You’d probably think I was crazy if you saw the local weather and then I went on to tell you how great it is. It’s been overcast and threatening rain, sometimes delivering, for the past several days. One of the great things this overcast condition brings is vastly cooler temperatures. It was below 80° when I was out at noon today, which is about 20° cooler than it was in August. It’s heavenly. Of course, it’s too early to rely on it staying like this, but one can hope. I remember how nice it was this time last year, in the post-Ike days when we had no power for a week. I spent a lot of that week sitting in a lawn chair in the driveway, reading under natural light. There was something magical about that time, a return to a simpler life. Cooking meals became an event. We socialized with the neighbors more than at any other time before or since. Anyway, bottom line is, I like September, especially when there are no hurricanes around.
If you’re a Stephen King fan, check out his website today for a link to a downloadable pdf of the first 60 pages of The Cannibals, an aborted novel that he wrote while on the set of Creepshow. It was a second attempt at the concept that is behind Under the Dome–people stuck together and what that brings out in them. The limited edition of Under the Dome also went on sale at 9 a.m. today. All 1500 copies were gone by 1 p.m. I was surprised it went that fast.
Tonight’s the two hour finale of Big Brother. I’m still hoping that Jordan can pull off the win. If she does, it might change the way the game is played in the future, since she played mostly square. She told her lies, got mad a couple of times, but was about as honorable as a person possibly can be in that environment–which isn’t so far different from The Cannibals, now that I think of it. A few more days on slop and they might have started to eat each other, too…
Mad Men is taking its time this season. It’s fascinating, sure, but I don’t know that it would win over the kind of viewership it’s managed if it were just starting now. The politics of the time are interesting, and Don Draper conveys a lot in few words. “And yet I never thought to bring a bottle before,” he tells the other man in the maternity ward after confessing that he’d been through the process twice already. I wonder what’s going to happen with the school teacher, the same one he saw frolicking around the Maypole last week. That was an interesting scene, as he caressed the grass with his hand as a way of coming into contact with her bare feet, yards away.
I’ll send in my Cemetery Dance column tomorrow, after one more pass of revisions. I trimmed a couple of hundred words from it this morning, but I’ll probably end up adding as many back in based on today’s developments.
My confession of the day: I bought the new Dan Brown novel for my Kindle. It was delivered to me overnight. Don’t hate me.
