One more editing pass on the new essay and it will be ready to send in to the editor. It ended up somewhere in the vicinity of 5500 words. That’s two 5000-word documents I’ve completed in the past couple of weeks. For a change of pace, my next one will be comparatively short, something on the order of 600 words.
I finished my read-through of all things Sherlock Holmes. Over the course of the past several weeks I’ve reread, or read for the first time, every Holmes novel and short story Conan Doyle wrote. I got the order of the last two collections reversed, which meant that I finished up with the story His Last Bow, which was as good a place as any to end.
The Bram Stoker nominees have been revealed. Ellen Datlow has the list on her LJ. Quite a few friends appear on the list. Congratulations, one and all.
Sometimes the Amazing Race‘s schedule is an equalizer. The cowboys were way, way behind at the midpoint of the first leg, but since the next leg involved a flight and the departures weren’t until the next morning, it was all moot. I’m not sure that 70-year-old Mel is going to make it to the end, given by how wiped out he was after just one or two days. And it looks like the redheads might be in some trouble next week. I couldn’t tell from the preview whether they hit another car or a pedestrian. Definitely not good either way.
I only watched an hour of the Oscars, but that was enough. My favorite line of the evening came from 73-year-old screenwriter David Seidler (The King’s Speech), who started with “My father always told me I’d be a late bloomer.” My overall assessment of what I saw: Mila Kunis looked terrific, and Anne Hatheway tried her best to keep things chugging along, but her best wasn’t good enough. I was bored.
I remembered that I had an episode of Law & Order: SVU recorded from last week that I hadn’t watched yet. Much to my surprise, it was actually quite good. Low on the preaching content and a real whodunit. They managed to shoe-horn in an ultimately irrelevant subplot about a businessman who was boosting his Google rankings by harassing clients into giving him negative reviews. Don’t know exactly where he found the time to do this, given that he was spending hours outside the house of one client. And then there was the boss from hell, the Queen of Mean, who surprisingly wasn’t the murder victim. The SVU folks had to do some real detecting and a nifty but yucky clue came from the manner in which the victim ended up with such a high blood alcohol content.
