Deane Barker

The Russia House (1990)

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

There is not one second of action or violence in The Russia House. It’s a very slow burn, mostly full of people talking, but I loved it.

Set in the late 1980s, just as glasnost and perestroika were taking hold, Sean Connery plays Barley Blair, a drunken book publisher with a thing for Russia. A woman tries to pass him a manuscript containing nuclear secrets, but it ends up in the hands of British and American intelligence. They use Blair to figure out if the writer is legitimate and if he has more information.

Connery is fantastic as the weary and reluctant hero, and Michelle Pfeiffer acts with a believable Russian accent as the woman caught in the middle of warring intelligence agencies (she got a Golden Globe nomination for it). The Soviet spy is played Klaus Maria Brandauer, which reunites him with Connery seven years after they starred in Never Say Never Again together.

It was the first film shot mostly on-location in Russia. The camera drinks in the scenery — at the time, it was a rare look inside the country, just before the Soviet Union dissolved. The soundtrack is a spectacular combination of symphony and jazz which has been released multiple times as a standalone album.

Lovely movie. Absolutely worth the time.

Book Review: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Fascinating”

This is the story of standardization – how the world’s shipping industries agreed on what the standard container was going to be and how it was going to function and how that changed everything.

Prior to the shipping container, loading and unloading a ship was a real mess. There was a worker called a “longshoreman” or a “steveadore,” whose entire job it was to unload and load ships, one item at a time. They would take bags of whatever, or machines, or boxes, and carry them into or off of ships. It took forever.

Then a guy who owned a trucking company decided this was incredibly wasteful, and he started toying with the idea of just loading truck trailers onto ships. This eventually morphed into have a container on the ship that could be loaded onto a truck frame and driven away.

A couple chapters in the middle of the book are dedicated to the huge fight this caused with the laborers. The longshoreman did not want this to happen – their entire livelihood depended on the inefficiency in loading ships. They went on strike, they required labor guarantees, etc. But, eventually and inevitably, the efficiency of the containers won out, and their jobs were decimated.

What’s amazing is how much the change to containers trickled down. It affected how ships were built, how ports were built, how port cities developed, how piracy and smuggling was enabled, etc.. And the efficiencies of the container changed how products were made – China would literally not be the country it is today without the in-country manufacturing which is solely possible because of the shipping container.

I’m prepared to that this is the likely the world’s greatest success story of mass-standardization. It was a bumpy road that started in the 50s and spread through the 60s and 70s, but I don’t think that anything else has had as big of an effect on the world economy.

It gets slightly tedious in some places, but not by much. I’m kind of a sucker for logistics, and this is the story about how we move stuff around, which is the precursor for about any other economic activity in the world.

Heineken Skyfall Commercial

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I don’t know how I missed this James Bond-themed Heineken commercial from back when Skyfall came out. It’s funny, and the Doctor No cameo is witty.

(I might be dim, but I had to watch it twice to realize that the guy and Bond are wearing the same clothes, and it’s a case of mistaken identity.)

It’s on YouTube.

The Eiger Sanction (1975)

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The Eiger Sanction is sort of a spy movie, but mostly a mountain-climbing movie.

First off, the title —

The Eiger is a mountain peak in Switzerland. It’s probably the most common image of The Alps, and its northern face is one of the most difficult ascents to climb (“Eiger” means “Ogre” in German).
“Sanction,” in the world of this movie, is an assassination.

So — you guessed it — Clint Eastwood has to kill someone while climbing up a mountain.

Eastwood plays the perfectly named Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, an art professor, mountain climber, and former government assassin (because, of course he is…). He’s brought out of retirement by the also well-named Mr. Dragon to avenge the death of an agent killed in Zurich while retrieving some microfilm. They don’t know which member of the climbing party is guilty, so Eastwood heads up the mountain with three climbing partners, any one of which might be his target.

The last 40 minutes of the film is spent on the climb, which is visually amazing. They shot it on location, and Eastwood did most of his own stunts (he was 44 at the time). One crew worker died during filming.

So, is it a spy film? I don’t know …ish? I think it mostly wants to be a mountain climbing movie, though there are a few nifty scenes of spy craft.

All in all, it was… okay, I guess. The plot is pretty thin, and Eastwood basically sneers through the entire film, but I didn’t hate it.

The Osterman Weekend (1983)

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Back in the mid-80s, I would see the VHS cover for The Osterman Weekend and it seemed very exotic. It had a enigmatic name and a woman with a crossbow on the cover.

Forty years later, I finally watched it.

…and it was awful.

It was Sam Peckinpaw’s final film, and it has a cast of recognizable names: Rutger Hauer, Burt Lancaster, John Hurt, Dennis Hopper, Craig T. Nelson (who was kind of unknown at the time), and Meg Foster (that 80s actress with the crazy pale-blue eyes).

Unfortunately, the movie didn’t make any damn sense.

Hauer is a TV talk show host who is led by the CIA to believe his three closest friends are spies for the KGB. They’re all coming over for an annual weekend get-together, and the CIA sets up surveillance cameras in his house to… honestly, I’m not sure what. I never did figure out the motivations for half the characters.

I wasn’t the only one. The film was poorly reviewed, mainly because the plot was confusing and had lots of holes in it. Apparently the Robert Ludlum novel it was based on was also fairly incomprehensible.

I never waited 40 years to be so disappointed. (Thankfully the crossbow did actually make an appearance, so it wasn’t a total loss for 12-year-old me…)

The French Illusion (2026)

Fri, 9 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve enjoyed John Grisham books in the past, but he’s mainly known for legal thrillers. However, in the NY Times review of his latest book, I saw this:

Grisham has written dozens of books since his first, “A Time to Kill,” in 1989, but this is the only one that can be called an espionage novel.

Say less. I was reading it on my Kindle two minutes later.

…however, I missed the fact that this is book one of the “French Illusion Series.” I wish I had known that going in, because I was waiting for a climax that never quite came.

When a honeymooning couple is abducted in Paris, the CIA has to admit this is becoming a pattern, and they suspect some international terrorist is at work. They come up with a plan to lure the bad guy into another kidnapping where they can trap him.

As with all Grisham novels, it’s efficient, well-written and page-turning. But it doesn’t have a clean ending, which I wasn’t expecting. My Kindle was getting to 98% and 99% and I was thinking, “How is he going to wrap this all up?”

Well, he doesn’t. The ending sets up the next book in the series.

Still, it’s a good read.

Book Review: The French Illusion

Wed, 7 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Solid thriller”

I’ve enjoyed John Grisham books in the past, but he’s mainly known for legal thrillers. However, in the NY Times review of his latest book, I saw this:

Grisham has written dozens of books since his first, “A Time to Kill,” in 1989, but this is the only one that can be called an espionage novel.

Say less. I was reading it on my Kindle two minutes later.

…however, I missed the fact that this is book one of the “French Illusion Series.” I wish I had known that going in, because I was waiting for a climax that never quite came.

Well, he doesn’t. The ending sets up the next book in the series.

Still, it’s a good read.

Thrilling Cities (1963)

Tue, 6 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I saw this on the shelf at Barnes and Noble in the “Travel” section. Thrilling Cities was a travelogue written by Ian Fleming in 1963.

He had been writing the Bond novels for a decade and the films had just become very popular. The Sunday Times flew Fleming around the world to visit 13 cities to write about them and play off the popularity of James Bond.

The Wikipedia page has very detailed history of the book and Fleming’s travels (which he reportedly hated).

James Bond Day

Mon, 5 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Did you know that October 5 is “James Bond Day”? I didn’t, until everyone started talking about it today on Reddit. Supposedly this because Dr. No premiered in London on October 5, 1962.

So, take the day off work, have a martini, and blow-up the lair of an international terrorist. You know, usual holiday stuff.

Book Review: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Mon, 5 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “I didn’t get it”

I hate saying this, but I just didn’t get this book. It was written in 1974, and has become the best-selling philosophy book in history. But it totally escaped me.

It’s the story of a Narrator and his son, Chris, who embark on a two-week motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to Northern California. They have some friends along for a while, and they stop in Montana to hike and visit the college where the Narrator used to teach. Along the way, the Narrator philosophizes about life and something he calls Quality.

I say “something he calls Quality,” because that’s an entire philosophy of its own which I found basically incomprehensible.

Consider:

“Quality,” or “value,” as described by Pirsig, cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual construction of it, namely due to the fact that quality exists always as a perceptual experience before it is ever thought of descriptively or academically.

…yeah.

The book is semi-autobiographical. The author, Robert Pirsig, was a professor at Montana State. While teaching here, he had a mental breakdown and underwent electroshock therapy.

This sets up the other strange part of the book: all throughout the trip, the Narrator speaks of “Phaedrus,” who is supposedly a ghost, but turns out to be the Narrator himself, pre-electroshock. The Narrator is apparently haunted by his former self, and the climax of the book is the recollection of when he fell apart, underwent therapy, and Phaedrus was born.

I think I’m understanding this all correctly, because I did quite a bit of meta-reading around it. I spent lots of time on Wikipedia, and I actually read an entire, chapter-by-chapter summary of the book after reading the actual book.

The book does actually discuss motorcycle maintenance a bit in the beginning. His friends that are with him at the beginning of the book have an entirely different approach to how they purchase and care for motorcycles and the author spends some time discussing that. I actually read this after Shop Class as Soul Craft thinking they would be similar, but they really weren’t (though Shop Class does quote from this book in places).

I actually tried to read this 14 years ago, but gave up. When I went to buy it, I found that I already had it in my Kindle account. And up until I gave up back in 2012, I had high-lighted quite a few passages, which was kind of weird to see so many years later.

I powered through this time, though I don’t think I’m any better for it.

Alias, Season 1

Sun, 4 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I plowed through Season 1 of Alias in record time, aided by a European trip involving 20+ hours in planes.

Some notes:

I thought the Rambaldi plotline came later, but it’s actually central to the first season. It takes on kind of a mythological quality — like James Bond meets Indiana Jones. There’s lots of talk about “artifacts” and “prophecy.”
Every episode involves one or more “missions” with Sydney jetting off to some country trying to find something or do something that has some tangential relationship to the overall storyline. Honestly, I kept losing track of where she was and why. You eventually just let it wash over you and accept that she’s in some exotic location breaking into some subterranean fortress for some valid reason.
I still don’t like the martial arts. Sydney gets into a fistfight every episode, and her style is very “kicky and punchy,” opposed to the more practical, grappling style that came into vogue as MMA got popular (think Jason Bourne). I just don’t find it at all believable that a woman that tiny could reasonably do what she does, and it takes me out of the story every time.
I enjoyed the Bradley Cooper plotline. He’s a journalist trying to uncover the truth, while being Sydney’s friend and not knowing that she’s a central part of it. I understand he gets demoted to recurring character at some point, which is unfortunate, because his plot is the most interesting and he’s a naturally likeable guy.
Every scene bumper has the name of the upcoming location with one letter in a reverse font. For a while, I kept trying to figure out if there’s some secret code involving which letters were in reverse font, but if there is, I couldn’t figure it out.
There’s a strong theme of parenthood through the first season. Sydney’s relationship with her father is central to the story, and her mother pops up quite a bit too. Additionally, Sydney’s relationships with Sloane and Dixon have some parental vibes to them. Sydney is everyone’s daughter, it seems.
Jennifer Garner emotes a lot. I can’t count the number of scenes that end with a shot of Sydney’s face looking stunned or hurt or confused or amazed or bewildered. She does a lot of acting with facial expressions. (But, she was nominated for four Golden Globes — winning one — and four Emmys, so I can’t complain too much.)

On to Season 2…

Book Review: Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance

Sun, 4 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Just okay”

A friend gave me this book after I expressed how much I loved From Strength to Strength. Both books talk about the same thing: how to have an effective “second half,” meaning middle age and what comes beyond.

I feel like From Strength to Strength is the much better book. This one is very heavily weighted to Christian faith, which is good, but gets repetitive. It’s tough to tell the chapters apart how any one of them said something different than any other one (they’re also very short chapters, which makes it hard to distinguish a point).

I do love that these books exist. I don’t think enough people talk about what comes after middle age, so I give it credit for that. Also, this book is maybe more strident about specifically planning for the second half.

I think it’s meant to read as a group study. The back of the book has lots of discussion questions and other material for that.

I Can See You (2023)

Sat, 3 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Taylor Swift made a pretty decent spy-ish movie with her video for I Can See You back in 2023. In it, Joey King and Taylor Lautner break into some compound to free a captive Swift while Presley Cash handles electronics back in the van.

Supposedly the story is a metaphor for how Swift “rescued” her master recordings from Scooter Braun. King and Cash had appeared in another one of Swift’s videos, back in 2010. Swift and Lautner dated briefly.

Here it is on YouTube.

Roger Moore on Alias

Fri, 2 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

To my surprise, Roger Moore showed up on an episode of Alias playing a spymaster named Poole… Edward Poole. He would have been 77 at the time and had last played Bond fully 20 years before.

In my imagination, he was still Bond, and still in the espionage game, just living under a different identity.

Bond-themed Connections Game

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The New York Times Connections game had a Bond(-ish) theme today.

Here is the solution:

Starting with Month Abbreviations: Decent, Novelty, Octopussy, Septum

Securities: Bond, Future, Option, Stock

Gangster Movies: Bugsy, Casino, Donnie Brasco, Scarface

Things That Are Shaken (Not Stirred): Etch A Sketch, Martini, Spray Paint, Tambourine

Cloak and Dagger (1984)

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Cloak and Dagger is (supposedly; see below) a kids movie — it’s kind of a crossover into fantasy.

Henry Thomas (yes, the kid from E.T.) plays Davey, a kid who loves role-playing games, especially those starring his hero, Jack Flack. He also has a vidid fantasy life, imagining Jack in real-life. Jack is played by Dabney Coleman, who also plays Davey’s widower Dad.

Davey accidentally witnesses a real-life murder, the victim of which hands him a video game cartridge and a mysterious number. Now Davey is running from actual spies, but no one will believe him, except the fantasy version of Jack, who appears and coaches him through life-or-death situations.

This was released to theaters at the same time as The Last Starfighter. They apparently played in a double-feature. A prominent plot point of the movie is a video game called Cloak and Dagger. It was an arcade title at the time, but in the movie it appears to run on the Atari 5200.

For a kids’ movie, there’s a lot of wanton killing. And it’s not even implied — lots of people just straight-up get shot on-screen. Also, there’s a disturbing monologue by the main villain explaining to Davey all the different ways he’s going to shoot him to watch him die slowly.

I was kind of fuzzy on the “rules” of the magic. Jack is in Davey’s imagination… except for one time, when he’s not. And Davey’s Dad escapes from a certain-death situation, which makes me wonder if he was Jack all along?

Maybe I’m reading too much into this. But, again, the tone of the movie and the violence in it really seemed to be at odds. Still, it was a cute premise, and the opening scene with Jack on a mission is a laugh riot of spy cliches which ends with a pair of giant D12 dice rolling towards him.

Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Three Days of the Condor is commonly cited as one of the best spy films ever made. I watched on a flight back from Germany, and I’ll concede that the reputation is well-deserved.

Robert Redford plays Joe Turner. He works for the CIA in New York under the cover of a “literary historical society” that reads books all day, and feeds them into a computer to determine trends and possible terrorist plots.

One day, he goes out to pick up lunch, and when he comes back, everyone has been shot dead. From then on, he’s on the run, trying to figure out why. He abducts Faye Dunaway’s character to get out of a tough spot, and she becomes an accomplice and lover along the way.

In classic spy fashion, Turner has no idea who he can trust, and no idea if his former employees are actually trying to kill him. He gets double-crossed a few times, and racks his brain to put together the pieces of what he was working on that might have threatened the wrong person.

The ending is quite good, with Turner thinking that he’s found a clean way out, but the last scene and dialog making you wonder if he’s just kidding himself and the apparatus that set him up might still be able to take him down.

It’s adapted from a novel published the year before (interestingly called Six Days of the Condor). There was also a 2018 TV series that ran for two seasons and 20 episodes.

The Man with One Red Shoe (1985)

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

This is a comedy, but not a spoof. Spy, that I watched last week, was a spoof. It was character-driven — really just an excuse for Melissa McCarthy to be (very) funny. You could have dropped her into anything else and it would have worked the same.

But The Man with One Red Shoe is a comedy, driven far more by story than characters. The spy angle of the plot is what makes it work.

It’s an early role for Tom Hanks. He plays a violinist from Washington DC who’s mistakenly identified as a witness who will testify against Dabney Coleman’s corrupt CIA executive. Coleman’s team of spies is trying to investigate and neutralize him, while another team is trying to protect him. Both sides are working against each other, while Hanks’s character stays largely oblivious (he’s not actually what anyone thinks he is).

There are some great performances here, but it’s a genuinely inventive and interesting story that results in some unique situations. There’s also a funny subplot involving Jim Belushi going slightly crazy after unwittingly witnessing several espionage-related events.

And, of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the line that has for some reason become iconic in a circle of me and a couple friends:

Does anyone here remember how to kill a man?

I don’t know why that’s funny. It just is.

Spy vs Spy

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I was reminded today of Spy vs. Spy, the comic series in MAD Magazine.

I was a little surprised to find it dates all the way back to 1961 by a Cuban cartoonist living in exile. It’s been published continually since then. The original cartoonist retired from the strip in 1987, when he passed it on to several others. In addition to MAD Magazine, there was a Sunday comic strip for a period of time, and there have been book compilations, a cartoon or two, and lots of cosplay.

The two spies are black and white, but there’s no indication of which one is the good guy and which one is the bad guy. Apparently, in 1968, there was some note in a strip about the black spy being from the “east,” but that’s about it.

Considering the early start, this strip might have contributed to the “trenchcoat and fedora” cliche of the spy. Through the 40s and 50s, that fashion was mostly associated with detectives, not spies.

Book Review: Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Absolutely wonderful”

This is actually the third time I’ve read this book, but the last two were over a decade ago, so I never recorded them. I read this again because I sent a copy to a friend who likes treasure hunting, and I decided to read it along with him.

This is the true story of one man’s search for the wreckage of the S.S. Central America. The ship was a steamer that was making its way up the coast from Panama to New York in 1857. It had a load of passengers from the west coast who had traversed Panama with all the gold they found during the Gold Rush. The ship went down in a storm, along with over 400 of the almost 600 souls onboard.

The book starts with a long narrative of the storm and the ship’s sinking, which is absolutely riveting. You progress from a small leak, to enough water to swamp the boilers, to offloading the women and children, the actual sinking, and the recovery of a few other survivors over the next few days.

Then the book jumps forward over a 100 years to introduce Tommy Thompson. He was a borderline genius, who I believe was somewhere on the autism spectrum. He was constantly thinking differently about all sorts of topic, testing theories, conducting pet research, etc. One day he became interested in finding lost treasure, and this culminated with his plan to have investors finance a expedition to find the Central America.

He proceeds methodically, in opposition to most treasure hunters. He has a plan and a search grid, and he assembles clues from all available resources, assigning a probability to every sector. He forms a company and raises money from investors and sets out to sea to find the wreck.

What follows is just a great procedural of how to solve problems, form hypotheses, evaluate evidence, and come to conclusions. It reminded me of The Martian in that respect – Thompson just solves probably after problem, slowly and carefully, always with his eye on the end goal.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s just a lovely book that makes me think humans can overcome any odds and solve any problem they put their minds too. I found it – and still find it – incredibly inspiring.

Spy (2015)

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Here’s the fun things about spoofs: they can embrace cliches. If a “serious” movie tries to be too much like something else, then it’s considered derivative. But a spoof has license to do exactly that — that’s the actual point.

Such is the case with the reductively named Spy. This is a Melissa McCarthy send up that puts her in Europe working as a CIA agent to… you know what… It doesn’t matter. The plot has something to do with a nuclear bomb, but who cares? The movie is basically a vehicle for McCarthy to be funny, and it absolutely succeeds at that, even if it falls short at pure storytelling.

Enjoying this will necessarily depend on how funny you find McCarthy (I personally find her hilarious), but there are supporting characters that contribute just as much. Rose Byrne is a self-absorbed femme fatale who steals every scene she’s in, and Jason Statham does a pitch-perfect parody of, well, himself, as a fellow agent who claims to have undergone some of the most inventive ordeals.

He’s worth quoting at length (read this as Statham yelling across a conference room; I know you can hear it…):

Nothing kills me. I'm immune to 179 different types of poison. I know because I ingested them all at once when I was deep undercover in an underground poison-ingesting crime ring… I once used defibrillators on myself… I put shards of glass in my fuckin' eye… I've jumped from a high-rise building using only a raincoat as a parachute and broke both legs upon landing and I still had to pretend I was in a fucking Cirque du Soleil show… I've swallowed enough microchips and shit them back out again to make a computer… During the threat of an assassination attempt, I appeared convincingly in front of congress as Barack Obama… I watched the woman I love get tossed from a plane and hit by another plane mid-air… I drove a car off a freeway on top of a train while it was on fire. Not the car, I was on fire.

This is not a sophisticated movie, but the humor isn’t entirely juvenile either. It walks the line pretty well.

There are some fun gags like the increasingly dowdy cover identities and names McCarthy’s character is given (cat lady Carol Jenkins; “I look like someone's homophobic aunt”), and a fantastic scene with Michael McDonald as a deadpan “Q”-type gadgeteer who issues McCarthy a series of gadgets under increasingly embarrassing guises (hemorrhoid pads spiked with chloroform and a poison antidote in a bottle labeled as a stool softener).

I watched this film on a flight to Frankfurt, and I’ll admit to laughing out loud a couple of times to the point where I became self-conscious that people were staring at me.

Alias (2001 - 2006)

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve begun making my way through Alias. This was the show that made Jennifer Garner famous back in 2005. Up until the pilot, she had just done some bit parts in Felicity and Pearl Harbor. The show ran for five seasons and 100+ episodes.

Sydney Bristow is a UCLA graduate student recruited by a secret branch of the CIA. I remember the series being the classic format of a relatively self-contained episode in service of a larger story. The larger story here is whether the “secret branch” of the CIA is actually that, or if it’s a shadowy organization actually working against the CIA.

Sydney’s father Jack is played by Victor Garber. He’s part of the same organization… or is he? The pilot sets up all sorts of plot threads. What happened to Sydney’s mother? Why is she so angry with her father? How will she stay undercover after the agency inflicts tragedy on her? Will there romance between her and her journalist friend Will (an early role for Bradley Cooper) or the handsome CIA agent introduced in the ending of the episode?

There’s so much going on here that the second episode opens with a full minute of voiceover from Garner re-hashing all the exposition bundled into the 90-minute pilot.

If I thought too hard about it, I could probably find some plot holes big enough to drive a truck through. And I never quite accepted Garner as an action hero — watching her do martial arts just never struck me as genuine. Also, I remember that later in the series, the storyline got weirder, having to do with some mystical artifact or machine (the “Rambaldi” story arc).

But, for now, it’s a fun spy caper. It will take me a bit to get through the first season (for which I paid $24.99 on Prime Video), so expect an update then.

BMW Films

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Back in 2001, BMW made a series of short films that they released to the web. They starred a then-unknown Clive Owen as “the driver.” He was a guy who drove BMWs and… did stuff. Some of this was spy stuff, some of it was private detective stuff, but all of it was very cool.

The films were five minutes or so, and they got some named directors for this: I remember John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, and Guy Ritchie (along with his then-wife Madonnna). Production values were sky-high — each film was a little action movie in its own right.

Given the rotating directors, all the films had a different vibe. There are straight-up actions films, some surreal drug-trippy films, a tender romance-ish film, a mystical film, etc. They all held complete stories, and it was fun to see how a director would tell the story.

I remember these leading to a lot of discussion about how Owen would have made a fine James Bond.

Here are two of them. They’re all scattered around YouTube somewhere.

No Way Out (1987)

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve long-felt that No Way Out is one of the great overlooked spy films. Released in 1987, it was was early starring role for Kevin Costner.

Costner is Tom Farrell, a Navy officer working in the Pentagon. He’s sleeping with Susan, who also happens to be sleeping with the Secretary of Defense.

One night, the Secretary accidentally kills her during an argument about her other lover (who he doesn’t know is Farrell). He concocts a plan to find the other lover and frame him as “Yuri,” a rumored Soviet deep cover agent that has been operating in DC for years. The CIA can then kill him and resolve Susan’s death without the Secretary’s involvement ever being known.

The Secretary assigns Farrell to find the other lover… which puts him in the problematic position of running a manhunt of which he is the target.

You might think I’ve revealed too much, but I haven’t. It’s a tightly-wound thriller with great performances from Costner, Gene Hackman as the Secretary, and a young Will Patton as his scheming assistant who has an agenda of his own.

Top it off with a head-snapping twist at the end, and you end up with an amazing thriller that never quite got the renown that it should have.

Bond Intro in LEGO

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

This guy spent a lot of time recreating the Bond “gunbarrel” intro in LEGO. Some amazing ingenuity here.

Book Review: The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Interesting, but highly speculative”

I did not read this entire book. I set out to “break” the book, like I did with Cooperation and Coercion a couple years back.

I read the cover material, the introduction, the conclusion, the index, then I went back through and read the first section of every chapter. And then I did a lot research on it.

The book is a little controversial. It was written in the late 1990s, and it introduced something called Strauss – Howe generational theory (named for the two authors).

The theory goes something like this –

History is divided up in to segments called “saeculums,” which are about the long human life – about 85 years. Each saeculum is divided up into four “turnings” of about 20 years. Those turnings proceed in order:

The High
The Awakening
The Unraveling
The Crisis

And then the cycle repeats.

The book is titled as such because when it was written in the late 90s, the authors claimed we had just ended an Unraveling, and we were headed into the fourth turning, which would be a Crisis.

This is somehow matched to generations. The generation someone grew up in falls into four categories:

Prophet
Nomad
Hero
Artist

Those “archetypes” correspond to turnings, and that’s what drives history.

…yeah, it gets a little metaphysical. Lots of people accused the authors of pseudo-science and a very selective view of history in order to get it to fit into their framework. It’s been called “unfalsifiable,” and therefore not valid science. Less complimentary critics have called it “voodoo” or “political astrology.”

But it also got a lot of press at the time, and a lot of people swear by the theory (it was recommend to me because the conservative pastor Douglas Wilson is apparently a big proponent of it). This was an updated version by one of the authors (the other one has since died), and he attempts to bring into the present and make present-day events fit the framework.

There’s also a documentary called Generation Zero (produced by Steve Bannon, of all people) that touches on some of the concepts. I watched it (it’s on YouTube), and it was interesting, but it’s more about the economic meltdown of 2008 (it was produced right after the housing crisis).

I didn’t buy all of it. I do believe that history is cyclic and events and the national zeitgeist tend to repeat, but some of the theory seems far-fetched. The book is a lot of examples trying to prove their theory. I skimmed quite a bit of it, and spent just as much time research the theory and other opinions of it.

It’s interesting and thought-provoking, but I wasn’t into it enough to spend 400 pages listening to people trying to prove that it’s true.

Gardner Novel Set

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I finally got around to finishing my collection of John Gardner’s original Bond novels. He wrote 13 original novels and two movie novelizations between 1981 and 1996.

I've never been a huge fan of Gardner, but I stumbled on Seafire in a used bookstore a couple of months ago, then realized I was just three novels away from having the set. It took a few eBay orders, but I finally got it completed.

(And you can call it sacrilege, but I highly approve of Gardner putting Bond in a Saab 9000 Turbo. I've always had a thing for them.)

Book Review: Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

TLDR: “Confusing and pointless”

I abandoned this one. It just wasn’t going anywhere.

It’s hard to even write about the book, because I can’t figure out what it was supposed to be about. The subtitle ostensibly claims it’s about engineering our way around problems, but by the halfway point, the book was no closer to that point than when it started.

It uses a odd story as a running theme: one engineers attempt to create a flight simulator in early days of airplanes. Apparently lots of pilots died trying to learn how to fly, so this guy set out to solve that “wicked problem” by creating a simulator so they could train without danger.

…I think? I mean, I think that was point of the story that the author keeps revisiting over and over again?

The author defines these properties of “wicked problems”:

Efficiency
Vagueness
Vulnerability
Safety
Matinenance
Resilence

This list is confusing in and of itself, because it doesn’t have parallel form. “Efficiency” is good, but “Vagueness” is bad. Also, “Maintenance” is an action you perform, not a property of something.

There’s a chapter devoted to each of them, but I think I got through two of them and felt that neither chapter did anything to explain the concept. And he just kept returning to the flight simulator thing, which didn’t make any sense to me.

I think I bailed out at the halfway point.

Eyes (2005)

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

If you blinked back in 2005, you might have missed Eyes which didn’t even last a full month. ABC filmed 12 episodes, but only aired five before yanking it off the air.

It was an hour-long drama about Judd Risk Management, a private investigation firm. So, it wasn’t espionage in the classic sense, but there was a lot of sneaking around.

It was an ensemble show. Tim Daly was Harlan Judd, who owned the firm, but he was surrounded by 7-8 other players with their own dramas, and a central plot point around how the troubled firm was going to survive and who was maneuvering for power over whom. It reminded me of a legal drama where ownership and partnership are the chess pieces.

But there were some neat spy-ish bits in the pilot episode: lots of surveillance, reconstruction of shredded documents, and general skullduggery.

I remember watching it on network TV when it came out and being surprised at how little it was marketed. Production values were sky-high, so I’m sure the show cost a fortune to make, but there was very little promotion of it — it just kind of appeared suddenly, and then disappeared just as quickly.

Probably for the best, honestly, because the pilot made it seem like it was heading into soap opera territory pretty quickly.

The episode is on YouTube, but is frustratingly missing the last two minutes of audio (which I remember being a montage over David Bowie’s Under Pressure… which, now that I think about it, is probably why it was removed).

Cover Up (1984 - 1985)

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Cover Up lasted for a single season back in 1984, but it’s most well-known for how one of its stars died mid-season.

Danielle Reynolds is a New York fashion photographer. She’s married to Mark, an embassy functionary (but really a CIA agent) in La Costa, a fictional country south of the border. When Mark is killed in a car bombing, Danielle finds an ex-special forces soldier named Mac who just happens to be handsome enough to pose as a model, and they travel to La Costa to investigate. At the end of the episode, it’s decided that they will take Mark’s place doing missions for the CIA using their photographer/model cover story.

Mac was the centerpiece of the show — it was kind of a reverse Charlie’s Angels, in that respect. He was played by newcomer Jon Erik Hexum, and in addition to his impossibly good looks, he had a genuinely compelling screen presence.

Tragically, during the filming of episode seven, he was playing on-set with a handgun loaded with blanks. He put it against his head and pulled the trigger, not realizing that even though a blank doesn’t propel a slug, there’s still a short range explosion of propellant. The resulting brain damage left him in a coma and he was removed from life support six days later.

He was replaced with another hero, and the show finished out a 22-episode season, but it just didn’t have the ratings to get renewed.

The CIA boss is played by Richard Anderson, who was Oscar Goldman in the Six Million Dollar Man. And the main villain in the pilot is Louis Jourdan, who had played Kamal Kahn in Octopussy just a year before. The theme song was Holding Out for a Hero (RIP Bonnie Tyler) sung by Hexum’s girlfriend at the time.

Someone has posted the entire series on YouTube. As with most 80s TV transferred to digital, the quality is rough.