One of my favorite Douglas Adams quotes (and I have many): ” I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Adams was reportedly cavalier about deadlines. He was just as likely to take off to go swimming with dolphins in the South Pacific as he was to work on something that was due. His editors had to ensconce him in a hotel suite and watch him constantly to get him to finish certain books.
I’m not like him. I like deadlines, and I like beating them. Today, I turned in my manuscript to the editor, two weeks ahead of schedule. According to the contract, I should have submitted 2/3 of the book, but I’d already done that at the first deadline. Since this is a fairly rushed production (by normal publishing standards), I thought the extra time would be helpful to them. The photo researcher in particular will have the entire thing at his disposal when he goes off to, well, research photos, I guess. And I get to move on to something else until I get the first round of editorial critiques.
Survivor: Impossible Place to Pronounce got off to a good start last night. They played us all for fools with the game’s first big twist. One member from each team will not be making the trip to camp, Jeff announced, and they voted on the spot based purely on first impressions. However, the contestants with the most votes weren’t eliminated–they got a helicopter ride to camp instead of a 4+ hour slog through the jungle. (One team’s navigation skills seemed to be much better than the other’s!). Still, it left two players as something of outsiders in their own tribes, especially when one of them elected to go on a futile search for a hidden idol (what’s “10 paces”? she wondered aloud) while the other one decided to start building camp instead. What’s really funny about the end result is that the person who was eliminated was the one player who Jeff said in a video on CBS.com wouldn’t be voted out early because she was too cute. Too annoying, more like. I wonder what Exile Island looks like this season. It’s supposed to be brutal.
C.S.I. was interesting last night. The part about the inverted fingerprints, especially. I like that some of the lab rats are getting the chance to escape from their offices from time to time. The toothpaste case, though, was simply silly. There have to be easier ways to accomplish what the culprit did. Yuck.
A good Burn Notice episode, too, although the genesis of the case was a little bit of a stretch, too. Using a dating service to gather intel on a bank job?
