It’s fill with stories from the Cold War, Atomic Weapons, and UFOs.  And despite the fact she talks at great lengths about how far the hidden powers will go to keep Area 51′s secrets, she accepts at face value the stories she hears from a number of witnesses who claim to have first hand experience about what has gone on in the Nevada Desert over the past 80 years or so.  It’s hard to not to be amazed by the many stories of Nazi Scientists, insane atomic tests, and really cool spy planes.  But let’s face, the best story has to do with UFOs.

The grand daddy of UFO stories is now the Roswell Crash of 1947, though it was not always that big a deal.  For years it was just one more silly flying saucer story-and that is what the Government wanted everyone to think.  Annie Jacobsen mentions Occam’s Razor a number of times, which states that the simplest solution is often the best one.  She ridicules conspiracy buffs for their willing to believe all kinds of nonsense. Then she dives off the deep end with her own massive evil government conspiracy theory that would put people who believe the Trilateral Commission is working toward the New World Order.

Ok, the UFO that crashed near Roswell was not from outer space.  It was from Russia.  It seems that the Nazis had flying saucers in 1945 when the war ended and these ships with anti-gravity drives fell into the hands of the Soviets.  Having possibly the greatest invention in human history on their hands, they naturally crash land it in the middle of nowhere to put the fear of aliens into the hearts and minds of poor dumb Americans.  There is more to the story of the Roswell Crash, small beings with large heads and eyes, and reverse engineering, but at some point I found myself having a hard time believing most of it.

I liked Area 51.  It is damned gripping stuff.  The stories of atomic testing and spy planes are well worth reading about, even if the stories about Nazi Flying Saucers make visitors from outer space seem the more plausible solution.  There is also a side story about an Atomic Rocket that was going to be used in the late 1950s to send 130 men to Mars and bring them back home in six months.

If even half the stuff she says is true, it’s a miracle than anyone lived through the 1950s.  Area 51 is a great read.

In Keep The Change, Steve ventures into the universe of tipping.  Being a poor schmuck myself, my own tipping activities are limited to restuarants with wait staff and my semi-annual haircut.  And I’ll be honest, I’d rather not tip the random woman at ProCuts because I tend to think $12 is too much to pay for a haircut in the first place.  But I do usually fork over a dollar or two.  Why?  Good question.

Almost everything Steve Dublanica talks about in Keep The Change is news to me.  From his stories of the origins of tipping and the anti-tipping leagues to more current times where more and more people wants tips who never got tipped before.  He calls this Tip Creep and sees it as a sign that more and more companies don’t want to carry the burden of having to pay thier employees themselves.

I remember several years ago I read some advice collumn that Evanna Trump was writing where she talked about tipping.  At some point she mentions how much to tip hotel maids, and I was like, WTF?  People tip maids?  Well, duh.  Not just maids, but Doormen, Parking Valets, Blackjack Dealers, Hairdressers, Auto Mechanics, Car washers, Movers, Delivery Drivers and so on and so forth.  Most interesting was the idea that people tip workers in the Sex Industry, but then, I don’t pay to visit Dominatrices or Submissives, so who knew?

For the most part, I don’t use any of the services that Steve says I should be tipping at least 20%, which is pretty much everyone who has their hand out.  I don’t get my shoes shined, I don’t play table poker at a casino, I don’t hang out at strip clubs or ride around in limos or taxis.  I might use a mover or get a pizza dilvered once every few years.  And the motels I stay at are usually the cheapest I can find and I can’t imagine the maids working at the bottom rung Patel Motel are used to getting too many tips.  But I could be wrong.

The stories of tipping are interesting, but they do seem to take place in an alternate universe from the one where my cheap-ass lives.  If there was a modern day Anti-Tipping League I would be a member-as long as it didn’t cost anything to join.  I’m one of those people that want the Minimum Wage to be twenty dollars an hour and employers to offer everyone benefits as well as a living wage.

So maybe it’s just simple jealousy on my part-people who make hundreds or thousands of dollars a week in tips while I make nothing in tips.  After all, for many of these tipped workers $20 an hour would be a severe pay cut.

I have no interest in doing any of the jobs described in Keep The Change, but there was a local story about tipping several years back that made me wonder about some jobs.  One of the local news outfits went out to DFW International Airport to find out who makes the most money.  Those pilots who bring in a quarter of a million a year? Nope.  The people who run the place?  Nah.  The guys loading airplanes?  Get real.  No, it was the Skycaps, who put a bag on a cart and push it to a waiting taxi cab and get five dollars a bag for their trouble.  Do that twenty or thirty times a day and it starts to add up. Work a forty hour week for a year as a Skycap and you could pull down around a half a million dollars in tips.  Or so the story said.  There was a similar story about the women selling cigarettes at the Playboy Club back in the glory days-they would make hundreds a day in tips, back when hundreds a day was a lot of money.

Keep The Change is an interesting book, but I’ve never worked as a waiter so I go around with blinders on to all the many people who expect a tip for one thing or another.  Steve seems to be of the opinion that people who don’t tip suffer from some form of mental illness that makes them immune to the suffering of others. Really?  Steve never mentions the most common form of ignored suffering, The Homeless, many of whom appear to live on tips alone.

Steve wraps up the book with a few guidelines about what to tip people and then goes into the murky waters of race relations in America.  Clearly Steve is scared shitless about saying anything that might in anyway be considered offensive by anyone.  He gets quotes from several people confirming that black people are lousy tippers, but he doesn’t want to believe any of them. So he goes and asks more people, who all tell him that yes, African Americans are lousy tippers.  He then puts forth a couple of theories.  Black people are poor and don’t know how to tip.  African Americans have a history of slavery and, uh, I’m not sure exactly how that makes them bad tippers, but he did mention the whole slavery thing a couple of times.  In all fairness, he then mentions just about every other group of people living in America and said they were often lousy tippers as well.

At several points along Steve’s journey to becoming a Tipping Guru he mentions the one solid fact about all of these people who get tipped-if you can afford whatever service they provide, then you can afford to tip the person giving you that service.  If you can’t afford it, and do it anyway, than don’t be surprised when the person you don’t tip treats you like shit.

Which brings us back to the simple idea of paying everyone a living wage and not tying income to the whims of random strangers.

Yeah, that’s gonna happen.

Not being an expert on Margaret Thatcher, I had to google her to find out that her husband died of cancer in 2003-the film never makes it clear that he wasn’t killed by a terrorist’s bomb.  There was also the hint that she was going to die in the last scene as she washes a teacup.  And no, I didn’t know if she was alive or dead.

Since the film covers, in endless flashback hops, a span of years from the 1950s to the 2010s, there is plenty of room of confusion for those of us in America who lived through the Thatcher years, but didn’t pay much attention to them.  Like her American counterpart Ronald Reagan, she’s a love em or hate em kind of a figure.  The fact that her own political party knifed her in the back is interesting, although the movie seems to imply that Margaret Thatcher was losing her marbles during her last days in office.

Our views of the present day Margaret Thatcher are those of an old woman suffering from some form of dementia and general decline from advancing age.    She forgets her name while signing a few copies of her books, her hands shake, she tends to issue orders as if she were still the Prime Minister, and she continues to see her dead husband hanging about.  The film fails to mention that Reagan also suffered from mental decline.

The Iron Lady was a beautiful film to look at, the costumes and the makeup were great, and the acting was brilliant.  The screenplay could have used some help.  I didn’t need to spend that much time with a confused old woman.

Both have an evil government putting kids in a battle to the death through random selection.  Both follow the Survivor model of a running tally as the little group gets smaller and smaller.  Both reward the sole survivor of the contest.  And both have too many characters that are, for all intents and purposes, identical and impossible to really care about.

Battle Royale is a Japanese film and the kids are all dressed in school uniforms and have the same haircut.  It seems that all the kids in this future are really rotten and have no respect for their elders.  So the elders kill off a class full of them once a year to teach them a lesson.  Only the kids seem to be surprised by what is happening and there is no TV crew keeping track of the action.  Kind of makes it hard for this to be a lesson to the other bad kids if they don’t know about.  But there was TV coverage as the film started, along with a winning girl who smiled a lot.

The forty kids in the Battle Royale only have three days to kill each other, not quite long enough to starve to death as in The Hunger Games.  The kids quickly get around to slaughtering each other, using the varied and sundry weapons found in random backpacks, as in the Hunger Games. Some of the weapons were pretty useless, such a pot lid and a pair of toy binoculars.  Other packs contained machine guns and handguns of one sort or another.

It was an odd film, lots of graphic violence, lots of hinted at romance, lots of blood packs exploding all over the place, and a lot of stuff that doesn’t make much sense. A lot like The Hunger Games.

So did Suzanne Collins steal the idea of a bunch of kids battling to the death for the Tv cameras?  Maybe.  Battle Royale came out in 2000 and The Hunger Games came out in 2008.  Other notable similar ideas-The Running Man came out in 1987 from a 1982 book.  The Tenth Victim came out in 1965.  The Lottery came out in 1948.  And people were really forced to kill each other in Rome a couple of thousand years ago.  We can assume that people, even kids, have been killing each other as long as there have been people.

Suzanne Collins says she never heard of Battle Royale until her book was in her publishers hands, they told her not to worry about it.  I had never heard of Battle Royale, either.  The similarities are there, but so what?  I have to say that I liked The Hunger Games better than Battle Royale.

As any one who has read If You Write It will know, I tend to think ALL films have ripped off earlier films.  That’s just the way it works now.  It really has all been done before, and usually better.

I love The Hunger Games.  It was original and amazing and gave us just enough information to accept the idea of some bizarre future world where the divide between the super rich and the super poor has reached a point where each group views the other as belonging to separate species.  The people of the Capitol are not portrayed as evil, but as clueless as to what goes on outside the bounds of The City.  The people in District 12 are portrayed as currant era poor people, they are doing the best they can with what they have and feel justified in blaming others for their lot in life.

You did too good a job in making me think the people of the Capitol are just people.  Selfish, silly, and vain people-not intentionally evil people, with the exception of President Snow.  And even President Snow is doing nothing more than protecting his government.  At least President Snow has a job, along with everyone we see working in The Hunger Games.  What does the average citizen of the Capitol do anyway?

Ok, I feel about Catching Fire and Mockingjay the way I feel about Matrix Revolutions and Matrix Reloaded-I just want to forget that they ever happened.  So I have a solution.

Katniss wakes up to find her arms and legs strapped down.  She feels a damp cloth on her forehead.  She opens her eyes and sees Prim looking down at her with a concerned look on her face.  Katniss sees that she is in her bedroom at the Victor’s Village in District 12.  Prim runs out of the room to call Peeta, Gale, and Haymitch.  Katniss’s mother comes in and tells her that things will be better now.

She is told that she was out hunting with Gale when they found a bee hive and decided to steal some of the honey.  Katniss was stung by a bee and fell into venom relapse.  For several days she has suffered from Tracker Jacker venom induced nightmares where everyone she loves is tortured and killed by her addled mind.  In her nightmare she is even forced to compete in another Hunger Game and District 13 was not destroyed.

“Forget about all that.” Gale says. “It was just a bad dream.”

The story can then be picked up right after the 74th Hunger Games and the story can follow a slightly less scorched earth plot-line.  You can still bring in the other Victors, still bring about the fall of the Capitol, still have that whole French Revolution thing where you kill all the rich people, if that really turns you on. But maybe you could make Katniss a bit smarter, Gale a bit less blood thirsty, Peeta a bit less destroyed, and twenty or so great characters a bit less dead.

I know, there will never be a sequel to The Matrix that makes sense and there will never be a squeal to the Hunger Games where you toss out two books of your trilogy.   But hope springs eternal.

A few spoilers.

The Hunger Games Trilogy is a compelling roller coaster of shocking moments and it also meets the most important standard that any fictive writing can-it elicits emotion in the reader.  By the time I got to the last page of Mockingjay I was ready to swallow a handful of poisoned berries myself.

Easily the best of the books is The Hunger Games, where our moody hero Katniss chooses to sacrifice herself so that her little sister will not have to die in the arena.  The Hunger Games is the most straightforward of the books and it has the most satisfying ending.  While there are hints that the Evil Empire will soon be facing its day of reckoning, we view the world through the selfish eyes of Katniss, who naturally enough cares only about herself and those that she loves.

Catching Fire and Mockingjay are dark and depressing books, filled with even more senseless violence and pointless murder than we saw in The Hunger Games.  We are told a bit more about the mysterious world where Panem exists, and this world of the future makes less sense with each added tidbit of info.  As with all sci fi, you have to follow Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s advice to suspend disbelief, but you still have to wonder.

Both Catching Fire and Mockingjay feel like books written to fulfill a contract or forced out of Suzanne Collins to meet some deadline and make as much money as possible.  I’m in the vast minority here, the people who love the Hunger Game Trilogy really, really, really love it.

Reading Catching Fire and Mockingjay is often confusing, since we are still viewing the world from Katniss’s point of view we can only have glimpses of the over arching story of the battle between The Capitol and the Rebels. This is a problem since Katniss bumbles along on her own course and even she is a bit depressed by how many thousands of people die as a direct result of her choices.  We also have long stretched of the story where nothing happens because Katniss has been injured or becomes depressed and we get long passages of mopey teenage angst until someone comes to visit and fills her in on what’s been happening.

For me, even a great book can be ruined by a bad ending.  I never liked The Four Musketeers or Hamlet where the stage is littered with the bodies of our heroes as the curtain falls.  I really hated the movie Knowing, where the film ends with the destruction of the earth, making everything that happened in the movie pointless and irrelevant.

And this is where Suzanne Collins leaves us, wondering if any of it mattered.

Penn Jillette is a magician/comedian who has been preforming with his mostly silent partner Teller for the past 35 years or so.  Like all performers Penn has a split personality, there is the Performer Penn who does magic tricks and entertains people for a living, and there is the Actor Penn who is a know-it-all asshole-to use Penn’s own words.

I read a computer mag one time that had an article in the back by Penn Jillette, clearly someone at the magazine thought it would be fun to have him write about the latest gadgets and computer trends.  Penn wanted to talk about how hot Uma Thurman was and in the only article I recall reading he talked about how much he hated small gadgets-this in a magazine that was filled with ads for, wait for it, small gadgets.

I’m reminded of actress Alexis Bledel who played the hyper caffeinated and super smart Rory Gilmore, but who is, herself, a bit on the dim side.  It was always a bit disappointing to see Alexis in interviews, not Rory.   It’s much the same with Penn, his stage persona is not the real Penn Jillette.  Yeah, it’s called acting.  But when you act under your own name, people have the right to expect that the Actor and the Performer might be a little more alike.  Maybe this is why I have never really liked Penn&Teller’s Bullshit, it’s a little too much of the Actor Penn and not enough of the Performer Penn-which I where we are with God, No! Signs You May Already Be An Atheist.

God, No! opens up with Penn telling us that he is an atheist and that he thinks everyone is secretly an atheist, because no sane person can really belief all that bullshit is the Truth.  He’s also an evangelist, he wants everyone to be an atheist and embrace his point of view and then maybe people will no longer be inspired to fly planes into buildings or forgo the joys of eating bacon cheeseburgers.  He mentions other famous atheists and talks about what a bunch of pussys agnostics are for not having the balls to take a stand.

Easily the most impressive part of God, No! are the positive reviews on the back cover-he gets a thumbs up from Matt Stone&Trey Parker, Glenn Back, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Richard Dawkins.   I found it a bit tough to get through at times myself, Penn is so proud of his writing prowess that much of what he has written is almost unreadable.

But hey, I did think the Blow Dyer Story was pretty damned funny.

The Hunger Games was a good movie with a quick pace and a lot of action.  The story is both interesting and kind of baffling.  The action is intense and you can’t help but wonder what you might do if thrown into this insane situation.   On the other hand, how is this yearly culling of two people from each District supposed to keep civil war at bay?

The Running Man and The Tenth Victim both used rather nasty people as the players, but The Hunger Games chooses the path of innocent youth forced to commit murder.   One of the more fascinating bits is how eagerly many of the Tributes, as the kids are called, embrace the fine art of slaughter.  These are not nice kids.

The rich people who live in The Capitol all dress like the rich people in the Emerald City with a hint of the rich people from The Fifth Element.  While our sacrificial lambs are being cleaned up for their first public appearances, I could almost hear someone singing a Snip snip here, and a Snip snip there in the background.

But these are really minor gripes, The Hunger Games was fun and there were a couple of good scary moments and a few good sad moments.  The acting was solid, the sets and costumes were good, and who doesn’t love watching people kill each other for no good reason at all?

War Horse is an epic that wants to make sure you know that it is an Epic. Steven Spielberg goes over the top with camera angles, strange lighting, and a closing scene filmed in silhouette like the Burning of Atlanta sequence from Gone With The Wind.  There were several times when hard lighting threw shadows on buildings-from multiple directions, on cloudy days.  These seemed to be a nod of the head to other Broadway plays that have been turned into movies, it’s impossible to image that Spielberg included these obvious mistakes unintentionally.

War Horse was a children’s book, then a play, and then a movie.  The play was famous for using giant horse puppets and the book is told from the point of view of Joey the horse.  We follow Joey from birth to his various and sundry heroics, from plowing a field that can’t be plowed to bringing a short break to the fighting on the front lines in World War One.

Joey ends up in the hands of random people at random places and his presence is a curse on every life that he touched.  People that care for this horse end up injured or dead-even the one other horse that befriends Joey meets with a bad end.  To be fair it is war and people die left and right, even when they don’t know Joey.

War Horse wants to be something more than it.  Just as The Artist was not really a silent film, War Horse is not really a Cecil B. DeMille epic with a cast of thousands. But then, Steven Spielberg hasn’t had much luck over the past few years trying to be Steven Spielberg, so he might as well go for being DeMille.

I liked the story and for the most part War Horse was a beautiful film to look at, I just could have lived without all the odd production details.  The only times I really felt any emotion had nothing to do with the story of our proud and noble horse. I’m always in awe of the general stupidity of the British Army in WWI and it’s desire to throw itself in front of German machine guns.

I’m not as interested in politics as I once was.  I have come the conclusion that they are all nasty bits of work and we should toss out that whole Representative Government idea and just go with Mob Rule using whatever is trending the most on Twitter.  But that’s just me.

So in Game Change we find Senator John McCain is a lily liveried, weak willed, old man who refuses to confront the much more dominate, if far less intelligent, Sarah Palin.  For all her missteps and odd turns of phrase, Sarah Palin does have a bit of star power.  She still makes occasional appearance now and then, but no one really pays her that much attention.  When she was running for office with John McCain, she got all kinds of attention.

I was surprised by the fact that I found myself feeling sorry for Sarah, someone tossed in the deep end while holding an anchor.  We see shots of Sarah watching TV and being humiliated by everyone making fun of her.  At the same time, we see her refusing adamantly to listen to any of her advisers and following her own instincts.

It’s hard to believe that the real Sarah Palin was as dumb as she was portrayed here.  At one point they are telling her that Germany was the bad guy in WWII and she is making a note of it.  Really?  Is there anyone who doesn’t know the Nazis were the bad guys?  It appears that person would be Sarah Palin.  She also didn’t know that the Prime Minister is the head of Government in England or why we went to war with Iraq.  To be fair, a slightly dim co-worker also didn’t know about that whole PM thing and he also thought we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11.  Really?  I mean, REALLY?

Game Change is told from the point of view of one of John McCain’s advisers, who suggests Sarah Palin and then regrets that suggestion.  He never asked her any questions that might have sent up a red flag that she was not quit up to the task of being second in line to the Presidency.   The more McCain’s people learn about Sarah Palin, the worst it gets.  But amazingly, Sarah has a few shining moments where she doesn’t look like a 6th grade drop-out.

I found that I liked Sarah Palin’s wanton naïveté about campaigning and how she wanted to go to States where they didn’t have a chance of winning to see if she get a few votes.  If only we had a system where individual votes counted, it might have been a good idea.

Game Change was a lot of fun and Ed Harris, Julianne Moore, and Woody Harrelson gave great performances as slightly larger than life life characters.