Book Review: Rocketeer Adventures Vols. 1&2 by J. Cassaday et al.

Rocketeer Adventures Volumes 1 and 2 written and drawn by John Cassaday and many others, based on the character by Dave Stevens

Dave Stevens created The Rocketeer in the 1980s and the comic book was a hit. He died of leukemia in 2008. This book is a tribute to Stevens' creation, with more than a dozen contemporary comic book artists. The stories all follow the same general format--Cliff Secord is secretly The Rocketeer, active in California, fighting America's World War II enemies who are spying in Hollywood. He's got a very attractive girlfriend named Betty who works as a bit player in movies. Peevy is the guy who built the suit and maintains it, providing comic relief and commentary in the stories. 

I was only familiar with the character from the movie version. This book leans into the pulp fiction of the 1940s, with Betty being a scantily-clad damsel-in-distress more often than she should be. The stories are fun, lightweight entertainment.

Mildly recommended.

I read this on Hoopla, along with a second volume which is pretty much the same with different artists working on it (including Stan Sakai from Usagi Yojimbo!).

Movie Review: The Gift (2000)

The Gift (2000) directed by Sam Raimi

Annie Wilson (Kate Blanchett) lives in a small town in the American South. She has three boys and her husband died a year ago in a factory accident. She makes a living doing readings, using a special deck of cards and her psychic abilities. She also has dreams and visions, though much more rarely. Her clients include Buddy (Giovanni Ribisi), who has troubling and unclear memories of his father, and Valerie (Hillary Swank), whose abuse by her husband Donnie (Keanu Reeves) is pretty obvious without psychic abilities. Annie tells Buddy he needs to confront his memories so he can get past them and Valerie that she needs to leave her abusive husband. Donnie is very unhappy with the situation and threatens Annie and her children. Her oldest son Michael (Lynsee Provence) has been having trouble at the school, pulling Annie into meetings with the principle Wayne (Greg Kinnear). Wayne is engaged to Jessica (Katie Holmes), daughter of a local rich man who also cats around quite a bit. The situation gets more difficult and dramatic when Jessica disappears and her father enlists Annie's aid to find the body, which turns up in Donnie's pond. 

While this movie combines a mystery story with a psychic story, it works hard at balancing the two and maintaining a realistic tone. Raimi, who is famous for directing the original Spider-man and Evil Dead trilogies, keeps his cinematic style to a minimum here. Annie's psychic abilities are bare-bones and depicted as such, giving her clues to what's going on without giving her whole picture. The limited information keeps the mystery side of the story in suspense, as the various suspects in Jessica's murder all seem plausible. The cast does a good job all around, especially with Reeves acting counter to stereotype as a villain. The movie is neither hysterical or over-the-top, a straightforward story that delivers an interesting mystery with twists until the end.

Recommended. 

I watched this streaming on Kanopy, a free service available from many public libraries, in June 2025.

Game Reviews: Wild West at Breakout Games and The Inflation Monster Card Game

My family took me to a local escape room for Father's Day. The room is called Wild West at Breakout Games in Columbia, Maryland. The theme is fun: We were gold miners who had been robbed by some local bandits. Half of our crew was handcuffed inside a local saloon while the rest of us were just outside. So there were three tasks: free our friends, find our gold (hidden in a vault), and get the heck out of there. 

The game had a lot of old west flavor and we had a big enough group to solve all the puzzles in a very quick time. The puzzles had a good variety of mechanical and verbal solutions. The finale was satisfying. We had a lot of fun working together.

Very good considering we had 60 minutes to finish

At home, my daughter got an early birthday present, a card game called The Inflation Monster. It is based of an episode of the Tuttle Twins on Angel Studios, flagging up how damaging inflation is. Players start with a little money that they can invest in real estate, gold, stocks, bitcoin, or a new business. The various ventures bring in money in a couple of different ways. But after each player has a chance to invest, a die is rolled and the inflation number moves up (or possible down, though only one side of the die is a -1). Then everyone has to pay the amount on the inflation counter. Pretty soon, only one person is left with any money and is declared the winner.

It was interesting to play and brought up some discussion about what are really good investments and how you can mitigate inflation in various ways (including actions not in the game). We had fun playing though getting wiped out by inflation in the game is not so much fun. 

Playing the game

Posing for a picture

Book Review: Desire of the Everlasting Hills by Thomas Cahill

Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus by Thomas Cahill

After his successes with How the Irish Saved Civilization and The Gifts of the Jews, Thomas Cahill continues what has become a series called The Hinges of History. The series is meant to chronicle people and events that influenced Western Civilization for the better. In this book, he looks at the impact of Jesus.

After a brief and colorful review of the Greek and Roman world that led up to the time of Jesus, Cahill gets into Jesus's story. A lot of people in Jewish society were expecting an apocalyptic revolution that would put Israel back on the map. After a time of hardship and suffering, the Kingdom of God (that is, the Kingdom of Israel) would be restored. Jesus's preaching does not follow this track according to Cahill. Jesus taught a time of reconciliation that would bring about peace in our time through loving God and our neighbors. Cahill's description and analysis is very earthy and very modern. Jesus's teaching on marriage, that it should be indissoluble, Cahill interprets as a triumph for feminism and a great social advance--no more "guys only" free divorce or blaming the woman for adultery. Cahill says that the Gospels give very little evidence what Mary, Jesus's mother, was like, and then proceeds to characterize her as a brilliant and manipulative schemer who wants the downfall of the rich and the rise of the poor (because that's what the Magnificat is all about, right?) orchestrated by her Son. 

The first chapters have so many moments where Cahill is so off-the-mark that I found it very hard to read. His text isn't confusing or excessively erudite, just a modern scholar reading in his own biases and calling it a "fresh and new understanding." If only there was something fresh or new or accurate! He briefly discusses metanoia, a famous Greek word used in the Gospels that identifies the change Jesus makes in His followers. It's a compound of meta and nous, which Cahill claims is a change (the meta) of mind (the nous). People are being persuaded to new ideas and understandings. But the word nous refers to much more than a person's thinking part. It is the core of a person's being, so the change is more fundamental than just being persuaded by an argument or behavior. The Gospels even have a word for the "change of mind" that Cahill references, metameletheis, which is used to describe Judas Iscariot's attitude after he betrayed Jesus. If Cahill is really a Greek scholar or a Bible scholar (which he definitely presents himself as), how can he not know this? He has plenty of other little and big errors. I gave up reading the book after a hundred pages because I felt like I was wasting my time. At least The Davinci Code, for all its ridiculous misrepresentations, admits it is fiction and has some interesting puzzles in it.

Not recommended.

Annapolis Maritime Museum and Park

Thanks to a pass from the local library, we were able to visit the Annapolis Maritime Museum and Park for free! 

The museum is housed in the former McNasby's Seafood and Oyster Company, a plant that canned mostly oysters but also other foodstuff taken from the Chesapeake Bay.

Looks like an industrial building, except for the mural

The entrance

The original sign outside

The museum chronicles the history of the Chesapeake from the first settlement of Europeans to today. Some of the exhibit are very high-tech, including video games that can be played on a touch-screen table (harvesting oysters) or on a VR headset (which wasn't working the day we visited).

My children try to dominate the oyster market. Ah, capitalism!

VR station

One book has minimal writing on it, but a projector aimed down at it shows different images depending on which page is open. It's almost like reading the Daily Prophet from Harry Potter. The set-up is a great way to make the information more memorable.

A magical book!

Back in the 1700s and 1800s, oyster harvesting was mostly done by individuals with simple tools. One display shows the tongs used to scoop up oysters from the bay bed. Dredgers were hauled behind boats to harvest more oysters more quickly.

Two types of tongs

A dredger

Annapolis became a prosperous place since the oyster population was so great and demand was quite large too. They referred to them as "White Gold." As with any valuable commodity, conflict was bound to ensue.

I didn't make that up!

Harvesting became so popular that regulations were put in place. Dredgers could only work in certain areas and tongers had protected areas for their harvesting. Maryland had laws against some mechanical harvesters. Virginia did not. Soon enough, oyster wars broke out between the different groups (Maryland tongers vs. Maryland dredgers, Maryland harvesters vs. Virginia harvesters, etc.). Maryland created the Maryland State Oyster Police Force to ensure the rules were being followed, so conflict options expanded. Guns and even cannon became involved. 

Civil War cannon repurposed for oyster wars

Another display shows various recipes for oysters, dating back 200 years!

Dining advice!

The back wall has a display on the conditions of the bay. When the first English colonists came, the bay was clear and oysters numbered in the millions. By the 21st century, conditions have worsened and the oyster population has significantly dropped.

Recreation of 1600s Chesapeake

Recreation of 2000s Chesapeake

The wall features a sort of bar graph of the drop in population. The picture below shows the various cages and how less and less they are filled further down the hall.

Also, the water quality changes

Another high-tech exhibit has a factory worker describing the process of shucking and storing the oysters for canning.

That guy isn't really there, even though he talks to you

Other tools of the trade

Several model boats are on display, including Bugeyes and Skipjacks.

Sample of a bugeye boat

A model skipjack

Local volunteers helped to restore the Wilma Lee, a skipjack that now serves as a cruise boat that can be rented for parties or used for education on the water. 

The Wilma Lee

The front of the boat

The museum has a small pier with a nice view of the Chespeake and the Bay Bridge in the distance.

A beach across the way

Bay Bridge in the distance

Mosaic of the product made here

We were grateful to the library for having a free pass and for the museum not being too huge. It is a lot of fun to visit.

Book Review: Batman/Deadman Death and Glory by Robinson and Estes

Batman/Deadman Death and Glory by James Robinson and John Estes

Batman is fighting the Joker when he suddenly shifts to a restaurant with piles of dead bodies...and he seems to be the killer. Commissioner Gordon is extremely upset because a close friend was killed in the massacre and he blames Batman. He even sets out to kill Batman. At the Batcave, Batman can't figure out what happened. Alfred suggests a supernatural angle, so Batman summons Deadman. Deadman is a former circus acrobat who died in a performance and is cursed to wander the Earth search for his killer. In the mean time, he fights crime as a spirit of can possess people. He's a natural to have the scoop on what might have possessed Batman.

The slightly convoluted premise slowly unpacks over the course of the story. I found the plot only mildly interesting. The art is quite incredible, much better than the story that is being told. Without a good story underpinning it, the art is not enough to carry the rest of the book.

Not recommended.

Movie Review: The Lost World (1925)

The Lost World (1925) directed by Harry O. Hoyt from the novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Professor Challenger (Wallace Beery) has returned to London with tales of a South American plateau where dinosaurs have survived and are still roaming around. He has no proof (his canoe tipped over dumping all his documents and samples) so the academic and scientific communities mock him. He does not take well--he's a brilliant scientist but also has (and this is a quote in the movie) "the temperament of a gorilla." He especially hates the press, which makes things awkward for Ed Malone (Lloyd Hughes), a low-level reporter who wants to impress his girlfriend by doing something brave and death defying. Getting an interview with Challenger would be frightening enough, but Ed goes the extra step and volunteers to go on a trip to South America. One of Challenger's comrades was trapped on the plateau and the friend's daughter Paula (Bessie Love) wants to go back immediately to rescue her dad. Ed is friends with Sir John Roxton (Lewis Stone), a famous hunter who is also friends with Challenger. They convince Challenger to take on Ed and they convince Ed's newspaper to finance the voyage, which at least will have the human interest story of rescuing Paula's father, even if there aren't any dinosaurs. The movie then gets to that South American plateau which is full of dinosaurs.

This classic silent film was the first adaptation of Doyle's novel of the same name. It is mostly faithful to the book, with an extra love interest added in the shape of Paula. She has a few too many "shocked and fearful" reactions as they confront various creatures but she also has more character too. The effects are by the same specialist that would go on to make King Kong, so they are top-notch for a hundred years ago. The story is fun though in the following century plenty of other films have copied the same story beats, so the plot is very familiar. There is a mildly annoying blackface character but his role is quite small. There's also a lovable comic-relief monkey named Jocko (played by Jocko, go figure), another recurring cliche that probably originated in this film. 

Recommended--this is a classic from the silent era and is the source for a lot of big-monster cinema that has come after it.

I watched this on Kanopy, which has two different versions with two different soundtracks. I watched the Flicker Alley edition, which has the restoration from 2016 (1 hour, 44 minutes) with a fairly standard orchestral soundtrack.