It’s been a while since I posted here—a solid month. Not because nothing has been happening, that’s for sure! My wife got back from several weeks in Japan and our daughter and two-year-old granddaughter came with her. Our grand-daughter is an energetic and delightful little girl who can talk reasonably well and who sings almost all the time. She’ll be eating supper and, for no obvious reason, burst into the A-B-C song or, more likely, the Baby Shark Song, a simple ditty that gets into your head and is hard to shake off. They headed back to Okinawa a few days ago and I still hear that song.
We also enjoyed many episodes of Puffin Rock and Sarah and Duck, both shows that are surprisingly watchable for adults. I preferred Sarah and Duck of the two, but my granddaughter was apt to call for “puffin” in the middle of an episode of S&D. Fun fact: the “scarf lady” in that show is voiced by the actress who played Mrs. Patmore on Downton Abbey.
Hodder & Stoughton, the UK publisher of Flight of Fright, the anthology of scary flying stories I co-edited with Stephen King, released their cover design recently (see above/right). They went in a different direction from Cemetery Dance, aiming for something more restrained and artistic. It’s quite striking, I think.
I also spent an hour and a quarter in a sound booth at a studio in Houston recording my Afterword from the anthology for the Simon and Schuster audio edition, which was an interesting experience. I’ll write more about that in a few days.
In the Afterword, I put out a call for anyone who saw someone reading the anthology at an airport or, better yet, on an airplane, to snap a picture and send it to me. So far, even though the book is some ten weeks away from publication, I’ve received two photographs from people who received review copies of the anthology and chose to read them on long flights.
Because I knew my daughter wanted to see The Avengers: Infinity War when she got here from Japan, and because I’m woefully out of touch with the Marvel universe (I’d seen a few Iron Man movies and Black Panther), I binged to get caught up, watching The Avengers, The Avengers: The Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, and Doctor Strange before we saw the new film. Very glad I did, or I would have completely lost. Now I’m in the camp of people who can’t wait for the next half of it to come out.
We also watched 15:17 to Paris, Clint Eastwood’s movie about the American soldiers and tourists who tackled a terrorist on a train in Europe. We’ve always enjoyed Eastwood’s movies, but this one was terrible. Terrible. Using the real people to portray themselves might have seemed like a clever idea, but they had limited range and depth, which made the film feel awkward and low budget. Also, because the pivotal incident is over in a few minutes, much of the film is backstory and a lot of it, quite frankly, boring and irrelevant. The older history was interesting, but the parts of the story about their trip around Europe leading up to them being on the train was over-long and beside the point. The boat trip where they meet a cute girl in Venice…we never see her again. The long scene in the Amsterdam disco…pointless. I hate to say the director has lost his touch based on a single film, but, boy, what a drop in quality compared to, say, Sully. Even the professional actors, like Judy Greer, turned in lackadaisical performances.
We binged through Season 5 of The Ranch in a couple of evenings. My wife is a big fan of Sam Elliott. It’s a show I could take or leave. I find a lot of the humor in it awkward and juvenile. It has a few good actors and a few who are clearly playing it purely for laughs. The season ends with the departure of Danny Masterson’s character, the actor having been fired after serious allegations were leveled against him. We wondered how far into filming they were when that happened, and how long they allowed his character to continue in the season after that. Trivia: I briefly met his brother, Chris, in Nova Scotia a number of years ago when visiting the set of Haven.
Oh, yeah, and I had a birthday since I last posted. 19×3.
