My Beloved World

My Beloved World
by
Sonja Sotomayor
read by
Rita Moreno

What an interesting and engaging story. Right from the get-go, I was hooked. The forward and prologue were read by Sotomayor herself and while Moreno does a great job, I really wish that Sotomayor had read the whole book. You can tell that she is a practiced speaker and the emotion with which she read was deep. I suppose her life as a Supreme Court Justice kind of doesn't allow much time for these kinds of things.
The start of Sotomayor's tale is about coming to grips with her childhood diabetes and of the death of her father at a young age. It is evident from the very beginning that she has always been self-confident no mattter what she says, not to mention that her idea of what a normal person is, better describes the academic and legal elite.
Sotomayor was born in New York and did not visit her parent's native Puerto Rico until she was old enough to be aware of it and what it meant. This is the place where she learned to love ripe mangoes, and would become aware of social classes.
During high school, Sotomayor joined her high school's debate and forensics team and explains how she felt while winning her first tournament competing in Extemporaneous speaking. It was cool to hear that what she was doing before I was even born had not changed at all by the time I was in high school and college competing in debate and forensics. But while I had some idea of what it was like to win a tournament, I never experienced it the way that she did. I never had that moment of clarity where I knew how to make every single member of the audience pick me to win. Even when winning, I never felt that I deserved to win because I was the best speaker or debater. At best I might have known that at that moment I had eeked something out.
After high school, Sotomayor went to Princeton. She pretty much took the place by storm as one would expect. She stayed away from the activist scene until she found a way to do it constructively and was involved with getting the university to hire Hispanic faculty. She also would have us believe that she graduated summa cum laude without knowing what the term meant before she was told she was graduating with the honors, I am a bit incredulous, not at her graduating with such high honors, but that having gone to a Catholic High School that she was never exposed to any Latin or to that term before.
The college years were busy for Sotomayor. As well as being a top student at Princeton and Yale Law School, her dear grandmother died. She also went to visit Puerto Rico, for the first time seeing it as an adult and seeing that it was not the paradise she had always thought it was which leads her into learning about it's history and working on rights for Puerto Ricans. She also marries her honey, Kevin and becomes editor of the Yale Law Review.
After law school, Sotomayor becomes an assistant DA in New York and becomes married to the job. She spends so much time on her, six days a week twelve to fifteen hours a day, that she and her actual husband grow apart and eventually divorce. By all accounts is was an amicable break-up, though Sotomayor is wise enough that if it were not, she would never let on. It is after telling of the dissolution of her marriage that she talks at great length of families and how we may not always be born into a family that best suits us, we can create our own families with the people we work with and associate with in our free time and it is these families that we make that one can find as much satisfaction and love as with the ones we are born into.
Sotomayor spends so much time saying how she will not discuss the details of any case she worked on because there are those that will try and interpret her actions in such a way as to predict how she will react as a Supreme Court Justice, that is a bit of a surprise when she talks about being asked to help try the Tarzan killer and explains how he could be tried for multiple crimes and why she and the more senior member of the DA's office had to be very careful and yet go for as big of a case as they could possibly get. I'm glad she included this, as I find her explanation of the workings of the DA's office very easy to understand and I also recognize how significant it is to successfully prosecute a serial killer.
Sotomayor covers the time up until she becomes a judge. If you want to know her brilliant insights into jurisprudence, you are going to need to read her rulings, because she wasn't kidding about not sharing them here.
This is a very well told story, read by a great reader. I did get a little perturbed about the hundredth time that she said she was just a normal person from a normal family. Well, the latter may be true, though I can't speak from experience about normal families. She spends the whole book telling one great anecdote after another, usually involving her setting herself heads and shoulders above her peers and we're expected to believe it ain't no thang? Well, I bet it isn't, I bet it really is as easy as she makes it sound - for her. Normal people are not brilliant legal scholars or the top jurists in the country. Normal people do not graduate Summa Cum Laude from Princeton or edit the Yale Law Review. If it were normal, why aren't there more peole like her running this country? Or pumping gas at the filling station? Or ringing up groceries at the local store? I don't think it's false modesty on Sotomayor's fault, I think she genuinely believes anyone can do what she did if they work hard enough and perservere. Is it odd that someone so intelligent and seemingly wise can also be so naive in this area?

My Beloved World at Amazon.com
My Beloved World Audiobook at Amazon.com

Lincoln (2012)

What a fantabulous film.. I will take good acting over vampire hunting any day. All of the characters in this film were such characters. Even the small roles had enough showing to pick up character foibles and eccentricities that really brought everything alive.
Of course I had heard how great this movie was, but it was always about Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln. He was absolutely fantastic. When I can forget that such a well-known actor is playing the role, I think that is a sign that they're doing something very right. But, I was not prepared for very strong showing by Sally Field, David Stratairn and Tonny Lee Jones. I expect these three actors to do a good job, just as I expect Day-Lewis to do a good job, but they all really stepped it up a notch. But maybe The Amazing Spiderman, Alphas and Men In Black 3, respectively, are not the most dramatic of vehicles to show off their fine acting abilities. These four actors were essential to this movie's success and set the bar very high for the rest of the cast.
I loved seeing Hal Holbrook in period costume. He somehow looks more appropriate dressed as a gentleman from the nineteenth century than in contemporary clothes. Perhaps that is because the first thing I recall seeing him in he was dressed as Mark Twain, or perhaps he is drawn to those roles because they somehow fit him best. He is looking as old as ever, which is to say not a bit older than he did twenty years ago.
It seems hard to believe that there was ever a time when long beards were the norm de rigeur, but it warms the cockles of my heart to see so many whiskers. I am glad that no one has suggested recently that those of us with beards shave off our mustaches, as I've never liked that look and doing it would not only feel funny, but make me look funnier than I already am. It is interesting that so many of the young men were sporting mustaches, like Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the President's son, Robert Lincoln, as well as James Spader as Mr. Bilbo. I wonder if there wasn't a sort of generational rebellion going on? Probably yes and probably no. I suspect that like now, it was largely a matter of fashion more than anything else.

Lincoln on IMDb

The Guild Season 6

Okay, obvious stuff out of the way first: I <3 class="goog-spellcheck-word" codex="" span="" style="background-color: yellow; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Tink
is still cute and Zaboo is still adorable, if in a creepy kind of way. There.This 12 episode season picks up after the events of Season 5 - The Convention. Codex finds herself working at the game company that makes the game that she and her guild have devoted their lives to. She finds herself the literal "yes" girl for game creator, Floyd. Floyd is completely whacko. He's obsessive compulsive and bipolar and very likely an alcoholic. Codex gets off on the completely wrong foot because Floyd sets her up as the new wunderkind. He starts by booting the lead artist out of his cubicle after giving her the parking space of the community coordinator. It's unclear exactly she alienated the COO and the lead programmer, but she did and the foursome are out to thwart her. We soon find out it's not personal and that they just want to get their expansion out which is already way overdue.
In the meantime, the guild is making Codex's life at the new job difficult. Zaboo just literally moves in and becomes the inpaid IT guy. Tink starts dating the lead programmer. And Zork, in an effort to win back the affections of his ladylove, takes on the corporate game. Bladezz and Clara don't so much complicate Codex's life as they do each other's while using Wiggly as an unwitting pawn in their power struggle.
Add in some zaniness with the additional character of Bruiser from Seasons 4 and 5 and Zork's girlfriend Madelyne as the uber-activist. Mix this all together and it was a fun season.
But, was it the last season? All kinds of story arcs get wrapped up. Zaboo is going to stay living at the game company. Tink finally feels emotions and gets a real boyfriend. Zork and Madelyne decide to date. Clara discovers a way to make money while doing online stuff and Bladezz is finally all the channel hits that he has dreamed of. Oh, and Wiggly is in training to be and Olympic discuss thrower. Discusser? Discuteer? There we go. Olympic Discuteer. And most important of all is the way Codex wraps up the final vlog, she says that she has finally achieved all the things that she had hoped for had come true - friends, job, going outside - those kinds of things. She turns off her computer, pats it fondly and walks off. Fade to black.
It's been fun watching the way all the characters have changed. Except Vork. He hasn't changed that much over the five seasons, until maybe this one. He still gives me the creeps, and not in the funny, "this-guy-is-so-lame-he's-hilarious" kind of way. And how about that Erin Grey? Va-va-va-voom. She was 62 years old when Season 6 was filmed. Her character has a line about, "us people over 40 having a sex life" or words to that effect, and I thought that I could believe her as a woman in her 40s. I don't know if she's had plastic surgery or not, and I like not knowing so I'm not going to look into it. She does look a little older than she did on Buck Rogers or Silver Spoons, but mostly the same. I think it is more likely that she is either a) an android or b) an elf with clipped ears.
If we get a seventh season, I will watch it, without hesitation. Well, once it is finally completely out, none of this week to week wondering if I missed something or if they are taking a break. But, if it doesn't come back, I will watch whatever it is that Ms. Day does next. It'll probably be awesome, too.

The Guild at IMDb

Merlin and the War of the Dragons (2008)

Well, this is by the same folks that did Dragonquest, so I wasn't expecting much. But, there in the very first scene is none other than Jurgen Prochnow, whom I prefer to think of as the Duke, Leto Atriedes. That had to be a good sign, I thought, and it was.
Even thought this film was by the same production company as Dragonquest, with the same director, it did not have the same cast of actors as I thought it might for some reason. But, that's not a bad thing. This time out instead of some crap story, there is actually a decent tale telling of the beginnings of Merlin and how Uther Pendrag came to rule as King of Britain. They took liberties with that, of course, but I'm okay with it.
The same special effects company, Tiny Juggernaut, did the special effects for this movie as for Dragonquest, and did just as good a job, with a lot more dragons flying about at once, but not as many 'glowy' and 'showy' effects applied to them, letting them look more like traditional dragons. The rest of the special effects were okay, reminding me a lot of syndicated television shows like Xena or Hercules.
The one complaint I have about this movie, well the one major complaint, is that they tried to have a battle scene representing thousands of warriors with a cast of about 20. They did try all kinds of camera tricks and special effects tricks, including some CGI soldiers at a very far distance which actually looked pretty good. The film suffered for having so few actors in the battle. Actually much in the same way that television shows, like the ones I mentioned above often do. Army A meets Army B, and somehow we're only shown about a dozen or a dozen and a half men at any one time. Even big name shows from the 80s and 90s had this problem. I've always thought if it is important enough to the story to have a large crowd, cut back on your special effects and hire the extras. I cannot even begin to tell you how annoyed I was as a kid to see shows like the A-Team fight a large bunch of goons, yet somehow the same vehicle is getting shown blowing up in different scenes, and they fight bad guys four or five at a time. Or how in Buck Rogers, there would be supposedly epic space battles involving squadrons of space ships on each side, yet we would only see three ships at a time. Okay, I always cut this show a little slack in that department because they were just doing what Battlestar Galactica had done.
Until the credits rolled, I was really excited that this company - The Asylum - had come so far in one movie, but then the production date was shown and this was made the year before Dragonquest. I could have guessed that based on the special effects, but I was hoping it was the other way around. The quality of story and acting went way down in one year's time. I am curious to see what they're doing now, though. maybe Dragonquest was the fluke.

Merlin and the War of the Dragons at IMDb

Ong-Bak the Thai Warrior (2003)

There must be something lost in the translation of the title of this film. Ong-Bak is the name of the buddha that looks over the village of Nram Pradu. He is a stone statue, and this is not some kind of fantasy film. I'm sure the warrior bit refers to Ting (Tony Jaa), the young man whom on the eve of becoming ordained as a monk must use muay thai skills to retrieve the head of Ong-Bak which has been stolen by a thug hoping that it's worth a lot of money.
Ting soon finds himself in Bangkok, trying to look up Humlae, who now goes by the name George and is a petty con man who works with a partner, Muay. Ostensibly they are pulling cons to pay her way through university. Since Ting has sworn never to use his formidable muay thai skills, he must think that his life is in danger or that another's life is - which it turns out through the coures of the movie that he only fights when it's a girls life in danger. He actually does a fair bit of running away to avoid fighting, which shows off Jaa's amazing athleticism. He runs like a cross between a parkors champion and a young Jackie Chan in one of his serious roles (hey, he had a few when he was younger).
The fights in this movie are impressive. The chase scenes are impressive. The acting, not so much. Actually, it's pretty much on par with most action movies starring a martial arts champion, whether it be Chinese, Brazilian or American.
The ending of this movie is great, and I doubt that I'll spoil it for you by giving it away since looking into my magic eight ball tells "not a chance" when I ask it if anyone who reads this was planning on ever watching this movie. The bad guy who you know is bad from the moment you see him because he uses an electronic voice box and smokes through the hole in his neck, after stealing the Ong-Bak and putting Ting through the ringer (including kidnapping Muay to make Ting fight), is crushed by the head of a giant buddha which he is trying to steal. It was a bit pedictable really, but still kind of cool.

Ong-Bak the Thai Warrior on IMDb (IMDb gave this a really high rating - 7.2, to my surprise)