I went back to work this morning on my review of Audrey’s Door for Dead Reckonings #6. It’s a fairly long piece, 1500 words, and I think I’ve got it more or less in the shape I want. Another couple of passes and it will be ready to get off my desk. I also want to get a head start on my next Cemetery Dance column, even though I haven’t been assigned a deadline for it. I want to write more about Under the Dome while it is all still fresh in my mind. In the review I didn’t get to talk about the dome-as MacGuffin, or explore a couple of the other thoughts I had about metaphors in the book at much length.
We had a good downpour yesterday afternoon, the first in a couple of weeks. We might get another today. Looks like I’ll be spared watering the lawn on our assigned days this week. I’ve been ignoring the back yard altogether, but yesterday’s storm took care of that for me.
I’m still working my way through How I Became a Famous Novelist. It’s not as funny a book as I was expecting, though it has its moments. The part where he takes an experimental drug to address his attention deficit problems while trying to write is pretty funny.
This week’s episode of Eureka was genuinely creepy, reminiscent of Tommyknockers, with the young people and, later, others, sleepwalking to a remote field to build something unusual out of ordinary objects, including the kitchen sink. There was the Christine-ish element of Fargo’s jealous car, too. I’m curious to see how this all plays out next week with the revelation that the signal was coming from a craft that Henry launched 20 years ago. I figured out the tie-in to the smart asphalt early on, but Eureka never really hides its mysteries too far below the surface. The new head of Section Five is a great addition to the show. Having her show up on Carter’s stakeout (with tofu pizza!) and enjoying it was a nice character touch–she is wide-eyed with fascination unlike most of the jaded Global Dynamics people.
Two episodes of classic comedies stand out in my mind as the funniest things ever. The first is the Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati where Carlson got the bright idea of throwing turkeys out of a helicopter at a local grocery store. As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly, he admits later, after the turkeys have plummeted to their deaths like boulders crashing through car windows in the parking lot and generally terrorizing people. The other is the episode of Barney Miller where Wojo brings in hash brownies prepared by his girlfriend. There were many hilarious moments in that show, but Jack Soo as Yemana deadpanning “Anybody seen my legs?” still cracks me up all these years later.
The writers of The Closer may have been conjuring up that moment in last night’s episode, but they didn’t go for the big laughs. It’s not a comedy after all. Not with decomposing bodies in ice chests, that much is clear. A good mystery, a rewarding resolution, and I thought the cops were going to blow it by paying off their wagers in front of the prime suspect. The best part, though, was Brenda taking heed of the victim’s mother’s plaint about abandoning her child and turning it into a lesson about how to respond to her niece.
I found it interesting that Nichols thought himself as unworthy of fathering a child as the terrorist in this week’s season finale of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. There were some nice, muttered exchanges between Eames and the Captain. “You’re starting to remind me of someone,” Eames says after Nichols makes some off-the-wall observation based on sparse evidence. “This one is taller,” her captain responds, though I would have to see D’Onofrio and Goldblum side by side to believe Goldblum was significantly taller.
Mad Men begins its third season on AMC on Sunday night, by the way.
