Yesterday and today, the heat index hovered around 100°. It’s already hot when we get up in the morning. Thankfully, a cold front is coming through this weekend that means we’ll see overnight temps in the low 60s and a couple of days next week, at least, it’ll only be in the low 80s in the daytime. Can’t wait. It has been a long, hot, humid summer.
The Big Bang Theory was back on its new night. Back with a bang, one might say. The nurse with an attitude was great. We’ve seen her before, I think? Most awkward date ever, plus the one Penny had to go on with Sheldon and Blossom! Since there was nothing on after BBT, I left the TV on while I worked on a jigsaw puzzle. Big mistake. That new Shatner comedy, Bleep My Dad Says, is one of the worst new shows of the summer. Oh, I’m sure there are a lot of equally bad sitcoms out there, but I’ve managed to avoid most of them. Surely this one won’t last.
The bloggers have come up with some clever names for the Earth 2 version of Olivia Dunham on Fringe to go along with the somewhat awkward Walternate: Olivialt. Bolivia. Alt-livia. Altivia. My favorite, though, is my own, which I haven’t seen anywhere else. Faux-livia. It doesn’t look so hot in print, but it rolls off the lips. After a quick but handy recap of the situation, the premiere launched into full-on Earth 2 events. Evil lab experiments on Olivia, who escapes, commandeers a taxi and ends up at her alterna-mom’s house, in brief. I like trying to catch all the little differences in Earth 2. Kennedy is still alive and Ambassador to the UN (according to the news radio in the cabbie’s car). The smash hit broadway play isn’t Cats, it’s Dogs. Tom Cruise is a TV star. Glatterflug, the same airline that landed in Boston 1 with a bunch of dead people on board, makes daily flights to the moon. Shell and Exxon merged to make Shexxon. People still ride penny farthing bikes, and there are dirigibles. Olivia has a tattoo now, to match Faux-livia’s, and maybe some of her memories? Certainly her shooting skills have taken off. However, I think at the very end she was play-acting to make people think that she was completely converted. The transition from Earth 2 to Earth 1 threw me for a second. I thought the dirigible over the Capitol building teleported.
Lisbon’s lie to Patrick Jane on The Mentalist served a good purpose. It wouldn’t have seemed natural to have Jane immediately back on the job after the events of last season, so they had to come up with some subterfuge that seemed at least moderately plausible. It worked, I thought. Jane was his usual self, though his dislike of the commissioner proved to be one big red herring, a surely a headache for Hightower. Did Lisbon really say “sheep dip?” The gag with the dead mouse (or, without the dead mouse, actually) was pretty funny, especially since the camera had lingered on one early in the episode (making me think the mouse had been collateral damage). I liked Cho’s exasperation with the widow, especially when he answered the question no man should ever answer when asked by a woman (how old do you think I am anyway?), especially not as honestly as he did. And his explanation of the situation was funny, too. “She cries a lot. Then she has to freshen her makeup. Then sher cries again. Sort of a cycle.” I still can’t get used to hearing Simon Baker speaking in his normal voice, announcing the preview for next week. Sounds fake.
Another book review posted at Onyx: The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith. I’m getting review copies of Moonlight Mile, the new Kenzie/Genarro novel by Dennis Lehane (sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone) and Djibouti, the new Elmore Leonard, from Amazon Vine, so my reading list is taken care of for a while.
