Not everyone can pull off the cowboy hat look. Joe Don Baker did it well in the BBC miniseries Edge of Darkness that we watched last weekend, and Timothy Olyphant does it well in the new FX series Justified. It’s based on something by Elmore Leonard, but I don’t think I’ve read the source material. Olyphant plays a US Marshall who is transferred from Miami to Kentucky after a questionable shooting in the opening moments of the first episode. Talk about getting a show off to a bang start. Olyphant walks up to this creep, who is eating lunch on a deck at a posh restaurant, and informs him that the 24 hours he gave him to get out of town have just about expired. He has five minutes to head for the airport. Classic deadline scenario, which amps up the tension as the countdown plays out. Kentucky just happens to be where he grew up, so there are plenty of landmines for him, including his ex-wife and a father he has spoken to in some time. The show has something of a Burn Notice vibe (Michael Weston is stuck in Miami and has to deal with old girlfriends and family and both characters are cold blooded killers when necessary). Definitely a show I’m going to keep track of.
It’s going down to near freezing here tonight on the first day of spring. It’s raining hard, filling the ditches. The rainwater is covered with yellow “slime,” the pine tree pollen that has been covering everything the past week or so and trigging everyone’s allergies. Weird, weird weather.
I’m really glad I cancelled my British Airways flights for World Horror. The strike began at midnight Friday and who knows what the cascade effect is going to be over the next several days?
I first went to see my current family doctor back in the late 1980s. I did a face plant in the sidewalk from my bicycle, got 18 stitches at the ER, and went to the clinic near my apartment for wound care and to have the stitches removed eventually. I probably went back to the same clinic a couple of times after that, but then they dropped off our insurance plan, so I went elsewhere for a while. Once the plan changed again and they were re-implemented, I went back. After my appointment yesterday, the doctor set aside my file, pulled up a stool and says he wants to test my memory. “Had you ever heard of me before you first came to see me?” he asked. I outlined my history with him, but I hadn’t heard of him before that. “I’ll give you a clue,” he said. “It.”
The pieces come together–sort of. The local paper ran an article about my Edgar nomination recently. Turns out my doctor used to practice in Orono, Maine back in the late 1970s and he was Stephen King’s physician. King named a minor character after him in It. “I’m in the back of the book,” he says. “Page 1000 and something.” It’s a fairly unique name, so I looked it up this morning and there he is, giving baby Mike Hanlon a tetanus shot. Small world, eh?
