Salmon fishing

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Bev Vincent

The table of contents for Chilling Tales 2, edited by Micheal Kelly, was announced this weekend:

  • In Libitina’s House by Camille Alexa
  • Gingerbread People by Colleen Anderson
  • Meteor Lake by Kevin Cockle
  • Homebody by Gemma Files
  • Snowglobes by Lisa L Hannett
  • The Dog’s Paw by Derek Künsken
  • The Flowers of Katrina by Claude Lalumière
  • Goldmine by Daniel LeMoal
  • The Salamander’s Waltz by Catherine MacLeod
  • Weary, Bone Deep by Michael Matheson
  • The Windemere by Susie Moloney
  • Black Hen A La Ford by David Nickle
  • Day Pass by Ian Rogers
  • Fiddleheads by Douglas Smith
  • Dwelling on the Past by Simon Strantzas
  • Heart of Darkness by Edo van Belkom
  • Fishfly Season by Halli Villegas
  • Road Rage by Bev Vincent
  • Crossroads Blues by Robert J. Wiersema
  • Honesty by Rio Youers

I finished Edge of Dark Waters by Joe R. Lansdale last night. Review forthcoming. I also got around to updating Onyx Reviews with my latest review for Victims by Jonathan Kellerman. Not sure what I’m going to pick up next. I want to read the new McCammon but I’m going to be traveling on Wednesday and Thursday so I’ll probably go with something that’s already on my iPad to cut down on the weight of my carry-on. I’m heading to Atlanta to the red carpet premiere of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, which should be fun.

We had a movie weekend. First, we went out to the theater on Saturday afternoon to see Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. It star Emily Blunt, Ewen McGregor and Kristin Scott Thomas. Blunt works for an investment company that handles a Yemeni sheik who wants to build a salmon river in his homeland so he can indulge one of his favorite pastimes. McGregor is a civil servant who thinks the idea is totally daft, and Thomas is the Prime Minister’s press agent who is looking for a feel-good story out of the Middle East and champions this project. It’s a funny part for Thomas, mostly played for laughs. The complications are: Blunt’s boyfriend of six weeks has just been deployed to Afghanistan and goes MIA. McGregor’s wife has accepted a long posting in Geneva, thus is similarly MIA. Some of the other tribal leaders in the Yemen see this as the first step in bringing Western influences into their country, something they don’t want. It’s a charming film. With fish.

Then we watched The Iron Lady. I was in England during some of the Thatcher reign. In fact, one day I was walking through London, a little off the beaten path, when a motorcade went past—I noticed the American flags on the front of the limos and later discovered it was President Reagan on his way to a summit with Maggie. Thatcher’s adviser in the chemistry department at Oxford is someone I’ve met, the Nobel Laureate Dorothy Hodgkin, whose politics were on the opposite end of the spectrum from Thatcher’s. She was known to muse in later years that if she had been a better adviser, maybe Thatcher would have become a crystallographer and stayed out of politics. The movie uses Thatcher’s decline as the entrance point into her story. Her memories come and go—at times she thinks she’s still the Prime Minster. Streep is very good—mostly invisible in the character—but the movie didn’t win me over to Thatcher’s side. Sure, she had a tough time as the first female leader of the UK, but she was a little too much “my way or the highway” for my liking and I’m not convinced that her solutions to some of the country’s economic issues at the time were the best ones.

Then, last night, we watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close about a young boy whose father (Tom Hanks) died on 9/11. The boy has some Asperger’s-like symptoms but is mostly functional and highly intelligent. A year after the event, he finds a key hidden in a vase in his father’s closet. The envelope it’s in says only “Black,” so he decides to hunt down every person named Black in the five boroughs to figure out what the key is for, believing it to be another adventure that his father wanted him to take. The kid’s a little bit hard to take at times. He’s abrasive and self-involved and rude (and carries a tambourine that he rattles whenever he’s nervous, which is most of the time). Sandra Bullock plays his seemingly absentee mother in a relatively small part that has a nice resolution. Max Von Sydow plays a mysterious “renter” who stays with the boy’s grandmother across the street. He’s mute and has the words Yes and No written on his palms so he can quickly answer simple questions. He has a charming glimmer in his eye and a bounce in his step at times—he’s the best thing about the film. The boy enlists his help in the search for the right Black. There is a credibility gap, though: it’s impossible to imagine anyone allowing a 12-year-old to wander the city day and night the way he does. The old man’s identity is no great mystery, though his backstory receives short shrift. John Goodman has a slight role as the building doorman who exchanges good-natured insults with the boy. I wanted to like the movie more than I did (the actor who plays the boy was discovered after winning kid’s week on Jeopardy and acquitted himself well in a demanding role), but the story was too incredible and the approach too emotionally manipulative.

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Smiley’s people

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Bev Vincent

Since turning in my manuscript last weekend, I’ve been taking it relatively easy. For three days in a row I didn’t even go upstairs to my office. I did work on a couple of diagrams for the manuscript, though, and was pleased at how they turned out. I’m nobody’s artist, but I think these do the job quite well.

This week’s Survivor was on the tame side, I thought. The product placement segment was as well done as these sorts of things can be. There were no huge developments, and even the blindside wasn’t that big a deal, I thought. I wouldn’t mind it if the women went on a clean sweep of the men. I wonder what things would be like on the island after that, once they’re forced to turn on each other. Could be entertaining.

I watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy last night. A well done Cold War spy thriller, a remake of a BBC TV series from the late seventies and an adaptation of the John LeCarre novel. He knew whereof he wrote, having been a member of the circus himself for many years. Made me think about how much things have changed in the last 25 years or so. In 1986, I walked from the train station in Berlin to Checkpoint Charlie, crossed over to East Berlin and spent the next ten days behind the wall. There’s hardly anything to compare it to these days. I’d love to go back to Berlin some day and see what it’s like now. I know I was anxious the whole time I was on the other side, paranoid that I was being watched constantly, though there was probably some truth to that. I was astonished at how freely I was able to move about, though. I figured people would ask me for my papers all the time, but I got on a train and went to Leipzig without anyone questioning my intentions. I had to register with the local police when I got there, but I had to do that when I lived in Switzerland, too, so that wasn’t a huge deal.

Gary Oldman was excellent in a role established by Alec Guinness. I hope he didn’t get paid by the word, though, because he was silent a lot of the time he was on screen, and often only said one or two words when called upon to speak. He was intense, though, and cracks in his British veneer showed through from time to time. I always like seeing Toby Jones, too. I spent a pleasant half hour or so talking with him in his trailer during a lunch break on the set of The Mist a few years back. The movie made you work to figure out what was going on some of the time. It certainly didn’t coddle the audience. Makes me want to see the original now, though, since it was seven hours long and the movie was only two.

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It is done

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Bev Vincent

I finished my latest manuscript at about 9:30 pm on Sunday, April 1. That’s about an hour and a half ahead of my deadline. It worked out just right. I put in two more 14-hour days on Saturday and Sunday and I needed every minute of it. I got down to the last two chapters thinking they would be a breeze to revise since they’d already been edited before, but I discovered that I’d had a brain fart at some point and the last quarter of the second last chapter covered the exact same ground as the first part of the last chapter. Sometimes in almost the same words. So I had to pick the best parts from each and rewrite the last chapter.

Anyhow, it’s done and in the hands of my editor. Now I wait to hear his thoughts. My schedule was such that I never had a chance to print out the whole manuscript before I submitted it. I sent it off to Kinko’s on Monday, so now I have the physical things in my hands for the first time. It’s big.

Cemetery Dance is shipping Crane House this month. This is a round-robin novella featuring Brian Keene, Kealan Patrick Burke, Al Sarrantonio, Rick Hautala, Brian Freeman, James A. Moore, James Newman, Ronald Kelly, Norman Prentiss, Ray Garton and me. My contribution was fairly early in the process, so I have no idea how the story ended. The book, alas, is completely sold out.

I’ve spent the last few days kicking back and catching up on TV shows from the DVR. Finally saw the last two episodes of Alcatraz. It ended with a very Lost-like scene of a guy gibbering “What year is it?” I don’t think anyone believes for a minute that Madsen’s dead. Good to see Lucy back and engaged in the story again. She’s a good character.

I was amused when Sofie Gråbøl showed up in a cameo as her character on the Danish version of The Killing in a recent Ab Fab. Then there she is again as a district attorney in the US version of the show, though less recognizable. I still believe that the Danish version is oodles better than the remake, but I’m hanging in there to see what they do with it. It’s fairly obvious by now that the killer from the original is not the killer in the US version.

Good to see Mad Men back again after a long, long hiatus. Everyone seems to have found their way back into their characters, with the exception of Betty Draper. Beyond the weight gain (which was written into the story to cover up January Jones’s real-life pregnancy), her whole attitude seemed very un-Betty. Little Sally’s voice seems to have changed, too. I hope Don doesn’t do something stupid in his relationship with Megan, who is trying so hard. She’s good for him and hopefully he’ll notice. All the other drama is normal operating procedure.

Fringe took a turn for the even weirder this week with the introduction of what is basically a New World Order plot. Olivia was quite correct in saying that working for Fringe division causes a person to completely revise their interpretation of the word “weird.” I was quite convinced on at least two occasions that Lincoln wasn’t going to get out of the episode alive (or at least unmutated), but he seems to have survived. I hope the show gets picked up for another season so they can wrap all this stuff up.

Down to just one more episode of Justified. One of the amazing things about the Robert Quarles character is how he can pick himself up when necessary, even after having just ingested a massive amount of drugs. I could have done without the drug subplot, though. It doesn’t contribute much, especially since it doesn’t particularly impair him. I really like how they’ve tied so much together. Loretta, seen briefly at the beginning, is back (Marshall? Do I strike you in any way as a Van Halen fan?). Arlo’s illness is now coming into play (he called Boyd “Raylan” this week). All of Limehouse’s machinations are bearing fruit. He’s eliminating the competition but also arranging so that he’s out of the spotlight again, which is what he wants most, I think. Dicky got his comeuppance, though not the one Boyd and Arlo might have wished. I do question Boyd’s wisdom in repeatedly make the mistake of leaving dangerous people in the custody of others ill-suited to handle the situation (Two saddest words in the English language: What Party?”). Twice this week, bad guys got away. The whole bank job turned out to be a French farce, with everyone in on it and no one actually planning to do it. Alas, the poor cop who missed his kid’s ball game ended up with the short end of the stick. The big question at the end of the episode is: Where’s Boyd? On Quarles’ trail?

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A different kind of sound

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Bev Vincent

An audio version of my short story “Silvery Moon,” which can also be found in When the Night Comes Down, is now available for your listening pleasure at Tales to Terrify, the same people who brought you recordings of the Stoker-nominated short fiction over the past couple of weeks. This week’s installment also has flash fiction by Tim Lebbon and other features. Check it out!

After approximately fifty e-mail messages back and forth and several go/no-go scheduling changes, I finally got the last interview for my next book in the can last night. And it was well worth the wait. Got some great stuff. I spent the rest of the evening transcribing the 25-minute interview. I wish I could talk more about what I learned, but you’ll have to wait for the book, which should be out in April 2013.

I watched Justified this morning while I had breakfast. Finally, the hidden gun comes into play. Quarles certainly doesn’t mind getting down and dirty when he needs to. This show has some of the greatest bizarre scenes ever, like the guy who was chained to the toilet on his hands and knees, trying to escape as Wynn Duffy and friend sit on the bed and watch. I also really like how secondary characters get built so vividly, like Lindsay, the woman from the bar where Raylan’s staying. And Art. “Some asshole threatened to kill one of my deputies. I’m the only that gets to do that. Rachel: new career = field goal kicker. Adam Arkin has been playing some great dirtbags lately—most recently on Sons of Anarchy. I think I might have liked it a tad better if they hadn’t shown Boyd in the background while Quarles was on the phone. Ruined the gotcha moment slightly, though the taser was a nice touch. “You ever get the feeling God’s laughing at you?

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The sound they make

Posted on March 29, 2012 by Bev Vincent

Issue #66 of Cemetery Dance magazine is at the printer and will ship in April. In addition to my usual column, I wrote the feature review of The Wind Through the Keyhole. The review got top billing on the magazine cover. Not my name, though. Never my name!

Douglas Adams once said that he loved deadlines, especially the sound they make when they go zooming by. His editors used to kidnap him to a hotel and sit with him while he finished his books. Otherwise something would catch his attention and he’d go off to the South Pacific to swim with the dolphins.

My book deadline is April 1. No fooling. Am I going to make it? Of course I’m going to make it. I would never miss a deadline. Could I have used another week? Sure, but I could always use another week. The trick with certain projects is in deciding when they’re done. Deadlines tell me that quite clearly: you’re done. Of course, to dredge up an old analogy, turning in a manuscript is like sending your kid off to college. They always come back, sometimes bringing their dirty laundry with them in the form or rewrites, revisions and the various stages of proofing.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when I get up to work in the morning next week. I’ve been living with this book for several months. Well, actually I do know what I’m going to do when I get up—move on to the next project, which I already have lined up.

A few days ago, I received the back cover copy for the book I’m about to turn in, which will be out in April 2013. I had a chance to suggest some changes to it, but I’m glad I didn’t have to write it from scratch. Writing back cover copy is harder than writing a synopsis.

I haven’t had any spare time to watch TV lately. I’m behind on Mad Men, Alcatraz, NCIS, Once Upon a Time and Justified. I did speed watch Survivor this morning while I was having breakfast. They make it look like finding an immunity idol is easy, but according to Jeff Probst it isn’t as easy as it appears. I think that the clues (remember when people used to use clues to find idols?) were more confusing then helpful most of the time. I was surprised by a few things in this week’s show. First of all, I was impressed by the way Kat performed in the immunity challenge. You could tell she was concentrating hard. It was almost a zen thing, and she finished in second place. Then, the tribal council was a blood bath. Jonas was a little desperate, with not much to lose, so he ruffled some feathers. What was even more surprising was that after all that they still voted him out. I was sure they would go after Tarzan. What were they thinking? I liked Jonas’s parting shot, though. He’s a funny dude.

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Hey! Wasn’t that…???

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Bev Vincent

I’m derelict in my duties. I neglected to post a link to my March Storytellers Unplugged essay, which went live on Saturday. Better late than never: Famous People.

I had to go to the Social Security office today to tell them I am now a US citizen. They have TV monitors running informational ads, many of them featuring George Takei dressed up like his Star Trek character, Sulu. In one of them, his female co-star tells him about the Social Security web site. “I’ll bet that’s hard to navigate,” he says. “You’ve navigated asteroid belts,” she says. “This is far easier than that.” She lowers her voice. “Even Kirk could do it.” They’re talking to the Star Trek generation, after all. The ones who saw the shows during their first live run.

Christopher Knight had an amusing, understated cameo in this week’s CSI. He was the minister at the drive-thru window of a Las Vegas quickie marriage franchise. I don’t know if there has been the same turnover of actors in the other CSIs—I don’t watch them—but the LV version has swapped out most of the original actors, except for Nick and Sara. And you know what? It’s still pretty darned good. Jacquelyn Smith was amusing as Hodges’ mother. When talking about her supposed fiance, she says, “He wasn’t a count. It’s possible he doesn’t even know how to.”

When I saw the previews for Survivor, focusing on the medical issue, I thought for sure it would be Tarzan who went down with an accelerated heart rate. I never would have guessed who it turned out to be. The only thing that disappoints me about the way this player went out is that I would rather have seen him blindsided. Just to see the look on his face. I’m not sorry he’s gone. Jeff Strand, I know, will object, because he likes villainous players. When they showed him talking about his medical emergency, still wearing his Survivor clothes (although they looked clean), I thought perhaps he wasn’t going to get yanked out of the game. And he took his idol as a souvenir. Well, why not?

And then a surprise merge, and very early in the season. They’re really keeping the players off guard. So much strategy is geared toward a merge at eight, not a merge at twelve. You’d think that things would go back to the male/female alliances, but not according to the previews. I was surprised to note that Tarzan is actually a plastic surgeon. He has some big words, though he doesn’t always use or pronounce them correctly, but I wonder if he has the same trouble remembering the names of the muscles or blood vessels that he does with people’s names.

Only three episodes left in this season of Justified and a storm is brewing. Quarles is in a corner—maybe even two corners or three, if that’s possible. He thought he had the sheriff in the bag, until Boyd pulled a pretty cool trick that used the letter of the law instead of something illegal for a change. “You are a conquistador,” Boyd says to Quarles after the fact. “But we are not your savages.” I’m not happy that they turned such a venomous and daunting villain into a drug addict, but I can live with it, I guess. He’s still pretty dangerous. The showdown with Donovan over the missing rent boy would have had more tension if I hadn’t seen the preview to know that the Quarles/Raylan face-off hadn’t happened yet, so Donovan wasn’t going to do Quarles any damage. I wonder why Wynn Duffy is still hanging around with Quarles when it’s pretty clear his day in the sun is over and he’s a disaster in waiting.

Despite all the drama, there were some funny scenes, too. The judge complaining about his wife when she was still on speaker phone, for one. The old lady who ordered a couple of milk shakes was a hoot. And Art gets some funny underplayed lines. After Raylan goes off script at the hearing, Art says, “Did that go the way you rehearsed it?” and, as they walk out of the courtroom, “Next time you tell me you’re not good at something, I’m going to believe you.” He can be a hard case with Raylan sometimes, but he backed him up when they tried to pass off a black man as Dickie Bennett. You’d think someone would’ve told Dickie to comb his hair, at least, before going to court. And I figured, from the preview, that Raylan’s warning shot might’ve gone into his boarding room.

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The Night Comes Down, electronically

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Bev Vincent

Including my session this morning, I estimate that I spent 30 hours working on the manuscript this weekend. Productive work, too. The thing is getting close to the point where I can print it out for the first time and go over it carefully. I have 13 days until deadline. Still waiting on a couple of interviews, but if they don’t happen, they don’t happen. Some of them may come in right at the wire.

Transcribing an interview with a slow-speaking person is great. I can almost type fast enough to keep up. With others, I’ve had to rewind and rescreen certain passages a bunch of times. This weekend I transcribed a 20 minute interview in about an hour. Others of similar length have taken me at least three or four hours.

It was almost warm enough to turn on the A/C this weekend, but I resisted. We have a cold front coming through, with a heavy rainstorm, tomorrow.

When the Night Comes Down, the anthology that contains 4-5 works each  from myself, Joseph D’Lacey, Bob Weinberg and Nate Kenyon, is now available as an eBook. There’s a Kindle version from Amazon and a Nook version from B&N. My four stories are “Silvery Moon,” “Knock ‘Em Dead,” “Something In Store,” and “Purgatory Noir.” These Dark Arts books are a great way to sample an author, as you get several diverse tales, all for one low, low price.

We watched the first two episodes of Season 4 of The Sopranos this weekend. Adriana is in a bind. Last night I watched Amazing Race while working on other things. I thought for a moment that the Border Patrol agents had forgotten their gnome at the curling rink, but that was just a lingering camera shot, I guess. I felt bad for the teams that went to the wrong castle, stood in line and paid for admission. I also thought that the gingerbread challenge was going to be complicated by the fact that it was snowing, but I guess the pieces weren’t covered up that much.

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Happy accidents

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Bev Vincent

I’ve been conducting a bunch of interviews lately for my next book. Some of them have been with people who are very busy. They really want to take part in the project—it’s just a matter of finding 15 minutes or so when they are free. I was supposed to one this afternoon and another one tomorrow.

The last thing I did before I left my home office this morning was check the phone. Ack! It wasn’t working. None of the phones in the house were. It’s VOIP, so I rebooted the modem. The phones came back. Then they went out again. Talk about stress. So, as a backup, I took my notes and everything I needed for the afternoon interview to work with me, in case I needed to use that as a fallback. I had everything set up to make sure I had no sound card conflicts. It took a while, but it was time well spent.

In the early afternoon, I got a text message saying I was about to get a phone call from my interview subject for tomorrow. The subject’s personal assistant said it was a case of now-or-never because of the subject’s schedule. I had my notes. I had my gadgets. All I had to do was push a button and away we went. I didn’t even have time to be nervous. Okay, I was nervous for a few seconds, but then I didn’t have time any more to be nervous. We were off and running. If the home phone hadn’t acted flaky, I wouldn’t have been nearly as ready for the interview and the panic level would have been exponentially greater. My wife tells me I’m blessed. I can’t argue. The material from this interview is gold. Gold, I say!

My Storytellers Unplugged essay tomorrow is more of a bloggy ramble. I was coming up blank for a topic, so I wrote about what was going on with me and it ended up connecting to some memories. The first line is, “I once put a Nobel Laureate to sleep.” But not in the veterinarian sense.

Another fine episode of Justified this week. Ava Crowder with a shotgun is a fearsome sight. And Boyd had the audience in the palm of his hand when he interrupted the debate. I was ready to vote for the new sheriff. The bit about the three women robbers was lightly lifted from Raylan. Most of the details were different, but you could tell they came from the same source. The teaser for next week looked great, with Quarles promising Raylan he was going to kill him on the street someday and Raylan shooting into the ceiling (maybe even into his own apartment?) saying, “Why wait?”

Unexpected happenings on Survivor, too. Why does it always happen that one team gets all the strong players when they shuffle the tribes? Moving them to separate beaches kind of negates the whole “one world” concept. I wonder if they did that because of the immunity idol swap last week, which could never have happened unless the two tribes were close to each other. I got a kick out of Tarzan, with his big vocabulary but short memory. It would have been funny for him to get to the voting station and then totally blank on whose name he was going to write.

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Loose threads

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Bev Vincent

That’s pretty much what it looked like out my office window all weekend, starting Friday evening. Except it was mild enough—and my window is recessed enough— that I was able to have it open most of the time. Which was good. I love the sound of rain when I’m working. And I worked a lot this weekend. I finally feel like I have the manuscript under control. That’s not to say that I don’t have a ton of work left to do on it. But I feel like I have a handle on it, finally.

Several weeks ago I spent an hour with Lou Sytsma and Karen Lindsay discussing the Bag of Bones miniseries. The hour-long podcast of that discussion is now available. We had a blast recording it.

We reached the end of the third season of The Sopranos this weekend. Still enjoying it, but it seemed like they dropped some fairly big threads. Maybe they’ll come back to them. I don’t know—I haven’t done any web searches in case I stumble upon something I don’t want to know about the series. The most prominent one was the Russian guy that Paulie throttled with the barbell. They took his body out into the South Jersey woods in the snow only to discover he wasn’t dead. The guy conked him and Chris and took off, was apparently shot but his body was never found. And Paulie’s car was stolen. Bad news for Italian-Russian relationships if he gets back home. But he was never mentioned again in Season 3.

And then there was the nutsy girlfriend Gloria, played by Annabella Sciorra. I have to say, after watching her on Law & Order, she was a revelation. She had some demanding emotional scenes that could have been campy, but she nailed them. Crying almost to the point of hyperventilation and making it seem real. And then there’s the bit where she gets mad and throws things. That trope always seems artificial. Big wind-up. Dramatic smashes. Gloria turned into a little tornado for about five seconds and did a lot of damage in a small area, and it seemed totally credible. As did her full body shakes when the guy took her out on a test drive and then pulled a gun and warned her off. Then, at the end of that episode, the scene focuses on that same guy getting into his car later and driving off. I kept waiting for her to pop up in the back seat or something, but nothing happened. Odd.

Some surprising turns of event on Once Upon a Time this week. A very original reimagining of the Little Red Riding Hood story. I had several theories about who the wolf would be, but none of them included the truth. Whoa. And then the fingerprints in the box Ruby found by the river. Double whoa.

I’m ready for Rachel to quit or get eliminated on The Amazing Race. She’s such a crybaby and a manipulative one at that. I’m not sure if Brandon deserves a medal for being with her, or if he needs his head examined.

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The other bullet drops

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Bev Vincent

Winter skipped us this year. We had some early cold weather in November, and it has dipped down into the thirties and forties on a couple of occasions, but for the most part it has been quite temperate. This week is mostly in the seventies during the daytime and the fifties and sixties at night. Good for the budget: we haven’t had to run either the heat or the A/C much for the past few months.

Elton John was one of the first rock musicians to catch my attention. I bought everything he released as it was released. I’ve seen him in concert at least a half dozen times in three different countries. Eventually I sort of burned out on him. I still like the albums he’s releasing, but I don’t listen to his older albums much any more. This week, I was listening to the new Elliott Brood album, Days Into Years, on iTunes as I worked in the morning. A fine album. I’m a big fan of their earlier Ambassador album. Then iTunes moved on and suddenly I was in Elton John territory. Blue Moves. Ah, there was a fine album. I remember buying it in the mall in Campbellton when it came out. I let it keep going. Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only the Piano Player. Man, I got a kick out of Elderberry Wine. And going: Then the demo version of Aida (which comes next because it’s called Elaborate Lives). Then the Elton John album. Wow. I think I’m just going to let it keep on going as I work on this book deadline. It’s an odd way to listen to a discography: Alphabetically by album title.

I don’t often pitch products, but when I like one, I don’t mind mentioning it. Especially when it’s free. I find the Twitterific app to be vastly superior to the web interface for Twitter. For most things like that (e.g. Facebook), I use the web browser on my iDevice. However, I like the way Twitterific is laid out and how it integrates all the various kinds of entries (retweets, mentions, direct messages) in the timeline, using color to differentiate among them.

It’s been a slow week for TV, which is good. A couple of episodes of Alcatraz on Monday night. The show is falling into something of a rut, in my opinion. We found out what the warden had hidden in his double-locked room in the bowels of the prison and it was kind of meh. Doc got the stuffing beaten out of him a couple of times and took it like a comic store employee. No, he actually took it like a guy who was used to getting beaten badly by homicidal maniacs. I read a rumor that it was on the verge of cancellation after its poor showing on Monday night, getting beaten by NBC of all things. Who watches NBC?

On the other hand, Justified just keeps on getting better. The “dropped bullet” scene a couple of episodes back was fantastic, and it paid off doubly in this week’s show. First, Raylan got to tell the story, and it was well received by the cops who were questioning him. “Deputy, that might be the coolest thing I’ve ever laid ears on.” Raylan spoiled it a little by saying he heard the dialog on an episode of the Johnny Carson Show, but still. And the bullet itself was used as evidence against Raylan. Poor Gary. Poor actor playing Gary. We have good news: we want you back for a couple of episodes. The bad news: well…

The show did a great job of building up tension. Quarles’ machinations came at him from a few different directions all at once, like one of those horror movies with the walls that keep closing in. Raylan managed to slip out from under all of that a little too easily, but it was fun to watch, especially when he realized the potential significance of the attempted break-in of his car.

I have to wonder how many times Sammy has had someone stick a gun in his face, because he seems pretty used to it, quite frankly. Last week it was Raylan and this week Quarles. You have to think that Wynn Duffy is reconsidering a) his hair stylist and b) signing up aboard the S.S. Quarles.

Here’s my prediction: Quarles’ gun IS going to jam when he uses it against Raylan. First they showed him oiling it up so it won’t jam, and then Sammy makes a point of asking him if it ever has.

Tonight on Survivor: Apparently something awesome during tribal council. A game changer.

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