Scarlet herrings

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Bev Vincent

I came up with the theme for my next Storytellers Unplugged essay yesterday and wrote the first few paragraphs of it this morning. It’s not due to be posted until a week from tomorrow, but I like to get these done in advance so I don’t end up scrambling at the last minute.

There’s a nice article in the Martha Vinyards Times about one of the editors of and contributors to Thin Ice. It’s about her upcoming signing, but the piece also contains a nice overview of the anthology, and says some kind things about my story, “The Bank Job.” By the way Level Best Books is offering free domestic shipping on the anthology until Monday, December 13.

Exciting news: a new Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum) book in the future, although I’m not sure if it will be available until 2011 or 2012. It’s called The Cemetery of Prague and it’s already out in Italian. I can’t wait.

A genuine blindside on Survivor last night. Benry was so unprepared to be evicted that he left much of his stuff at camp instead of packing for tribal. As an aside, Benry can’t be his real name, can it? It always makes me think of one of those media mash-ups, like Brangelina. I wonder what the record for weight loss is. He lost 35 lbs, or about a pound a day. Some of the other Ponderosa evictees have regained much of their lost weight. I think it was Alina who said she now weighs more than when she arrived in Nicaragua. I was amazed by how spineless Sash became without Brenda around to prop him up. His nervous yammering made him seem untrustworthy. Chase got away unscathed from his dunderheaded decision not to take Sash on his reward trip.

Clarice Starling joined Criminal Minds last night. Sort of. I hear that Seaver is going to be around for at least a few episodes. She’s the FBI cadet whose father happens to be a serial killer. She was carted off to New Mexico this week (we knew it was New Mexico because they showed us a scorpion during the opening) to see if she could identify signs of the family of a murderer in a gated, vanilla community. They pushed the red herrings so hard they were scarlet. First there was the skeezy detective with the muttonchop sideburns. Then there was the other cop who liked to yell at potential suspects during questioning. So obvious they couldn’t possibly be the killer. So, that left the one character who was played by an actor I recognized from other programs. By default, it had to be him. Too bad crime solving wasn’t that easy in real life!

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Canadian air is coming

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Bev Vincent

According to the teaser on the TV monitor at the gym today, Canadian Air is coming. Don’t they know that airline was bought out by Air Canada nearly a decade ago? I guess they’re alluding to the fact that it’s going back down to freezing temperatures tonight. Blame Canada. Right.

Speaking of Canada, there were some freaky high tides along the East Coast this week. Here’s a YouTube video of the waves crashing up against Inch Arran Park in Dalhousie, New Brunswick. The Bay of Chaleur doesn’t get riled up like this very often. Listening to the audio on this clip is a little like being back home. The guy’s accent is so familiar to me. More pronounced than mine, I think, but then again I don’t have an accent.

Stephen King is doing a live chat on UStream this evening. Check the link for the local time.

Got another story into circulation this morning. It’s one that had been accepted by a magazine that underwent a shift in model to anthologies that were never published. I’d almost forgotten about the story, but it’s a cool one. Only 1000 words, but every one counts.

The Eureka Christmas special was cute. They managed to work a normal Eureka-like science catastrophe into a seasonal story, including a return by Matt Frewer with his holographic reindeer.

Men of a Certain Age is back for a limited engagement, too. I’m pretty much exactly the same age as the three characters are supposed to be (Ray Romano’s Joe said he’d be turning 50 in a few months), even though two of the three actors are well into their 50s. Only Andre Braugher isn’t — he’s a year younger than I am. I don’t have any of the issues these guys have, either. Much was made of Joe having to wear reading glasses. Hell, I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 16, although the addition of a reading component to them is something new in my forties. I don’t have Peter Pan syndrome (like Bakula’s Terry), I’m not divorced like Joe, and I’m not stuck in a job I don’t like or trying to live up to my father’s high expectations like Braugher’s Owen.

Terry is on a clock, perhaps for the first time in his life (he even responds to an alarm going off during sex). He’s trying hard to conform (wearing a suit, although he bikes to work) and just as he’s about to flake out again, Owen’s father gives him a pep talk that might connect.

Joe’s trying to make it to the senior golf circuit, and also learning that it’s okay to dabble with interesting women with whom there are no long-term prospects. He needs to get rid of that bookie friend, though. That can’t end well.

A low-key first episode. The fastest thing about it was Owen’s little macho outburst when the guy tore off from the red light. Man, was that an ugly green car he was driving, though? Favorite line of the episode was Owen responding to Joe’s angst over being flirted with by a single mom. “It’s probably all in your head, although there’s probably not enough room with all that other crazy shit going on up there.”

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Today’s evidence

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Bev Vincent

This morning I found a new market for the story that was rejected yesterday and then wrote a brand new 250-word flash fiction story for the CBC Literary Awards flash fiction contest. They provide a prompt of a few words for the beginning and a couple for the end and writers have to fill in the rest. I always enjoy little exercises like that, and this month’s prompt was appealing, starting as it did with a malevolently grinning snowman.

Received my six-month royalty statement from Penguin for The Road to the Dark Tower yesterday. Still moving copies six years after publication. Could earn out before I retire at this rate! Maybe the film release will breathe new life into it in 2013.

Eureka has a one-off Christmas special tonight. I’d almost forgotten about it. Everything else is reruns. Time to catch up on Men of a Certain Age, I guess.

The return of The Closer was entertaining. Once again Brenda got the bad guy to implicate himself through trickery. I have to wonder how many of those tricks there can possibly be before they run out. I’m glad they seem to be softening Raydor’s character a little. She was too much of an evil witch when introduced. Their con game on the reluctant witness was funny. Sanchez in a “blue hoodie.”

Nathan Fillion was going to live-Tweet last night’s episode of Castle, but apparently he fell asleep before it came on. The glamorous life of a successful actor. At least, I hope he didn’t fall asleep during the show. Nah—it was a pretty good one. Can’t imagine what his tweet might have been when Beckett surprised Castle by unfastening another button before they went into the bar, as he suggested.

It was good to see him doing some writerly things again—like, you know, actually writing. And taking notes when they were interviewing the former mobster. “This guy is gold.” I was about half a step a head of them before Castle found the hidden door. I figured the recently discovered basement must have held more than the new owner let on. Got a big kick out of the kid who mixed the old hootch with root beer. And at Beckett dousing Castle’s flame when he tried to jury rig a torch. “Not so fast, Indy,” she said, whipping out a flashlight instead.

The “drunkest murder suspect this year (including St. Patrick’s Day)” was a hoot, and the ending was over the top but so much fun, with Castle getting a bottle of the much-coveted booze and inviting the gang to head over to The Haunt to share it. It just happened to be nine o’clock on a Saturday, apparently (or 9:15, rather), which led him to start a sing-along of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” The men were all up for it, but it caught Beckett by surprise when they turned to her. One of the guys was a decent singer.

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Hop a Freighter

Posted on December 6, 2010 by Bev Vincent

One thing I’ve discovered in the writing life: if you query a market about a long overdue submission, chances are you won’t get good news in return. The story in question was submitted to a specific issue of a magazine not due to be released until Spring 2011, so I was patient, thinking they wouldn’t necessarily make final decisions until late this year. But when I pinged them today I found out that they weren’t going to take my story. However, they had some encouraging words about it—it just wasn’t a fit with the other stories in this themed issue.

The folks involved with Level Best Books and the Al Blanchard Award sent out a stream of press releases this week about the Thin Ice anthology and the award. At least one made it to a receptive ear: The Woodlands author wins prize for crime story, with accompanying photo.

Two out of the final three teams in The Amazing Race are all female. In fact, five of the remaining six contestants are. There’s never been an all-female winning team. That might change next week. Team Tattoo were never in it during the final leg. Their six hour penalty made them miss the best flight, and they were nine hours behind the others when they got to Korea.

Down to the wire on Dexter and everything’s starting to go sideways. Dexter got on the wrong scent when he thought it was Quinn who was on his trail. That false trail might be Quinn’s undoing yet.  Liddy was his friend, Deb has seen them together. The signout log for the electronics is under Quinn’s signature and Liddy’s blood ended up on Quinn’s shoe. That’s not going to look very good for him. Poor guy. Just when he found the guts to man up with Deb and tell her she was just like another guy. “You don’t play games where I have to figure out what it is you’re thinking. You just say it. Usually with a lot of really filthy words that I’ve never heard before.”

Idle musing: When does Dexter ever find time to work?

And then there’s Deb, who begrudgingly admires the supposed vigilante and her loving, supportive friend. It takes devotion to kill someone together, she says. That’s some pretty serious shit. What word would you use to describe that but love? I’m willing to bet that Deb discovers Dexter’s secret next week. That would make for an interesting story next year, and the show was just renewed for season six.

Lumen apologizes to Dexter for putting him in the position of having to lie to Deb. (Not the first time he’s had to do that, he says.) He apologizes for putting her in danger. (She’s had worse, she says.) When they go shopping, he doesn’t buy her jewelry, he buys her a nifty little pocket knife. They hang off each other while they use toy soldiers to plot out their next murder. Surely it’s love.

Funniest scene of the show: Liddy telling Dexter’s nanny to go ahead and get a magician for Harrison’s birthday party. Jordan is unraveling, blowing a gasket. For the first time he has to get his hands dirty. And bloody. “Is this the only kind of love I’ll ever find?” Dexter wonders as he tracks the drops. “The kind that ends in blood?”

The six-part run of The Walking Dead is history, and we have to wait until this time next year for its continuation. We start with a flashback showing that a hospital is a bad place to be when the zombie infection starts and end with a live scene showing that the CDC is a bad place to be when the clock runs to zero and the power goes off. No zombie-related deaths, but one actress quit her job by deciding to stay behind when “facility-wide decontamination” starts.

What do we think the doctor whispered to Rick? How about the possibility that Rick’s wife is pregnant? The day will come when Rick won’t be so grateful to the doctor for figuring that out, if that’s the case, although it took a long time to convey that message if that’s all it was.

I liked the computer-generated demonstration of the death and zombie resurrection. I also got a kick out of Rick’s kid’s reaction to sipping wine. My daughter did the exact same thing back in the day. Ewwwww. And the things men leave in their pockets when they throw their pants in the laundry basket. Were did I put my hand grenade? I do have one story logic question, though. If they’re so short on gasoline, why are they driving five vehicles?

My favorite bit, though, was when Rick tells his wife they don’t have to be afraid any more. They’re safe here, he says. This just minutes after Shane attacked her. We’ve seen the enemy and he is us. Shit, the survivors can’t even listen to the doc’s request to go easy on the hot water. Except for Daryl. I think he went very easy on the hot water…by avoiding the shower all together.

Ominous words: this is our extinction event. This is what takes us down. It will be interesting to see how this picks up next fall. Some people are a little miffed by how the series is diverging from the graphic novel but not me. I’ve never read the graphic novel.

The Closer is back. That was one nasty fight Lt. Flynn got into at the beginning of the episode. Guy brought a knife to a gun fight, fortunately. Chief Pope to Brenda: Ah, good. Proceed with your outrage.

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I failed the test, didn’t I?

Posted on December 5, 2010 by Bev Vincent

It’s been a productive writing week. I submitted one story last weekend, a substantial rewrite of an existing manuscript. Then I wrote and revised and submitted another story during the week. Finally, today I did a rewrite of a third story and submitted it to a new market.

After I got the new story off yesterday, I put up the outdoor Christmas lights. I insist on waiting until December to do this, regardless what many neighbors do. It was unseasonably warm, so I was in shorts when I put them up, which seemed unnatural. However, it was an easy task because last year my wife talked me into installing permanent hooks instead of using the staple gun. I’ve maimed more than a few strings of lights over the years thanks to errant staples.

Today’s accompanying photo (Britain’s youngest undertaker) was inspired by a line from this week’s Burn Notice. Michael and his brother are dressing up as part of a sting operation when Maddie walks in, demanding to know what they’re up to. “I have to help some friends,” Nate says. “And you have to dress like a funeral director?” his mother responds.

A few projects I was involved with this year were nominated for a Black Quill Award. When the Night Comes Down, edited by Bill Breedlove was nominated in the Best Dark Genre category. That’s the book that contains four of my stories. In the same category, Dead Set, which has one of my stories. Thrillers: 100 Must Reads is nominated in the Best Dark Genre Book of Non-fiction category, and the book trailer for Specters in Coal Dust is nominated, too. The awards have a reader’s choice aspect, so go ahead and cast your votes here!

I hear that Fringe is moving to Fridays when it returns in the new year. That’s a time slot that did well for The X-Files. Doesn’t matter much to me because I never watch the show live. It’s up against CSI.

This week’s episode was terrific, and finally the two Olivias are back where they belong. The same can’t exactly be said for Broyles, unfortunately. That was one major needle that Faux-livia gave to Peter to paralyze himself after her cover was blown. When Broyles learns that Peter has been literally sleeping with the enemy, Walter tries to ease the tension with this revelation: “In the 1970s, I innocently wandered into the wrong home and it was three days before I realized my mistake. And, unlike Olivia, the woman with whom I was sharing a bed didn’t look like my wife at all.” Walter’s Palinesque contribution to the English language came when he claimed that Peter was tricked by Faux-livia and “fell straight into her vagenda.” His food passion provided the ultimate clue that allowed Astrid and Peter to track Faux-livia: the address on the box of pastries she brought Walter. When they arrive in the neighborhood to follow up, Walter volunteers to start with the pastry shop, of course.

Differences between the alt-world and ours: As we knew before, JFK wasn’t assassinated. There’s a picture of him with grey hair on Walternate’s desk. The train station in Newark is called Springsteen Station. Central Park appears tropical. The Roy Orbison song “Anything You Want, You Got it” is a ballad. The East River suffered a vortex twenty years ago that killed 165 people.

The guy who wants new legs has been gate keeper to the quantum entanglement telegraph. I want one. Looks like the others finally kept their promise to him when he delivered the missing part of the Walternate machine.

When they converge on the train station, Walter says “no gun for me” to which Broyles responds “Good idea.” I had a suspicion that the woman hostage was a mercury dude, an alt-world spy who, we learn, can never return home. This guy liked his current face. “I seem to be a big hit with the ladies.” There’s only one woman Peter wants to be a hit with, and she’s back now. I wonder how long it will take for them to really kiss again…for the first time. I do wonder a bit who the Peter was who visited Olivia over there. He had no knowledge of this projection, which leads me to believe it was completely a product of Olivia’s psyche.

We watched Knight and Day last night, a light action romantic comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise. I see Rotten Tomatoes is split right down the middle on it. The story has absolutely no believability quotient whatsoever. It has so many holes and unexplained questions that it can’t possibly hold water, and yet it’s fun. There’s a MacGuffin called the Zephyr that everyone wants. Cruise and Diaz carry the audience along, willingly or otherwise. They speak fast, and ignore the impossibilities they’re expecting us to believe, so we go for the ride with them. The worst of the CGI was the bull run, but the rest of it was okay. We laughed. We learned that Cruise’s character’s real name was Knight, but where did the Day part of the title come from? Shannon from Lost has a bit part of Diaz’s younger sister.

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Fore!

Posted on December 2, 2010 by Bev Vincent

I finished the first revision round on the WiP, reducing it from 4400 words to 4000 in the progress, which is pretty much par for the course. I tend to overwrite by about 10% in the first draft. Another day or so of molding and reshaping and off it goes to the editor.

I hate it when I get really good news, but it comes with a request not to blog or tweet about it for the time being. Well, the bit about “blogging or tweeting about it” is fairly recent. Used to be they said “don’t talk about it.” Talking is so passé.

I got a CARE package last night. What did it contain? Timbits. Just yesterday morning they were in a Tom Hortons in Halifax and by supper time they were in my eager hands. For those who don’t know, Timbits are doughnut holes. Or, rather, what is removed from the doughnut to make a hole. Yummy.

I had my second acupuncture experience today. This time she hooked up four of the needles in my lower back to a TENS unit to provide electrical stimulation, too. That was great.

The snake guy was back at it on Survivor last night. First new shot of the episode: a snake. And then two shots after that, another snake. At least there was a very cool clip of a preying mantis eating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.

Do you think Jeff Probst knew there was talk around camp that people were considering quitting? He sure banged that theme home during the Gulliver competition. “Nobody’s giving up,” he said, over and over again. He seems more determined to press teams to perform in the middle of competitions. I don’t remember him doing that so much in the past.

I used to think it was lame when they had movie night on Big Brother, but having it on Survivor was even worse. It always seems like the contestants are primed to say good things about the show, although I think I heard one of them mutter about how fat Jack Black is. If it was supposed to be a promo for the film, though, it had the opposite effect on me. A horde of Lilliputians couldn’t drag me to see it.

NaOnka should meet Sarah Palin. They’re both so good and coming up with new words that are almost but not quite what they mean to say. This week it was “smuffed,” which sounds sorta naughty. Her torch was smuffed out. I was hoping she or Kelly would tell Jeff they thought their torches should be thrown in the fire. It really sucks that those two end up on the jury, but apparently the producers were sticking to precedent.

Things got interesting when the two self-evictees got to Ponderosa. For the first full day, Alina wouldn’t have anything to do with them, hiding out in her cabin. Brenda was really good with them, and her example helped Marty figure out how to welcome them as well. I think she’s a pretty smart cookie, even if it sort of backfired on her in the game. This isn’t the game any more, Brenda reasoned. We’re meeting them in the real world now.

When SVU started this week with a scene in Olivia’s apartment with her foster child, I thought: this is getting old. Then I laughed when Elliot seemed to mirror my thoughts. “How long is this going to go on?” No matter how much they flaunt police procedure, no matter how many times they rub Cragen’s authority in the dirt, they always seem to get away with it unpunished. I was hoping it was Cragen who had somehow deep-sixed Olivia’s parental rights. Question: do people routinely get shot on the steps of, on the sidewalk near or in the parking garage of the courthouse in New York? Cause it seems that way based on TV shows. Most dangerous place in the city.

Law & Order: Los Angeles riffed on the Tiger Wood sex addiction debacle. The Tiger stand-in was a guy who had to pay his wife $1 million every time she caught him cheating—and she caught him a lot. The guy’s favorite thing to do was to pay three women to spend the night with him, which led to Skeet Ulrich’s character asking him, “What is it with you and foursomes. Is it a golf thing?” His partner, upon hearing that a stalker was loitering outside a hotel and texting the object of her desires for hours, said, “How did people work out their crap before cell phones?”

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Luck of the Irish

Posted on December 1, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Finished the first draft of the WIP last night. Came in at about 4400 words and 14 pages. Did some extensive revision to the first five pages this morning, but didn’t cut more than a hundred words or so. Did get it down to 13 pages. I expect this first pass will mostly address organization, logic, continuity and flow. Then it will be time for a fine tuning job on the writing and any subtext that decides to show its face along the way. I like the idea I came up with for the last sentence, but I’m not terribly fond of the way it’s expressed at the moment. It needs to have more punch.

A dramatic ending to the third season of Sons of Anarchy. It started out with some tender together moments for the SAMCRO families, and a crazy moment for Stahl, lounging in bed and laughing about the lover she murdered last week to cover her ass. That’s one major breakfast buffet they put together. No wonder Unser (bad pun of the episode, Tig calling him Chemo Sabe) was eager to attend. Of course, we know that dreamy scenes like this presage terrible things ahead, which is one reason I was so jittery throughout much of the episode. I expected…the unexpected. All the time.

Poor Chucky has been trying to show “something important” to anyone he could corner for weeks, and everyone kept blowing him off. They shoulda listened sooner. Things might have gone differently with the whole Salazar ransom thing. Tig’s reaction to the news that they were sitting on $5 million in counterfeit money was hilarious, offering to lend him his hand so he could do what caused him his severe shortage of fingers in the first place.

When they bought Jimmy O from the Russians, I kept expecting the deal to go south in the worst possible way. The phone calls Victor kept getting during the transaction made me even more nervous, but they had to wait for him to figure out how he’d been duped. “Looks like Victor did a little accounting.”

I lost count. Did they double-cross, triple-cross or quadruple-cross Stahl? In the parlance of Sawyer from Lost, this was one long con. It’s not exactly clear when Jax brought everyone up to speed, but it must have been a while ago. They totally sold the moment in the garage yard when Stahl sold Jax out. I mused to myself that that was going to be one of the longest, most uncomfortable rides in the back of a van ever, with Jax on one side and his former buddies on the other side, all glaring at him. The ultimate “are we there yet?” Then came the ultimate switcheroo. Piney and Chibs and Kozik driving up in the big yellow bus. I got a kick out of Unser trying to give Stahl a hit off his joint. “You really should have some.” He knew what was about to happen to her.

But first, Jimmy O got his due. I would assume from the first slashes that Jimmy was responsible for the scars on Chibs’ face. He hung tough at the end (“Take care of our girls”) but man that looked like a painful way to go. Dig in the knives and then twist them. Owie. The luck of the Irish he was so smug about earlier ran its course.

Odd detail: I was intrigued by Unser’s shirt when he took off his badge. It had holes for the pin to go through instead of making new holes in the fabric every time he put it on. Makes sense—I’ve just never seen that before. I thought he was resigning his position, and maybe he was, but more than that, I think he was making a clear distinction to himself that he was acting as Unser, not as the sheriff of Charming. He gets some great “dry” witty lines, like when he told Kozik to hit him on the left side of the face. “I had bridge work done on the right.”

And then there was Opie, who finally got his revenge for what happened to Donna. Walker was very good in her final scenes, pleading for mercy. We all know that she was merciless to others, so it was no surprise that the newly engaged Opie didn’t offer any. “This is what she felt,” he says before putting three in the back of her head. A very definite end to that chapter in his life—not to mention Stahl’s.

And we get to see what Maureen was up to when she put those letters in the suitcase before SAMCRO left Ireland. The first one Tara choses has Jax’s father predicting his own death at the hands of his wife and best friend. The guys are off for a short hiatus in prison, but things will probably be very different around Charming when they get back out. Maybe Unser will join up and get patched in.

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Another damned tree

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Another one of those epiphany mornings when all of a sudden I saw the ending of a story that I’ve been having a bit of a struggle with. Can’t remember if I was in the shower or doing my calisthenics, but it was one of those two places where my mind free associates and I get some of my best flashes of insight into works in progress.

There was one glaring glitch in this week’s The Walking Dead. The Winnebago breaks down after they leave the quarry. Shane and another guy go off in the direction of a building that they hope is a garage while the others figure out what to do about Jim. They discuss Jim’s decision—and Shane’s in on the discussion. They handle Jim, then they all drive off, including Dale’s Winnebago. I guess they found what they needed to fix it, but they skipped that part. It was important enough for them to show it break down, but not enough for the repair part?

Also, I would have felt the immediacy of their decision to leave more if they’d said up front that they didn’t have much fuel. I found myself thinking: it’s only a hundred miles. If they get to the CDC and find nothing, they can always turn around and come back. It wasn’t until they were pleading with the hypothetical people inside the building that they spelled out their plight, which came too late, in my opinion.

There was a wonderful little understated moment when one family decided to go off on their own to Birmingham. One daughter went over and hugged another girl of about the same age and, a moment later, she handed the girl a doll. The other girl (Dead Ed’s daughter) gave a very genuine reaction to this act. Almost a double-take but a look of shocked amazement that impressed me for such a young actress.

I wasn’t sure why they kept cutting to Darryl (and my other brother Darryl) during that departure scene, though. I kept expecting him to do or say something, but he didn’t and his facial expression was unrevealing. Mild disgust, perhaps, but not worthy of all those cuts.

My favorite cut came early on in the episode, when they were reassuring Andrea that the would “be as careful with your sister (Amy) as we can.” CUT TO: Daryl driving a pick-ax through the head of a disabled zombie. Did you think that Ed’s wife took a bit too much delight in delivering the coup-de-grace to her late, lamented, wife-beating hubby? They don’t seem to be as concerned about getting zombie blood on themselves as they did a while back.

The romantic triangle took an interesting twist tonight when Shane briefly contemplated gunning down his former best friend. Rick’s wife took Shane to task for continuing to bring up her marital status. Dale might have interrupted Shane at the perfect moment, and there’s little doubt that Dale saw exactly what was happening. Dale also had his moment when he was the only one who could break through to Andrea, which he did by sympathizing with her rather than trying to force her into cooperating.

Jim’s story was tragic. They left him to a fate worse than death, knowing that he’s going to die and come back as a zombie, a fate that he had premonitions of early in the episode. I found it interesting that when Amy came around, she did so by first breathing. Has other zombie literature addressed the question of whether or not zombies respire? If they do, what happens if you take a lung out instead of the head? Anyhow, I guess we have a better idea know of roughly how long it takes for a deceased person to “revive.”

Did anyone flash on Desmond from Lost in the hatch when we were introduced to CDC guy, plugging away at the computer. He even looked a little like Desmond’s old hatch buddy. “I think tomorrow I’m going to blow my brains out. I haven’t decided yet.” And then along comes the cavalry to save his sorry, drunken ass, but he didn’t seem delighted to see them. I wonder what that was about. A Close Encounters of the Third Kind moment when the gate went up and the stragglers were bathed in light.

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Give me a number. Thirteen.

Posted on November 29, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Something you don’t ever want to hear a doctor say: “I’m just going to remove the top few layers of cells.” Not when the doctor is an optometrist and it’s a few layers of cells from the surface of your eye she’s talking about. I had something in my eye all weekend and nothing I did would get rid of it, so I went to the optometrist today. She stained my eyeball yellow and looked at it from every which way, found the place where something might have been and then told me her plan. I’m not as sensitive about my eyes as I once was—I can now actually administer eye drops whereas that used to be an impossibility, but I’m still squeamish about them and I’d never be able to wear contact lenses because I don’t think I’d ever get them out, assuming I got them in to begin with. However, this process wasn’t as horrific as it sounded and it was over fast. Eye drops thrice daily for the next three days, then back for a checkup. An interesting factoid: she told me that eyes are very sensitive to pain but they aren’t able to localize it, so it might feel like the discomfort is moving around.

Crazy weather around here. We had a brisk and fallish long weekend, then it was back up to the seventies today with a decent rainstorm or two. Then it’s back down to the thirties tomorrow night.

For some reason or other, many of the evening programs in the early part of this week are reruns. All the CBS comedies tonight, plus House. No Castle, either. An NCIS rerun tomorrow night. No CSI or The Mentalist or Criminal Minds. And they’re apparently running a hi-def version of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.  How do you make a nearly 40 year old cartoon high definition without going back to the drawing board?

I’m past the halfway point of Against All Things Ending (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 3). I forget from one book to the next how frustrating these characters can be. The only ones who aren’t paralyzed by self-loathing are buffoons (eg. The Ardent, and even he gets mawkish). Situations that could be improved by a few casual words, aren’t. And yet I still enjoy the books.

We finished off our weekend movie marathon with The Green Zone, in which Jason Bourne…well, not exactly, but almost…tries to figure out why all the intelligence they’ve been provided about the location of WMDs in Iraq is bad. Matt Damon’s character, Miller, and his team end up risking their lives to search abandon factories and toilet warehouses, always coming up empty. It’s unusual in a modern film for the CIA to be the voice of sanity and reason, but that’s how it works out in this film. Loved the safe full of money. Here’s $1 million. Go get the guy to talk. The WSJ reporter was a little underutilized, but we get to see a bit of her plight, having been duped into being a White House mouthpiece, buying into the pretext for the war. Greg Kinnear is good as the smarmy Pentagon chief who’s trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug, but the star of the film is Freddy, the Iraqi who reports a meeting of wanted men to Miller and gets caught up in something big. His anger is tangible, especially when Miller tries to brush him off with the promise of a financial reward. “You think I want money? Everything you want for this country, I want a hundred times more,” he says. It’s a complex story, and I’m sure it doesn’t appeal to people with some political affiliations, but we enjoyed it.

I think Brook will go down in history as the contestant on The Amazing Race who had the best time ever during the race. This week in Hong Kong she was leading two other women contestants in a dance routine in front of a roomful of onlookers while their partners performed a roadblock. She took the tame karaoke that was going on in the background and almost turned it into burlesque. I hope her team at least makes it to the final three. I couldn’t believe that the punk rockers were spared by a non-elimination round. They deserved to go, or at least he did after acting like a wuss on the parakeet challenge. Of all the endurance things they’ve had to do, this one was pretty easy, if tedious. But he just wimped out on his partner. A six hour penalty instead of searching some more? Gimme a break.

We’re getting down to brass tacks on Dexter, and it’s hard to imagine how this is all going to pan out. He’s got more people watching him than ever before, and now Liddy has a DVD of him and Lumen in the pre-game show to an execution. And Jordan and Dexter know exactly who each other is, exchanging veiled threats as Dexter swabs Jordan for DNA. Who would have guessed that Jordan was the fat teenager? But he’s still a master manipulator, continuing to exert power over his first victim two decades later. “You made me what I am today,” he tells her, and that shouldn’t be taken as a compliment.

Deb is of the opinion that no one could go through what the barrel women endured and have a life again. There’s no coming back. And yet Lumen seemed to bounce back pretty well. There were a couple of well constructed moments during the episode, I thought. The seduction: Dexter putting Lumen’s necklace around her neck in Alex’s living room. His and her matching gloves. Lumen showing up in her black stealth outfit instead of a little black dress, and her entrance rendered Dexter momentarily speechless. Lumen admiring his knives. “One of these days you’re going to have to teach me how to do that,” she says as she watches him pick a lock. And I thought the misdirection that resulted from Lumen showing Dexter (and us) a possible killing chamber turned out nicely when Deb and Quinn entered Alex’s house. Pairs survive better in the wild, Dexter muses.

A few commentators I read today expressed concern that we still don’t know how Lumen ended up in Jordan’s grasp, and that there might still be a gotcha moment coming with regard to that. That never occurred to me at all, and I don’t know where they’re coming from, to be honest. And it looks like they may be laying the ground work for Deb to figure out Dexter’s secret. A few times now she has expressed sympathies that are similar to his. This week, after being forced to watch all those DVDs that appalled even Dexter,  she identifies herself as the kind of person who might be eliminating these killers.

When Alex tries to put the blame of Jordan for making him do things that he would never otherwise have done, Lumen almost leaps at him. “No. You made me do things I never would have done. Ever. Ever.” When it came time for her to do the deed, she didn’t hesitate. Being too short, she climbed up on the bench and plunged the knife into Alex’s chest. Murder is an aphrodisiac—who knew? I found myself wondering if Liddy was still watching, the sleazeball. “With Lumen I’m someone different. In her eyes I’m not a monster at all.”

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Movies, movies, movies

Posted on November 27, 2010 by Bev Vincent

On this long weekend, we are pretty much camping in, cooking meals, working in the daytime and watching movies in the evenings. No Black Fridays or Saturdays for us. Couldn’t catch us dead within three miles of a shopping mall (the closest one is 3.5 miles from our house).

Yesterday I finished revisions of a story and sent it off to market. I have another one that has to be ready by December 1st that I hope to get drafted out today. It’s cozy and warm in the house, even though the outdoor temperatures plummeted by forty degrees between Wednesday afternoon and Thursday evening. We hovered near freezing overnight, but then it’s going to go back up to the high seventies over the next day or two. I wish it would pick a temperature and stick with it.

Last night we watched The Kids are Alright with Annette Benning, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. The women play a lesbian couple, each of whom had a child from the same anonymous sperm donor (Ruffalo). When the daughter turns eighteen, the son, who is only fifteen, talks her into tracking down the donor. Hilarity ensues, along with domestic drama. Though the daughter didn’t really want to have much to do with Paul, she’s the one who is more fascinated by him once they meet. The boy, with the unlikely name “Laser,” is less impressed, though Paul does plant more seeds of doubt about his friendship with a reckless loser than his parents (Moms, they’re called as a collective unit) ever could. Paul is happy-go-lucky, carefree, and a bit goofy, and his arrival on the scene throws a major monkey wrench into the family unit. The dynamic was already strained, with Benning’s character, a surgeon, being the primary wage earner and Moore’s character less self assured and frail, still seeking her career after staying home to raise the kids. The second-act twist is rough going, but fortunately there’s enough levity in the script to keep it from being too much of a downer. Funny self-referential moment: after discovering gay male porn in his moms’ drawer, Laser asks why lesbians would watch something like that. Moore gives a rambling, detailed explanation and Benning concludes that she finds lesbian porn hard to credit since they hire two straight women to pretend to be gay.

On Thursday night we watched All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst. It isn’t out in theaters yet but was available via OnDemand. It’s based on the real-life case of Robert Durst, whose wife vanished in the 1970s. He was later charged with improper disposal of a body after killing a neighbor, supposedly in self-defense. It’s a twisted tale of powerful people (the Dursts, or rather the Marks family in the movie) owned some of the seediest properties in Times Square and collected rent in cash while publicly stating their plane to raze the buildings and put up theaters and office buildings. (Durst’s father in real life was the creator of the National Debt Clock). Since Durst is still alive, the filmmakers probably had to tread a fine line to avoid being sued, but they certainly implied that Durst killed his wife and left her body with his father (Frank Langella) for disposal, and that he tricked an elderly neighbor into killing the only person who knew about his cover-up of that crime before staging the “self-defense” killing. It’s a grim film, with Gosling switching from an okay guy with lots of friends and interests into this closed-off pseudosociopath (Durst was originally diagnosed as schizophrenic and later as having Asperger’s). Dunst’s character is not well developed, but Langella is his usual powerhouse.

On Wednesday evening we saw Beneath the Dark, starring a bunch of people I’ve never heard of before, although the female lead was apparently on The Sopranos and the lead is on No Ordinary Family. They’re a cute dating couple heading from Texas to L.A. for the wedding of one of his old frat brothers. She gets frisky, distracts him, they spin out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and decide it’s time to find a place to stay for the night. The place they find isn’t quite the Bates Motel, but it’s the next best thing. They’re the only guests and the guy behind the counter is a bit of a creep. When Paul goes to the cafe for a late night coffee, he encounters a mystical black man who gives him Overlook cigarettes and mentions the name Ullman (the officious little prick from The Shining). He says he’s Jesus Christ and tells Paul that he has to reveal his secret to his girlfriend. A mysterious woman shows up in their room later that night and, in a parallel storyline, we find out the guy from the front desk’s own tragic story. It’s not the typical harum-scarum haunted hotel story, but the resolution will be familiar to anyone who has watched movies of this type (or The Twilight Zone). Still, Paul’s final decision was interesting enough to keep us talking about the film over breakfast the next morning.

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