It’s a good 40 degrees colder today than it was this time yesterday, when it was in the mid-80s. A cold front came through and with it, some much needed rain. However, I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so miserable today. Rain, yes, but cold on top of it. It’s just like being back in Chicago. Tomorrow’s going to be even the same, if not worse. We can’t complain about the rain—although we will—because we’ve been desperately short of it since Hurricane Ike last September. There’s one small consolation: until this morning my car was covered in tree pollen.
My DSL modem died overnight. At first there was just a solid red power light and no others, which the AT&T tech support guy said wasn’t a good thing. After I unplugged it and plugged it back in again in a few different sockets, even the red light didn’t come on, which definitely wasn’t a good thing. That’s the second 2Wire modem that’s died on us in about four years. At least AT&T volunteered to send us a free replacement this time.
I’m making good progress on the new short story. Now that the pressure of the deadline is a little bit alleviated, I think I can actually produce something really good for this anthology. I had an epiphany this morning that helps pull the whole thing together.
I caught the last 20 minutes of the new show Lie to Me on Fox while noodling around with other things last night. I wasn’t impressed. They seem to want us to believe that lie detection is an absolute science and that everyone always behaves in exactly the same predictable way. That poor kid swallowed so much I was afraid she was going to pass out. At least on The Mentalist, it’s all done in good humour and with the sense that it’s little more than a parlor trick instead of a hard science. I won’t be watching that show again any time soon.
Criminal Minds was okay, although I have to wonder how many cases the group is going to take based on murders that have close connections to members of the unit. The Exorcist connection was fun, but they seemed to drop the ball on explaining exactly why the people died, after raising the specter of ricin, which was also used in the season premiere of Breaking Bad.
They did an interesting reinvention of the BBC episode of Life on Mars last night. The story was overall much the same–although the flight was new to the show–and yet it was particular to this version of the characters. The epitome of this was Annie’s last scene, where she spoke up for herself and asked for a promotion. In the BBC version, Sam is tasked with finding a new deputy for the department and he is the one who chooses Annie. Sam seeing the planet Earth from his airplane window was pretty funny.
