Kathy Reichs's Latest Mystery "Spider Bones" Due this August

So many real-life mysteries to solve, so little time, but finally author and forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs has penned an episode of Bones, the series inspired by her novels and work. The Witch in the Wardrobe airs tonight (Fox at 8 pm), and voila, the obligatory preview clip is below.

I regularly watch Bones, the series from Canadian Hart Hanson, based on Reichs’s novels, the Temperance Brennan mystery series. I’d read the books before the series premiered (five years ago) and liked it from the start. Unlike a lot of fans of the books, I appreciated that actress Emily Deschanel’s Brennan is (thanks to the demands of TV?) a much younger version of a 40-ish literary alter ego.

Many die-hard Reichs readers weren’t that appreciative in the early days. I recall going to see and listen to Reichs here in Vancouver, at a Q&A to promote the book Ashes to Bones, when it was released. Many in the crowd made it clear to Reichs that in their opinion TV’s ‘Tempe’ was 'too young.' Reichs offered the same answer then as she did recently when talking to reporters about her first TV-writing effort.

"I do think there was some reaction, maybe negative reaction, initially. But I don't think that's true anymore. People understand that we had a younger Tempe...on TV and a 40-something...in the books. But they understand that's an older part of the character," says Reichs, who in addition to writing serves as a forensic anthropologist in North Carolina and here in Canada, in Montreal, Quebec. She appears to have an affinity for many things Canadian, and has set several of her stories in this country.

Her next book, however, will very clearly be set in the United States and will tell a very-American story. Spider Bones, set for an August release, will be set in Hawaii and will again be pulled from the pages of Reichs's personal career archives: her forensic work on the reclaiming of American war dead.

"It draws on my experience," said Reichs. "I consulted for years [to] our central lab in Honolulu for the identification of [American] war dead. It's called JPAC, the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Commission. All of our war dead from Southeast Asia, Korea, World War II are identified here. So, it's going to draw on those experiences and Tempe will be going to Honolulu to straighten out a mix-up [of] an ID back in 1968."

Reichs has tackled many challenging subjects and projects. She was part of the recovery team in New York City following the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. "Probably the most difficult working situation was Ground Zero. That was both physically and psychologically very demanding. But each case bring something different to the table, literally."

"I've got, for example, a little child's skeleton in my lab up in Montreal that I've had since 1989 that's never been ID'd although I think we may finally get this little guy identified."

The work can take a toll on anyone and although TV's Brennan displays hilariously little "EQ," emotional intelligence, the same can't be said of Reichs. "We have a similar sense of humour," she says. "But as far as her social awkwardness goes and her inability to form close relationship, I think we're different in those ways."

She certainly has built solid relationships with many fans, both on the page and on screen.

Here's the forensic evidence: photo above: The excessively gracious Reichs (C) takes the time to pose with fangirls, yours truly (L) and screenwriter Kat Montagu (R).

Boobquake: More Trivial Titillation than Protest...

Looks like some women made boobs of themselves for naught.

Did you notice more T&A than usual today? If you did, you can thank the organizers of ‘boobquake,’ a call-to-action organized by women on Facebook to mock an Iranian cleric who blamed earthquakes on women who wear “immodest dress.” The leader of the ‘boobquake’ pack is a 22-year-old American who urged women to dress scantily and “embrace the supernatural power of their breasts.”

Talk about dumb luck. A 6.9 magnitude tremblor struck today off the coast of Taiwan, just as women were set to show off their boobs. The quake’s underwater rumbling was strong enough to be felt in Taipei. Initial reports indicate it didn’t cause any damage, except possibly to the boobquakers’ cause. Anyone think cleric Kazem Sedighi will distort the news as proof of his asinine claims? So be it. (Seismic activity happens daily, in any case.)

‘Boobquake’ was a misguided, intelligence-offending idea from the start; one unlikely to have any real impact except to demonstrate that women in wealthy, Western societies can be as immature as men about female sexuality. This 'protest' makes as much sense as a similar movement in 1929 when a group of women demonstrated their 'equal rights' by smoking in public and calling their cigarettes 'torches of freedom.'

And, unfortunately, 'boobquake' also revealed that women here can be a bit oblivious and irresponsible about our role in protecting and advancing the human rights of truly disadvantaged women around the globe. It spawned a 'counter-revolutionary movement,' formed by two Iranian women, called Brainquake. The fact they they did so, speaks volumes.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=100832899962032

The more news coverage I read about ‘boobquake,’ the more it bugged me. And when I spotted a feature article online today with a photo of a woman sporting black lingerie and announcing her plans to wear the ensemble to work, I thought, ‘These women have totally lost the plot.’

The implicit message screams: ‘Check me out!’ and not much more. Okay, well maybe it also screams ‘impulsive, self-indulgent and exhibitionist,’ but still, not much else.

The whole ‘boobquake’ caper trivializes – even negates - the daily realities of life for so many truly oppressed women around the world. And imagine how galling this must seem to the young Iranian female soccer (football) players who were excluded from the Youth Olympics this month by FIFA because their uniforms include the traditional Muslim hijab (headscarf)? Or how irrational is must appear to the Muslim woman in Quebec forced out of school for wearing a niqab (veil)?

We haven't quite figured out how to accommodate faith-based dress in our society. That said, we are largely free in our culture to wear what we want. So are men. And when either dresses to shock - or just plain dresses like a fool – riducule is the worst punishment we face. Compare that to countries , like Sudan, where women can be beaten or jailed for wearing “offensive” clothing.

Yesterday, the same day that ‘boobquake’ rocked Facebook, the media paid more attention to it than to yet another suspected attack against school girls in Afghanistan. Almost 80 girls have fallen sick at school and it’s feared they inhaled noxious fumes which were released to scare them away from school. Afghanistan is not the only nation where that happens.

Elsewhere around the world: rape is endemic in war zones. Many women still die in childbirth in developing nations. Poverty is significantly worse in nations where gender disparity is greatest. According to the UN more than a billion people live in extreme poverty, most of them women and children. Girls in South Asia are being denied access to education.

And in Western nations like Canada and the United States, women live with arguably the greatest freedom our gender has ever known. Can’t we do better for our global sisters than to offer up titillation masked – or unmasked – as protest?

Of course we can. And women with privilege and advantage must step up if the lives of children and women around the world are going to be improved.

The intertubes are filled with many websites that advocate on women’s behalf, like:

http://www.un.org/womenwatch;

Stephen Lewis’s foundation, at http://www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/ dedicated to helping women with AIDS in Africa;

and there’s always www.unicef.org advocating on behalf of children.

“Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.” ~Margaret Mead

Ready Gleeks!

Glee finally returns, tonight on Fox after American Idol...

A Bridge Too Far

Been wondering for some time now what, if anything, to write about the new Canadian crime drama The Bridge, inspired by the life of former Toronto-cop-turned-union boss Craig Bromell. Not sure who I mean? Bromell was (in 1999) the subject of the CBC fifth estate report entitled Bully, produced by Victor Malarek.

Hey, here's a story idea for the first season...The Bridge could include an episode where a homeless man alleges that he was beaten by cops, including the union boss...Nah, who'd believe that?

It's bugged me from the outset that this project takes a lot of "creative license" with its fact-based storyline. I will say no more, but simply refer you to this piquant and excellent posting by Jim Henshaw, over at http://the-legion-of-decency.blogspot.com/

He says it all, and with authority. It's a must read if you care much about honesty and integrity in Canadian TV.

Meet the Press: Hanks and Spielberg on the making of the new mini-series The Pacific

Journalists from across North America gathered in Pasadena in January to meet with the stars, actors and mega-players behind TV’s best new projects. The most impressive is HBO’s The Pacific, a new 10-part miniseries that completes the Spielberg/Hanks Second World War trilogy, which started with the major feature Saving Private Ryan and continued with Band of Brothers. The Pacific debuts tonight on HBO.

What follows are highlights from a transcript of a media conference helmed by Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg to take media questions about the project. Picture this, Hanks, Spielberg and crew assembled in a seriously posh hotel in a ballroom full of journos.

(Remember that scene in Notting Hill where Hugh Grant pretends to be a reporter from Horse and Hound magazine to meet and interview Julia Roberts? It’s kinda like that, only on steroids… or hallucinogens.) The reporters – and yes I was one of them – were frenzied enough to make Hanks comment, “It’s like the White House.” Saner, thoughtful moments also prevailed.

The Pacific is worthy of the attention. So check in for more coverage and episode updates from week to week.

QUESTION: When you do something like this, do you have to sort of shy away from the things that you did in [the past] and the style of it?

STEVEN SPIELBERG: I had a sense in Saving Private Ryan that I was establishing a template based on the experiences communicated to me by the veterans who fought that morning on Dog Green, Omaha Beach, and their experiences and the way ‑‑ and informed by the very few surviving photographs of the great war correspondent, Robert Capa.

And I combined those photographs to try to find a 24‑frame‑per‑second equivalent about how I can show that kind of terror and that kind of chaos without making a movie that looked elegant and beautiful and in full living color, very much like war movies had been made in the past. It wasn't that I was trying to break the mold of the old war movie approach, visually, but I was simply trying to, I guess, validate all of this testimony ‑‑ if you can call it that ‑‑ that had been communicated to us based on the young men that lived and survived that battle. I didn't know it was going to establish a look for war movies. But it was certainly what I thought was right for that particular story.

QUESTION: And given how pervasive, though, that look has become in subsequent movies, when you do a project of this scale, do you try to get away and try to give it a different look?

STEVEN SPIELBERG: Well, we did give The Pacific a different look because there is a very strong de-saturated quality about Band of Brothers. And in The Pacific, because it was blue skies ‑‑ they weren't fighting in overcast weather. Sometimes monsoons would come in and it was terribly rainy and muddy and you couldn't see the hand in front of your face, but it was a blue‑sky war. It was a hot, dry, humid blue‑sky war. So there are more vivid colors, I think, in The Pacific than we ever had in Band of Brothers because that was the way it was, when you read the books and talk to the survivors of those campaigns.

QUESTION: …Are you telling us that there are little men in HBO that can tell Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg what to do?

STEVEN SPIELBERG: I can simply say that Tom Hanks and I are marvelous collaborators. And they were also giving us a lot of money. Not us, but the production.

TOM HANKS: I'm going to assume that all you crack members of the fourth estate can appreciate sarcasm when it comes your away…We had a great relationship. And, yeah, we fought probably over every single one of these moments throughout the course, including the closing titles that describe where everybody went. And, you know, we knew that once the ‑‑ what is it? ‑‑ the HBO programming blip was gone at the beginning of this, it was our story to tell with our own pacing, and we wanted to include everything that would turn it into a perfectly ‑‑ the perfect book with the opening pages that get into the meat of the thing. So I don't have any true complaints. I just have sarcastic ones. So please report my sarcasm in the spirit for which it was presented.

TOM HANKS: It's been like six years in the making.

STEVEN SPIELBERG: But it's also ‑‑ if I can just add, it was inevitable that we would do The Pacific with HBO because there was such an overwhelming response, not only from the general public that got very involved in Band of Brothers, but we got so much positive mail, but at the same time, mail that said, "I was a veteran of the Solomons." "I fought on Tarawa." "I fought" ‑‑ you know, "I was at Midway." I mean, we got so many letters of veterans from the Pacific Theater of Operations asking us if we could acquit their stories the way we acquitted the stories of the European Theater of Operations.

QUESTION: Having watched the first four hours, you're struck by the enormity of the combat scenes and how riveting and visceral they are. Mr. Spielberg, does it get any easier to do them .....

STEVEN SPIELBERG: It doesn't get any easier because these are all new actors to this experience, and these are all new directors to this experience. So you really have to pose that question to them. But I could imagine that this was a very gruelling and difficult and scary experience, being where Tom and I have been twice before.

Some of the actors mentioned include Canadians and we'll tell you about them in the weeks ahead.