According to one item I read, a software glitch made iPhones fall back an hour yesterday morning instead of springing ahead. My iPod got it right, so I wonder why the phones wouldn’t. No daylight savings today—a cool front passed through making it dark and dreary all day.
I spent the weekend editing the short story I finished on Friday morning. The first draft was 6300 words. By the time I was done yesterday afternoon, it was down to 5500. Most of the words went on the first pass, which is fairly typical. One of these days I may learn how to skip writing all that extra verbiage in the first place, though I’m open to the possibility that they are part of the creative process. I really like the way it turned out. I wrote myself into a corner and used the corner as a plot development. Had to overnight the manuscripts to meet the deadline. Fingers crossed, though I don’t expect to hear back for months.
We watched the end of Season 1 of Deadwood and 3/4 of the second season. Still loving it, still think the doctor is the best character, getting a kick out of Calamity Jane upon her return. Swearingen was put through the wringer in the early parts of season 2 with his kidney stones and the treatment thereof. Man, he looked like crap! Fascinating the way the characters all dance around things without addressing them head on, with the exception of Swearingen who seems to have no filter whatsoever. He can keep secrets, but he’s pretty open about his opinions of people otherwise. His conversation with Alma Garrett was funny. She objected to his colorful language and you could see his forehead pinch each time she tut-tutted him as he had to review what he might have said that would offend her.
I’ve never seen a team melt down as completely as Kynt and Vyxsin did on The Amazing Race this week. They missed a mandatory flight out of Narita. Vyxsin allowed her emotions to overwhelm her during one of those needle-in-a-haystack challenges. And then, to top it all of, they left their fannypack containing money and passports in a gondola car and didn’t notice until they were well away from the site on a bus that couldn’t easily turn around. They almost dug themselves out of the missed-flight fiasco, but it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be so lucky twice in a row. Ron was pretty funny, the way he kept irritating his daughter because he wanted to stop and nibble at every kind of food they passed in China.
CSI did something this week that shows seldom do. They showed me a character played by a recognizable actor (Max Martini from The Unit) in a moderately significant role at the beginning of the episode and then made me forget about him. However, they didn’t catch me with their other sleight of hand. If there’s a murder without a body, I immediately think the person is still alive. It’s like the old Ross McDonald novels where they find a body with the face smashed in. I immediately knew that the body had been misidentified.
We don’t see nearly enough of the Bennetts on Justified this season, but a few minutes of Mama Bennett doing the latest amazing thing make up for a lot. This week, she discovers that her dunderhead boys have been trying to think for themselves again, which is usually a bad thing, so she lays a smack-down on Coover for being stupid enough to cash checks belonging to McCready, the guy they murdered at the beginning of the season. I don’t think she knows he also stole the guy’s watch, so maybe he’ll get some more schooling. I’m not sure which hurt more, though: her hammer blows to Coover’s hand (not his gun hand, she hastens to point out) or the cutting remark she makes to Dickie about how he’s crippled to the point of worthlessness, and that she likes Coover—implying that maybe she doesn’t like Dickie. What a twisted family.
Wonder what the blow-back on Boyd is going to be over the shenanigans up at the mine. He got sucked into the robbery (because it’s what I do), but knew about the lack of honor among thieves so he spied on his co-conspirators and figured out a way to keep from being on the wrong end of a lit fuse. And he managed to come away with enough money to save Ava’s house from the creditors while doing so. The episode had explosions and all that, as well as a tag-team tasering between Raylan (aka the hillbilly whisperer) and the guy who was cashing those bad checks. Yikes! And then it ended with a great scene between Raylan and that little girl, Loretta, in which Raylan warns her that he’s kicked the hornet’s nest and he’s ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice to come to her rescue, no matter what he’s doing. You get the feeling that no adult has ever made a promise like that to her before.
