One goal every 120 minutes. Be still my heart. I watched most of the World Cup final yesterday afternoon. I don’t think my pulse rate got up over 60. It was a relaxing way to spend a few hours while reading and doing other things. I see that Paul the Octopus has retired with a stellar record.
I still haven’t managed to see the first episode of Haven. Both times I recorded it our SyFy was out. Guess I’ll have to see if they have it on the SyFy website. Most of the comments I’ve heard about it thus far have been lukewarm at best.
I did see Eureka, though. I liked the first episode of the new season. They often find a way to reinvent themselves to get rid of annoying and unproductive plot points. In this episode, a handful of characters were sucked back in time to the point where Eureka was founded (the 1940s, I believe) and while there they managed to create enough of a butterfly effect to alter their present reality. An autistic boy is no longer autistic. Henry has a wife. A marble statue is now bronze. Jo’s fiance is an inmate in her jail. And Tess, ah, yes, Tess is living in Carter’s house. That’s a terrific development–I’m very happy to see Tess back. I wouldn’t have minded it, though, if they’d spent more time–even a few episodes–back in the 1940s, but such was not to be.
My wife asked me over breakfast this morning what I found so interesting about Big Brother. It took a while to come up with an answer. Finally I decided that I like the voyeuristic aspect, but not from a prurient point of view. I live a relatively sedate, quiet life, and it gives me a chance to observe real people in stressful circumstances. I am fascinated to see how the contestants responded, for example, to the news that there’s a saboteur in their midst. True paranoia reigns. And then when the saboteur put tape across the faces of two random contestants, the paranoia quotient in those two amped up even more. Granted, the show is edited so it isn’t a true chronicle of reactions, I still find it fascinating.
I’m about half way through Mr. Peanut by Alex Ross. It’s an interesting book, hard to classify. You could call it a crime novel, because there are at least two equivocal deaths. The initial protagonist fantasizes about different ways his wife might die. At first, by misadventure, but later by his hand. He’s working on a novel that expands on these fantasies. When she dies, he naturally becomes a suspect, especially when the manuscript turns up. However, though the cause of death is clear (anaphylactic shock from eating a peanut), it could be suicide or murder. One of the officers investigating the case is Detective Sheppard, who used to be Dr. Sam Sheppard, the man who is reportedly the inspiration for The Fugitive. His wife was murdered in the 1950s and he was convicted for the crime and later exonerated. The other detective has a wife who went to bed one day and refused to get up for five or six months. No one seems to have a happy marriage, or at least it isn’t happy for long.
