I spent an hour on Skype yesterday with Lou Sytsma and Hans-Åke Lilja being interviewed for their next podcast. We talked about a variety of subjects and I believe the material will be used for two podcasts. This is the first time Lilja and I have spoken to each other, though we’ve been communicating via e-mail for many years.
I’m over halfway through The Last Kind Words by Tom Piccirilli, his forthcoming breakout hardcover crime novel. The main character, Terry Rand, is summoned back to his home town five years after he took off. His brother is on death row and facing execution in a couple of weeks. The Rand men have been thieves for generations. Terry did his stint as a burglar, but he’s been straight for a while. He still has the mad skills, though, and some of the most interesting scenes so far are the ones where he creeps other people’s houses, just because he can. There are plenty of issues in the Rand family, primarily caused by the fact that there are certain subjects they simply never raise with each other. Plus the fact that Terry left a lot of unfinished business behind when he left. Senility and dementia is a secondary plot, but the main thrust is Terry’s brother’s insistence that one of the people he is accused of murdering was killed by someone else, possibly a serial killer who is still operating with impunity. His brother doesn’t deny the other killings, though no one has any idea why he suddenly went on a spree and killed seemingly at random.
I don’t think anyone could deny that Rachel and Dave deserved to win The Amazing Race. They dominated the game in a way no one else ever has before, setting the record for the most first place finishes. And it wasn’t like they were always in the lead. They just managed to do well when it counted. I thought they were screwed when they took the wrong route at the end and got to the mat without finishing a challenge. As the strongest evidence of just how much they dominated, they paddled back across the water, completed the challenge (which the border patrol agents had been working on for quite a while unsuccessfully) and paddled back to the finish line still with a comfortable lead. I knew Vanessa and Ralph were in trouble when Vanessa got stuck doing the “chicken grab” challenge on a sprained ankle. I can’t even imagine how much that must have hurt.
Looking forward to the Once Upon a Time finale. The cliff-hanger at the end of last night’s episode was a good one. Henry stepped up to the plate to force Emma into seeing what was really going on. Can’t even imagine how it’s going to end.
We finished the first season of Downton Abbey this weekend and watched the first episode of the second season. It’s a little like Upstairs/Downstairs. Maggie Smith is always fun to watch (I got a kick out of her shielding her eyes against the new electric lights) and I’m glad that they didn’t make her a relentlessly negative and wrongheaded character. She correctly diagnosed Molesly’s affliction and she lets Molesly Sr. win the flower show. She gets many of the series’ best lines. I think Anna Smith is my favorite character—I could tell she was sweet on Mr. Bates very early on. I thought for sure Mrs. O’Brian was going to throw herself down a staircase after the incident with the soap, but, no, nothing so good as that. We get a kick out of Mrs. Padmore, too. “I sent you for a drink of water, not to find the source of the Nile,” she chided Daisy. It’s an enormous cast, but it didn’t take long to see who was who and what was what. Carston’s reaction to the new telephone was amusing, too, as was the Earl of Grantham’s complaint that there were too many cars in town. He saw five parked at one time and three more drove past.
