Houston set a record yesterday for the highest temperature ever seen in June: 105°. Not just for the day, for the entire month. We also heard thunder rumbling all afternoon, but that didn’t give us any rain. The rain did materialize later on in the evening, a decent shower, the first in weeks. Not nearly enough to put a dent in the drought (we’re at about ⅓ of our normal rainfall for the year) but I’m sure the plants and animals welcomed it, plus the sound of rainfall was nice to fall asleep by. Today it’s only supposed to be 100°.
I found a nice new review of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion. It concludes: “Vincent’s well-footnoted research has dug up a range of anecdotes and details at least a few of which are likely to be unknown. The Stephen King Illustrated Companion is an unusually in-depth, well-designed coffee table volume, to be recommended above all but a few books on its famous subject.”
I spent the weekend catching up on writing book reviews. I had five on my to-do list and managed to finish four of them: The Matchmaker of Kenmare by Frank Delaney, Pacific Heights by Paul Harper (David Lindsey), The Night Season by Chelsea Cain and The Snowman by Jo Nesbø. I also read about 3/4 of Satori by Don Winslow, which takes place in various parts of Asia during the early 1950s, including a harrowing trip down the Mekong River.
I hear there’s a ghost of a chance that the SyFy network might pick up The Event for at least a miniseries. That would be nice.
On Friday night we watched Surviving Picasso, a Merchant-Ivory film starring Anthony Hopkins as the famous artist. The movie is based on the story of Françoise Gilot, who stayed with him for the decade after World War II and bore him two children. She was forty years his junior and Picasso had a son who was exactly her age. The movie depicts him as something of an asshole, a self-absorbed “artiste” who did whatever he wanted with whomever he wanted. For some strange reason, though, women were enraptured by him. Even when he moved on, they still doted on him, as if he had somehow mesmerized them. Hopkins was good, but he was always Hopkins in my eyes and never quite Picasso. Interesting from a historical/art perspective but not a very nice guy so the movie suffered from that perspective. Hard to fathom why these women liked him so much. Juliane Moore did a wonderful French accent, though.
Watched the first period of the Vancouver/Boston game on Saturday night before switching over to Doctor Who. Then we checked in on the game during commercial breaks. It was looking dire for Vancouver, then I switched over and saw that it was “intermission.” Intermission? Too late for that, which told me Vancouver must have tied the game and it was going into overtime. Well, it did just that, for a whopping 11 seconds.
Some fascinating developments on Doctor Who.
There was some good trickery in the episode. First, the two versions of the miner Rory was looking for: both “flesh.” And then the switcheroo with the shoes so that Amy would reveal her true feelings about the faux-Doctor, or so she thought. The real Doctor said that it was important to learn about them through her eyes, though we don’t really appreciate the full meaning until the end of the episode. Great line: “I never thought it was possible. You’re twice the man I thought you were.”
Also, what will be the consequences of the Doctor knowing that Amy & Co. were invited to see his death? One of the problems with a game-changing episode like “The Doctor’s Wife” is that the vernacular of that episode has to get integrated in ways that it never was before. The TARDIS is now always “sexy,” though it rarely was in the past. Favorite line of the episode though, was the Doctor’s response to the question “how much time have we got?” He says, “An hour. Five seconds. Somewhere in between.”
