‘Tis the season!

Looking back on this year, I'm immensely grateful to have met you. Your enthusiasm, passion, and, indeed, criticism kept my cerebral engine going during my most intellectually vacuous times.

There were days I couldn't think of a thing. Then I'd reach into the mailbag, et voila!

The engine started.

My covenant with you is simply this: to provide the most entertaining, informative, and helpful daily newsletter I can write.

I hope I've lived up to your standard. You've certainly lived up to mine.

With that said, have a Merry Christmas!

Dah Na Na Nah Na Na Nah...

Indiana Jones. Batman. And James Bond.

(Sherlock Holmes and Harry Flashman came later.)

Sure, it was the movies that did it.

Roger Moore was my first Bond.

Does anyone remember how many times For Your Eyes Only played on HBO in the 80s?

One hundred, two hundred times?

Though The Spy Who Loved Me was Sir Roger's favorite film, For Your Eyes Only is his best by a long way.

Sir Roger had to act in that film, and he was terrific.

Julian Glover (Grand Maester Pycelle, to you whippersnappers) was the evil Kristatos.

Topol played Bond's ally, Columbo, with glee.

Pierce Brosnan's late first wife, Cassandra Harris, was Columbo’s girlfriend.

And Carole Bouquet's eyes still haunt and resonate.

I didn't start reading the books until much later, when I was in England. They still read books there!

I had read Casino Royale long before the film came out in 2006. Live and Let Die and Moonraker were the next two in the series.

Though I bought the rest of the books, I stopped reading them for a reason that escapes me.

So when the lights went out in Cebu back in the Christmas week of 2021, I needed something to do, and the first thing I thought to myself was, "Start reading again, ya big nonce!"

Technology, though excellent for all its applications, dulls my imagination.

Since it had been a while, I decided to start at the end.

Octopussy and The Living Daylights is a book of four 007 short stories Ian Fleming wrote earlier, but were published together in 1966.

The stories are “Octopussy,” “The Property of a Lady,” “The Living Daylights,” and “007 in New York.”

I had read “The Living Daylights” and “The Property of a Lady” already, but I thought it was time for a reread.

I wasn't disappointed.

If you were wondering who Oberhauser really was and how the film writers came up with Spectre's stupid plot, read “Octopussy.”

It's an excellent short story about Major Dexter Smythe (Octopussy's father in the film) and his wartime treachery.

Bond catches up with him years later, and the story reveals itself.

“The Property of a Lady” was a part of the film Octopussy. It was the scene in the auction rooms with the Faberge egg.

The story is much more compelling than the movie scene. The man 007 is tailing - and the reason for the tail - is so Cold War you feel positively Baltic reading it.

“The Living Daylights” is the last Ian Fleming story they turned into a film.

The short story on which the film is based is fantastic. It describes the "lady with the cello” assassination scene in the movie.

Eon Productions, the company that used to produce the official Bond films, deserves credit for building a great movie around so little material. 

Incidentally, it's one of my favorite Bond films. Timothy Dalton was great in the film, but his colder, more mature Bond was too early for American audiences.

Daniel Craig benefited from two decades passing and 9/11 happening, before Americans could handle that kind of Bond.

Finally, “007 in New York” was Fleming's answer to his American critics. Fleming didn't like New York City - many Englishmen I know don't - and had written a negative review of the city in The Sunday Times.

The story was a consolation to those Americans, and it's pretty amusing.

A Feast For My Senses

But the main course was From Russia With Love.

President John F. Kennedy had named the book one of his top ten favorites in the March 17, 1961, issue of Life magazine. As a result, both Fleming and Bond became household names.

I loved the film version. It's my favorite Sean Connery film, and it's still the best in the series.

But I wasn't prepared for how quickly I'd turn the book's pages.

It's easy to see why a man like Kennedy would love it.

Anyone interested in the Cold War, espionage, and romance would love it.

Ian Fleming isn't known as a great writer, but some passages clipped me around the ears.

I rarely mark up a fiction book. There's too much frippery and silliness in many of the stories I read.

But I felt like a Professor of Life named Ian was directly speaking to me.

Maybe all good authors do the same.

Let me share a few with you.

When Bond was flying over the Alps to Istanbul for his rendezvous with Kerim Bey:

Bond put the thought of his dead youth out of his mind. Never job backwards. What-might-have-been was a waste of time. Follow your fate, and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple - or dead.

My goodness, I wish I read that years ago... or earlier.

Kerim Bey, Head of Station T (Turkey) on money:

"Ever since Croesus, the first millionaire, invented gold coins, money has depreciated. And the face of the coin has been debased as fast as the value. First, the faces of gods were on the coins. Then the faces of kings. Then of presidents. Now there's no face at all. Look at this stuff!" Kerim tossed the money over to Bond. "Today it's only paper, with a picture of a public building and the signature of the cashier. Muck! The miracle is that you can still buy things with it."

This passage was written over 40 years before the euro was introduced!

Again, Kerim talks to Bond about the unknowns on their Orient Express train journey. Every damn quant on the planet should read this before they code a trading algorithm that could blow up the system.

This is a billiard table. An easy, flat, green billiard table. And you have hit the white ball and it is traveling easily and quietly towards the red. The pocket is alongside. Fatally, inevitably, you are going to hit the red and the red is going into that pocket. It is the law of the billiard table, the law of the billiard room. But, outside the orbit of these things, a jet pilot has fainted and his plane diving straight at the billiard room, or a gas main is about to explode, or lightning is about to strike. And the building collapses on top of you and on top of the billiard table. Then what has happened to that white ball that could not miss the red ball, and to the red ball that could not miss the pocket? The white ball could not miss according to the laws of the billiard table. But the laws of the billiard table are not the only laws, and the laws governing the progress of the train, and of you to your destination, are also not the only laws in this particular game. 

That's one of the best explanations of unforeseen happenings or the consequences of Black Swans that I've read.

And I got a remarkable story around it, too.

So I'll leave you here to enjoy your holidays.