Group ONE: Eleven and One

Forget George Clooney. Okay... maybe you cannot forget those eyes, but when it comes to MEMORABLE, the movie Ocean's 11 (not that other movie named Ocean's 11) along with Rio Bravo were more important than graduate school and all that tuition in forming my World Outlook. Now that I think about it, it might be the fact that Angie Dickinson was in both movies. Hmm. But then, so was Dean Martin. Hmm..... I would much rather blame it on Angie though. And then she was in that thing with Michael Caine, standing naked in the shower (Angie, not Michael) which just fused it all into one big lump that permanently resides in my cerbellum (look it up) dictating my every action.

Sneaking around. Spraying my shoes with radioactive paint. Black nylons. Mexican trumpet music. Crematorium. Dynamite. Hand in the spittoon. It's all there. It was one of those movies (I forget which one) that taught me how to leap from the protection of one wall across an alley to another wall and land with a somersault, a skill which is useful to this day when evading clients whose work I have just not got around to yet. Or avoiding household chores.

To tell the truth, I did not even remember that Angie was in Ocean's 11. It was a guy movie, full of guys. Angie must have been thrown into the script just to prove they were NOT GAY, as John O. says. But in Rio Bravo.... well. She taught my cerebellum all those other tricks.

The NEWS

Mark Rast graces these pages with his masterful Wormholes and Cheese...a literary review....sort of. I may be wrong, but this may be the FIRST book review (certainly the first review of a Stephen Hawking book) by a Group ONE writer wearing his bathrobe backwards. The field of cosmic physics may be impenetrable to most of us, but in the hands of a Master Storyteller, it all becomes painfully clear. Please read this and then form your own opinion about the great quantum mechanics vs. string theory debate.

Eck-Stabber honors us with his How Man Learned War (Short Fiction), winner of the coveted Jaworski Rock Prize (or, as Mr. Tab himself tells it, he didn't actually win THE rock, but something equally nice). X, as most of you already know, does not shy away from that fearsome genre called fiction and here he gives us glimpses into civilizations past. Or future. Disturbing. Parallels. Book of Mormon type of stuff.

Gautami Tripathy posted her Book Review: The Pearl by John Steinbeck, then WITHDREW it for reasons best known to herself. But because I had already gone through the motions of creating the links to the article, I will STILL write it up here. Nobody can henceforth say I am not a benevolent emperor and editor. The Pearl, as you may know, is Steinbeck's allegorical tale. Stay away from oysters.

FINALE

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