Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Errata
Well, I’ve had a lumbar puncture at the hands of a crappy ER doc and a root canal at the hands of a competent dentist, and I can confidently claim that the root canal is less painful. Though I guess the best comparison would require me to have a root canal at the hands of an incompetent dentist. But I think I’ll pass.
(Those few of you who also “friend” me at Facebook . . . yeah, so I cross-posted. I have an excuse. I just got a root canal.)
Thus far I am not impressed with Clancy’s Rainbow Six.
It’s a pre-9/11 tale of international terrorism in which the multinational “Rainbow” group, composed of cookie-cutter stamped übermenschen who can shoot the eyes out of a sewing needle at 100 yards, deal with one incident after another . . . I suppose. I’ve only made it through the first such incident, wherein Swiss police are somehow too incompetent to handle a hostage crisis at one of the banks (somehow I think not, but hey, suspension of disbelief).
Thing is, the team, based out of England, flies to Switzerland on a commercial airline. No, really. There’s a bit where one of ’em kvetches that the Swiss really need to decide soon if they want them or not, because the flight leaves in 2 minutes, and if they miss that flight they’ll need to wait another 90 minutes for the next one. Well, I guess if this NATO-sanctioned outfit actually took military aircraft to jump the Channel they would miss out on all their frequent flier miles . . .
Oh, and then there are the supervillains, who I gather are tree-huggers intent on sending the world back to the Stone Age, or some such. And one of them is a woman who doesn’t like men. Horrors.
And then there’s crap just thrown around like this BS about a characteristically German handshake, which is a sudden grab, a single shake with a warm squeeze midway through, and then a quick release. WTF? Kira, you reading this? IS there a characteristically German handshake?
I could forgive him the one-dimensional characters for whom I feel nothing if he got the other details right. I mean, I had always heard that Clancy was a details man, that the reader could count on him to get the techie stuff correct. But do I really care that he knows his armaments if he does crap like send his SuperSWAT team to Switzerland on TWA?
/vent
D.
The last Clancy book I liked was Without Remorse. Maybe because John Clark was the protagonist and it was set pre-Jack Ryan? Clancy’s politics were present but they didn’t grate on me as badly as in his later Jack Ryan books. Or maybe it was the phoned-in quality that alienated me? Anyway, I think fondly of Without Remorse and still have a hardback copy somewhere, although all my other paperbacks of Clancy have long since been tossed.
I came to this one a Clancy virgin . . . think I’ll make it a one-night stand. Better yet, I’ll leave before he has a chance to consummate. Yes, I read the precis over at Wikipedia, and I can see that I’m not going to miss much. (At one point, the terrorists go after Clark’s wife AND pregnant daughter — predictable much? Good lord how I saw that one coming.)