To celebrate the publication of Tuttu su Stephen King, today’s entry will be written entirely in Italian. However, because I have cleverly embedded a babelfish in the post, you won’t notice the difference. I’m told that dvd.it has this translation of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion on sale for 15% off.
In rereading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series (We’re up to So Long and Thanks for all the Fish), I’m struck by Adams’ powers of prognostication. Sub-etha net is a pretty close analog of “ethernet” that behaves like a cross between WiFi and Amazon’s WhisperNet. And the Guide itself is really a Kindle or a Nook, or maybe an iPad. One of those companies should have been clever enough to license the rights to put “Don’t Worry” on the front of their device.
I downloaded and installed Beta 1.0 of the Windows version of Scrivener this morning. I plan to use it while I work on the second draft of my latest novel. It installed without a hitch. I spent the morning going through the online tutorial that comprehensively introduces the project management package and all its features. A few of the options that are available in the Mac version haven’t been ported yet, but nothing too crucial, so far as I can tell. Looks cool. My plan is to start on the novel on November 1. Not doing NaNoWriMo, per se, but it helps to have a fixed starting date in mind for a project of this magnitude.
I was amused to see Liz Vassey on Two and a Half Men last night, playing a 47-year-old woman. Vassey was Wendy the lab rat on CSI for several years, and is actually 38, much younger than Charlie Sheen, who is 45. (She was on Two and a Half Men once before, back in 2003, according to IMDB.) It reminded me of another actress I looked up recently whose publicity page gave her age as 32 but she claimed she could play “26-31.” In other words, she didn’t acknowledge that she could play her own age! (Aside: Today, Charlie Sheen was found drunk and naked in a trashed Manhattan hotel room. Life imitates art?)
Last night’s Castle was one of the strongest episodes to date, I thought. The case was a good puzzle, and they used solid police work and detecting to arrive at the perp’s identity. The fact that they got it wrong was just the cherry on top. They were plagued a bit by the hands of the clock, by which I mean the guy confessed with fifteen minutes left in the episode, so I was expecting some sort of reversal. However, what I anticipated was that Mr. Sweaty was going to turn out to be the real killer. They projected a bit by having Castle accompany Ryan to the motel at the end (we’ve never seen him do anything like that before), but it was still a good reversal. I liked the way the perp turned Castle’s pop psychology around on him. “How close to death do you want to get?” And the bit with him and Beckett holding hands by the pool at the end was nice. My favorite line: “Just for that, I’m going to base my next book on Esposito,” after Beckett said his job was “menial and unimportant” during the profile.
