Acceptance letters make me smile. I received one last night from a relatively new Canadian pro market for a story called “Matthias Comes Home From the War.” More details once all the paperwork is finished.
I also received the page proofs for A Sea of Alone, the poetry collection that contains my first-ever published poem, “24 Hour Psycho.” The book should be out in a couple of months. Did you know that the theme music from Alfred Hitchcock Presents is from a piece called Funeral March for a Marionette? That’s a Jeopardy question that would have stumped me.
Speaking of Jeopardy, I finally got to see the first two episodes of the big Champions vs. Watson contest. The first thing that amused me was the apparent randomness by which Watson selected questions. Most people pick a category and work down the column, jumping over to another category when the questions get too hard. Watson just picks whatever comes into his silicon mind. Trebek’s reaction to his wager on the first Daily Double question ($6435) was funny, too. “I won’t ask.” There was probably a reason for it, but it wasn’t immediately obvious. Seeing Watson’s thought processes was interesting (I had a chance to play around with him on the NY Times web site several weeks ago), and his wrong answers were more instructive than the right ones. The biggest gaffe of all was a total blowout in the category U.S. Cities, where Watson guessed Toronto (with a bunch of question marks thereafter). He was clearly so baffled by the syntax of the question that he plumb forgot the category. I’ll bet there were a bunch of wonks in the audience taking copious notes on that one.
Jennings looked like he was going to blow a gasket, and, to be honest, I don’t blame him. I suspect he knew the answers to a lot of those questions, but he couldn’t ring in. Even though Watson is manually activating a buzzer just like everyone else, his response time has to be much faster than a person’s. Do I know the answer? Yes. Buzz. I’m not sure what the solution to this would have been. Perhaps having a person behind the podium who received a little jolt when Watson wanted to ring in?
This week’s Castle was good but not great. It was a switch to see Castle and Beckett actually fighting and disagrees as opposed to simply bickering. The murder weapon was good for some shock effect, but didn’t play into the storyline at all. It was good to see Alexis contributing to the case by pulling a crucial piece of evidence from the cold case file. The actual culprit of the contemporary killer was a tad arbitrary, but I’m sure life’s like that. There was a nice multiple change with regards to Rick’s old friend, though. And good on Beckett for seeing that Rick was upset and calling his BS when he said he was fine.
Has the NCIS team ever been put in charge of guarding someone and have it go well? Has McGee ever met a woman during a case who wasn’t trying to use him for evil purposes? Has Gibbs ever obeyed a direct order from Vance? I wonder what they have in store for us. For the past few weeks they’ve been rattling swords in a way that implies there might be some big change coming up regarding the team’s composition. This week we had Ziva and McGee’s conversation. McGee would like to have his own team someday. Tony was once offered a team of his own and turned it down (much like Ryker on Star Trek: The Next Generation) but he won’t get to do that a second time.
