My essay The Illustrious Man is now up on Storytellers Unplugged. It’s about the people whose works inspire and influence us and, in particular, Ray Bradbury.
I was going to work on my Screem magazine essay this morning but I got tangled with doing some maintenance on my web site and then I accidentally wrote the first thousand words of a story that’s due at the end of the month. Well, it wasn’t strictly an accident. I finally figured out my hook into the story yesterday and then I went to sleep last night working over the opening few paragraphs. When I woke up they were still fresh in my mind, so I set them down and then kept going.
I always enjoy the Provenza/Flynn caper episodes of The Closer. The guys are usually good cops but every now and then they get caught off guard. In this one, Provenza is doing a favor to get his first ex-wife off his back by retrieving the wedding band she sent off to one of those cash-for-gold places. The woman behind the counter is extremely cooperative, which should have been a clue that she was actually there robbing the place and the loud noises in the back room was her partner opening the safe, not “renovations.” The ex-wife’s dog played a crucial part in “gathering evidence” (though it took 24 hours for said evidence to become available). The surviving owner of the cash-for-gold place was funny. Over-the-top funny, but entertaining. I was ruing the fact that this might be the last Provenza/Flynn episode, but both actors are returning for Major Case in August, so maybe they’ll get a chance to screw up again.
It was with sadness that I deleted Eureka from the series recording menu on my DVR this morning after watching the finale. I stumbled onto the show when an online friend who I’ve never met sent me VHS recordings of episodes of The Dead Zone back in the days before I had cable. The last tape had a few episodes of Eureka and I’ve been watching the show pretty much faithfully ever since, though I think I probably missed some of the end of Season 1. It was a cute show with cute characters and fun situations. I liked Holly’s summation: the people in Eureka are smart, but Sheriff Carter is the “strong force” that holds everything together. Eureka was being dismantled, there was a crisis involving worm holes, Holly started to get her memory back, Fargo staged a sit-in, Henry reached out to Barlowe on behalf of his incarcerated wife, Parrish went for a spa treatment, Zane and Jo figured out their future, Zoe came back, Taggart chased a runaway dog, Carter (who is about to be a dad again) saw his life flash before his eyes thanks to a wormhole expedition, and the city was sold and thereby saved from dismantlement. At first I thought it was going to be Vincent from Cafe Diem, who hasn’t been collecting any money for food all these years, as it turns out, but it was really their time-traveling friend from 1947. And, as Carter and Zoe are leaving town (Zoe is about to graduate from Harvard summa cum laude), they pass themselves driving into town all those years earlier, thus completing the circle: the event that inspired Carter to stay in Eureka in the first place. Fare thee well, Eureka.
