I’ve become a stand-up guy. My kangaroo arrived last night. The UPS guy wrestled it to the door. It was in a massive box, and weighed about 40 lbs. Solid construction, and the wooden platform matches my work desk perfectly. I took it into the office, but didn’t get around to setting it up until mid-afternoon. It became an instant attraction. People were coming from all over the building to see it.
I’ve been badly out of sync on my television viewing this week. I’ve had things taped (okay, recorded. I’ll begrudgingly give into the anachronism.) I finally got around to watching Sons of Anarchy, which is building up towards something potentially cataclysmic. An SoA vs. the IRA Smackdown. Most of SAMCRO is on their way to Belfast, thinking no one knows they’re coming when in fact everyone does. On the flip side, only Piney and Tig are left behind, along with a bunch of prospects, to hold down the fort, just when the former Calveras president has an ax to grind. Did they seriously not think the guy would be raring to get even?
I feel smugly pleased with myself for figuring out the truth about Trinny. I suspected it right from the beginning, and I felt like my suspicions were validated by the exchange of glances between Gemma and Clay when Clay asked Gemma to talk to Maureen “mom to mom.” Then it was confirmed straight out by the photograph Maureen dug out of her lock box: Trinny is John Teller’s daughter and Jax’s half sister. Gemma says to Tara, “Secret babies are a bad idea,” but she’s thinking about her late husband’s indiscretions.
And I think that Tara’s boss was far too eager to sock her in the face, even though her reason for doing so was sound.
My favorite exchanges of the episode:
Opie, after Jax’s ill-advised night: That was a high traffic zone you were ripping through last night.
Jax: Let’s go find my kid—figure out what we’re doing with our dicks later on.
Clay, handing over Gemma’s cockatoo to one of the prospects: Anything happens to this bird, Gemma will stuff you in this cage, make you wear a beak and shit on newspapers.
Prospect: That sounds fair.
Actually, I starting to like one of the prospects. “What? Caffeine is a mood booster,” he says to his partner in crime after offering Jax a morning drink.
Hey, Jeff Strand—you out there? Talk to me out this year’s Survivor. Pretty lame? Definitely not up to the high standards of the past few seasons, in my opinion. Marty’s an interesting character (I loved the way he pulled off the chess master gag by invoking the name of some 1970s tennis player), but it all feels, I dunno, disorganized. Like no one really has a plan they’re willing to stick to for more than a few minutes.
Criminal Minds was suitably creepy this week. I knew they were messing with us when the minister picked up the hitchhiker, playing with our expectations (and of course, the minister had to leer and look evil). I didn’t quite buy the kid, though. Sure he was a sociopath, but I didn’t find him credible.
SVU managed to avoid most of the proselytizing this week. At first I thought it was going to be about animal smuggling and using skins for clothes, but it was actually a serious story about a human crisis. I can’t figure out how the girl’s father knew he had a daughter, though. And the coincidence of the mother hearing her daughter’s laugh on the street was a tad too slick to credit. It’s okay for Alexander McCall Smith to talk about Edinburgh as a small town where everyone runs into everyone else, but not New York. Hell, I live in a community of fewer than 100,000 people and I hardly ever run into people I know.
Law & Order: LA started off with a dramatic and brutal explosion. I couldn’t believe they would do that to kids, but I totally bought the mother’s reaction. Then the show almost veered off into SVU territory, with its preachiness about domestic terrorists. I liked the Terrence Howard’s ADA character’s gambit in the trial, dropping everything that referred to the terrorism case. A stroke of brilliance that almost came back to bite him on the butt, but didn’t.
