Got a little behind schedule this month, so my Storytellers Unplugged essay is a revised rerun: The Day Job. Originally posted in 2005, it is still as true for me today as it was back then.
We’ve had enough rain of late, including some decent showers today, to move out of the “extreme drought” category. I guess we’re just in “normal drought.”
Alas, the Houston Texans ended their impressive season with a not-so-impressive game last weekend. It would have been nice to see them go farther, but they did indeed go farther than anyone would have guessed before the season started. So kudos.
We watched another episode of The Sopranos this weekend. I’ve been told to stick with it, that it gets better. It’s okay so far, but it’s not exactly bowling me over yet.
Justified returns tonight and, by some lucky coincidence, I guess, Elmore Leonard’s new book, Raylan, is out today. I snagged a review copy last fall but held my review back until today. It’s a fun book, but it might take viewers of the show by surprise since many of the details of what happens in Raylan’s life and work are different.
I watched the two-hour premiere of Alcatraz last night. Poor Hurley, back on the island again, although this time he’s a PhD who is also a big fan of comics. Perhaps even a comic artist? I’m a little foggy on that detail. The score is very Lost and it shares a little bit with that show. A time-travel mystery of sorts, and flashbacks to the prison before it closed and this batch of prisoners vanished, only to reappear fifty years later. Sam Neill is good as the mysterious sort-of-FBI guy, and I like Sarah Jones as Rebecca, the SFPD cop who gets co-opted into Neill’s task force. The fact that her grandfather is one of the mystical prisoners adds to her motivation and the intrigue. I’ll be back next week, for sure.
I love the way BBC reinvented the Holmes story with Sherlock. Episode 2 of Season 3, not as much, but the finale, The Reichenback Fall, was fantastic. Of course, anyone who knows the Holmes stories get the significance of the title. Hell, even people who saw Sherlock Holmes 2 last month will. It’s related, closely, to the original, and yet it’s totally different. No trips to Switzerland for these guys. I think a lot depends on how much you like the depiction of Moriarty, which is quite outrageous. (Someone said on twitter that they found he talked too much like Graham Norton.)The concept of a fall from grace rather than a literal fall was a stroke of brilliance. It’s pretty convoluted, when you stop to think about it, and there was some sort of legerdemain involved at the end, but I was impressed. I might have been a touch more impressed if they had avoided the “reveal” in the final seconds (as they couldn’t avoid it in the Robert Downey film, either). I’ll bet there was a wonk somewhere who decided that you have to show him alive. But in “real life,” Doyle left his readers hanging for three years. Remains to be seen when we’ll see Holmes and Watson again. Moffat promises a third series, but the two stars have become hot properties of late. Martin Freeman said (on Graham Norton) that it was a part he could see himself playing for a long time, if the circumstances allow.
