My wife had to call AAA yesterday when her car wouldn’t start. They told her someone would be there in 30 minutes and gave her a hyperlink so she could monitor the responder’s location. The guy got there not in 30 minutes, but in five. And he had just the right battery among his gear to replace hers. Quite impressed with the service.
I posted my review of The Girl from Venice by Martin Cruz Smith, who is best known for his Arkady Renko books set in Russia (including Gorky Park). This is a standalone set in northern Italy in the closing weeks of World War II.
I finally (finally!) finished the fifth Game of Thrones novel, having put it aside several times to read other things. We’re about halfway through the fourth season of the TV series. We’ll probably pause there to watch the new season of Longmire on Netflix. I also have just one episode of the second season of Narcos left to watch.
We watched the documentary For the Love of Spock on VOD this weekend. It was directed by Adam Nimoy, son of Leonard. It started out as an exploration of the fictional character, but then Leonard Nimoy died in the midst of this project, so Adam decided to expand it to include some of his father’s life as well. It’s quite—as Spock would say—fascinating. Nimoy cast a wide net when it came to interview subjects, including Nimoy’s brother and daughter, many original cast members as well as the cast of the recent reboot, JJ Abrams, and a few random people like Jason Alexander. We were impressed by the massive block of credits. I only just realized that these were the people who had responded to the crowd-funding campaign to raise over $600,000 to cover the cost of licensing the photographs and video clips included in the documentary. Over 9000 people contributed, some as much as $10k, for which they got an associate producer credit.
