The President leads into Criminal Minds. Coincidence?

I’m reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. About 100 pages in. It’s a very mild story at present, though it’s very well written and perceptive, and we learn a lot about the characters through their actions. I’ll be interested to discover why the uncle was in jail. Since I haven’t read even the dust jacket yet, I have no idea if the story will extend to Edgar’s adulthood, or if it’s completely a story of his youth. I like reading books without knowing a thing about them. Dust jackets often reveal more than I want to know.

Good to see the stock market heading in the upward direction today. My Morgan Stanley financial advisor called yesterday and he sounded like he had been though a hurricane. Oh, wait—he had. And still didn’t have any power at his house. But that was minor compared to what he’d been weathering with his anxious customers.

This week’s House was pretty good. I wonder if the detective is going to be a continuing character. He’s a little like the Mentalist. I watched Fringe, too, and it’s just more of the same. I’m getting a little tired of mega-conspiracy theories and the fact that every single case they investigate ties back to the doctor’s earlier research. Haven’t the conspirators had a single new idea in the past two decades?

Law & Order: SVU was okay, though Sara Gilbert’s acting left a lot to be desired. That little kid was a piece of work. I wonder if they just loaded him up on sugar and set the cameras rolling. The plot was a bit of a mess. It’s about child abuse. No, it’s about drug testing on children. No, it’s about rape trauma. I liked it that Munch referred back to his bar-owning days in Baltimore, which was part of his Homicide: Life on the Streets history. The captain’s reaction after being asked to buy into a new bar was drolly funny. “I’ll bring it up at my next AA meeting.”

Criminal Minds had a good debut. I was worried that they were going to pre-empt the crucial opening minutes for the presidential address, but fortunately they decided to time shift the rest of the evening’s schedule. That footage of the van explosion was brutal, although Hodge looked pretty puppetish as he flew out of frame. I didn’t suspect the kid as the bomber right away, but I latched onto the paramedic the instant the ambulance appeared, and I was disappointed by my perception when he delivered his patients to the hospital without doing anything evil—or so I thought. I have to wonder how Garcia kept on the line with Morgan when she was jamming all the cell phones in the area, though. Do they have some sort of super-special non-cell-phone link? And are they assuming that because the head of the group is gone that the cell isn’t worth pursuing? They left without investigating further.

I watched last week’s episode of Eureka! on their website and then this week’s season finale from my DVR, except there seems to have been time-shifting going on there, too, as I missed the last 6 minutes. The bomb went off, and then that was it. I’ll have to wait for that one to go up on their website, too, so I can see how it was resolved.