Examined

I was interviewed earlier this week about The Stephen King Illustrated Companion by Blu Gilliand for examiner.com. The interview went online yesterday. When I visited it, I got a Netflix popup, but not everyone reported that so maybe it was just me. My B&N sales rank took a good bump down into the 300-400 range again starting yesterday evening. Still hasn’t outdone its best performance, which was 317 last week, but here’s hoping!

I think I scratched the lens of my newish glasses. I have no idea how it happened, but all of a sudden there’s this ½ cm mark right in the middle of my right eye. I’m going in to see the optician later today to see if it can be buffed out or if I’ll have to get the lens replaced. A few minutes after I discovered this, I sold a reprint of some old interview material so even if I have to get a new lens, I should come out square for the day. Funny how these things happen.

Steven Rea was on Law & Order: SVU last night, elevating the normally humdrum series with his performance. Of course, they went and wrecked the episode with a ludicrous set piece where Eliot voluntarily spent a three-day weekend in solitary confinement. It was just plain dumb. My other quibble with the episode is that the Rea character’s problems seemed to arise only in the second act and didn’t mesh with the way he was depicted for the first 20 minutes. I’m still despising Christine Lahti’s character, too. When Eliot took a header I had my fingers crossed that he wouldn’t survive but, alas, I was wrong.

I only watched Criminal Minds with half an eye while I worked on something else. I confess to being puzzled by the answer to the crossword puzzle clue: Crater creator = arc tangent? Looks like this week was one of those cases where everyone fails. They solve the case but not in time, and the killer gets away (even though someone else cleaned up the mess later on.)

I’m about 1/4 of the way through Ilium. The Greek gods have just shredded the spaceship carrying the moravecs, and the humans have just tracked down Suvi.

So, the story I alluded to yesterday. During the last year of my Ph. D. program, Dorothy Hodgkin was given an honorary Ph. D. by my university. My advisor sponsored the honorary degree, as he was an Oxford graduate who knew her during her heyday. I knew of her work, of course, and had heard many fascinating tails about her exploits the summer I spent at the chemical crystallography lab in Oxford. One of her honors students was a young Margaret Thatcher, and Dorothy had reportedly expressed the opinion (on numerous occasions) that if she had been a better supervisor, Thatcher might have stayed out of politics!

Anyhow, my advisor decided it would be a good experience for me if I were to present the results of my research to Dorothy. He set me up with the slide projector in his smallish office and left me alone with her. Dorothy was about 77 that summer, and used a wheelchair whenever she needed to travel any distance. The small office quickly became warm. After about 10 minutes I was aware that my entire audience had nodded off. What do I do? I asked myself. Stiff upper lip, I decided, and I plunged on, completing the 20 minute presentation, convinced I was talking to myself for most of it. The next day, when my advisor took her to the airport for her return trip, she supposedly told him that I was “sharp” but I’ve always wondered if she was just being nice! So, that’s my story of the time I put a Nobel prize winning chemist to sleep with my research project.