"Thrilling Cities" QUIZ

Somehow, in all my reading over all these years, I missed out on this gem of a book.  Recently I discovered this book and now have reviewed it HERE.

For the book, Fleming visited thirteen cities.  Curiously, he combined Los Angeles and Las Vegas into one chapter in the book. We separte them for this project. Join me for a moment and see how you do on this matching exercise.  (At least one of the answers can be found in the review.) You'll need paper and writing instrument. 

Number your paper from 1 through 14 in this order:

1.   Hong Kong

2.   Macao

3.   Tokyo

4.   Honolulu

5.   Los Angeles

6.   Las Vegas

7.   Chicago

8.   New York

9.   Hamburg

10. Berlin

11. Vienna

12. Geneva

13. Naples

14. Monte Carlo

Here are the items to match with the above cities.  Good luck!

A. Lipizzan stallions

B. Suzie Wong

C. cleanliness (this city was by far the cleanest of the 14)

D. The Copacabana Club - NOT the one in New York - there's another

E. gold smuggling - no doubt an inspiration for Goldfinger

F. famous zoo here has no reptile house

G. battleship Bismarck built here, also home of the St. Pauli nightclub district

H. Pompeii

I. Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau

J. Dragnet

K.Playboy

L. Frank Sinatra

M."M's" steakhouse - Fleming wondered if his character had gone into business here...
N. Espionage is one of the main industries here.(in the late 50's and early 60's)

Some answers are obvious, some are not.  "Gambling" could be either Vegas or Monte Carlo. Good luck!

Check back soon for the answers! -- maybe in a day or two.

Elvis Found Alive!

Why can't the mainstream media pick up a really good story?  When all the best stuff comes out, we're often left to rely on documentary films to tell us the whole (real?) story.

Such is the case with the return of Elvis "The King" Presley.  Documentary film producer, Joel Gilbert, brings us the story and is reviewed by my wife, HERE.  Accompanying the DVD was a recently released "Comeback" album from Elvis himself.  The CD includes some fresh covers of some of Elvis's most poplar tunes and rock and roll classics (such as Every Step You Take by The Police) along with a new composition, "Lisa Marie" especially for this project.  You can find my review of the CD, HERE.

Join the more than 50,000,000 Elvis fans in welcoming his return!

MCMXII - A centennial and a half

Pictured above are Danny Thomas and Marjorie Lord, stars of  Make Room for Daddy that aired on CBS in the early fifties. (Image credit: WikiCommons)  I remember it from syndication.  I recently started a series of articles on subjects that celebrate their centennial in 2012.  Thanks to "Miss Bob," I narrowly missed getting this story.  Today, Jan. 6, 2012 is not only Epiphany, but it's the 100th anniversary of Danny Thomas's birth.  It is also the Golden Anniversary of St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital which Thomas founded.  Check out my story HERE.

GITMO Anniversary and Satan's Spy

January 5, 2012 will mark the tenth anniversary of the Guantanamo Detention Center.  The use of torture to obtain information varies from country to country and differs also by culture. The timeliness and importance of the information needed are also factors.  The use of torture is typically denounced and at the same time used continuously -- even by the countries that denounce it.

Internment of one's enemies is also a tactic that is used and it, too, is perceived differently by other cultures.

And then there's capital punishment.  What a can of worms!

These issues and more are all included in a best selling novel by Andre Le Gallo, Satan's Spy. We spoke recently and I asked him about these topics.  Here is his reply:

Le Gallo:  Both the internment of Japanese Americans and the use of Guantánamo reflect national security policies crafted to deal with the perceived threats of the time.   To my knowledge there was no popular outcry at FDR's  executive order and the use of Guantánamo has now received bipartisan imprematurs by two very different administrations, Bush's and Obama's.   An interesting, and unintended, consequence of  leftist uproar  over the Bush counter terrorist policies has been an increase in the loss of life and intelligence. Rather than face opposition from its core supporters, the Obama administration has chosen to kill rather than capture enemy combatants in spite of their intelligence potential.

Interesting comments from a former CIA agent.

My review of Satan's Spy can be found HERE.

MCMXII -- The series begins

First in the series was "MCMXII -- The Lost World Centennial" published on Examiner.com on December 17, 2011.

Watch for the next article about a business that spawned an international best selling book whose title became a household phrase in the 1950’s.

MCMXII

Watch for my new series of articles at Examiner.com!

Subjects will include the births and deaths of famous people, centennials of famous events, businesses, books and inventions.  In fact, anything of interest that happened in 1912 will be fodder for my column.  

Thanks for following and watch for notices on FB and Twitter.

12 Movies with body counts higher than Rambo

Rambo comes in at number thirteen?  

What a shock!  I remember when the first of the Rambo series (First Blood) hit the big screen in October of 1982, there were considerable discussions about the body count -- especially in later installments. The ranking of Rambo 2008 came as a real surprise when I discovered a list of “46 Movies with Ridiculously High Body Counts” in a newly published book from HarperCollins.

Listomania, A World of Fascinating Facts in Graphic Detail contains over 250 pages of interesting lists.  As I scanned through the forty-six mentioned above, I noticed that the 2008 version of Rambo came in at number thirteen.  Rambo III (1988) appears at number 37 and is the only other of that series to make the list.  Here’s the list and along with each title is the year it came out and the body count.  Rambo 2008 had a body count of 247.

12. Saving Private Ryan, 1998 -- 255 dead

11. Starship Troopers, 1997 -- 256

10. We Were Soldiers, 2002 -- 305

 9. Titanic, 1997 -- 307

 8. Hard Boiled, 1992 -- 307

 7. Grindhouse, 2007 -- 310

 6. The Two Towers, 2002 -- 468

 5. The Last Samurai, 2003 -- 558

 4. Troy, 2004 -- 572

 3. 300, 2007 -- 600

 2. Kingdom of Heaven, 2005 -- 610

and the winner (the second of the Lord of the Rings series to make the list) is...

No. 1.  The Return of the King, 2003 with a ridiculously high body count of 836!