s an active Navy SEAL who did tours in Iraq. (Thought, perhaps oddly, there’s very little talk about his actually military service. I assume at least some of it is classified.)

He eventually gets moved into recruiting and PR because he’s Black and they’re trying to recruit more Black operators that will blend in better in Africa. Additionally, he uses his ultra racing “career” as a promotional device – he’ll run an ultra every weekend after talking at a bunch of area high schools, to reinforce how much of a bad-ass he is to potential recruits.

To top it off, he has this weird fetish with other special forces training. He goes to Army Ranger school (…just because, I guess?), and fails to pass Delta Force selection twice. There are a couple other ones in there – Air Force ParaRescue and something called “DEVGRU” – just for good measure.

This is all super-interesting, but the book also tries to be self-help, which means there are a lot of platitudes in there about getting super-hard and enjoying pain. I just don’t know how relevant this is to the average ready. I’ll repeat: David Goggins is a freak.

Example: at one point his wife is begging him to go to the ER after a race, and he’s curled up on the floor saying that he just wants to “stay in this pain” a little longer – how relevant is that for the average person?

Is David Goggins a total animal? Yes, no doubt. Will this transfer to anyone else? Not likely. To do what he does would be a fast track to physical injury for most people. I’m glad that he can push himself so hard, but his mindset and physical resiliance are clearly very rare.

This means that the self-help sections are about an inch deep and will apply to virtually no one (they boil to, “don’t stop”). I think that maybe he just wrote a memoir, and the publisher said, “You know, if you can turn this into a self-help book, we’ll sell 4x as many….”

I’m glad I read it, if for nothing other than the sheer horror and amazement at what Goggins does to himself. And if the self-help stuff inspires you, awesome. But I just don’t think there are many people like David Goggins, so I’m not sure how applicable it is beyond simple morbid fascination.

Book Review: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Fri, 7 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “A masterpiece”

I’ve wanted to read this for a long time – it’s one of those “goal reads” that I haven’t dared attempt for fear of failing. The book famously took seven years to write, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

This is the definitive biography of Robert Moses, who started off as a simple Parks Commissioner on Long Island, but accrued more and more power over 44 years to eventually become the man who totally controlled the development of New York City. He could do whatever he wanted, over the objections of whomever was the current mayor of NYC, or whomever was the current governor of New York State.

Moses was a builder. He longed to leave his mark on the landscape. He loved to build parks, and expanded this to the concept of “parkways.” As his power grew, he eventually managed to get control of building “expressways,” then bridges, then tunnels (thought he never liked them), then buildings, then entire public housing projects.

He accrued power by being a master of legislation. He wrote laws that meticulously established “authorities,” which are self-funding government entities that take in income through tolls, then issue bonds based on that income (at a huge multiplier, since the revenue only has to fund interest). Moses then took the proceeds from those bonds and built more stuff which generated more tolls.

The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority eventually became an empire which controlled hundreds of millions of dollars (tens of billions in today’s money) and was answerable solely to Moses, who installed himself as the managing board member and could not be dethroned.

Moses could be a cruel man. He was arrogant, latently racist, and enjoyed humiliating his opponents. He never cared much for personal fortunes – he strangely never had much in the way of a personal fortune – but loved to amass the power to impose his will on other people. Anyone who dared to challenge him was crushed – one phone call from Moses could instantly end someone’s career.

The author makes the point that Moses was like this because it had been done to him. He paints a picture of him as a very principled college graduate who sought to reform municipal government, but who threatened Tammany Hall a little too often. They destroyed him, left him penniless, and basically begging for work. He recovered at the age of 30 with a burning desire to never suffer that humiliation again, and employed those same tactics on everyone who opposed him for the next half-century.

Every one of Moses’s relationships was evaluated in the context of how much it would increase his power, as was every project. His desire for control became a powerful gravitational pull, growing year over year.

And Moses’s personal preferences became what NYC implemented. And Moses absolutely loved the automobile (despite not being able to drive). He disdained public transportation (in a larger sense, he disdained the public in general), so he built highway after highway, bridge after bridge, tunnel after tunnel, in a never-ending attempt to ease traffic problems. Of course, this failed – more capacity meant more cars and that meant more problems, so Moses simply kept building roads. No trains, no subways, just more and more roads for cars.

He managed his public image incredibly well. He was well-known in NYC, and cultivated an image of a tireless public servant, toiling away for very little money. The press loved him… until they didn’t.

In the 1960s, he began to falter. He over-stepped on some threats, picked some fights he couldn’t win, and his image took some hits. His enemies, seeing blood in the water, began to pile on and he was eventually brought to heel. He decided to run the 1964 World’s Fair, and it was a financial disaster.

But he ruled until very late in life. He was still wielding huge amounts of power in his late 70s. He was in his 80s when this book was published (he issued a 29-page rebuttal to it), and finally died in 1981 at the age of 92.

Was Moses a hero or a villain? The book says the latter, but despite his petty motivations, he wasn’t completely without merit. He did provide a lot of new public spaces for New Yorkers, even if it was unevenly distributed and capricious. The mark of a good biography is perhaps that it leaves with you with both good and bad impressions, as is the case here.

Robert Moses left an indelible mark on NYC that stands today, and this bled over to other cities. Many metropolises based their development off of what Moses was doing in New York, and today, many of them are still trying to dig themselves out from under the vehicle dependence that the strategy embodied.

This is a monster of a book – some 1,300 pages. But it’s never boring, not for one second. Robert Caro has done a stunning job of weaving an incredible tale of hubris. I loved it.

Seafire

Fri, 7 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I read the James Bond novel Seafire while on a business trip. This is from 1994, which is late in the John Gardner era — he only wrote one more original Bond novel after this one.

It was…okay. I've never loved Gardner's work. Here’s my review.

Book Review: Seafire

Thu, 6 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Just okay”

I don’t love John Gardner’s Bond novels. There, I said it.

This was from 1994, which is very late in his tenure. He would only write one more original Bond novel after this one (plus the GoldenEye novelization). It was his 13th original novel in the series.

He fiddles with the canon quite a bit. Bond is now in charge of “Two Zeros,” which is some branch of MI6, I think? Also, he is living with his girlfriend, a former Swiss intelligence agent named Fredericka, or “Flicka.” I gather they met during a prior Gardner novel.

Note: This content includes a spoiler which cannot be hidden in RSS. Click through to read it.

This installment is… serviceable. It’s not bad, but Gardner always has some weirdness in his books. In this one, for instance, he has two cross-dressing female assassins who are apparently drop-dead gorgeous women, who also pass as male “Delta Force types” and manage to capture Bond and Flicka. That just didn’t seem credible to me.

There are also awkward moments in the plotting. Bond and Flicka are told not to do something, and they decide to go rogue, only to be stopped at the airport and sent back to MI6 to be told that it’s okay now – they can go do that thing… which eventually puts them right back on the same course they were on.

There are lots of henchmen on the villain side. It was hard to keep track of them all. In my head, I kept trying to envision it as a movie, and it just wasn’t working.

One more thing: maybe this is just filtered memories, but I feel like Gardner is kind of obsessed with Nazis and “the Fourth Reich.” Do lots of his Bond novels involve neo-Nazism? This one does, and I know there’s at least one more, maybe two, which seems odd.

I read it during a short business trip. I had found the novel in a used bookstore on vacation, and it’s one of the few I didn’t already have, so it was top-of-mind.

NY Times Top Thrillers

Wed, 5 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The NY Times released The Top 50 Thrillers of the 21st Century. Slow Horses is #9. I enjoyed that — here’s my review from a few years back.

Maps of Bond Stories

Tue, 4 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Reading Maps visually plots the geographic travels of various novels. As you can imagine, the James Bond novels are pretty active, in terms of globe-hopping. Here’s the entry for Casino Royale (the movie).

Chief of Station

Sun, 2 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Chief of Station was a bit of a miss. It’s well-filmed, on-location in Budapest, and even has a bit part for a former Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko was Camilla Montes in Quantum of Solace). It opens with a nice scene of tradecraft, which makes up for a particularly uncomfortable torture scene later on (a la Syriana, but worse).

However, I just don’t think Aaron Eckhart is that great of an actor, and a lot of the story depends on him (apparently, Alec Baldwin was originally cast in the role). Plus, the writing was just kind of tired. Nothing interesting to see here, honestly.

Annotated Link: Hidden by billboards for over 100 years, the tiny holdout building in the middle of Macy’s is back in view

Sat, 1 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0500

A small building prevented Macy’s from building on an entire block, so they built around it and leased billboards on it for a century.