1998 in review. What went good, what went bad.

The year that was 1998 was an interesting year indeed, both in
my personal life, and in the life of the universe and everything (thank
you Douglas Adams :-). There was never a dull moment this year (I’m still
out of breath!). We had the good, the bad and the ugly this year, and
everything seems to be in tact. Ok, now that I’ve strung an entire
paragraph together with clichés, let’s get down to the business of the
review.

• “Carney’s Corner News 1998”
  
• “New House News”
  
• Bill and Bill
  
• So what exactly is a Lewinsky?
  
• [[April 1998 Trip Report]]
  
• [[Do I dare to eat a peach?]]
  
• [[Saving Private Ryan]]
  
• [[Vanessa’s 1998 Birthday]]
  
• [[Halloween 1998]]
  
• [[And let your best be for your friend]]
  
• The year I started getting to know [[Frontier]] like an old friend.
  
• Jackie Chan broke into the American market with [[Rush Hour]], his first

  American made film since [[The Big Brawl]] in 1984.

• Chow Yun-Fat broke into the American market with [[The Replacement Killers]]
  
• [[Oscar 1998 Predictions]]
  
• This year was a crummy year for golf, but I won my company golf league!
  
• [[LTX]] had a tough year and ended up laying off 50% of its workforce
  
• 
  

Is there some sort of Constitutional Crisis 200 year cycle?
[The US suffered through turmoil in ’98 – 1798, that is](http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/362/oped/The*US”suffered”through”turmoil”in**’98””*1798’**that_is+.shtml.)
Can we learn anything from the first serious test of the
US system of government??

Review: [[A Perfect Murder]]

Review: [[Enter The Dragon]]

Review: [[When Harry Met Sally]]

Tequila goes undercover to try and break up a triad gun running operation. John Woo’s last Hong Kong movie is one of the best action movies ever made.

##Right from the beginning

This movie grabs you from the beginning and doesn’t let go.

##Did you notice…

Did you notice the tracking shot in the middle of the hospital sequence?
It lasts a good 3 minutes. For those of you that don’t know, a tracking
shot is an extended scene in which there’s no edits and no camera angle
changes. That is, the camera just runs the whole time until it’s done. As
you can probably imagine this is a very difficult technique. Every detail
must be planned out for the entire shot ahead of time. It’s difficult under
normal circumstance, but next to impossible in an action sequence. Think
about trying to get all of those explosions and squibs to go off at the
right time. Word has it that it took 45 days of set up and retakes to get
this shot done right!

Harry and Sally meet and eventually all in love.

I just watched this movie again after not seeing it for a long
time. It’s funny how much a movie like this can parallel aspects of your
own life.

##Back in College

Harry met Sally just after they finished college. Sally had a car and was
going to New York, and so was Harry. Harry was dating a friend of Sally’s,
so she agreed to give him a ride. They hated each other from the start.

During a dinner on the road, they have a conversation about the nature of
relationships between men and women. Harry states that “men and women can
never be friends because sex always gets in the way. Even if they never
have sex, he wants to so it’s already in the way.” She doesn’t agree, and
they argue a while. Eventually they agree to disagree. They arrive in New
York and go their separate ways.

##A few years later

A few years later they run into each other. They still don’t really like
each other, but they sit and talk a while. Harry decides to amend his
previous statement by saying that “men and women can never be friends
unless they’re both involved with someone else. That way the pressure is
taken off of them about the sex thing. But even then, everyone around them
will still think that something is going on, so sex gets in the way even
when it isn’t in the way. So we have to revert to the original statement
that men and women can’t be friends.”

In [[A Note to a Friend]] I talked about this exact situation. I made a
friend that’s a women. We were just friends, but we got pressure from all
sides from people that wondered what was going on between us. Nobody could
believe that we were very close, but just friends at the same time.

##A few more years later

Harry and Sally met again, and this time they became wonderful friends.
But their friends couldn’t understand it. Here’s the way a conversation
went with Harry’s friend:

Friend: You find her attractive right?

Harry: Yes.

Friend: And you can talk to her about anything?

Harry: Yes.

Friend: And you don’t want to have sex with her?

Harry: Nope.

Friend: I just don’t understand this.

Harry: What’s to understand. I don’t need to have sex with her. She’s

my best friend.

This is where art imitated my life. I heard stuff like this from all sides
including from my wife. And no matter how much I tried to explain that we
were just friends, people couldn’t believe it.

##And so, they get married

This is what my wife always points out when we have this discussion. At
the end, Harry and Sally finally get together and get married. So, whe
wouldn’t it happen with me and my friend.

##Universality

Rob Reiner (the director) and whoever the writer was did something that
was absolutely brilliant. They used interviews from various people about
how they met and fell in love interjected during the movie to tie the
universal ideas in the story together. Each of their stories is different,
but they all have one thing in common: there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme
or reason to why people fall in love and get together. It just happens
(sometimes easier than others). The movie ends with Harry and Sally
finising their story with the interviewer, and what you realize is that
you’ve been watching their story as told by them to the interviewer.

Passable thriller in which a husband tries to have his wife killed for the two oldest reasons.

##Dial M

This movie is a remake of “Dial M for Murder,” a much more effective movie.
In any case, the story revolves around man whose going broke and whose
wife is worth millions to him, if she’s dead.

He decides he needs to killer, and making it even easier for him is the
fact that she’s been having a red hot affair on him. And he knows who the
guy is.

From his point of view this is perfect. He hires the guy that’s having an
affair with his wife to kill her.

##For a thriller to work

For a thriller to really work, the audience can never be quite sure what’s
coming next. Alfred Hitchcock is the acknowledged master of this. Remember
in “North by Nortwest” when, near the end of the movie, Cary Grant needs to
get a message to the woman that she’s in trouble. He writes the message on
a matchbook cover and throws it towards her hoping that she’ll see it
before the other people in the room. Tremendous suspense was created
because nobody in the audience quite knew if should actually would see it
first.

The problem for me with this movie is that too many times I turned to my
wife and said “I bet that…” or “She’s going to…”, and I was right.
There was just no suspense.

Musings: [[Wag the Puppy]]

We bombed Iraq. It’s about time. But why **now**

The United States and Great Britain bombed Iraq last night. I
personally thing that’s a good thing. I’ve wondered for quite a while why
we didn’t do it sooner. But right now I’m feeling pretty cynical and have
decided that we didn’t bomb earlier because there was no political
advantage for Bill Clinton to do so. Now, there is.

##Don’t get me wrong

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the only reason we are bombing
Iraq is because Clinton thinks it’ll delay his impeachment. I’m saying
that at a minimum, it played a part in the final decision to start
bombing.

I can imagine the meeting right now:

General: “You know those bastards have those weapons ready to go Mr.
President, and it’s up to us to stop them.”

President: “You’re probably right general.”

Weasel Presidential Aide: “And if we do, it’ll distract the country from
your impeachment hearings and they’ll get delayed. Hell, maybe even
forgotten.”

President: “Good point. OK general. You have you’re ‘Go’ order”

##Don’t stop the process

We, as a nation of voters (well, some of us anyway) need to take the
question of impeaching the President very seriously.

The framers of the constitution didn’t put a proviso in it exempting the
president from impeachment during a conflict with another country. So we
shouldn’t stop the process because of one now.

In fact, because of this president’s penchant for lying, it might be best
to get rid of him before the situation in Iraq heats up even more. Can you
imagine us getting into another Viet Nam type scenario where the president
tells us that he’s going to get out of Iraq, all the while continuing the
bombing a starting a ground war? I can. He wouldn’t think twice about
doing it an lying to us about it.

More reorganization. Now the family articles have been
moved into the [[Musings]] area, and the
“Family Picture Album” into [[Genealogy]]. I think this
makes a little more sense. Also, I got a better
summary mechanism going for [[Musings]] as well.

By the way, did you notice the page counters?

Isn’t [[Frontier]] cool!!!!