Taking one for the team

Poor Jonathan on Survivor. He’s such a fiercely competitive person that it was obvious that being forced to leave the game because of his injury went against everything in his heart. Quitting is anathema to him, but the consequences for not seeking medical attention would have been dire. I’m glad to see they finally got rid of Chet. He had to beg them to vote him off, when I would have lobbied for his ouster after the first or second week. So, the big question is: does the guy who found the fake idol believe it’s real, or was that staged for our benefit. He said he thought Ozzie had it, which could have been a red herring on his part, or maybe he’s not as dumb as Ozzie would have us believe. The way James gamed the competition was amazing. I’m still not sure exactly how he managed to pull that off. Jeff was astonished that he’d come up with a different way to follow the rules and give them a huge advantage in the contest. Bravo!

LOST was a step up from last week. Not at the same level as the first four episodes of the season, but not bad. The big reveal was a letdown because at least half the viewership guessed who Ben’s spy was weeks ago. The freighter captain is an interesting guy. I wonder why he is not to be trusted. Is he suffering from the same “cabin fever” that afflicted the woman with the upside down book who jumped ship? The doctor seemed to imply that Sayeed and Desmond didn’t really want to meet the captain. Interesting. The wraparound story was done reasonably well. There were clues to what was happening, best appreciated in retrospect. Jin’s cell phone, for example. I also think the headstone is something of a red herring.

I did a full revision of the short story I need to submit by the end of the month. I managed to trim nearly 400 words, getting it very close to my 5000-word target. There is some leeway, so I’m not obsessive about getting to that exact figure, but I like being closer than I was. There are only five open slots in the market where I’m submitting, so I don’t want to give the editors any external reasons to reject the story. The revised version is also much more focused. I was able to convert a new character who appears late in the story into an existing character to good effect and, though the story trajectory is much the same as before, I managed to sharpen the trajectory and improve the logic and motivation. Or so I’d like to think.

I finished my Storytellers Unplugged essay and posted it to the time-delayed dashboard so it will show up like magic on Monday morning. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to do a podcast version this month. We’ll see.

I also finished a jigsaw puzzle I’ve had going since Christmas. It was a Casablanca puzzle, with an enormous Ingrid Bergman head hovering over a group of people sitting around Sam’s piano, none of whom look like any of the movie’s cast. It was a challenging puzzle, with large regions of featureless white and black pieces. Getting the big red “Casablanca” was easy. The rest took a lot of patience.