I received my first copy of the Cemetery Dance limited edition of The Dark Tower Companion the other day, and it’s a beauty. I see that it is out of print from the publisher, which is a nice surprise.
Over the past several days, I read a book my daughter gave me for Christmas . It’s called Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and it is a delight. It’s about a guy who lost his job to the economic downturn who takes a job at the strangest bookstore in San Francisco. It is three stories high, but all one floor, with tall ladders required to access the books on the upper levels. Very few customers, except a group of people who are “members” who come in at odd hours to exchange one volume from the upper levels for another. They’re trying to solve a puzzle related to a book from hundreds of years ago. The main character has a lot of spare time on his hands, so he uses his computer to solve the first part of the puzzle, which sets him on the way to the bigger goal. It’s a nerdy literary book, with a character who works for Google bringing in all the modern tech tools, an ancient order out of Umberto Eco, a love of literature and puzzles: it has it all. Great fun. The first book I’ve ever read where the climax is in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.
Didn’t stray very far from home over the past week since my last post. We didn’t even go out to see any other movies, since none appealed to us. We don’t generally watch live TV very often, but we found all sorts of things to entertain us while we visited. We watched the Adele concert and a couple of Christmas specials, plus an Austrian version of The Nutcracker.
A lot of older TV shows don’t stand the test of time all that well, but we stumbled upon The Andy Griffith Show and watched several of them. They’re obviously dated, but the show was pretty good, with only a minimum of bumbling and pratfalls and some decent storylines. The best of them have Opie reflecting something bone-headed Andy did.
On New Years Eve, rather than watching the increasingly insufferable countdown shows, we stumbled upon something called Drunk History on Comedy Central. Drunk comedians and actors recount interesting incidents from American history while other actors and comedians recreate the incidents and lip-sync the drunk person’s narrative. It’s as hilarious as it sounds, especially when the narrator loses the thread or stumbles over words and the re-enactors have to deal with it. I didn’t know most of the narrators, but one was the guy who played Badger on Breaking Bad and another was Jane Curtain’s daughter. Familiar faces popped up in the re-enactments, though, some of them surprising. It was the best way to ring in the new year, I swear.
We watched the twisty-curvy Christmas episode of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride. Once it was finished, I described it as a Möbius strip. Sherlock2100 goes into his mind palace to try to solve a 19th century crime. Sherlock1880 extrapolates forward to the 21st century, envisioning himself in that era as someone who might create a mind palace to come back to the 19th century to solve a crime. It’s enough to put your brain into a knot. There were a ton of touch-points to both the Conan Doyle works and to Sherlock itself, many of them tongue-in-cheek. It was all highly enjoyable while at the same time highly improbable. It seems to be the setup for what we’ll get in the next series in 2017. Did Moriarty kill himself to complete an impossible scheme? Will he be back as “the virus in the data”?
Last night, we watched the first episode of the final run of Downton Abbey. The course of true love never did run smooth, especially on this show. The best parts were the scenes where Mrs. Padmore is delegated to find out from Mr. Carson what he expects from Mrs. Hughes in their impending marriage. Mrs. Padmore is so embarrassed, she can’t even look in Carson’s direction. And, finally, the Bates/Anna plot is laid to rest, although Anna (a character I used to like more) can’t help but gainsay every good thing Bates claims about their future. It will be interesting to see how they wrap things up. Will the dowager survive the series? Will their be another wedding (or two or three) at the Abbey? Will the show end with everything being auctioned off?
