Deane Barker

The Interpreter (2005)

Sat, 7 Nov 2026 00:00:00 -0600

Here’s the thing about The Interpreter — the opening scene is important, but I didn’t understand why. I don’t think they did a great job explaining (or even hinting at) what was going on. As a result, I was a little confused throughout the film

Nicole Kidman is the United Nations interpreter of the title. One night, she overhears something that sounds nefarious and alerts the authorities. Sean Penn is a Secret Service agent assigned to the case as part of the Dignitary Protection Service (a real thing, it turns out). He both has to investigate what the interpreter heard, but also prepare for the visit of the head of an African country that might be the target of the plot he’s uncovered.

Penn is playing against type here, in the sense that his character is quiet and thoughtful He doesn’t quite believe Kidman's character because she's from the (fictional) African country involved.

Again, the opening scene was important, and I didn't understand it until I read the Wikipedia plot summary later. (It didn’t help that I was watching this at the very end of 27 hours of travel to Nairobi.) The ending is a little cliched, but I enjoyed the appearance of Jesper Christensen. He played “Mr. White” (or “The Plae King”) in a number of Daniel Craig’s Bond movies.)

Is it a spy film? …maybe? It’s definitely a political thriller, but I was interested in usage of the Secret Service, which you don’t see used often outside of actual presidential protection.

Alias, Season 2

Wed, 4 Nov 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I got through Alias, Season 2. Like a lot of shows that last about five seasons, the second season is where it got really popular.

My notes —

It’s darker. Sydney is less of an innocent this time around, and some really unpleasant things happen to people.
Sydney’s mother looms very large in this season. She’s played by Swedish actress Lena Olin, which is a stroke of genius because she and Jennifer Garner absolutely look like mother and daughter (though she has no relation to the show’s director and producer Ken Olin). Her loyalties are very much up in the air. The big arc of the season is how she regains Sydney’s trust, then loses it, but maybe just temporarily?
The plot “resets” halfway through the season by getting rid of the whole SD-6/Alliance angle. In the second half of the season, everyone is working directly for the CIA, and Sloane is the main bad guy. This is good, because the old plot was getting confusing and a little silly.
The Rambaldi plotline continues. A lot is made of Sloane’s lifelong obsession with Rambaldi and his mania at “finishing” his work. Things occasionally get mystical. The entire show has been about collecting “artifacts,” and this comes to a head in the final episode.
Sydney and Vaughn predictably strike up a romance.
Terry O’Quinn is in almost every episode as the head of the CIA unit, though he’s always listed in the credits as a “Guest Star,” so I don’t know how much further in the show he goes.
The show has a very weird view of the NSA. Lots of NSA agents doing stuff that NSA agents wouldn’t do (do they even have agents?).
Lot of one-shot guests this season: Rutger Hauer, Christian Slater, Danny Trejo, Faye Dunaway, Ethan Hawke, etc. I remember Alias was the “it” show of this TV season, which is sure to draw a lot of guest stars.
Ford evidently paid a lot of money for product placement this season. It’s like no other car company even exists.

Finally, the season ends on one of the all-time great TV cliffhangers —

After a fight to the death in her Los Angeles apartment, Sydney passes out and wakes up in an alley in Hong Kong with no memory of how she got there.

She reports in, and when Vaughn arrives at the safe house, he’s wearing a wedding ring. He tells Sydney she went missing after the fight in her apartment, and she’s been gone without a trace for almost two years.

The picture on this post is Sydney’s reaction, on which the season ends.

SNL Bond Girls Sketch

Tue, 3 Nov 2026 00:00:00 -0600

I was reminded of this hilarious SNL sketch from 2012 which imagines some “lesser-known” Bond girls: Diane Keaton, Jodie Foster, Penny Marshall, Ellen Degeneres, Lea Michele, and Molly Ringwald.

A bonus are the ridiculous but almost-believable Bond movie titles: Never Die Twice Tomorrow, The Man Who Was a Gun, etc.

Daniel Craig was hosting, so he appears, along with Taran Killam doing a not-terrible Connery impression.

Here it is on YouTube.

Kids Spy Book Display

Sun, 1 Nov 2026 00:00:00 -0500

I loved this display in the local Barnes and Noble. The City Spies series was prominently displayed — I’ll try these out sometime.

The Day of the Jackal (1973)

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

The Day of the Jackal from 1973 is the original film version of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel. It shouldn’t be confused with a couple of remakes — one in 1997 with Bruce Willis (just called The Jackal) and a TV version in 2024 with Eddie Redmayne.

It’s quite good, in an unique kind of way. There’s not a lot of action, because the entire film is essentially an asynchronous chase scene.

A terrorist group hires an assassin (”The Jackal”) to kill Charles DeGaulle (likely set in the mid 60s, since an early scene references an actual event). The entire film consists The Jackal preparing for the job and traveling across Europe to carry it out, culminating in the attempt itself.

This isn’t a mystery. You can see all sides at all times, but it’s a very tense game of missed opportunities and excruciatingly bad timing. It’s more of a “howcatchem” rather than a “whodunnit.”

The Jackal himself is weirdly affable. You’d expect him to be brooding or anti-social, but he seems like a really nice guy, which makes him even scarier.

Michael Lonsdale plays a French detective pitted against the villain. He’s credited under his real name of “Michel Lonsdale” here, as it was partially a French production. He would go on play Hugo Drax in Moonraker six years later.

It’s a weirdly quiet film. There’s not a lot of dialog and not much soundtrack or score.

There’s also an implied homosexuality plot point, which was likely pretty risque for the early 70s. I’m not sure if it was in Forsyth’s novel, but I remember the situation was recreated in the 1997 version and it was eventually re-shot because test audiences thought the victim was killed simply for being gay, when in the original, it’s clear he was killed because he discovered The Jackal’s identity.

Solid movie.

Bullet to Beijing (1995)

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Bullet to Beijing is another Harry Palmer installment of the series that started with The IPCRESS File back in the 1960s. It was the first Palmer film in 30 years.

Unfortunately, it’s terrible.

It was supposedly filmed for theaters then released direct-to-video because it was so bad. Michael Caine has reported that filming this was the worst experience of his career, and he threatened to retire in the middle of it.

Harry is forcibly retired from the service about two minutes into the film, which seems weird. Then he’s flown to Russia by a mysterious employer and given the job of recovering a biological agent called The Red Death. At some point, he’s told that it’s on a train across Siberia to Beijing, so that’s where most of the film happens.

There were a lot of characters, and I’m not totally sure what they were all doing. At some point, it’s revealed that his employer is smuggling the weapon to North Korea, which got me wondering why he hired Harry in the first place? I couldn’t remotely figure out how the plot fit together and why everyone was doing what they were doing. To top it off, there’s a weird sequence in the middle which reminded me of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

There’s some interesting casting. Jason Connery has a role (son of Sean), and Mia Sara is there too (Sloane from Ferris Bueller). I maintain that you could have completely removed these two characters and caused zero damage to the story. Incidentally, those two would marry a year later, until she divorced him and married Jim Henson’s son.

I rented it in HD, but the film quality was awful. And there’s a weird soundtrack which plays in the background of almost every scene.

Awful movie.

The Agency, Season 2

Tue, 27 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

There are a lot of “sophomore slumps” in television, but the second season of The Agency just knocked it out of the park.

The focus of Martian in this go-around is two-fold —

To capture “Viking,” the American solider who turned traitor and is working with the Russian mercenary group Valhalla
To free his lover, Samia, from her abduction by the Sudanese (or is it the Iranians?)

This intersects with Daniela’s undercover work in Iran, which was an unfulfilled subplot in season one. And of course, there are lots of politics in the CIA’s London office.

Lots of supporting players get bigger roles this time, especially John Magaro as novice operative Owen, who gets in way over his head.

Season three is supposedly in development, but there has been no official announcement. I do hope it happens, because the season ended on a hell of cliffhanger.

Spy Role-Playing Games

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

For no other reason than middle-age nostalgia, I asked Claude for a list of “spy-themed role playing games.” It gave me the following:

James Bond 007 (Victory Games, 1983). Widely considered the best of the era. Its “Hero Points” let players bend the story in cinematic, Bond-film ways, and it has excellent chase rules.
Top Secret/S.I. (TSR, 1987). TSR’s own revision of Top Secret, with a cleaner system and a pulpier, more action-oriented feel.
Espionage! (Hero Games, 1983), later revised as Danger International (1985). This is the Champions/Hero System engine applied to spies and mercenaries.
Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes (Flying Buffalo, 1983). It uses a Tunnels & Trolls-style engine and handles both detective and spy play.
Ninjas & Superspies (Palladium, 1988). Gonzo martial arts and gadget-heavy espionage using the Palladium system.

After a couple weeks prowling around eBay — and way too much money spent — I managed to accumulate them all. I won’t play them, I just like reading the rule books.

Give me some time and I’ll do some more analysis. I feel like the commonalities between different systems have some valuable things to say about how we frame spy fiction.

Pickup on South Street (1953)

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

It was about 9:00 p.m. and I wasn’t tired, so I asked Claude for a spy movie less than 100 minutes long. It suggested a few, including Pickup on South Street from 1953.

Turns out, the entire film is on YouTube, and has a running time of just 77 minutes. (Pete would be so happy…)

It was… okay. The “spy” aspect is just a MacGuffin — a pickpocket lifts a woman’s wallet on the subway. Turns out it has microfilm in it. She’s a courier for a traitor and everyone wants it back.

I mean, let’s face it, the missing thing could have been anything. But it was kind of interesting listening to people talk about the “reds” and the “commies.”

There are some good performances. Jean Meyer is the femme fatale (she would eventually marry Howard Hughes and drop out of public life). And Thelma Ritter was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for her supporting role as a seedy information source.

It was otherwise pretty forgettable.

Havana Syndrome

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0500

Havana Syndrome is the claim that some enemy is targeting Americans with a futuristic weapon which is undetectable and which causes neurological damage to the victim. It’s so-named because CIA operatives in Havana were the first ones to report it.

Since first reporting in 2017, there have been additional reports from around the world. The CIA has officially sought to frame the reports as mass hysteria at best, and a money-grab at worst.

60 Minutes has been reporting on it for some time, and a new book was written by two of that show’s editors: The Havana Syndrome: Secret Weapons, a Government Cover-Up, and the Greatest Spy Mystery of Our Time

Frustratingly, there’s no smoking gun. There’s a ton of circumstantial evidence — something absolutely happened to these people — but no one has ever caught the perpetrators in action.

The NSA apparently abstained from a report discounting the attacks, which the authors interpreted as them having eavesdropping evidence they didn’t want to reveal but that couldn’t go on the record against. And, in the very last chapter, the authors write of a meeting with an unidentified source that says the CIA bought one of the weapons on the black market, meaning they’ve lied for years when they claimed these reports were baseless.

The book is well-researched, but as I said, you’re not going to find any clear answers here. It might be a long time before the truth finally comes out.

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 people having tense conversations — but I loved it.

Set in the late 1980s, just as glasnost and perestroika were taking hold, Sean Connery plays Barley Blair, a drunken English 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 a young mother 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.

It was the first film shot mostly on-location in Moscow and (then) Leningrad. The camera work is…luxurious. 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. I had no idea it was still being sold as new.

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.