One (more) great thing about being Canadian: First, libraries buy copies of your books and stock them on their shelves. Then the Public Lending Right Commission pays you, every year, based on a sampling of how many libraries stock your books. I think I found out about this a year or two after The Road to the Dark Tower was published, so I missed out on it at first, but now I’m on the regular annual schedule, and the checks come each February like clockwork. The amount you get paid for a specific book diminishes every five years, but it’s still a nice little bonus. Somewhat more per title than I get for the average pro short story sale.
It’s funny—every time I tweet with the hashtag #NCIS some autoresponder tweets back with one of Gibbs’ rules. Finally this week McGee met a woman who was involved in their case who turned out not to be trying to screw with him. And Tony went above and beyond the call of duty by fixing McGee up with the woman. Will wonders never cease? Though the finale was a little bit hokey, it was nonetheless amusing. McGee is talking Gibbs through a booby-trapped landscape much like a video game. When Gibbs reaches the computer at the end, the countdown until all the computers at the Pentagon are wiped clean is almost at zero. “You’re going to have to shut it down using UNIX commands,” McGee says to his boss, the guy who until recently couldn’t retrieve voicemail messages from a cell phone. The world is doomed if Gibbs needs to so much as enter “cd /root” at the keyboard. Instead he pulls out his trusty Glock and performs a system shutdown as only he could. The episode was called “Kill Screen,” and that’s exactly what he did, though I wish TV shows would quit perpetuating the idea that if you shoot out a computer monitor you’re actually harming the CPU.
