One of the fun things about traveling is the pot-luck you get with change in airport concessions. After my trip to Boston I discovered that instead of a nickel I’d received a 5 centavos coin from Ecuador.
I wrote and revised my 350-word story and got it off to the contest a day early. Turned out pretty well, I think, but now it’s in the hands of the judges.
One of the cameramen or producers on Survivor must have a thing for snakes. It seems like every cutaway this season features some kind of snake. Maybe they’re trying to be metaphorical. I liked Brenda. She seemed smart, up until the end. I can appreciate her rationale about not looking weak by scrambling but when all is said and done your strategy should never be “I hope X will give me an immunity idol.” That had to be the longest pause ever when Jeff asked if anyone wanted to play one. NaOnka coined a neat new word tonight when she said she was pissed off to the “highest point of pisstivity.” I’m going to use that in my next novel. You’d think at least one person would have made the connection between “wooden chests” and “kindling,” though. I wonder why Jeff didn’t raise their little conflagration during tribal.
I finally caught up with last week’s episode of Fringe, and it was a good one. Faux-livia is starting to make enough mistakes that someone’s bound to catch her out before long, and Olivia is getting messages from the beyond about returning home. Hugo thought he had it bad with his six numbers, but that number stream sure had an ominous effect. Walter was in fine form, digging at Peter about his interest in the device. “I knew my Jimi Hendrix wah-wah pedal would come in handy,” he said. LOL at him and Nina sitting on a bench in the campus smoking dope. “I have a prescription,” he said. “Me, too.” My favorite Walter line: “If you end up breaking the universe, this time it’s on your head,” followed closely by “I remember hours spent ripped out of my gourd listening to Beatles albums backwards for secret messages. There weren’t any.” I like the way the show’s mythology is evolving, and the deviousness of the alt-universe cabal. Draw attention to something by going to heroic lengths to try to cover it up. They want Peter to find the parts of the First People’s device. And Walter saves the day by making one of the sandwiches that he devised to provide clarity of thought. It worked on Astrid. Maybe he should munch on a few himself when he gets foggy.
A more traditional episode of Criminal Minds this week. I wonder where a person goes to buy cage doors like the ones in the underground cave. I wasn’t convinced that you could fit them in through that narrow tunnel. I also thought that Reid’s leap from one body to a mountain man stalking the trail was pretty broad.
Finally, after how many episodes, Jax is reunited with Abel. I was really mad at him (via the writers) for having him walk away from the son that he’s moved heaven and earth to find. How many people have died in the cause of this reunion? I know Father Ashby got inside his head a bit, but still. Gemma was the fierce momma bear, and she wasn’t giving up, no way, no how. I liked how Clay told her “not to kill anyone” when they went to the orphanage and five minutes later she has a gun to the head of a screaming baby threatening to go all Samson on him. Famous last words from Jax: “Me and Opie can handle the nuns.”
Meanwhile, Tara has another body on her conscience. That’s two, now, right? The whole deal with Salazar was muddled, from the abysmal way the money drop was handled (if a couple of kids can bollix up a situation, it probably wasn’t well conceived). Then when Tara and Salazar were in the standoff, I found myself wondering why one of them didn’t just pull the trigger. Is it a given that if you shoot the other person will have time to shoot back? I wonder. And it seems to me that at some point while Salazar was carrying his girlfriend out to the car that Tara should have been able to either get his gun from him or get away.
Getting Jimmy O back to northern California means that Jax will have a chance to keep up his end of his agreement with Stahl and possibly kill Jimmy, too. Into whose bag did Maureen put the letters from John Teller? Jax or Gemma? I wonder what she’s hoping to accomplish by doing that. Anyhow, as today’s subject line indicates, Jax is done listening to dead men.
