Father's Day

I love my father ...

Alec Baldwin

When they were filming It's Complicated at St. John's University, where my father teaches philosophy, Alec Baldwin crossed paths with my father. My father gave him a big broad smile, and said, "You know, Adam is my favorite Baldwin brother."

Adam Baldwin on

the left... for once.

Alec Baldwin sighed and said "Yeah, I get that alot."

Adam Baldwin has nothing to do with the tribe of the Baldwin brothers, and is actually on the opposite end of the political spectrum from said family of left-wingers.

My father can be just a bit of a troublemaker.


Once, at the Great Irish Fair, in Coney Island, New York, my father came across NORAID -- a "charity group" for Northern Ireland, dedicated to helping the widows and orphans of the violence in Northern Ireland.

In reality, they took the money and dedicated it to creating more widows and orphans.

When Noraid hit my father up for money, he told them, in his clear, second tenor voice, "I don't support cop killers."

My father did catch the attention of every police officer within earshot.

.... Okay, more than a bit of a troublemaker.

My father is about as responsible for my writing career as J. Michael Straczynski.  When I told him I had an idea for what basically turned out to be Fanfiction from Hell, he told me to write it down ...

A million words later, and it turned into something so completely different, I had to rewrite it from the bottom up. Now that it's a five book series (and outlined to thirteen) I'm thinking of submitting it to Baen books.

My father is responsible for my Catholic education, more than any of those ignorant morons in Catholic school.  As a student of Thomas Aquinas, my father has applied reason and rationality to religion, and has taught me to do much the same .... which is usually why atheists like Matt confuse me when he says that "no one uses their brain about religion and believes in it", and why Protestant friends of mine say that Catholics don't even read the Bible. All I can think is: Where do they find these people? Answer: everywhere, probably.

There was this one time, back in college, my father worked with a hydrogen generator ... remember those? If you don't, there's a wiki entry for that somewhere, I'm sure... anyway, my father once, by accident, added the wrong acid. His professor took his generator and tossed it out the window, destroying part of a construction site outside. The professor then informed the lab that using the wrong acid results in the more unstable cousin of TNT....

It's going into a novel somehow.

Another story he told me was of ether ... apparently, ether tends to give off a lot of vapor. It is also very flammable, so to heat it, people in a lab use a water bath, heated by a hot plate beneath the water. So, of course, someone used a Bunsen burner, the ether vapors caught fire and ...

As my father told it, "When you see the air catch on fire above your head, you hit the ground fast."

Anyway. Here's to my father. I have no idea what I would do without him.

But what is he when he's at Home? Other Novel Ideas.

I've had people in my Real Life tell me that they're confused about what I'm selling at the moment.



I post on my personal pages about what I'm working on, while at the same time inviting them to look over A Pius Man. 



So, it might be a good idea to clear things up.



To do that, I think it's time to allow you a glimpse into my dark, dark mind.



A Pius Man is only one of my thrillers. My thriller universe is interconnected, and borderline incestuous, if you read them in the order they were written. Eventually, every character in my thriller novels comes to know everyone else … if they're still alive.



And all of them ended up in A Pius Man.



Summer Death Camp, book one of the Death of an Alois Boy series.

 I had a high school that I really, really didn't like. I started writing a murder mystery series that, in the outline, started off as acting out little grudges. In the mysteries, the class pornographer wannabe ended up face down in a bucket of KY jelly. A bully who made constant KKK jokes ended up lynched with a noose made of piano wire. The “hero” was only the protagonist because he was always in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he had the inside track because he was hip-deep in the high school stupidity.  Sort of like Murder, She Wrote with teenage serial killers.



The character's name was Matthew Kovach. He started off being modeled on me, and he bored the crap out of me. Though, in my outline, by book four, he stopped looking like me, and became far more interesting.



He shows up in A Pius Legacy.



It Was Only on Stun

It Was Only on Stun was a novel of Sean A.P. Ryan, mercenary. He was doing security at a science fiction convention out in Long Island. It was called C-Con … no relation to I-Con, also out on Long Island, where I had volunteered once or twice.  An actress from the Balkans is about to be a major star in an American TV series that threatens to make her popular world wide--and since she had been driven out by all sides in the Balkan conflict, all sides want her dead. 



This book had everything, including two incompetent “IRA hitmen” being hunted down by Interpol Agent Maureen McGrail, and there was also Middle Earth's Most Wanted Elven Assassin … don't ask. Matthew Kovach appeared as an author, hawking his books “Tales from a Catholic High school” that looked like “Jean Shepard meets Jack the Ripper.”  It was one part comedy, one part mystery, and it ended in a massive shootout, playing hide and seek in the backwoods of Long Island, and a sword fight.



Maureen McGrail and Sean A.P. Ryan both show up in A Pius Man.



I also have a hostage novel set in a Barnes and Noble, only one of the hostages is related to a mafia don, and his "fixer" shows up.  A man named Jonathan Koenig.  Jon Koenig shows up in A Pius Stand (book three of the Pius Trilogy).



Too Secret Service, Et Al.

Too Secret Service is about a Secret Service Agent who was trained to eliminate any and all threats tot he life of the President.  During an international "incident," he is framed for attempted murder, and needs to not only get his head attached to his shoulders, but has to stop the President from being nuked.  However, CIA Assassin Catherine Miller is also investigating the same threat, and he is in her cross hairs.



Dances With Werewolves. Another Secret Service tale.  Catherine Miller has been sent to assassinate a Haitian President using voodoo to scare the natives -- human sacrifices of the tourists will scare practically anyone.  The Prime Minister, and high priest, is a little slicker, and she needs to hunt him down in New Orleans.

Meanwhile, my Secret Service Agent is investigating a laughable threat to the President--a prediction made by a Wiccan coven in San Francisco.  He stops laughing when the one who made the prediction is found vivisected.

And Matthew Kovach also wandered into this story too.  He's up in Boston trying to create a fiction universe; he wants to do to Massachusetts what Stephen Kind did to Maine.  And it looks like he found an interesting subject: Joshua Melasure's Community of the Old Time Religion.

Enter the Kraft Brothers.  Each own a magic shop in a different part of the country.  "Merle" of San Francisco works for the Federal government as an expert on weird; he also doesn't need lock picking tools.  "Tal" is a stage magician in New Orleans. And it looks like the third one, "Dalf," is dealing in magic of a slightly darker nature.

Imagine Live and Let Die, updated with Goths, vampires, and Wiccans.



Night of the Assassins-- Everyone's past comes back to haunt them.  Literally.  A guest star is one Scott "Mossad" Murphy.



Giovanni Figlia was a bit player in Too Secret Service novels, and he shows up in A Pius Man.



And, later, I go completely off the tracks. Literally. I have three series in the works that have nothing to do with any of the above. In one, I've got five books already written, and the other series has one book that I'm expanding into (probably) three.



Tales of White Ops: If I were designing the future, it would look … a lot like science fiction of the past, only better-looking. Take a group like a interstellar Templar Knights, pit them against two Sauron-like enemies, and then create a special forces unit within these alien Templars. Take one part space opera, one part Babylon 5 as written by David Weber, and one part Mission: Impossible as written by John Ringo, and you get the idea. Add a great military genius who looks like the wrong end of a horse, a psychotic President who stole an election, a telepathic special forces unit made up of complete sociopaths, and a crackpot who likes to play with nuclear bombs, and you get the idea.  I also blow up an amusement park currently named Disney Planet, have an alien mafia with its own special forces killers, and it spirals out from there.



In this series My hero's name was "Sean Patrick Ryan" -- now you know why every mention of the 21st century Ryan makes a point of calling him Sean A.P. Ryan.  Five books have been written in this series, and I'm on number six.



The Last Survivors.

A little something I co-authored with a friend of mine (or I was Shanghaied, I'm fuzzy on the details), it had been proposed to me as a dystopia in a little corner of the world that had been nuked to within an inch of its life (San Francisco). Then I asked about the rest of the world. And I asked how the rest of the politics, and the economy, and the dynamics of the society worked … and somewhere along the line, I started writing parts of it.



I had suggested a character, a spy exiled to San Francisco for being "Inconvenient," with the capital I.  My friend wanted to name him "Mr. Anderson."  When I started writing, I called him Kevin (can you tell I'm a smartass?)



 Book one is written, book two is half finished, and it's outlined to book seven.



The Last Survivors, 2093.  Three years after the minor nuclear war known as the April Fool's War, Kevin Anderson is going to take out the nuclear arsenal of the Islamic Republic of France.  His mission is blown by politicians on the Senate Foriegn Intelligence Oversight Committee.  It's time to enforce term limits.  But how do you burn a spy like that, and where do you send him?  Hint: not Miami.



The Last Survivors: Professional Ethics.  San Francisco's most famous misanthrope is a professional assassin, the last of his guild.  When a serial killer starts using San Francisco as his playground, using methods out of the assassin's playbook, it's time to go hunting.



Unnamed Vampire Project.

I don't know what prompted this particular work. It's probably because I had seen one too many vampire novels and movies so mess around with the original concept that I wanted to get back to basics. Joss Whedon at least had vampires react to crosses, and used holy water as a weapon, and then he stuck them in the smallest town he could find in California. I wanted to examine vampires from a more real-world perspective. I'm a history major: What would vampires be doing for the last century? And, because I'm a philosophy nerd, I also wanted to answer the question of why religious artifacts would work on vampires; are they automatically evil, and if so, when did free will get chucked out the window? In my vampire universe, vampires use communion wafers as suicide pills. And you can do creative things with rosaries, and full-immersion baptismal pools. I'm come up with numerous titles to this project, and absolutely none of them work—and half of them have been used already. 



And, then, at the end of the day, there's



A Pius Man.

Professor David Gerrity, PhD, has been murdered while on sabbatical looking through the Vatican Archives.  His assassin is blown up shortly after the murder, and the killer's corpse lands on the car of Giovanni Figlia, head of Vatican security.   Figlia has enough problems-- Secret Service Agent Wilhelmina Goldberg has come to audit Vatican security, and a Egyptian cop Hashim Abasi has come to coordinate the Pope's visit to Egypt.

At the same time, an al-Qaeda strategist has been murdered ... and no one is claiming credit.  Scott "Mossad" Murphy comes to Rome to investigate, and finds a beautiful German spy there to help him, Manana Shushurin.

And lurking in the background is a priest with commando skills, a Pope who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals, and a highly destructive Sean A.P. Ryan is working at the Vatican.

It has philosophy, theology, history, war, international politics, geopolitics, advanced weaponry, a mystery, betrayals, plots, three conspiracies, several counter-plots, mass murder, and enough high explosives to level a few dozen buildings.

It's fun.

The Pirate King, a Story of Sean A.P. Ryan.

One of my characters in A Pius Man is self-described mercenary Sean A.P. Ryan.  He enjoys long walks on the beach, heavy caliber machine guns, and the screams of his enemies as he dangles them off the roof of a skyscraper.



This is one of his stories.



The Pirate King

"Erin Go Boom," a story of A Pius Man.

In the background of A Pius Man is a suspicious-looking priest.  Danger is not new to him.  Which makes you wonder .... he wasn't always a priest, was he?







Erin Go Boom

A Pius Synopsis

The below is basically how the fly leaf of a A Pius Man dustjacket would look like.

*******************************



A Pius Man is a mystery with too many suspects.



In Rome, an old terrorist is blown out the window of a hotel and crash-lands on a car at the gates of the Vatican. A figure in a priest’s robes is seen running from the scene. But the body on the windshield is just the beginning for a team of six unlikely investigators from around the world. Each pair of hands on this case has a past, and a few secrets … and an axe to grind. They don’t want to work together. They don’t want this case.



And one of them just might be the killer.



Is it....



Sean Ryan, an American stuntman turned mercenary and self-described “cleanser of the gene pool”? He’s supposed to be in Rome to train priests in combat, and old habits die hard.



Then there’s Giovanni Figlia, a homicide cop for the Pope who fears only paperwork. He was best known for starting soccer games with bishops in the Borgia gardens … until the corpse landed on the hood of his Jetta.



Could it be a former U.S. Army chaplain who was meeting with the murdered man on a weekly basis? Did the Jesuit priest who’s killed men with his bare hands know that his weekly luncheon date had just murdered a researcher in the Vatican Archives?



And what about Scott "Mossad" Murphy of Israeli intelligence’s “Goyim Brigade”? He and his partner are in the middle of investigating another murder at the Vatican … this one a high-ranking Muslim leader with connections to al Qaeda.



Into this mix comes Maureen McGrail, an Irish Interpol agent with a bitter past with Sean Ryan. She’s working her own murder case, related to the controversial canonization of Pope Pius XII, sometimes known as “Hitler’s Pope.” And guess who Interpol wants to send to Rome … ?



And the final, most distressing suspect is Joshua Kutjok....aka Pope Pius XIII, a right-wing African pope with rumors of blood in his past and the stated goal of turning “Hitler’s Pope” into the “Hero of the Holocaust.” To accomplish this goal, he’s already let terrorists into the Vatican Archives … would he kill a man who stood in his way?



In A Pius Man, six unlikely heroes must work together to unravel a web of intrigue and murder that entwines one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Was Pius XII a Nazi collaborator who deliberately let millions of Jews die? Has the Vatican covered up the truth for more than 60 years? Or has someone perpetrated a decades-long smear campaign? And what will happen to six strangers trying to finally bring the truth to light?

Novels to films, a brief history.

I have received the question, at times, about who should play characters in a film of A Pius Man.  This got me thinking about adaptations. Given the last decade of novel-to-film movies, the question becomes more interesting.



Looking at the slew of Harry Potter films, filmed comic books, etc, I find that Hollywood has obviously hired people who can read.



Why do I express surprise? I can answer that with another question.



Does anyone REMEMBER the 1990s?



Let's look at a few authors who had their work turned into films.



Michael Chrichton:



Author of such noted works as Jurassic Park, Congo, and Rising Sun, he probably had the most good fortune of any author short of Stephen King in having his books translated by Hollywood. And that's the sad part.



Anyone who's read Chrichton's work will appreciate a book I saw while shopping in London. Star Trek as Written By Other Authors—the short story as “written” by Chrichton had five charts and graphs over three pages. While no one missed those in the film versions, I'm sure they missed a few other things.



In Jurassic Park, the novel, the differences were numerous and frequent. There were dozens of Velociraptors, and part of the problem was that raptors had been escaping to the mainland. The park staff was more than the seven people we saw over the course of the film, and security was so well armed, there were moments when it looked like it was Park security versus the dinosaurs in an all out war that included missiles.



Back then, there were few complaints because, despite all the differences, it was still a fun movie, and to create a full adaptation would have required a miniseries. Elements from the first novel would be scattered throughout the next two films.



The Lost World: The sequel to Jurassic Park, the novel, was... better than the filmed version. While the novel followed up on the original enemy from the first one (the problems of Jurassic Park were caused by industrial espionage), the movie decided to make the primary adversary was the stereotyped “Evil Businessman #1.” Someone decided that the movie needed to be made into an endangered species riff, complete with an action lead played by.... Matthew Vaughn, playing an ecoterrorist? And we're going to throw in a cute kid, just because Spielberg likes cute kids. There's a reason that the third film consisted of little plot, less character, and mostly running.



Rising Sun: Someone must have been asleep on the job when looking up their cultural research. I can only conclude that Hollywood wasn't paying attention the day that the Japanese Emperor declared that both blacks and women were “inferior”... why else would they change make one of the lead policemen of this murder mystery into Wesley Snipes?







Tom Clancy: The major problem here lies in one book, one that I'm sure everyone remembers as a film.



The Sum of All Fears: The premise of the novel was simple. Middle Eastern terrorists nuke the Superbowl in order to prompt the United States and the Soviet Union into World War III. It's up the National Security Adviser Jack Ryan to talk everyone down.



I will usually grant a lot of leeway to people who adapt a screenplay. A lot. The previous film had been several years before, and Harrison Ford had moved on to other things. It would have been reasonable to have gone onto later novels, changed actors, and move on. Alec Baldwin had played Jack Ryan in the first film, The Hunt for Red October, I would not have objected to bringing him back. And they had already skipped one novel—The Cardinal of the Kremlin—due to the fact that there wasn't a Kremlin anymore. Taking the character of Jack Ryan from his post as CIA director (from the previous film, Clear and Present Danger) and making him NSA director (in Debt of Honor, the first post-Cold War novel), would have been nice and easy.



Instead, the film for Sum of All Fears was a series reboot about shiny new CIA analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck), going up against.... wait for it... Neo-Nazis. Most of whom were taken out in an ending sequence reminiscent of a Godfather film.



So, wait, the movie comes out after 9-11-01, and for some reason, terrorists from the Middle East are inferior villains? Hollywood's racism is astonishing; somehow, European bad guys are superior to any other flavor of bad guy, especially if the Europeans are evil Nazis.







Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child



The Relic: The first book in their series about mysterious FBI Agent Prendergast, who seems to specialize in X-Files quality strange, without the space-alien level stupidity. The Relic was a thrilling tale about a monster in the New York Museum of Natural History. When the book was first written, the museum in real life looked like a great setting for a horror film. Part of this team consisted of a graduate student Margo Green, her wheelchair bound mentor Dr. Frock, and, of course, Special Agent Prendergast. The mystery starts with what, exactly, could have killed a museum security guard in two blows—one to rip open the chest, and one to smash the back of the head clean off.



The adversary of the novel was a genetic mutation that was about eight feet long, like a cross between a panther and bug... it had an exoskeleton like an insect's chiton, only bulletproof. It survives an encounter with a SWAT team with full assault rifles and a grenade launcher.



The film... eliminated multiple key characters (one being Prendergast, goodbye series), killed off several who were necessary for any possible sequel, replaced everyone remaining with pure cliches, and made the creature a thirty to sixty foot monstrosity. This extra large beastie is supposed to have slipped into a small employee restroom to kill a guard, when it couldn't even fit into the hallway leading to the restroom. It manages to kill an entire SWAT team because they all run like scared rabbits—possibly frightened by the horrid graphics—and it starts bleeding because it took a few rounds from a .9mm handgun (to quote the governor of California, if it bleeds, you can kill it). But, no, in this film, they had to try blowing it up with bad CGI fire.







I'm going to cheat for the next few books. They are not the nineties, but they are film adaptations that went horribly sideways.







F. Paul Wilson—The Keep.



This one is interesting. F. Paul Wilson, Fordham graduate, agnostic, and all around interesting person, who even created a character with a rabid following—one so rabid Stephen King is President of the fan club.



One of his earlier books was called The Keep. It opens in 1943, with the German High Command getting a communication from an outpost in Transylvania: “Something is killing my men.” In another area of Europe, a man awakes, and knows he has to get to The Keep before everything ends. It essentially starts out as Dracula and ends as Lord of the Rings.



Enter: the movie. The author himself has concluded that the set of The Keep had a lot of white powder going up a lot of noses. Frequently. Not even Ian McKellen could save this train wreck. The synopsis of the film is as follows: creature kills Germans in WW2; a professor in the Keep makes deal with creature. Professor's daughter sleeps with guy who comes out of nowhere. Creature kills everyone in the Keep. Guy who comes from nowhere has an entrance with lots of light, creature goes away. Credits roll. Audience goes “huh?”





Clive Cussler—Raise the Titanic!



Before there was Indiana Jones, there was Clive Cussler. His main character is Dirk Pitt, one part old fashioned swashbuckler, one part nautical engineer. You may have seen the movie Sahara, made from another of his books—not a great film, but a decent popcorn movie. Better than this one.



Premise: there is an element that might be able to power a sonic-missile shield for the United States (this is the 70s). The only known sample was on board the Titanic, so, we—guess what—RAISE THE TITANIC! (this was before anyone knew how badly the ship had been totaled, so go with it). The book had everyone sail away on the resurrected vessel after a tense shootout with Soviet agents who had found out about the plan and tried to steal the precious material.



The movie, of course, had to have the Soviet bad guys come on board, and our hero scuttles the ship to make sure they don't get it. No victory, just a draw.



Movies of the day suffered from the Hollywood's idea of detente—there are no victories, only draws. If that was the only problem Raise the Titanic suffered from, it might have been salvageable. Instead, Hollywood took a fast paced, tightly written book, and turned it into a slow, ponderous mess. To tell you how bad it was, Clive Cussler saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and cried—mainly because it captured everything that he put into his own writing.





Today, I look at several adaptations—if you have major kvetches, I suggest holding off of them until my conclusions.



Lord of the Rings: Scenes lifted directly from the pages, dialogue from the novel, subplots taken from the appendix. You don't get much better than this. The major quibble I can conjure up is the buildup to the climax of the second film, The Two Towers—and I can blame that on the director's fondness for the buildup in the film Zulu, which felt like nothing but screaming “WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE.” Aside from that part of one film, I couldn't complain even if I wanted to.







Harry Potter: I read the books. They weren't bad for YA novels, and a nice parody of the English school system. The more you know about British culture, the funnier they were. Frankly, I thought the films improved on some things. Granted, some of what was left out of the films confused me... in movie three, there's no explanation for a major device of the film, or how another character knows of it. In #4, our protagonist asks why something went odd with his wand, and no answer is given. I say its odd because both “problems” could have been corrected with about three lines of dialog each. And, while confusing, no big deal. The end.







Comic books.



These are clumped together, and easy.



X-Men Origins: Wolverine: For a film that was studio mandated, it wasn't bad. Originally wanting to make Frank Miller's storyline about the mutant with anger management / memory / family issues, the people who did the film were ordered to make an origin story. Considering that the details of everyone involved in Wolverine's past were essentially turned into memory goulash, it was possibly the most comprehensible version they could come up with. I'm still confused about complaints that “Deadpool wasn't done well. He was just Ryan Renolds.” Considering that Deadpool wasn't the main character, and had, maybe, five minutes on screen, I don't think you can do anyone well in that amount of time.







The Spider-Man Films: The comic book career of Peter Parker looks like a rubric to diagnose bipolar disorder. Check. The whole Goblin family drama—mostly. Check. Parker puts on the black suit and turns from nerd to.... evil nerd. Big check. Though he could have taken tips from Neil Patrick Harris on being an evil nerd.



The biggest complaint has been about Spider Man 3, particularly on the character of Venom... well, as Sam Raimi said, “I had never read Venom in the comic books, since they came after my time. Because of that, I didn't have a natural inclination toward him. And when I read those comics, at [producer] Avi Arad's urging, I didn't understand where Venom's humanity was. I know that kids think he looks cool, and they think he's a good villain for Spider-Man. I actually didn't. What was it about Peter's own makeup that this villain represented some weaker or darker side to? Just looking like a dark version of him is not enough for me. The more I read [Venom stories], the less interested I became.” So, I get that. Though I wonder why he bothered putting Venom in a film if he didn't really like him.



Aside from that, there could be aesthetic quibbles—why they felt they had to make the Green Goblin look like a power Rangers, I don't know.





Batman Begins: I've had some people complain about the opening of the film, and how Bruce Wayne had been trained to become Batman. My usual response is that, if you read the comic books, the way it was done in the film contained the simplest, least convoluted explanation, as well as introducing the primary villain. And if there are any complaints about The Dark Knight, the best I can come up with is that the movie should have left off with catching the Joker, leaving Harvey Dent / Two-Face to be an ominous thread to be expanded into another movie. The last fifteen minutes felt odd, but having one of your key actors die in the middle of shooting can mess up a schedule a bit.







Now, aside from the above example, I will not say that modern day Hollywood adaptations are all perfect. That would be impossible. However, without lingering on minor quibbles, I can point you to several movies made recently that were based on books and made into something... different.





Shooter, based off of Stephen Hunter's novels about a marine sniper who had been framed for murder, turned into the usual conspiracy theory film about evil government employees messing around in Africa for one natural resource or another. That it starred Castro fan Danny Glover was a hint that the book would be rewritten.





[NOVEL SPOILER ALERT] The Bourne Identity was based off of Robert Ludlum's novel of the same name. A tv miniseries was made in the 1980s, starring Alan Chamberlain. The CIA had sent operative David Webb, war veteran, after assassin Carlos the Jackal, seeming to be another assassin and competitor named Jason Bourne. During the operation, he is shot in the head while fleeing a ship at sea, and awakes with amnesia. In piecing together the story of his life, he believes that he really is an assassin, the CIA thinks he has gone rogue, and the assassin he's hunting is returning the favor, and a civilian he saves from being gunned down in the crossfire is a female accountant who grows attached to him.



The movie: Boat, amnesia, perfect operative, check. Carlos the Jackal is replaced by African Dictator #1 from the nearest cliché yard, and the CIA isn't interested in listening to what happened to him, they all just want him dead. Period. Everyone involved on the CIA end dies, except for Julia Styles, using her amazing blonde powers. Bourne hooks up with a backpacking, gypsy-like female with no discernible education, intellect, or personality.



The Bourne Supremacy – The novel: elements in the government want to use David Webb to flush out another assassin, only this one has taken over the name of Jason Bourne. So, they kidnap his wife, the accountant he saved in the first novel, leaving clues that end him after this new Bourne. The CIA isn't the bad guy, but they are manipulative, which pretty much goes with the trade. Webb's other friends within the Agency lend him aide as he tries to find his wife.



The film: Still on the run as Jason Bourne, his girlfriend gets her head blown off by a Russian assassin on orders from a CIA administrator left over from an X-Men film .... Start your average revenge plot. Kill more CIA agents. Throw in some Russians, because they are obviously still the massive, intimidating threat that they were when they had a working government, now that they're taking orders from us, somehow.... huh? Julia Styles still manages to survive.



The Bourne Ultimatum—the novel is simple: Revenge of Carlos the Jackal. The film: obviously not, because they didn't have Carlos in the first film anyway.





In short, Hollywood has apparently become literate since the 90s—or, at the very least, is CAPABLE of adhering to source material such as novels and comic books. I'm certain that part of it has to do with a director appreciating the source material (Lord of the Rings), or a horde of slavering child fans who will tear them apart if they screw up the movie (the whole Harry Potter / Twilight franchise), or having the Intellectual Property owners run the studio (Marvel / WB). When you consider what has come in the past, things have improved.



Though, apparently, all bets are off when a film include Matt Damon or his clone (Mark Wahlberg). Still, even those films at least resemble the books they were based on to some degree. So, whenever you have a quibble about your favorite character in a novel / comic that's been adapted to film, or that elements had been changed, shifted or modified, always remember one very important lesson that I have learned over the years.....





It can ALWAYS be worse.



And if you don't believe me, ask the hordes of video game fans who have ever gone to see a Uwe Boll film of their favorite game.

Terrorists are stupid.

Yes, the title is exaggerated, but you're reading, aren't you?



I must say, though, for the most part, terrorists are not the brightest lights in the night sky.



Think about it. I can plan a better terrorist attack than any of these bozos. So could you.



For example....You want terror? Screw blowing up the World Trade Center—over fifty thousand people worked there, and the WTC could have upwards of 100,000 visitors per day (the magic notebook sees all and retains all). Infect all of them with the bio-weapon of your choice. A little smallpox, for example, maybe plague in the HVAC system. Have it running all day, and you infect both employees and tourists. They, in turn, infect people while going to lunch, on the subway, the ferry, their families, and when tourists go home, they bring it back with them. Being a smart terrorist, you tell the states friendly to you that they should really restrict travel to and from New York, and possibly all of America, period.



By the time the penny drops at the CDC, most of New York City now needs to be quarantined. The economy starts drying up, slowly. Tourism is dead. Fifty thousand jobs in the two buildings are lost, assuming that the employees are not all simply dead.



And I'm not even thinking hard.



Ironically, despite the Wyle E. Coyote explosive in Times Square, the attack itself was the right idea from their point of view. If terrorists want to inspire terror, then small, but frequent, attacks are the way to go. People are scared, frightened, uncertain about what may come around the next corner.



However, a word to al-Qaeda, et al, upon looking at the Time Square incident: when you're acquiring explosives, avoid the ones marked ACME....



As I was saying—thus far, when terrorists can't come up with ideas that I can in my spare time, they should probably reconsider their career goals.



And they are not necessarily uneducated. Osama bin Laden, last I checked, had a degree in engineering—and if I'm mistaken, his family is fill with engineers so he should have some idea. Mohammed Atta, one of the 9-11 pilots, had an upper middle class education in Egypt.



Though it does make me wonder why, thus far, a lot of the terrorists coming our way seemed to have come out of the Wyle E. Coyote school of home explosives.



The Underwear Bomber whose bomb caught fire without going off.



The Times Square bomber, with a Rube Goldberg timer.



The best answer I can come up with is that we're getting all the cannon fodder, who seem as bright as cannonballs. Not to mention that they have few experienced fighters—when you encourage martyrdom in your ranks, you have few people around who can share hard won combat experience. It didn't work well for the kamikaze, I can tell you that.



If I were going to do a terrorist attack....



Before someone freaks out about giving them ideas, the media looked at the Time Square bomb and pointed out EXACTLY what was wrong with it. I'm not coming up with anything new.



As I was saying...



Let's look at Grand Central Station: use a biological weapon in the building. From there, it starts infecting the east coast with the plague of your choice. Or, suicide bombers in the terminal during rush hour would also be effective.



Look at Grant Central for a moment. No security checks in the main portion of the building. No metal detectors, x-rays, nothing. Even I could make an anti-personnel bomb and bring it inside. Bio weapons and suicide bombers would both leave the station itself virtually intact, and the building would eventually be reopened. But in the meantime, traffic would be shot to hell, and once it's reopened... well, would YOU want to go there? The damage would be done. The terminal would be seen by millions of people as a plague-infected site by the ignorant, or it would be seen as a monument of death. It would be a lingering, lasting monument to an attack that would cost hundreds [suicide bomber] if not thousands, or millions of lives [bio weapon].



Traffic would be crippled, either by a lack of people coming in, or by the level of security now required to fully scan everyone coming on or off a train, into or out of the station. It would be a NIGHTMARE, worse than blowing up the 59th street bridge.... then a smart terrorist would blow that up. They've already tried for the Brooklyn Bridge.



But why haven't they? I can make mustard gas, or a bomb, from my kitchen cabinet. My mother is a medical technologist, and she can make a bio weapon in the kitchen. Is it so impossible for al-Qaeda to find five guys to get an associates degree for medical technology, or chemistry? Anyone can come in through the Mexican-US border, so why hasn't a bio weapon attack happened?



It's easy to say “Because they're stupid.” In those cases of allowing cannon fodder to fire cannons, yes.



However, it's mostly because they're fairly undisciplined. Sure, al-Qaeda has training camps, but have have you seen some of the video footage from them? They come into rooms in a perfect shooting posture... for a firing range. Do a quick glance at Youtube with any footage of Jack Bauer (of 24 fame) moving through a room with a gun—gun is close in, both arms are tucked, feet in what look like a combat stance for MMA. This is called a Weaver Stance. Now look at the after terrorist training video, and note how they square their feet, and hold their guns out at arm's length, practically locking their elbows. Get some good recoil, they could break their arms.



It's not even an “ethnic” problem. Most terrorists are similar. The IRA for example. They've blow up the wrong targets, caught more people in the crossfire than some Palestinian terrorists, and the Palestinians are AIMING for the civilians.



Then there was the Japanese Red Army unit brought in to Israel to aid the Palestinians-- they got cut down in the airport because they didn't know the Israelis had security! Yes, and somewhere along the line, SOMEONE thought it was a good idea for Japanese communist terrorists to invade the Middle East. Maybe they thought everyone would think they were tourists...



And one day, I suspect, we will see an attempted nuclear strike on America. They may even make it happen.



Why do I say that would be stupid?



Because they'd be dead.



Mecca, Medina, gone. Saudi Arabia, gone. Oil fields? Saudi Arabia's population is mostly on the shoreline, away from the oil. Syria? Israel can have them, if they want them. Iran will either disarm, or be destroyed. And God help anyone who gives them a nuke in the first place. The party will be over. War on terror would be finished. And would the world protest?



“The world” would probably be the one doing the nuking. Because they know that using a nuke is crossing the line.



The UN would complain, as would all the usual suspects, but would they really do anything? Nope, why would they? Environmental disasters? Not really, the Middle east is a large sandlot, and the populations that aren't nuked can be transplanted [although the winds won't be able to carry the radiation that far east, and remember that OUR nukes come with very little fallout].



Aren't I being callous about this? A nuclear strike would be on either NY or DC, and the Secretary of agriculture would be the head of the country.



Well, if DC, we have elections, and the bureaucracy is really hard to destroy, not to mention the amount of bunkers floating around the politicians. The Pakistani bomb requires a warhead the size of a volleyball, and MAY destroy midtown Manhattan [US warheads are the size of a bottle of Pepsi and can vaporize the 5 boroughs], and I live in Queens, so I should be relatively safe, because I intend to run like hell after the initial explosion, or at least head East, away from the fallout. Or I'll be dead, and I won't have to worry much about it, now would I?



However, would it really come to that? It might. But given the performance thus far, I am reminded of an old joke ....



Q: How can you tell a Soviet nuclear submariners apart from the other members of the fleet?



A: Because they glow in the dark.



If terrorists were smart about attacking the United States, they'd do it. They'd be sending people across the Mexican border daily for the sole purpose of heading directly to a target. Any target.



My father, a professor in Philosophy, came up with the idea of blowing up the New Orleans dams as a terrorist attack in 2000. Now it's a little late for that. Apparently, a family of academics dickering around with this as a mental exercise can come up with a better plan than bin Laden himself.



Ah, but “What about 9-11?”



The only reason they could get away with 9/11 is that the hostage playbook said be calm, you'll be ransomed for later, just play nice with the hostage takers. Not to mention that planes involved in 9-11 came out of Boston. As comedian Carlos Mencia has noted, before 9-11, someone flying Southwest airlines said he would rush the cockpit. When the plane landed, this guy had already been stomped to death.



Not to Osama: please, fly Southwest.



After 9/11, the playbook was rewritten. Even the passengers of Flight 93 knew better. Sneaker-Bomber Boy was nearly torn apart by the passengers around him, so we know the rules have changed. I want to see some terrorists pull box cutters on board a plane coming out of La Guardia and see how long they last.



The terrorist threat to this country remains, but there are days I think it's just a threat. Looking at the genius exhibited thus far by those to have tried to attack the mainland, I'm just glad that either they're stupid, or we're lucky.



Unfortunately, sometimes idiots can get lucky.