For many years I have been something of a James Bond fan. I remember watching "Diamonds Are Forever" when ABC had it as a Sunday night movie back when I was in junior high. I figured back then when it came to the movies, you had to pay strict attention to what was going on in the beginning if you were to understand the rest of the movie. I couldn't get my head around that as a junior high schooler, but I did take note of the stunts, especially when our hero was climbing the outside of a hotel in Las Vegas.
In the 1984 timeframe, my interest in the movies got going. I rented the VHS cassettes from a rental store where I had a membership, and I watched them all..........and understood them better. My favorite was "For Your Eyes Only" which I saw in a movie theater in the summer of 1981 when I was visiting a friend in Maryland, and really enjoyed the stuntwork in that one.
Anyway, that year I was collecting all of the Ian Fleming-authored novels, and learned right away that his novels quickly diverged from the movies early on. "Diamonds Are Forever" is one such example of that divergence. Although Las Vegas was in the novel, the plot was different.
Fleming got away from us too soon if you ask me, and it wasn't for many years when John Gardner was approached about bringing James Bond back into the novels. I have all of them, have been re-reading them, and enjoyed them.
Now some of the Bond fans panned Gardner's novels. The first in the series was a decent read, and yes, the critics were right that Gardner wasn't Fleming. But Gardner did not set out to be Fleming, and the subsequent novels are entertaining and I'm having trouble putting The Man from Barbarossa down. I know that there are post-Gardner novels out there and I have a few of them that I haven't gotten to yet, and the next recreational read might be a Tom Clancy novel, or one of the many books that Thomas Sowell authored. There is one of Dr. Sowell's in the bookshelf that I want to re-read, and I might be bringing that up in its own separate blog post.
As for some other activities, there is of course, ham radio, but I'm currently on a hiatus from the airwaves. As passionate as I am about that hobby, I find it helpful to take the occasional break from it so that I don't burn out on it, so to speak. Thus, this afternoon had two, maybe three hours of reading, and if it isn't a novel then it's articles from radio magazines in an effort to better understand the digital modes I have been experimenting with. But here comes something else I am considering. Learning a foreign language.
Now I took three years of Spanish in junior high school, and if I had kept that up I would be fluent in it. At my peak I could have been dropped off in South America and been able to find my way home. Those three years made it easier to learn Italian, which I needed since I knew I would be spending time there. I found Italian to be a very fun language, and got to where I could be conversational in it. It came in handy while over there on a business trip in 1997 as that one of my co-workers and I got lost in Rome, it was night, and we needed directions. I was able to converse with the manager of a benzina station and understand his instructions on how to get back to the hotel. He slowed down his speaking, and my comprehension was 100%.
In that same trip, it came in handy when my supervisor and I went to a restaurant. I was able to order the pizza, with the toppings that we wanted on it. The waiter was so impressed to meet an American who could speak his language, and when we asked him to call a cab to take us back to the hotel, he drove us over in his car instead! And folks, a compliment of that magnitude doesn't happen very often in a lifetime.
Anyway, I have learned a little Portuguese, as that I talk to Brazil quite often over the air, and I like giving the signal report and my location in Portuguese. The operators over there like that very much, even though I think many of them want to practice their English. I have thought about developing my Portuguese some, I have thought about trying to recapture what I knew in Italian and Spanish, but there's also French and German that I could learn, even though the odds of my going to Germany or France, much less Quebec, aren't really there. I guess the justification here is to tell myself that I've broadened my horizons.........somewhat.
There are lots of online language lessons out there, and my most recent dabbling in them was for the purpose of learning how to count to ten in French. I know how to count to ten in English, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, and with more practice I will add French to that list. We'll see.
With this I now close this post, and head upstairs. And I think I will knock off one more chapter in The Man from Barbarossa.
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