My latest Storytellers Unplugged post went up this morning. It’s called Maybe I Could’ve Been a Rock Star, like this guy over here ⇒.
One of my latest “claims to fame”—one of my tweets was quoted in a Guardian article about Bret Easton Ellis’s disparaging remarks regarding Alice Munro winning the Nobel in literature. I found the “emoticon” online somewhere: not everyone supports the character set, apparently. I hastened to post a follow-up to make sure everyone knew I was joking and that there was no such quote from Ms Munro.
I finished The Last Dark by Stephen R. Donaldson over the weekend. A fitting end to a series that I’ve been following since the early 1980s. Then my electronic galley of Police by Jo Nesbø was due to expire on the fifteenth so I read it cover to cover during my day off on Monday. (I use it to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving, but we always get Columbus Day off at work.) Nesbø was on Craig Ferguson the other night, his first ever appearance on a North American talk show. He’s very good at misdirection and playing with readers’ assumptions, though it sometimes goes a bit overboard. Then I read The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, which was passed on to me by my daughter. I especially enjoyed the trip to Amsterdam section, where the goal of the two teens with cancer is thwarted a little by unexpected behavior from a third party, which I thought was a brilliant stroke. Now I’m reading Darker Than Amber, continuing an on-going, intermittent sequential reread of the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald.
Last night’s Survivor was spoiled a bit by repeated ads that proclaimed someone was going to be blindsided. As they were, but it didn’t look that way going into the vote, so that foreknowledge ruined the surprise a little. Sad to see Candice go home. She’s a fierce competitor. Looks like we’re in for a tribal shakeup next week. That should be interesting.
I’m glad that this week’s The Mentalist wasn’t exactly the “very special episode” they threatened us with in the previews. The special part was restricted to the end and didn’t take over the entire episode. I’m surprised they entertained the idea that the Napa sheriff was Red John, though. He seems too far out of the loop for the kind of access RJ has.
I get a kick out of it every time Walton Goggins comes back to Sons of Anarchy. It’s so funny to see him in a the ultimate non-Boyd-Crowder role, crying on Gemma’s shoulder. I’m still not sure the show deserves 75 minutes every week. They could cut out the musical montages and squeeze it into an hour, surely.
Got a kick out of Castle and his #1 fan episode this week. Glad they found a way to resolve the Beckett situation without dragging it along for too many weeks. And I am in agreement with just about everyone else: Pi has got to go. Maybe Rick can investigate his murder. Or be suspected of it.
The kick-off of the new season of The Walking Dead was a little so-so. Certainly they could at least have given all those new characters red shirts so we’d know where they stand. And then there was the crazy Irish siren in the woods that Rick followed without worrying that he’d end up surrounded by desperate men. That plotline reminded me a bit of Mark Pavia’s calling card short film Drag, which you should check out sometime.
