Few things will wake you up as quickly in the morning as sitting down at your computer, which you’ve left on overnight, to find only a black screen. All the lights are on, but nobody’s home. I’m not sure what kind of seizure it had, but it rebooted okay. I usually leave it on so I don’t have to wait for it to start up. My morning writing time is precious and limited.
Then, when I went to grab the hyperlink for my Storytellers Unplugged essay, which I wrote a few days ago and posted on the site to appear this morning, it wasn’t there. Not the hyperlink—the essay. I take pride in the fact that I have never once in the seven years since Storytellers Unplugged started have I missed my monthly slot. I may have reposted an old essay a couple of times, but I’ve never produced dead air. So I promptly sat down and rewrote the blasted thing. When I went back to look a few minutes later. The other one had reappeared. Blast and double blast. But, I have to admit, the original was better than the rewrite, which I dashed off in 10 minutes. It’s about digital piracy: Prepare to be boarded.
I’ve been busier than a one-armed paper hanger, as my wife likes to say. The next six weeks will be pretty intense. Thank god it’s a leap year—I’m going to need that extra day. I have three more phone interviews lined up in the coming weeks, plus a call slated with a publisher for whom I doing some editing work.
I have been keeping up with TV shows when I can, but often during odd hours and rarely when the show is airing live. Fringe is getting really interesting, with the mystery of the overlapping realities. The fact that Olivia from Peter’s old timeline seems to be merging with the one in his current location is mystifying. Does it have something to do with the experiments Nina is performing on her? I got a kick out of NCIS, with it’s story about neighborhood watch people who dress up as superheros. Tony’s ex-fiancee was an interesting addition, but Vance’s comment about her to Gibbs was the best: “Please tell me you weren’t married to her.”
Castle has done the terrorist threat story before, a fact the characters allude to when they end up locked in a trunk together. Again. But Jennifer Beals is a welcome addition to the mix, especially when it’s revealed that she was Castle’s first character model. It’s hard to believe she’s almost as old as I am. She wears it well.
I hope the writers of House got the cancellation news early enough to bring this thing to a reasonable ending. The stuff with Chase over the past couple of weeks has been good material, and House himself is revealing more of his true nature, as in the scene when he yells at Chase last week. Elizabeth Schue looks like a promising addition to CSI. As a blood spatter expert, she’s cuter than Dexter and less likely to leave dismembered bodies lying around. We think. Except for, perhaps, DB, with whom she has a history. She even knows his rather unlikely first name, Diebenkorn, which is also the last name of an American abstract expressionist painter.
Justified was interesting this week because they took something from Elmore Leonard and changed it around significantly. The scam with Dewey and the supposed kidney ransom was a nice twist. In Raylan, a doctor really is stealing kidneys and holding them for ransom. The idea that you make someone think they’ve done this is cooler. The scene with Raylan in the bathtub at the end is straight out of the novel, though. One ticking bomb this season is the secret up-the-sleeve gun Quarles has. He could bring it out during any tense scene, which ups the ante. Eventually, you know he’s going to…but when?
Survivor: One World. I’m not sure. I didn’t see anyone in the first episode who stood out for me as being particularly likable with the sole exception of the poor woman who broke her wrist. Having the two tribes at the same camp was interesting. Dividing them by gender, not so much. The women look ready to self destruct already, though the whole Prometheus expedition was pretty savvy. It’s hard to imagine how they couldn’t get caught in the middle of the night with all those camera operators following in tow.
Morena Baccarin is always fun to watch, as on this week’s Mentalist. Some day I’d like to see her stretch out a bit and play something other than a completely in control, self assured, powerful woman. Of course it was no big surprise that she would try to escape. However, the double attempt at the end was a surprise, though I had an inkling that maybe her federal guard was up to something. Not the cop that took her away. And it was pretty obvious that Joe Spano was the killer because his part was too small earlier in the episode. Famous Actor Syndrome.
I’m still watching Alcatraz. Tricking the bomber at the end of last week’s episode was a tad too facile, but I liked the interaction between Doc and the coroner with the Sandman shirt, and the way the guy rolled a landmine at Sarah, and Hauser getting stuck for hours with his foot on a mine. I also checked out the first episode of the new season of The Walking Dead, but was a tad underwhelmed. I hear there will be more zombies in the next couple of episodes.
I haven’t heard anyone raving about The River, so I don’t feel bad that I gave it up.
Logged onto the local newspaper when I got up this morning. The current weather said “mist.” Loudest damned mist I’ve ever heard. We got a good soaking. Puddles in the yard, ditch nearly full to overflowing. Mist, indeed.
Living in interesting times. In a good way. Lots of great stuff happening in 2012. So long as the world doesn’t end, that is.
Another busy, busy weekend. They’re all going to be that way until the end of March. Then life will return to something approaching normal, I guess. However, it looks like I’m up for a trip to Japan in April, so that will disrupt things, too. Not sure exactly when, but it’s shaping up to be a lively year.
I’m not quite sure what it means if the groundhog predicts 6 more weeks of winter when we haven’t really had any to speak of thus far. It’s been over 70° and flirting with 80 for the past several days, and for the foreseeable future, too. We’re also getting a decent amount of rain, which is good. Heavy at times, though not always. We’re actually a couple of inches ahead for the year.
My wife called me the other morning on her way to work to say that she’d heard there was a tornado warning (not a watch, which is less urgent) for our county. About 10 minutes later, I got an automated phone call from the Emergency Weather System, a red alert warning about possible tornadoes. So I moved anything that wasn’t bolted down in the back yard to prevent flying debris.
We supposedly have an impressive rainstorm heading our way, one that could produce 1-5″ of precipitation in the next 24 hours. We call that showers. We call that welcome, in fact. Despite the rain that we’ve had in the past month, we’re still in a drought, so the more the merrier.
I received my contributor copies of Cemetery Dance #65 in the mail last night. It’s been a while.
Got a little behind schedule this month, so my Storytellers Unplugged essay is a revised rerun: 
Until last night, I’d never seen a single episode of The Sopranos. Last fall I bought the Season 1 DVD set and we just got around to sampling it now. We watched the first two episodes. Interesting. Tony’s mother is a real piece of work. “He was a saint,” she says about his deceased father, though the reality was that he was something less than that. The notion of having him suffer from anxiety attacks requiring counseling is an interesting one. Has Lorraine Bracco always been such a terrible actor? I’ve been peripherally aware of her for years. She plays Jane’s mother on Rizzoli and Isles and she’s dreadful. Fortunately, her part on The Sopranos doesn’t require a lot of range from her, so she manages to stumble through, but there was one point in the first episode where it almost seemed like she’d forgotten the end of her line. The delivery was wretched. I have no doubt that we’ll go through the first season, but whether we decide to go on from there remains to be seen.