Starting To Feel Human Again

     Got a proper night's sleep and woke up in the morning, just like a real diurnal animal, even.  Finished my Raymond Chandler book, too.

     When people say a Robert A. Heinlein or H. Beam Piper character is too competent, too confident?  If they snicker at the way John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee always comes up fighting, or Correia's O. Z. Pitts never gives up?  You point 'em at Chandler's tough-guy heroes, who are quite often right even when they're wrong, and are usually three moves ahead of the reader -- and four moves ahead of everyone else in the story.

     Which reminds me: if you haven't yet seen the BBC four-part miniseries about Ian Fleming, The Man Who Would Be Bond, and you liked the books or the movies about that fictional spy, or you ever wondered what a real-life Sterling Archer might be like, you should be watching it.  (I've read several fairly savage reviews, all of which seem to miss the point that, like a Bond film, this fiction-spun-from-life is meant to be fun, the cinematic equivalent of a box of chocolates.) As lushly shot as any of the Bond movies, well-cast and nicely acted, it's got an excellent score and none of the usual Beeb cheesiness of sets.  He's a hometown boy* who made good, after all -- and a very bad boy, at that.  It's Fleming's biography as he probably would have liked it. He had a good eye for drama.
_______________________________________
* For a given value of "hometown:" the Flemings were Scots!