Houston Texans not so impressive today. I started watching at halftime, when it was 10-3, and it’s been downhill since.
I’m trying to trim an old urban fantasy short story that has always been nearly 10,000 words long down enough to submit it to an anthology with a 5500 word cap. After the first editing pass, I’m down to 6900 words, so I’m getting there. I always liked the story, but there were few potential markets for it. The stuff I’m cutting isn’t absolutely crucial to the story, but I’m afraid that I’m eviscerating some of the best bits. We’ll see. I also received my contract and pay for “Centralia is Still Burning,” which will be published in October in Specters in the Coal Dust.
It looks like fall is arriving in Texas, finally. It might even get down into the fifties overnight this week, which is about twenty degrees cooler than anything we’ve seen lately.
One of my Facebook friends mentioned an 80s song by Wang Chung the other day. I first heard the group in 1984 at a day-long multi-band concert at Wembley Stadium in London. They didn’t release many albums, but I liked them, but hadn’t really given them much thought for a while. The FB post impelled me to look them up and, low and behold, they have a new double EP out. One disk has a handful of hits (including an acoustic version of “To Live and Die in L.A.”) and the other is new material. The video for “Rent Free” opens with a clip from The Big Bang Theory where Wil Wheaton tells Sheldon Cooper that he’s been living rent free in Sheldon’s head for years.
Henry Ian Cusick (aka Desmond from Lost) appears in the first two episodes of Law and Order: SVU. He starts out as a suspect in an assault on a little girl, and is then revealed to be a member of an anti-predator group, and is then revealed to be something of a vigilante and is finally revealed to be something else altogether. He and Mariska Hargitay have some fun scenes together where he, even while a suspect, flirts with her. Joan Cusack appears in the first episode as a “smother,” the ultimate helicopter mom. Boy, did that little girl ever have an attitude. When the girl claims that her adoptive parents implanted a computer in her, Munch gets off this line: I hate to admit it, but that sounds a little paranoid delusional even to me. The story ultimately ends up something of an Elizabeth Smart knockoff.
The second episode starts with a couple of video-game addicts ignoring the woman’s daughter, primarily because the woman suffered a head injury that causes her to not recognize the girl as her daughter. Her game-playing male friend is suspected of sexual assault but Dr. Huang issues his informed medical opinion that the guy is really just a jerk. I thought it was ironic that the animated boy character the geeky couple was determined to save fell to his death because of SVU.
I think I missed an episode of Haven. This week’s was not bad—any episode that features that much Duke has a lot going for it. He makes the rest of the cast look stiff and awkward. Also caught up with Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice. I think I could easily give both of those shows up without missing them terribly. They’ve pretty much run their course. They have their emotional moments, and I’ll probably stick with them just out of habit. I’m not as turned off by them as I was by the second season of Desperate Housewives.
We watched a couple of light-weight movies this weekend. First it was Letters from Juliet starring Amanda Seyfried and Vanessa Redgrave. I’ve been to Verona a couple of times, so it was fun to see all that familiar scenery. The story featured some improbable coincidences (they just happened to stumble on someone they’d been combing the countryside for) and most of the plot could have been eliminated if they’d sat around a cafe and made a couple of dozen phone calls, which is how Sophie traditionally did her fact checking. My biggest issue with the story was that we never got to see why Sophie was engaged to Victor to begin with. He was pretty much a jerk out of the gate. On the other hand, Sophie didn’t seem at all interested in some of the adventures Victor gave her access to in Italy. Vanessa Redgrave, though, was charming, which made up for the shortcomings.
Last night we watched Killers, starring Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher and also featuring Tom Selleck, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Mull and the guy who runs the comic shop on The Big Bang Theory. Kutcher is a CIA hitman who meets and falls in love with the recently dumped Heigl in Nice while she’s on vacation with her parents (Selleck and O’Hara). Selleck plays it broadly as the overprotective, compulsive father, sort of a tongue-in-cheek Magnum PI, and O’Hara is a lush who drinks Bloody Marys straight out of the blender and wine by the magnum. It’s all terribly improbable, especially when all the other hitmen come out of the bushes, but it has some funny moments. Put your gun on the coffee table, the clip in the potted plant and check your brain at the door. We laughed.
