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Thank you for your great site. I grew up in Half Moon Bay. As you know it is a very special place with special people. I live far away now, but it is nice to keep tabs our wonderful town through site’s like your and the Review. Please keep up the good work and thank you!

Clyde Wilson | Accounts Payable Coordinator
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP

Mountain House: Overlooking Crystal Springs Lake on Skyline Blvd & the Half Moon Bay Road, circa 1930s?

Most cities are broke and their highways aren’t being fixed and their schools are falling apart– but San Mateo has a library–there might not be half a dozen libraries in the entire world that compare with this new library on 3rd avenue that takes up almost an entire square block.

Every donor’s name has been permanently engraved in steel plaques. I recognized many of them–Ken and Sherrilyn Fisher, the T.J. Fosters, Franklin-Templeton, Oracle, Genetech–

If you haven’t seen it, you gotta go. It was closed today, Labor Day and I just admired it from the outside. There are not many really pretty buildings, public or otherwise, and this one is just smashing.

I walked around the entire building and peered into the windows, some of them round like giant portholes. There are sculptures and benches and the inside (which I hope to see soon) looks cutting edge, worthy of the county where high-tech was born.

It’s certain to be a touristy place to go–this library is one we can all be very proud of.

Now if only we could get private funding for an exceptional new Coastside library.

(When I’m over there tomorrow, I’ll take a pix)

(Might contain “spoilers”).

We watched “The Matador” (2006) starring Pierce Brosnan on the tele last night.

You know Pierce Brosnan is still identified with the sophisticated, high-tech James Bond, the British MI5 agent whose victims are very evil–and whose women are ooh la la.

But the star of the darkly humorous film Matador is Julian, a crudely unsophisticated Brosnan (but still handsome, I think, even when he reveals his teethy teeth)–a stark contrast to the polished Bond with the proper English accent.

So turn everything you know about the celluoid Bond upside down, inside out and round and round you go and you get Julian, an assassin whose assignments are passed to him by an unseemly agent on the streets of the world’s cities where Julian is eyeing “illiterate teenage girls”–he is a womanizer, who instead of making love with a gorgeous model at the Ritz in Paris, is found cavorting at the low-end bordello.

There are only 3 main characters in this darkly funny film. Greg Kinnear plays Danny Wright, the Denver-based “loser”–a traveling businessman who is seduced and corrupted by the deliciously amoral Julian. Most of the movie takes place in foreign cities but the final scenes unfold in Denver at Danny and his wife “Bean”‘s home (with Hope Davis perfectly playing “Bean”, a young numb matron ready to swing).

You may find it hard to identify with Julian but I loved him. Julian rationalizes his sordid “gigs” to an innocent Danny by telling him his victims are generically bad.

Danny is so sucked into Julian’s web that he becomes an accomplice in Julian’s “final” assignment.

What is really irrestiable about this movie is that Pierce Brosnan turned an original character that was was just a typed decription on a computer screen into a real, believable person.

Written by June Morrall & Burt Blumert

If This 1957 Chevy Is El Granada Mike’s “Other Car”: Just Imagine How Pristine His Vintage Corvettes Are…

*Note: If you’re wondering what Mike’s wife drives, he says “Hondas”.

BTW: How come my old high school boyfriend’s dark green ’57 Chevy didn’t look this good in 1963?

P.S. This car was also photographed for a calendar–has anyone seen it? Mike didn’t get a copy. Please send him one.

Marilyn Haupert

Stopped by to see Marilyn Haupert at the “Old Victorian Miniature Shop”, 799 Main Street, Half Moon Bay.

Marilyn’s been in the miniature business for eight years (before that she was a very successful realtor for 35 years)– and now she’s having a terrific sale– she’s going to close the store and kick back a little.

She’s an expert on miniatures and the store has a little bit of everything small (I bought a mermaid)–it’s heaven if you enjoy the smaller things in life like tiny upholestered gold & red striped couches and chairs, old-fashioned pinty-pint-sized claw-footed bathtubs, beautifully made itty bitty dolls…

There’s much to look at and enjoy and Marilyn is charming and knowledgable. She also told me that as a realtor she bought copies of my book, “Half Moon Bay Memories”, to give to clients as gifts…..

Unusual in the shop of miniatures is this “large” mermaid.

Did you ever wonder if the silhouettes that advertised IPODS on Bay Area billboards were real people–and if they were real, who are they?

I can now reveal that the silhouettes ARE real people.

Recently I had lunch with friends whose beautiful young daughter, Christiana, told me that her friend from New York, Martin, is one of the silhouettes. (See Martin below).

Christiana told me that Martin is a model, an outstanding dresser with extraordinary looks who was “discovered” walking down the street in New York City–and signed up for Apple’s IPOD advertising campaign.

So, what does that make me? Two degrees of separation from Martin?