I’m a weekend bachelor this weekend. My wife is doing her Ph. D. in nursing research, and when she gets a patient for her study she is gone for a week collecting data every hour, with occasional relief so she can catch a few Zs every now and then. She enrolled a new patient this morning. As luck would have it, I got my homework assignment for the weekend today, so I’ll have something to do to occupy my time and keep me out of trouble.
I often compare submitting a finished manuscript to sending a kid off to college. It’s not gone for good, and when it comes back, it will bring its dirty laundry with it. Today I received the copy editor report for the book I’ve been working on this year. Accompanying the report was the book’s style sheet, three pages of rules that were adopted to make sure everything would be consistent throughout. Fascinating things, style sheets. When in doubt, the Chicago Manual of Style is the Bible, but there are always things that are unique to any book. After a fashion they are passive aggressive lectures. You did it wrong–this is the way they do it!
I think there are about 25 comments in the copy-edited manuscript that require a response from me. Some of them are simple affirmations of changes (or rejections thereof), but a few will require some additional text to clarify things that were clear to me but not to anyone else. Shouldn’t be a huge task. I’ll also go through the other changes to make sure they don’t alter my intent. The editor would like my responses by Monday afternoon, which should be easy, seeing as how…I’m a weekend bachelor.
Whenever they bring in a guest director on C.S.I., the feel of the show suffers slightly. Last night, for the 200th episode, they used William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist. This isn’t his first time directing the show. Last night’s focused on the murder of a grad student who was orphaned when Ray Langston, her advisor, defected to CSI. That part was decent enough, but the cameras focused too long on the Lucha Libre wrestlers, when they were something of a McGuffin. Not entirely, but almost. It was an okay episode, though I would rather have spent more time learning about Langston’s relationship with the grad student and less about the fake maneuvers of masked wrestlers.
I would have bet good money that the tribe that is now two people down would have been the odds-on favorites on Survivor this season. They simply can’t catch a break, and when a contest is almost even, they’re bound to lose. I think they probably made the right decision by voting off a weak link this week, but getting rid of Taj and keeping her immunity idol might have been a smart move, too. In either case, the impending merge is bad news for them unless they can do something to turn it around, and we’ll soon see whether the cross-tribe alliance plays out or fizzles.
