John Gardner's novels did a decent job of putting Bond in the modern age (the 1980s), with the 00 section being disbanded (the origin of M's "blunt instrument" quip, but this time it's positive), Bond switching to lower-tar smokes, and driving a Saab rather than anything British. The first few novels worked very well;…

Wasn't it "baw-haw"?

it involves the rights ownership of Thunderball, a story that could be a pretty interesting movie itself. Lawsuits, threats, Connery, and the possible destruction of a multi-million dollar franchise - it would be as tense as a Bond film.

It's one of my favorite scenes in a Bond film: Vesper's profiling of Bond to a T and throwing all of his preconceptions of her back in his face, and finishing with an excellent exchange:

That whole sequence is a master class on how to condense an origin story. A touch of exposition, a flashback fight scene, and wrap it up with a bow. It's only bested by the origin in All-Star Superman.

Embryo! Mine was The Spy Who Loved Me.

Roger Moore started off as a cross between Bond and Simon Templar, and wound up as your dirty-minded uncle who thought he was your favorite. Octopussy made me absolutely cringe, but he did great in the older films, especially Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me.

Renaming iTunes to iMedia and making a program that just manages music named iTunes Light would work. I do most of my iTunes work for my iPod Classic.

There are programs available that will allow you to do just that. One of them is Sent, which works very well.

Olive. And pitted at that.

I put it above the iPhone and the cheese-grater Mac Pro as one of the greatest products Apple ever made. When my iPod got run over by a truck it was a pretty bad day.

That's the bee's knees!

You can get an adapter for SD, CF, and mini-SATA through here: https://www.iflash.xyz. I'm going to do that later this year on an old iPod and take it from 80gb to 128gb. If that's successful, I'll convert my 160gb to 256.

My iPod classic still runs like a charm on the newest version of iTunes. There are third-party apps you can use if/when that day comes.

Well, sometimes I'm in a Louvre mood, sometimes an Orangerie mood, but most of the time it's Orsay.

Wow - that is gorgeous. From a first look I like how Winterhalter makes each woman unique in looks; so many painters make a group with almost the same faces. The brunette with the thick curls (a woman in purple is leaning close to her, right side of the painting) really stands out.

We didn't drive in Paris, and kept to taxis, the Metro, and a hired driver (who was great). I couldn't make sense of the intersections, with what looked like double the number of lights and arcane rules of movement.

Ew.

We did choose the place, so that's on us - but who would have predicted that a restaurant in Paris would serve a buckwheat crêpe with ham and cheese from the grocery store? No flavor, bland, and they needed to check how they stored their supplies. A dessert crêpe I had later in the trip was perfect.

I ran into only two rude people during my trip - one was a woman who ran her baby buggy over my foot in the town of Versailles and said something I took as rude (to be honest, I was standing in the middle of the sidewalk) and the other was a taxi driver cursing out all the pedestrians who would just walk in front of…