Waiting for Godot

Posted on September 27, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Halfway through the second pass, I trimmed another two hundred words from the story I’m trying to reduce to approximately 5000 words, getting me to 6700 from the original 9600. I think I can make it, but I foresee the time when I’m going to have to make some tough choices about some little vignettes I really like. The story is sort of a road trip that has some (I think) amusing incidents that aren’t 100% crucial to the outcome. However, I’m going to get to a point where one or more of them is going to have to go. Ah, well, it’s only for one potential market. If the story isn’t accepted, I can put them back in. Still, I think the story is better in its new leaner form, so it hasn’t been a pointless exercise altogether.

I converted my ITW membership to Active today, which means I don’t have to pay any dues. Coolness.

Lots of people speculated that Joan and Roger’s indiscretion in the wake of being robbed on Mad Men would lead to pregnancy, but they dispatched with the storyline quickly, which leads me to wonder what the point was. Is it one of those things that’s going to come back up again later?

Just when it looked like Don was emerging from his tailspin, something new came along to knock him for a loop—the unforeseen side effect of getting a defense contract. At least now he has someone to be with during this hardship: Faye, who freaked out when confronted with a whiny kid but stood by her man when he confessed his lifelong cover story. All of his secrets are coming home to roost, including his relationship with Faye. However, it was Pete who took it on the chin for Don to keep the cover story alive. Roger’s getting pounded, too. First the pregnancy, then the news that Lucky Strike is yanking their business, which accounts for the lion’s share of the firm’s income. He wasn’t kidding about the news almost killing him, based on the way he was popping nitroglycerin after the meeting. Speaking of taking lumps, poor old Lane got his from dear old dad. On any other show, that would have been a lethal blow.

My favorite exchange of the episode:
Lucky Strike guy My grandfather fought in the Civil War
Roger Really. Where did he surrender?

I thought for sure something was going to happen to Don’s tickets for the Beatles, and he’d have to disappoint Sally once again. Her squeal when she got the news was pitch perfect. And then there was the final shot: Megan touching up her lipstick in profile, the epitome of the heart-stoppingly beautiful Beatlemania girl. Was Don looking at her with lust in his heart or did he still resent her for filing the documents that almost led to his ultimate downfall?

Is it just me, or is Tanya the Lindsay Lohan of Rubicon? She was forced to confront her demons with her therapist, and when asked if she wanted help with her problems, she thought long and hard (and we never got to see her answer). Consigned to the basement sorting documents—at least Grant came down to help her out. I liked the reference to Godot—the first thing I ever published in the newspaper was a review of a Theatre New Brunswick production of Waiting for Godot when I was in grade twelve. I was working on a term paper (The 20th century as the age of pessimism) and wrote the play up for that essay. When my English teacher read my notes he said I should write it up for the paper since he was supposed to review it and I’d already done most of the work.

The scene with Donald Bloom and Katherine Rhumer was great. Pulling notes out of his pocket and reading them to her. “Do you understand this message? Because sometimes they can be unclear. But that one was pretty straightforward.” One of the interesting things about the show is the way the big bad villains have been nothing but words on a page and data in a file. Kateb, George, Tanez, Yuri. They’re being killed off one by one and we’ve never seen them. I think we’re going to reach a point, though, where the wants and needs of the four leaf clover club will come into conflict with the impending terrorist attack. And Kale rocks the martial arts moves on Maggie’s ex. “Old man.”

Dexter is back, and is it ever. Everyone…places, including Matsuka, who starts off the episode by being his twisted, perverse self by crouching beside Rita’s corpse and saying, “I imagined her naked many times—never like this. Still, Dexter gets the line of the show. He’s standing at the funeral home (shades of Six Feet Under) watching a grieving family. “So, this is how normal people do it. No Hefty bags.”

The flashback to his first date with Rita was terrific. It gave him the opportunity to say goodbye to Rita and, in a way to Julie Benz. Their first date actually took place while Dexter was stalking another victim, and was cut short when the victim needed killing. The next door neighbor is looking more and more like the prime suspect. If that’s the case, I hope they don’t drag the whodunit out for more than a few episodes. And I’m also glad that Dexter aborted his plans to take it on the run. Although that might have allowed them to take the character in a new direction, it would have played havoc on everyone else in the cast. A good, solid return to an exceptional series. I’ve always maintained that Dexter has many more emotions and is much more human than he gives himself credit for.

Posted in Dexter, Mad Men, Rubicon | Comments Off on Waiting for Godot

Killers

Posted on September 26, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Houston Texans not so impressive today. I started watching at halftime, when it was 10-3, and it’s been downhill since.

I’m trying to trim an old urban fantasy short story that has always been nearly 10,000 words long down enough to submit it to an anthology with a 5500 word cap. After the first editing pass, I’m down to 6900 words, so I’m getting there. I always liked the story, but there were few potential markets for it. The stuff I’m cutting isn’t absolutely crucial to the story, but I’m afraid that I’m eviscerating some of the best bits. We’ll see. I also received my contract and pay for “Centralia is Still Burning,” which will be published in October in Specters in the Coal Dust.

It looks like fall is arriving in Texas, finally. It might even get down into the fifties overnight this week, which is about twenty degrees cooler than anything we’ve seen lately.

One of my Facebook friends mentioned an 80s song by Wang Chung the other day. I first heard the group in 1984 at a day-long multi-band concert at Wembley Stadium in London. They didn’t release many albums, but I liked them, but hadn’t really given them much thought for a while. The FB post impelled me to look them up and, low and behold, they have a new double EP out. One disk has a handful of hits (including an acoustic version of “To Live and Die in L.A.”) and the other is new material. The video for “Rent Free” opens with a clip from The Big Bang Theory where Wil Wheaton tells Sheldon Cooper that he’s been living rent free in Sheldon’s head for years.

Henry Ian Cusick (aka Desmond from Lost) appears in the first two episodes of Law and Order: SVU. He starts out as a suspect in an assault on a little girl, and is then revealed to be a member of an anti-predator group, and is then revealed to be something of a vigilante and is finally revealed to be something else altogether. He and Mariska Hargitay have some fun scenes together where he, even while a suspect, flirts with her. Joan Cusack appears in the first episode as a “smother,” the ultimate helicopter mom. Boy, did that little girl ever have an attitude. When the girl claims that her adoptive parents implanted a computer in her, Munch gets off this line: I hate to admit it, but that sounds a little paranoid delusional even to me. The story ultimately ends up something of an Elizabeth Smart knockoff.

The second episode starts with a couple of video-game addicts ignoring the woman’s daughter, primarily because the woman suffered a head injury that causes her to not recognize the girl as her daughter. Her game-playing male friend is suspected of sexual assault but Dr. Huang issues his informed medical opinion that the guy is really just a jerk. I thought it was ironic that the animated boy character the geeky couple was determined to save fell to his death because of SVU.

I think I missed an episode of Haven. This week’s was not bad—any episode that features that much Duke has a lot going for it. He makes the rest of the cast look stiff and awkward. Also caught up with Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice. I think I could easily give both of those shows up without missing them terribly. They’ve pretty much run their course. They have their emotional moments, and I’ll probably stick with them just out of habit. I’m not as turned off by them as I was by the second season of Desperate Housewives.

We watched a couple of light-weight movies this weekend. First it was Letters from Juliet starring Amanda Seyfried and Vanessa Redgrave. I’ve been to Verona a couple of times, so it was fun to see all that familiar scenery. The story featured some improbable coincidences (they just happened to stumble on someone they’d been combing the countryside for) and most of the plot could have been eliminated if they’d sat around a cafe and made a couple of dozen phone calls, which is how Sophie traditionally did her fact checking. My biggest issue with the story was that we never got to see why Sophie was engaged to Victor to begin with. He was pretty much a jerk out of the gate. On the other hand, Sophie didn’t seem at all interested in some of the adventures Victor gave her access to in Italy. Vanessa Redgrave, though, was charming, which made up for the shortcomings.

Last night we watched Killers, starring Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher and also featuring Tom Selleck, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Mull and the guy who runs the comic shop on The Big Bang Theory. Kutcher is a CIA hitman who meets and falls in love with the recently dumped Heigl in Nice while she’s on vacation with her parents (Selleck and O’Hara). Selleck plays it broadly as the overprotective, compulsive father, sort of a tongue-in-cheek Magnum PI, and O’Hara is a lush who drinks Bloody Marys straight out of the blender and wine by the magnum. It’s all terribly improbable, especially when all the other hitmen come out of the bushes, but it has some funny moments. Put your gun on the coffee table, the clip in the potted plant and check your brain at the door. We laughed.

Posted in Big Bang Theory, movies, SVU | Comments Off on Killers

The Usual Insanity

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Yesterday and today, the heat index hovered around 100°. It’s already hot when we get up in the morning. Thankfully, a cold front is coming through this weekend that means we’ll see overnight temps in the low 60s and a couple of days next week, at least, it’ll only be in the low 80s in the daytime. Can’t wait. It has been a long, hot, humid summer.

The Big Bang Theory was back on its new night. Back with a bang, one might say. The nurse with an attitude was great. We’ve seen her before, I think? Most awkward date ever, plus the one Penny had to go on with Sheldon and Blossom! Since there was nothing on after BBT, I left the TV on while I worked on a jigsaw puzzle. Big mistake. That new Shatner comedy, Bleep My Dad Says, is one of the worst new shows of the summer. Oh, I’m sure there are a lot of equally bad sitcoms out there, but I’ve managed to avoid most of them. Surely this one won’t last.

The bloggers have come up with some clever names for the Earth 2 version of Olivia Dunham on Fringe to go along with the somewhat awkward Walternate: Olivialt. Bolivia. Alt-livia. Altivia. My favorite, though, is my own, which I haven’t seen anywhere else. Faux-livia. It doesn’t look so hot in print, but it rolls off the lips. After a quick but handy recap of the situation, the premiere launched into full-on Earth 2 events. Evil lab experiments on Olivia, who escapes, commandeers a taxi and ends up at her alterna-mom’s house, in brief. I like trying to catch all the little differences in Earth 2. Kennedy is still alive and Ambassador to the UN (according to the news radio in the cabbie’s car). The smash hit broadway play isn’t Cats, it’s Dogs. Tom Cruise is a TV star. Glatterflug, the same airline that landed in Boston 1 with a bunch of dead people on board, makes daily flights to the moon. Shell and Exxon merged to make Shexxon. People still ride penny farthing bikes, and there are dirigibles. Olivia has a tattoo now, to match Faux-livia’s, and maybe some of her memories? Certainly her shooting skills have taken off. However, I think at the very end she was play-acting to make people think that she was completely converted. The transition from Earth 2 to Earth 1 threw me for a second. I thought the dirigible over the Capitol building teleported.

Lisbon’s lie to Patrick Jane on The Mentalist served a good purpose. It wouldn’t have seemed natural to have Jane immediately back on the job after the events of last season, so they had to come up with some subterfuge that seemed at least moderately plausible. It worked, I thought. Jane was his usual self, though his dislike of the commissioner proved to be one big red herring, a surely a headache for Hightower. Did Lisbon really say “sheep dip?” The gag with the dead mouse (or, without the dead mouse, actually) was pretty funny, especially since the camera had lingered on one early in the episode (making me think the mouse had been collateral damage). I liked Cho’s exasperation with the widow, especially when he answered the question no man should ever answer when asked by a woman (how old do you think I am anyway?), especially not as honestly as he did. And his explanation of the situation was funny, too. “She cries a lot. Then she has to freshen her makeup. Then sher cries again. Sort of a cycle.” I still can’t get used to hearing Simon Baker speaking in his normal voice, announcing the preview for next week. Sounds fake.

Another book review posted at Onyx: The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith. I’m getting review copies of Moonlight Mile, the new Kenzie/Genarro novel by Dennis Lehane (sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone) and Djibouti, the new Elmore Leonard, from Amazon Vine, so my reading list is taken care of for a while.

Posted in Fringe, Mentalist | Comments Off on The Usual Insanity

Checking for implants

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Bev Vincent

I’m so pleased with my decision to switch to Chrome on my home desktop computer that I converted to it on my work desktop as well, and I think I’ll put it on my laptop next. I only have one web app that occasionally balks in Chrome, but it’s not a big issue. I can’t get over how lightweight it is.

A couple of jabs about Canadians on last night’s TV episodes. First of all, on NCIS McGee was deployed to Canada to look for the murderous female Mexican drug lord, Paloma. He makes his video report in front of a couple of RCMP officers while one of their horses keeps nudging him from behind.

Then, on Sons of Anarchy, the bikers plan a trip up to Vancouver to look for Cameron, who kidnapped Jax’s son, Abel. Jax says that he can’t ask the others to jump bail with him to go to Canada. “But I can,” Clay says. “You lose. Eh?”

It was good to see Castle return to form again. The show was designed with a conceit that has been used a lot lately: a prolog that is really from the end of the episode, followed by a card that says: X hours or X days earlier. But it was a very good prolog, with both Beckett and Castle apparently aiming guns at each other. For a while it looked like the case was going to be a Breaking Bad clone (even Castle commented on it), but it went in a slightly different direction. The parallels between Castle and Beckett’s awkwardness and his daughter Alexis’s teenage angst over a boy who didn’t call her on her schedule was funny. Adults really do behave like kids sometimes.

I didn’t plan to watch The Event, but I found it on our OnDemand listing last night when there was nothing else on, and I’m glad I did. The show has something of a FlashForward feel to it, but I hope it fares better than that series, which was canceled just when it was getting good. There was a lot of the X hours/X days earlier going on, so you really had to pay close attention, but the piece de resistance was the last few seconds, which really took me by surprise. I did not see that coming. However, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I don’t think the president was the target. I think they were after the leader of the former prisoners. I haven’t read anything about the series, so I don’t know if there have been any rumors about where the show is going, and that suits me just fine. I definitely don’t want to be spoiled about this one. Please don’t get canceled.

Survivor just finished. Glad to see the old farts pull off a challenge win. I didn’t want this to be another season where one team was chronically weak and picked itself apart while the other tribe thrived. And then there was this amazing tribal council where the young’uns imploded. I’ve never seen anything like it on Survivor. I definitely don’t think the evicted party would have been selected if he had kept his mouth shut. Two weeks in a row someone cut off their own legs at tribal. There are some people playing this season who seem…unstable. I mean, what was the deal with the shoes? Could get interesting.

There wasn’t a lot of forward momentum on Sons of Anarchy this week, but there were some nice things going on all the same. I liked the circular camera motion when the lawyer told SAMCRO that their bail might be revoked. “This spun my head too,” the lawyer says at the end of the scene, emphasizing the camera work. Later on, when Amelia is thrust against the living room wall, there’s a crucifix in the foreground of the shot. When she falls to the floor, her arms are spread exactly like a crucifix, too. Subtle but nice. And there were two beautiful scenes involving Hal Holbrook. In the first, he was sitting at the lake, contemplating suicide. Not a word said, but his entire emotional spectrum is played out for all to see. Later, he and Gemma sit on a bench in the garden, surrounded by flowers as he tells her how days like this, the ones where he can remember everything, are the worst. More than anything else, he remembers how useless he was to his wife in her final days.

The SAMCRO situation reminds me of an episode of MASH, the one where Hawkeye needed a pair of boots so he set up an elaborate series of trades. A dentist appointment for the boots. A pass to Tokyo in exchange for the services of the dentist.  A date for Radar in return for a cake for a party for Frank needed to get Margaret of Henry’s back so he’ll sign for the Tokyo pass. A section eight for Klinger in exchange for a hair drier to bribe the nurse to date Radar. On Sons of Anarchy, SAMCRO needs guns to pay off the Grim Bastards (really? you call your gang that?) to spy on the Mayans. To get the guns they need to supply Henry Lin with porn actresses to entertain his Chinese clients, which means that Opie has to swallow his pride and let his new girlfriend ply her trade. In both cases the carefully constructed houses of cards collapse. The deal with Lin was going to give SAMCRO some extra cash to fund their search for Jax’s son, but they were chasing a red herring anyway.

Then there was Stephen King’s cameo, which was a hoot. He rode up on his cherry red Harley-Davidson Road-Glide, wearing black and looking vaguely like Frank Dodd from The Dead Zone. Bachman (yes, that’s his name) acts so strange that even Tig, who can be as weird as the best of them, is creeped out a little. Bachman measures his subject (did you notice that King let the tape retract before noting the measurement?), tests her for rigor, looks at her teeth and, in a moment that topped it all off, groped her breasts, presumably checking for implants. When he emerged from the basement and announced he was done, Tara asked him where she was. Bachman turns on her and glares. “Where’s who?” he hisses. And, in an inspired moment, when he’s invited to take articles from the house to supplement the cash they have at hand, he makes a beeline for the statue, the golden praying hands, that Tara used to whack Amelia (fair payback for being whacked herself).

We never really got to find out much about Amelia, but I imagine that she had a hard life in Guatemala before coming to America. She’s hard as brass tacks. She spits in Gemma’s face when she’s duct taped to a chair, and she uses the few seconds afforded by Tara’s inattention to scope out her surroundings and figure out what is nearby that she can use to her advantage.

I’m going to go out on another limb and suggest that Trinny, the girl who came home from holiday to Maureen’s in Ireland carrying her laundry is John Teller’s daughter. I don’t know the timeline of Teller’s visit to Belfast, but it’s clear that he and Maureen had a past.

My favorite exchange of the episode, after Opie and Lyla got done making out:

Jax: Looks like you guys are working things out, huh?
Opie: I can never tell. Every time I try to talk to her we end up naked.
Bobbie: Just marry her. That’ll stop it.

Tim Curry on Criminal Minds: “I’m like…God!” Pure magic. A second later. “Uh oh. Even a god discovers that sometimes people have bad luck.”

Posted in Castle, Criminal Minds, NCIS, Sons of Anarchy, Survivor, The Event | Comments Off on Checking for implants

She’s an astronaut

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Nobody would ever mistake me for a rabid football fan, but I do watch a game from time to time when there’s nothing else on television and I’m looking for some background noise while I do other things. I watched the last quarter of an afternoon game yesterday, then tuned out for a while and picked up the Houston Texans game about halfway through. They were lagging badly at that point, so I pretty much wrote them off. Huh. Color me surprised when they staged a pretty awesome comeback that consisted of at least five crucial elements: 1) the blocked field goal attempt late in the game; 2) the impressive hail mary touchdown with less than a minute to go; 3) icing the field goal kicker in OT, which made him miss on his second attempt; 4) another impressive long pass that got them into range and finally 5) the field goal itself. Delete any of those events and the Texans would have lost. Football isn’t often a terribly exciting game, but I was on the edge of my seat for a while. They’re actually in first place, all by themselves, for the first time ever.

She goes by “Andy” and she’s been staring into Will’s apartment for several episodes. This week on Rubicon we finally get to meet the mystery lady who’s rich enough to afford a sizable apartment in NYC but not rich enough to afford curtains for her windows. Should we be suspicious of the way she welcomed Will into her place late at night bearing only a cheap bottle of wine and a tomato? She certainly didn’t hesitate to snoop through his stuff when he was out, but she didn’t bother to hide her tracks. Maybe that’s the best way to hide your tracks.  Boy, that Truxton Spangler is a creepy dude. As some blogger wrote this morning, he even makes eating corn flakes sinister. My assessment is that he’s become the head of API for the sole purpose of funneling information to his cabal of friends so they can get filthy rich by investing in countries based on their insider knowledge. Kale Ingram isn’t in on the secret, I don’t think, but I believe he knows there is a secret. I’m glad I stuck with the series. It’s slow burning (0 to 60 mph in 540 minutes, according to one blogger) but it’s paying off.

Mad Men continues a run of excellent episodes. I was thinking it was going to be Ms Blankenship’s greatest hits of quips. She was firing them off one after another. “The hell it does,” she tells her former lover when he says that a crossword puzzle entry starts with the letter L. She seems half asleep most of the time, and then out comes this philosophical musing: “It’s a business of sadists and masochists—and you know which one you are.” We forget that she’s been around the business for a long, long time. And then, out of the blue she dies “like she lived, surrounded by people she answered phones for,” as Roger quips.

Which leads to one of the show’s great scenes. A sight gag going on in the background of a pitch meeting, like the Sergio Aragones cartoons in the margins of MAD magazine. While Don tries to get three men to agree on an advertising approach, the rest of the staff, in the background, throws an afghan over the recently deceased (“My mother made that,” Harry complains) and wheel her off out of frame. Don and his coworkers can see what’s happening, but only Don really knows what’s going on. It was knee-slapping hilarious, and worth watching two or three times to catch everything that was going on. And then Burt delivers her eulogy: She was born in a barn at the end of the last century and she died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.

And then Don gets his quip of the night, when he asks his new girlfriend to sit with his daughter. “I would have had my secretary do it, but she’s dead.” I’m willing to bet there’s a blooper reel somewhere filled with takes with John Hamm cracking up over that line. He’s also impressed by the results when Sally mistakenly puts rum on his French toast instead of Mrs. Butterworths. “Read labels,” he tells her. “Is it bad?” He turns back to his breakfast and continues eating. “Not really.”

In the end, the episode was all about women. Those with power and those without. Peggy took umbrage over the fact that her new friend was willing to go to the wall to protect racial rights, but not the same rights for women. Faye is a strong woman who wants to live life on her own terms and not become a substitute mother when she made the choice to favor career over family. Joan, that former powerhouse, is trying to be strong in the face of her husband’s pending deployment and Roger’s incessant advances, but she has lost a lot of the power she once wielded.

The three women are framed in the elevator as a parting shot, but Megan was the real star of the night. The new rock star administrative assistant. She handled the Blankenship situation when everyone else was flustered, and she also handled the Sally situation as deftly as possible, though one or the other, or perhaps both, had her on the verge of tears. At least Don recognized her contribution and thanked her—sincerely. His new girlfriend is good for him, it seems. I was afraid the confrontation over the way Don threw Faye to the wolves (well, to his ferocious daughter, at least) might spell the end of them, but it didn’t.

Posted in Mad Men, Rubicon, Uncategorized | Comments Off on She’s an astronaut

Going Chrome

Posted on September 19, 2010 by Bev Vincent

I’ve been an advocate of Internet Explorer for a long, long time. I don’t know what version I started with, but it was old. I think they used Roman numerals back then. Even when all the wonks started advocating Firefox, I stuck with IE. I dabbled with other browsers, though. I have Safari on my iPod, along with Opera. I also have Opera on my aging laptop, which gets sluggish with IE. I’ve used Firefox enough to know that I don’t prefer it over IE. Its tendency to cache everything under the sun causes me no end of grief as a web developer. I make changes to a web site and people complain that the old text is still there. I have to tell them to do a dozen or so hard refreshes to see what anyone using IE or other browsers can already see. And for all the complaints about security problems and exploits, I never caught a virus or a trojan in all my years on IE on numerous computers.

However, IE’s big problem—and it’s getting worse—is the way that its memory demands increase over a single session. I suspect that the biggest problem is memory leaks in Java and Javascript, but it starts out needing only a couple of hundred MB of RAM and by the end of a few hours it’s gobbling 1.5 GB of memory and slowing everything else down. Of course, I can just exit and restart the browser, but I shouldn’t have to.

I’ve used Google Chrome from time to time, and I like how lightweight and snappy it is. I decided to test it out this morning on a usual round of website visits. After a few hours of doing all manner of things, it’s still only using 50 MB of RAM. That’s less than IE takes on startup. So I think I’m going to make the switch to Chrome for my home computer. So far I haven’t seen anything that doesn’t work properly.

I did some more website housecleaning to make sure pages are displaying properly with the new template. While I was doing it, I redid my Store page to make use of Amazon’s aStore function. All I need to do is add a single line of code to my page and I get the entire store loaded into the page. I picked all the books and anthologies and added them to the store. Very slick—it even puts the shopping cart in the site.

I finished The Devil’s Company by David Liss and started The Masuda Affair by I.J. Parker, which I’m reading in pdf on my Kindle. It’s a period crime novel set in Japan. I haven’t read any of the previous books by this author, but I was intrigued when she approached me to see if I would be interested in reviewing her forthcoming book. I like books set in Japan and I like crime novels, so it seemed a fit. The main character is Akitada, a government official traveling home after a business trip. He encounters an abandoned boy outside a village where they are celebrating a three-day festival that welcomes home the spirits of dead relatives. Akitada recently lost his own son to disease, and he and his wife have been drifting apart in the aftermath of that loss, so he takes the boy’s plight to heart and becomes enmeshed in a mystery that involves some of the wealthiest people from the area. So far so good.

We also finished The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith and backtracked to the first book in the series, The Sunday Philosophy Club. I think I like this series and the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books better than his 44 Scotland Street and Corduroy Mansions series because they focus primarily on one character and those around her.

I received an advanced copy of the next Michael Connelly novel, The Reversal, yesterday, so that will go to the top of my reading pile.

For Amy Grant fans: her newest album, Somewhere Down the Road, is available for MP3 download for $2.99 today only.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Going Chrome

Freakynomics

Posted on September 18, 2010 by Bev Vincent

My message board is having problems. I opened a service ticket with my ISP and was gratified by how quickly they responded. If you visit the board, it looks okay until after you log in. Then the page keeps resetting and never displays fully. Apparently it’s a known issue at the ISP and they are working on it. I almost went so far as to launch a new message board, one that doesn’t rely on CGI/Perl, but the headache of porting the existing MB content over was enough to keep me from heading down that road. I was also about to upgrade from 2.4 to 2.5—glad I didn’t. I might have thought I had broken something during the upgrade.

Had an e-mail this morning that one of my short stories is still under consideration for an Atlantic Canadian contest, and the longlist will be released next Tuesday. There will be three winners, with a nice cash prize and publication in an anthology “alongside some of the country’s finest writers.” Nice to know that I’m still in contention. Fingers crossed to see if I make the next cut on Tuesday.

Specters in the Coal Dust, the Woodlands Press anthology that contains my story “Centralia is Still Burning,” is now available for pre-order.

I found a very nice review of “A Murder of Crows,” my short story in Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead, at Temple Library Reviews. The reviewers is covering a few stories from the anthology each week, and covering them in depth. He hit every point I attempted to make with the story.

Lee Thomas posted a bunch of reviews and blurbs for Thrillers: 100 Must Reads. Rather than duplicating that list here, I’ll just provide a link to his LiveJournal. My essay is about Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon. Lee writes about Dean Koontz’s Watchers. Here’s just one of the glowing comments: “Not only is this book fun to peruse, it is intelligently written and researched. Make space on your reference shelf.” The Florida Times Union, July 4, 2010

We watched Freakonomics last night, a movie based on the bestselling book. The thesis of the movie, which is narrated by an economist and a journalist, is that there is a tendency in modern culture to mistake correlation for causation. You see this a lot in studies that claim that such-and-such causes cancer. Does it cause cancer, or does it just happen at the same time as something else that causes cancer? It’s hard to tell. They present six case studies, each one directed by a different person. In one, they explore the question of whether being branded with a strange name causes a person to be less successful. The avatar of this was a case where a man named his oldest son Winner and his youngest son Loser. Their lives turned out to be the exact opposite of what you might expect. However, in another study, identical fake job applications were sent, with the only difference being that one had a traditionally white person’s name (Greg) and the other had a traditionally black person’s name (Tyrone). Tyrone was invited to far fewer interviews than Greg was.

There was also an interesting study from the University of Chicago about using money to try to incentivize poorly performing ninth graders. If the students could meet a fairly low set of criteria (few absences, few detentions, straight C or above grades) they would get $50 for that month, with a chance at $500 from a random selection of $50 winners. The two profiled students were both initially energized by the thought of the money, but one of them (whose mother promised matching funds) couldn’t motivate himself to do the work and continued to fail. The other one kept at it and barely met the criteria in the final month, but he did it. Overall, the study showed that ninth graders are poorly motivated by financial incentives.

It was an interesting film, good as a conversation starter, without getting too deeply into anything. There was a fascinating study of cheating in sumo wrestling that was obvious once someone looked at the statistics. When one contestant needed to win his fifteenth contest to have a winning record for the tourney and the person he was competing against already had a winning record, the person on the cusp won regularly, and then lost the next time he faced the same opponent. A kind of sumo quid pro quo. The most controversial conclusion the economist arrived at was how a decline in violent crime in the late 80s/early 90s could be attributed to legal access to abortion 17-18 years earlier. The evidence he presented was compelling.

The movie opens in theaters in a few weeks, but it was available via our Comcast OnDemand system this week.

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New look

Posted on September 17, 2010 by Bev Vincent

My new Storytellers Unplugged essay is up today. It’s called How far would you go for a critique?

Today also marks twenty-one years that I’ve been working for the same company. It’s had a few different names over that time, but it’s essentially the same business. A back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that if I make it another six years I’ll have spent half my life working here. I’d have to work another 25 years to duplicate the longevity my father had in the paper mill, though. He got a head start on me, going to work for them when he was seventeen.

There was an article in the NY Times today about a 103-year-old judge who was still hearing trials. He doesn’t walk up the five stories to his office any more, and he wears a nasal cannula to deliver oxygen when he gets short of breath, but otherwise he’s keeping active. His main concession is that he will no longer agree to adjudicate trials that look like they will be long. “I don’t even buy green bananas any more,” he said. One defendant who appeared before him wondered if he was catching everything that was going on and how sharp he was. Then he realized they were probably wondering the same thing about the same judge twenty years ago.

I’m giving my website a bit of a facelift. I found a new theme that allows pulldown menus and supports all the widgets I like to use. Then I put my mediocre image manipulation skills to the test and created a collage banner. I don’t think it turned out too bad. I’m working on the look of some of the static pages, many of which I have basically ignored since I created them.

Last night was a wasteland when it came to television. There was nothing worth watching. Even Wipeout was a rerun. I turned to a channel that was airing Twister and pretty much ignored it while I read more of The Devil’s Company and worked at a jigsaw puzzle. You might be surprised by how much of a handicap partial colorblindness is to working on one. Especially this one, which has a lot of trees.

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The Cleaner

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Bev Vincent

Though at least one of the new Survivor competitors did her homework by learning how to start a fire without flint, another one threw her game plan out the window on the first day, and got sent packing for her trouble. Her original plan—to keep a low profile and rein in her natural tendency to prattle—was sound. People thought she was a little weird, and she came across as a weak link, but I think that at least one other player might have received a lot of votes if she hadn’t gone off the deep end during tribal council. She babbled. She rambled. And, just when everyone thought the worst was over, she interrupted Jeff’s call to vote to ramble and babble some more. Bad move. She should have kept her trap shut. If she had, the football coach might have gone home. He seems like a nice enough guy, and is probably a good strategist (why wasn’t he in charge of solving the puzzle?), but no one ever made the mistake of thinking an NFL coach, even at the peak of his career, would be physically strong. We didn’t get to see how well the young team did with the flint and fishing gear. That will say a lot about how well they’ll fare at this game.

I sort of hoped Lane would win Big Brother, but I can see the argument in favor of Hayden. He did win more challenges, and otherwise the two competitors were just about even.  I was surprised by how close the vote was. It all came down to Enzo in the end. The after-show interviews in the back yard were hilarious, especially Britney’s. (I was pleased that she won the viewer’s choice award, by the way.) As she was being interviewed, Rachel was just an arm’s length away, laughing that crazy cackle of hers, and Britney just lost it. She said to the interviewer, “I thought I was away from that. Can you even hear what I’m saying?” Her frustration built until finally she said she had to get away and left the interview.

I’ve said this before, though, and I’ll say it again. I think they give the winner short shrift by waiting until the last five minutes to announce his/her name. He barely gets a chance to bask in the glory, and then he’s superseded by the people’s choice winner. It’s all too rushed. I like the way they do it on Survivor, where the winner is announced and then they do the recap with the losing contestants.

Only one gunshot fired on this week’s episode of Sons of Anarchy, so far as I can recall. That one was from the rifle of a mildly disoriented Hal Holbrook. Chucky got a brief moment, running around in his hospital gown ranting that he had come into the hospital to have a mole removed and they “cut my fingers off!” This was after Jax tried to get Tara to create a distraction so the SAMCRO dudes could interrogate the shooter. “We got it covered,” Clay said a second before Chucky’s performance. The guy buried up to his neck got off lucky, and the kidnapper met his fate in unexpected surroundings. That priest is one scary dude.

My favorite line of the evening came from smug Jacob Hale after he made a proposal to Sheriff Unser that Unser spurned. “Even if I’m the devil, it wouldn’t be the first time you shook my hand, Wayne.” Tig was hilarious this week. Turning around all the figurines because he thought they were staring at him. Then Gemma runs into him while he’s wearing a shortie gown and carrying a bottle of baby oil. When she asks him why, he says, “I’m not going to lie to you, Gemma. I’m a big man. A little bit of lube sometimes is just the humane thing to do.” Not to be outdone, Gemma shoots back, “I hope that’s the Guatemalan hottie in there and not my Dad.” This was just a short while before her dad shot Tig in the shoulder.

It was surprising just how badly SAMCRO sucked as bounty hunters, though. Next week Stephen King has his cameo (on his birthday, no less) as a cleaner who takes care of some messy business for Gemma. Click on the photo for a page with several other shots from his upcoming appearance.

My Storytellers Unplugged essay will appear first thing tomorrow morning. It’s on the subject of critique groups.

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Legacies

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Bev Vincent

A couple of weeks ago, my wife asked me what I wanted my legacy to be. I tend not to be a deep thinker when it comes to future matters. Oh, that’s not to say that I don’t make plans and lists, but it’s all short term stuff. Ask me if I’m going to NECON next year and I’ll probably say “That’s long term planning.” I don’t chart out the future or make career goals. Look after the days and the years will take care of themselves, I figure.

My father left an observable legacy. At his funeral, on a cold, early January, Canadian winter day, the church was packed to the rafters. It took the wind out of my lungs to emerge from the back room and see how many people wanted to celebrate his life and mark his passing. He was generous with his time and talents, was deeply involved in the surrounding communities and rarely said no to a request for his time and energy. He served on committees, some of them for decades. People liked him, though he wasn’t gregarious for the most part. In thinking about this over the past twenty-four hours, I figure he left behind a big footprint. Mine will be nowhere near so large because I’m more stingy with my time and I’ve lived most of my adult life in a suburbia where you don’t even get to know your next door neighbors unless you’re outgoing, which I’m not.

It was the passing of David Thompson from Murder by the Book that got me thinking about this. He’s another guy who’s leaving behind a big footprint. The outpouring of shock and grief at his premature death has been profound. He touched a lot of people. In addition to his family and friends, all the customers from the store are going to miss him, as are the authors he brought in for signings.

As soon as I saw Courtney B. Vance on The Closer the other night and heard that his character was also a candidate for Chief, I figured the writing was on the wall for Brenda. I’m never impressed when characters on a show aren’t allowed to figure out something that is patently obvious to the audience. As soon as Brenda suspected that the original failed bombing was really meant for the fire department and that the perp wanted to lure out more firefighters to get them with the larger bomb, I knew what his plan was. Still, it took Brenda a while to figure it out, and she pretty much had to spell it out for the other Chief. I loved Tao’s reaction after he stopped the rolling cylinder (“Holy crap”) and the parking garage scene was good. I don’t know if Vance’s character will be back to meddle next season or not. The chief of police has been pretty much a non-entity in the series until now.

Rizzoli and Isles exhibited its best and worst in the season finale. The worst was its clunky obviousness. Show the faces of all the bad guys except one and immediately we know we’re going to see him again in different circumstances. Linger repeatedly on the fact that one character has a gun and no one else did. Linger again and again on the walkie talkie. Have the gun-toting character ask suspicious questions that no one else sees as suspicious in the context. Have the savant-like medical examiner freeze when asked to perform minor surgery on a living patient. And what was the deal with the tortoise? (As I joked elsewhere, if you show a tortoise in Act 1 it’s supposed to go off in Act 3, right?) And turn a powerful scene into some sort of mock ballet by shooting it in slow motion in case the viewers don’t get what’s happening. Lots of worsts. The best was the suspense built inside the station house after the bad guys arrived, and Rizzoli. Angie Harmon is carrying this show, basically. Her solution to the ending—didn’t I see Bruce Willis do that in a Die Hard movie? Too bad they decided to screw the scene up with slo-mo. Otherwise it was pretty potent stuff.

The two-hour finale of Covert Affairs was really just two independent episodes run back to back. I was scratching my head all through the first one, trying to figure out why the heck Vivian, the embassy employee, looked so familiar. Then I see that it was Anna Chlumsky from My Girl, all grown up. She was a little over the top, but it was a fun, light episode that also featured Augie playing the tour guide to a bunch of school kids at the Smithsonian to preserve Annie’s cover. The second episode was more down and dirty. We found out who the leak was, but given the actor’s tendency to play smarmy, oily characters it wasn’t a huge surprise. The switch with the GPS was clever, but I knew that the “biggest house” was going to be something other than what everyone thought it would be.  Another cliff hanger ending. Bastards.

Tonight we get to find out who wins the $500,000 on Big Brother. Boy, they sure stretched it out. This past week must have been sheer misery for the three remaining contestants. No challenges, no games, nothing to do but sit around and wait and wait and wait. Torture. Survivor is back tonight, too. Old farts vs. the young pups. I know which side I’m rooting for already.

Housekeeping details:

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