Bev Vincent

We watched a very strange movie called Wakefield on Friday, based on a story by E. L. Doctorow. It stars Bryan Cranston and Jennifer Garner as a couple with issues. Cranston is a  Manhattan lawyer who is delayed getting home after work one day, chases a raccoon into the detached garage facing their house, and ends up deciding to spend the night in the attic, from which he can surveil his family, which also includes teenage twins who don’t have much use for dear old dad any more.

When morning comes, he realizes how difficult it will be to explain his decision to camp out in the garage, so he decides to stay there longer. And longer, and longer. Days stretch into weeks stretch into months, as his situation becomes more and more untenable in terms of explaining his behavior. He becomes in effect homeless, looking somewhat like Tom Hanks from Cast Away and behaving like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. He eats food he finds in the trash, battles with Russians over the choicer bits of things people throw away, befriends a couple of special needs children who live across the fence from them, and basically checks out from society. Is it a nervous breakdown? I guess you could make that argument. The more we learn about Wakefield, the less we like him. We learn how unfair he was to his best friend and how duplicitous and controlling he was toward the woman who would become his wife. Only Cranston can make us go along for the ride, because this is another version of Walter White. I envisioned him claiming a fugue state and showing up naked in a convenience store to work his way out of his dilemma. How do you resolve such a situation? Will your family rejoice at his return after so long or will they hate him for what he put them through? An interesting question, isn’t it. The answer, alas…

On Saturday night, we listened to the Blue Grooves playing a free concert at the waterway park and then saw Wonder Woman, which is every bit as good as everyone is saying. There is the origin story part of the movie, featuring Robin Penn Wright as a fearsome Amazon general, and then there’s the part of the film where Gal Gadot’s character truly becomes Wonder Woman, and then there’s the final conflict. All well handled, though I might like fewer Matrix-y conflict scenes in favor of more natural (as natural as superheroes and demigods can be) battles. A good turn for David Thewlis, currently chewing up the scenery in Fargo. The movie works well for us in part because it has zero reliance on any other part of the D.C. universe. Even if you didn’t know who Bruce Wayne was, it works. And the fact that it’s set against the backdrop of a conflict everyone knows and more-or-less understands is so much the better.

Alas, I have fewer kind words to say about Season 3 of Bloodline (Netflix original). This is a Florida family drama that hinges on an incident from the childhood of the Rayburn children in which they were coerced into lying to the police (and everyone else) about how brother Danny was injured on the day their sister drowned. That lie, which they have to continue to live, is poison to the family, and it culminates in a Biblical reckoning at the end of Season 1. The truth is that the Rayburns are not nice people, external appearances notwithstanding. Danny took a dark path, Kevin is a lazy screw-up, and John is so tightly wound that he has never been able to enjoy any of the good things in his life. Sister Meg has gotten away from the toxic environment on occasion, but she keeps getting sucked back in.

So it’s not the easiest of shows to watch, as the Rayburns continue to do self-destructive and damaging things and then have to pile lie upon lie to cover up. The murder that ended season 2 propels Season 3 up to a point, but then, nine episodes in out of ten, they decide to pretend the show is Twin Peaks. A solid hour of baffling storytelling. They make poor use of some of the supporting cast (John’s wife, for example). Not to mention the fact that there’s this character played by John Leguizamo who wanders around like the purveyor of doom, making gloomy predictions and dire threats, only to have the character expunged from the story without anything coming of it. Mystifying. I would have been happy if the final season had ended with the rather jarring incident at the end of episode 8, although it would have been a shame to miss Sissy Spacek’s show-stopping rant in the final episode. And then there’s that ending. Hmmmm. Shame, really. Good actors doing good work, poorly served by the story.

Last week, my wife and I took a vacation in Arizona (mostly), New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. We flew into Phoenix, picked up a rental car (a Mustang GT, not the convertible we had reserved—thanks, Hertz) and drove up the Oak Creek Canyon scenic route to Sedona, where we spent our first night in an outwardly plain but well-appointed and centrally located motel. We had a late dinner at the Sound Bites Grill, overlooking the mountains while we listened to the music of Estaban and his ensemble. We were, at that point, at about 4000 feet above sea level, and we’d stay at least at that height for the rest of the week, though we were often above 5000 feet and, at one point, as high as 8800 feet.

The next morning, we completed the drive up Oak Creek Canyon and turned east. Our first stop was in Winslow, Arizona, a little town made famous by “Take it Easy,” the first hit single by The Eagles. The town itself looks terribly depressed, and I’m not sure it would still exist if not for the song. According to the legend, Jackson Browne came up with the line “I’m standing on a corner in Winsolow Arizona, such a fine sight to see…” but got stuck until Glenn Frey convinced him to lend a hand, coming up with the line about the girl and the flatbed Ford. There’s a statue on a corner that is supposed to represent Browne and a more recent one added to depict Frey, and a permanently parked flatbed Ford with a painting on the nearby wall that looks like a window reflection showing the girl. It’s a place rooted in nostalgia, as evidenced by the average age of the people hanging around the corner that Sunday afternoon.

From there, we continued west, driving through the Petrified Forest National Park and the Painted Desert. We stayed overnight in Gallup, New Mexico and headed north the next day toward Cortez, Colorado. From there, we went east to Mesa Verde National Park, which is famous for it pueblos. We spent most of the mid-day hours there, viewing the types of accommodations the natives used hundreds of years ago. Also saw a very large snake outside one of the Anasazi pit houses. From there we drove west, passing through Cortez again on our way to Four Corners. My wife had been here decades ago, when it was just a disk in the middle of nowhere, but it’s fairly built up now, with souvenir stands, and a lengthy queue to take a picture standing at the junction of the four states. We decided to skip the line and take a few stealth photos nearby.

From there we continued west in Utah, driving through some of the most spectacular landscape this country has to offer, namely Monument Valley, which has served as the setting for many classic Westerns and other movies. Breathtaking at every turn. We ended up in Kayenta, Arizona for the night. The next day we moved on to Page, where we took a cruise on the Colorado river into Antelope Canyon, joined a tour of a slot canyon where the colored walls and lighting from above made for some spectacular views, and ended the day at Horseshoe Bend, a scenic overlook that is, again, breathtaking.

We drove up to Kanab, Utah the next day and had a fairly relaxing afternoon in the low-key town. We took a drive up the Johnson Canyon trail, where one of the attractions is the dilapidated remains of a set used to film Gunsmoke, and had a fantastic meal at Sego. We also learned the importance of keen attention to detail at an artisanal deli where we both misread “roast beet sandwich” as “roast beef.” It was like those old Wendy’s commercials: where’s the beef? Much amusement.

The next day, we drove down to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which is much less frequently visited than the South Rim. This part is at least a thousand feet higher than the other side, and it’s closed in the winter. A deer dashed across the road in front of us while we were driving up the mountainside, which gave us a fright. Then a few minutes later there was a sign on the side of the road warning of bison, which was worrying, although we didn’t see any that day. I tried to keep a mental list of all the things we were warned might be crossing the road during our journey: deer, antelope and elk (they each had their own unique picture), bison, mountain lions, children, old people, ATVs, snowmobiles, motorcycles, trucks, and boulders. I’m probably forgetting some. (We did see some snow on this side, tucked in at the edges of the treelines, and on the tops of some distant peaks, but I didn’t think there was much chance of snowmobiles.)

The north rim visit was really nice. There are a number of hiking trails that take you along the edge of the canyon overlooking some spectacular vistas. The crowds were relatively small (compared to what we’d see the next day), and it was all very low-key and laid back. However, a thunder-and-lightning storm rolled in (and we were at 8800 feet at that point!) so we hid out in the general store for a while and purchased a couple of $1 ponchos that kept us dry and warmer on the long walk back to where we’d parked. By then, the worst of the rain was over and we had a pleasant drive to our penultimate destination, Tuba City, which is east of the Grand Canyon on Navajo/Hopi land.

On Friday, we drove to the Grand Canyon again, approaching from the east to get to the South Rim. It was my birthday, so we splurged on a 1-hour helicopter tour that took us over the entire canyon from about a mile up, at about 130 mph. Truly spectacular. There was a controlled burn in one part of the mesa that we flew right through, and a section where we saw some bison from above. The pilot told us that the herd was a few hundred in number and that they had moved 100 of them to another part of the region a few years ago, but within a week they had returned to their original location.

We spent the rest of the afternoon hiking along the rim and taking in the vistas one last time before the three-hour drive down to Phoenix, where we caught our return flight on Saturday morning. We drove 1600 miles from start to finish. I posted some of our many photos on Facebook, but I’ll put together a slideshow here in the coming days, too. It was a fantastic vacation. We had mapped out the stopping points in advance and reserved all of our motels/hotels, which took most of the stress out of the trip. We always knew where we were staying, so we could just enjoy ourselves and take in the scenery.

Since Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings time, but the Navajo reservations do, we had fun pinpointing exactly what time it was during most of the trip. We switched back and forth an hour at least once a day, it seemed, and sometimes more often than that.

I picked a Tony Hillerman novel (The Blessing Way) as our night time reading on the trip, and we were thrilled to find many of the places we visited mentioned by name: Gallup, Window Rock, Teec Nos Pos, Four Corners, Monument Valley, Mexican Water, etc. We could visualize the locales as they came up in the story.

There’s been a fair amount of controversy and negative reviews accompanying the new CBC / Netflix version of Anne of Green Gables, called Anne with an ‘E,’  but we really liked it. It diverges from the novel’s storyline at a number of points, and it certainly presents a darker version of the story, but it feels honest and realistic. Anne’s past in the orphanage was traumatic, and she has the occasional issue dealing with it. Her transition into school life in her new environment isn’t smooth, and she is faced with a number of issues that confront teenagers during any era. The acting is top-notch, and it comes with a jaunty set of opening credits set to “Ahead by a Century” by The Tragically Hip. Fine cinematography and scenery. We are eagerly awaiting the second season.

I’m glad I watched the original Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me recently before tackling the new season of Twin Peaks. I would have been mightily lost otherwise. Blue Rose? The ring. The talking tree (okay, that one was just messed up, and there’s apparently a real-world story behind why “the arm,” also known as the little dancing man, is now represented this way), etc. But it all makes perfect sense now. Well, as much sense as one might expect. Lynch has managed to recapture the feeling of the show and prequel movie very well, and add some new viewing experiences as well.

Speaking of the talking tree: as with everything else in the Black Lodge, its dialog is captioned. I swear when it said “2-5-7” the captions read “2-5-3.” I wonder if that means something.

I was intrigued by the fact that the opening credits started with the casting director and that the actors themselves weren’t named until the closing credits, but I guess that was to keep the identity of some of the new (and returning) cast members a secret. I liked the way the subtle image of Laura Palmer is hidden in the mist at the very opening of the credits. Blink and you’d miss it.

There is a lot of strange shit going on here, and not much of it is taking place in Twin Peaks itself so far. After four episodes, the weirdest thing happening there is Doctor Jacobi spray-painting a bunch of shovels (gold? I can’t tell—my poor color perception defeats me in situations like that). I wonder who the billionaire is behind the mysterious viewing chamber in New York. It’s a little sad to see some of the returning cast members, a couple of whom have passed away since filming, but it was good to see David Duchovny again.

Kyle Maclachlan looks like he’s having a blast playing several different versions of Cooper, including one who is reminiscent of rain main. His reaction to peeing for the first time was hilarious. The show occasionally tests your patience—the cameo by Michael Cera was only a few minutes, but it seemed interminable—but I’m along for the ride to see where they plan to take us. I’m also enjoying the musical performances at the end of each episode: the Chromatics and Au Revoir Simone. Trippy stuff.

Acceptance and rejection letters come in many forms. For the latter, there are form letters and postcards with checkboxes. Sometimes these come with a handwritten scribbled note at the bottom. Sometimes the rejections are personalized and constructive. I once received a rejection that was a strip of paper about ¾” wide cut from a sheet of printer paper. It had a couple of lines of type, and was tossed into a legal-sized envelope, where it rattled around as the letter made its way through the postal system. How frugal, I remember thinking at the time. They could get nearly a dozen of those rejection missives from a single sheet.

Acceptance letters are generally unique, and the one I received for my short story “Truth or Dare?” this week easily qualifies as the cutest ever. It opened with a colorful green monster with a polka-dotted body, Viking horns and a facial expression—including extended tongue—that would rival the happiest of dogs. This was Manny the Monster, I learned, and the editors said that if they hadn’t accepted my story, Manny would have eaten their toes.

The story will appear in Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, an anthology from Necon E-Books that will launch at Necon 37 in July. There will be both a print and an electronic version, and many of the authors will be present to sign at the convention. The coolest part is that all proceeds will go to the Jimmy Fund from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

“Truth or Dare?” has a long history. I originally wrote it in 2007, or thereabouts, and I think I submitted it to a few places and had it accepted to a pro-paying market. Signed a contract and everything. However, ultimately the terms of the contract lapsed after a few years; therefore, I took the story back because I had no faith the market was ever going to appear. So it was available when this call came out and, happily, it found a receptive audience.

We’ve been working our way through Bill Nye Saves the World on Netflix. It’s a more grown-up version of his popular science show. It’s frenetic and fun and informative, with a clear political and social slant. It doesn’t always hit on all cylinders (I thought the Rachel Bloom segment fell flat), but we’re enjoying it. Nye also does a good job of bringing diversity to the table in his panel discussions.

Small quibble about NCIS: I know it would have taken screen time to explain who these strangers were, but I found it strikingly odd that every one of McGee’s co-workers was able to attend the very special event this week and not a single one of Delilah’s co-workers was there. They hand-waved away family members, but not that.

We watched and enjoyed the Tim Burton movie Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children on the weekend. I’ve never read the book it’s based on, and I didn’t really know all that much about the story going into it, but it was cleverly done, with a terrific cast and the expected spectacular special effects. Liked Chris O’Dowd as the boy’s father, although poor Kim Dickens got relegated to a single scene as his mother. Samuel L. Jackson chewed up all the scenery.

I’ve gone on two protest marches so far this year. I’ve contacted my congressman. I joined the ACLU.

And I’ve written to complain to a cereal company!

I’ve always been a big consumer of cereal. Growing up, I ate it for breakfast most days. I had a number of favorites, and Alpha-Bits was always near the top of the list. At first, it might have had something to do with the fact that they were letter-shaped, but I enjoy the flavor and consistency.

A number of years ago, for reasons I don’t quite understand, the cereal was pulled from grocery stores. However, it didn’t vanish completely. It was still available at places like Target and Wal-Mart. So I’d stock up on a couple of boxes any time I went to those stores.

I didn’t notice the “New & Improved” banner on the top of the most recent two boxes I bought. But I did notice something wrong when I poured the first bowl. The cereal was bigger and puffier, and it didn’t taste the same. And not in a good way. Quelle dommage! I did a search of social media and found out I wasn’t the only person who felt that way.

So, I decided to write the company, Post. I told them it reminded me of the New Coke debacle. I asked them to bring back Alpha-Bits Classic! I had a response from them saying they would pass my complaint on to their Product Development Department.

I don’t expect to go on a March for Cereal, but I’m not going to take this lying down!

On Saturday, I took part in the Houston satellite March for Science. The organizers expected 10,000 people to show up, but the semi-official estimates suggest that 15,000 people showed up. There were a lot of scientists from academia and industry, students, etc., but also a lot of non-scientists who are simply upset at the way science is being dismissed.

There were some very creative signs, some of them quite witty, science-based, punny and nerdy. One woman turned to me and, with a straight face, said that she was surprised to find out that scientists had a sense of humor! The march was supposed to start at 11:00, but we ended up standing around until 11:30, leading us to theorize that, as far as scientists are concerned, protesting isn’t an exact science. The delay was probably on account of the crowd size. The original plan was for us to stick to sidewalks but the numbers meant the police had to barricade some streets for us.

The most common chant during the march went like this:

What do we want?
Evidence-based science!
When do we want it?
After peer review!

When we reached City Hall, there were speeches by physicians from the Medical Center, scientists from Rice, NASA and industry, and some award-winning high school and university students. There were hundreds of other satellite protests around the world, including Antarctica. Bill Nye was at the DC march, and Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who) showed up in London.

I’ve had Deadpool on the DVR for months and finally got around to watching it this weekend. I had no idea what to expect beyond the general rumblings I’d heard about it. I don’t know the character, and only know a little bit about the mutant universe. I have no idea who the big metal guy was, but I did chuckle at some of the inside jokes: Deadpool expressing his confusion over whether it was Stewart of McAvoy. The visit to the manor where no other mutants could be seen because of the low budget. The breaking of the fourth wall inside of the fourth wall, so that was sixteen walls being broken. However, the real surprise to me was Morena Baccarin (Firefly, Homeland), as I’ve never seen her before. My favorite moment was when she said “ruh roh” when her boyfriend hit the high-scoring slot at the carnival.

I also binged my way through all ten episodes of Season 3 of Bosch. The story picks up where it left off at the end of Season 2. The trial arising from the discoveries in that season is still in development, and some of Bosch’s off-the-books actions endanger the prosecution. There are new murders to solve, too, using storylines and elements clever extracted from the novels The Black Echo and A Darkness More Than Night. Titus Welliver has become Harry Bosch for me, and I don’t think I’ll be able to read a new Connelly novel without seeing him in my head. The story takes Bosch down some dark roads and leaves him in a morally conflicted position. I also got a kick out of how many people roll their eyes when they are in his presence. His teenage daughter has that reaction perfected, but his partners, colleagues, boss, even the chief can be seen rolling their eyes. When I commented about this on Twitter, I got back a pitch-perfect response from whoever is in charge of social media for the show: a tweet containing a short video snippet with Bosch’s boss rolling her eyes at him!

In anticipation of the new Twin Peaks series, I’ve been watching the original. I remember how eager we were to see it when it first aired in 1990. There was big buzz around it, and each week we dissected the meaning of all the bizarre stuff that happened. I’d forgotten that the first season was a mere eight episodes. It’s a tad dated, but it’s still mesmerizing.

Last weekend we saw Going In Style, the comedy starring Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin. It was pretty good—I don’t think I’ve ever seen the original version. It’s a heist caper more than anything else, and it has some funny scenes and it treats the aging protagonists with respect most of the time.

I’m on the Literary Track at Comicpalooza in Houston again this year. I’m on a panel on Friday morning, May 12 at 10:00 called “Too Many Plot Bunnies: Managing Runaway Ideas” and a round-table discussion at 4:00 pm on Crime/Mysteries/Thrillers. I’ll also be signing at the Barnes & Noble booth at 12:30 Friday, and they’ll have copies of The Stephen King Illustrated Companion, my two Dark Tower books, and the X-files anthology for sale.

The story was accepted last May, but I found out this morning that “Pain-Man” will be included in the July/August issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. My first appearance there. It’s about a man of a certain age who decides to fight crime after a humiliating incident.

I made my first risotto last weekend, and it turned out pretty well. It’s more labor-intensive than most of my cooking projects. You have to babysit it for nearly half an hour, adding liquid, stirring, adding more liquid, and so on, but the results were worth it. It went well with the marinated tuna steaks.

I’m really enjoying Hotel Beau Séjour on Netflix. I’m eight episodes in (out of 10) and we still don’t know who killed Kato (and others), but some secrets have been disclosed.

We watched a couple of films last weekend. First up was 20th Century Women with Annette Benning and Elle Fanning. It’s set in 1979 and focuses on a single mother who decides she needs to do something to guarantee that her 15-year-old son gets everything he needs to become a proper man, so she enlists the help of various people in her orbit, including a couple of renters in her rambling old house. The characters are terrific and the plot is ramshackle and spontaneous. There’s no end game in sight, just evolution and a gentle reminder to not look for problems where there might not be any.

Then we watched Miss Sloan, with Jessica Chastain as a lobbyist who jumps ship to take on a gun control bill with a boutique agency. She’s hard as nails, calculating, manipulative and cold, and the movie never does answer how she got to be the way she is. There’s a passing reference to a youth where she had to lie all the time, but nothing more, and maybe that’s for the best. Any answer to that question might have been found wanting. The movie dives deep into the kinds of antics that take place in D.C. all the time, and there’s a wonderful twist at the end that makes the whole thing pay off. Sure, the gun lobby hated the movie and reveled in the fact that it made no money at all, but any other issue could have been chosen. The film isn’t about gun control so much as the dirty tricks and deals that go on behind the scenes around any hot button topic.

I’m happy to reveal that my original short story “The Halloween Tree,” will be in Volume Four of Halloween Carnival, an anthology edited by Brian Freeman for Hydra/Random House. One of my Necon friends made the connection between the story title and a blog post from a year ago and, yes, the story was inspired by a real tree—although events have been greatly fictionalized and expanded.

Halloween Carnival will be released in five eBook installments during October, one per week, with each section containing five stories. Some of them are reprints and some are originals. The full anthology is then to be printed subsequently, I believe.

How’s this for a list of who’s who in horror: Robert McCammon, Lisa Morton, John R. Little, Keven Lucia, Mark Allan Gunnels (Volume 1, October 3); Glen Hirshberg, Lee Thomas, Holly Newstein, Del James, Al Sarrantonio ( Volume 2, October 10); Kelley Armstrong, Kate Maruyama, Michael McBride, Taylor Grant, Greg Chapman (Volume 3, October 17); Ray Garton, Kealan Patrick Burke, C.A. Suleiman, Paul Melniczek and me (Volume 4, October 24) and Richard Chizmar, Lisa Tuttle, Norman Prentiss, Kevin Quigley and Peter Straub (Volume 5, October 31).

I finished the first draft of another short story this week, the one that I got up and wrote notes for several days ago. I’m very pleased by how it turned out. I finished it at the same table at the bar at the local Mexican restaurant as the previous tale, so I gotta think those margaritas are tax deductible. I dictated the story into Word, patched up all the transcription errors and gave it a full edit pass before setting it aside to percolate for a few days before I look at it again.

I’m three episodes into a cool Flemish crime series called Hotel Beau Séjour on Netflix. In the opening moments, a teenager wakes up in a strange hotel room, realizes something is odd, wanders into the bathroom and finds her own bloody corpse in the bathtub. It takes her a little while to conclude that she is really dead. However, a handful of people in town can still see her, talk to her, interact with her—but no one else. Her body is removed from the tub and turns up again later, having been dumped in the reservoir. There’s no real rhyme or reason to the people who can see her: her town-drunk father, her step-sister, her ex-boyfriend’s father, a total stranger. And the rules of her ghost-hood are fascinating, too. She can interact with things, but no one else can tell. She can make phone calls that ring, but the person who answers can’t hear anyone. She gets on a motorbike and rides away, but the motorcycle is still where it was originally. People bump into her and she feels it, but they don’t. She sleeps, has nightmares, drinks coffee. The plot has lots of small town secrets to be revealed, of course. It has a touch of The Returned feel to it, but Kato is the only walking dead person in the story…so far at least.

I can’t wait for the episode of The Americans where Stan finds out who his neighbors have been all this time. I can’t wait.

A funny thing happened yesterday. I was working on a short story and I reached a point where I was convinced I had written myself into a corner. I had conjured a scenario so specific that I couldn’t see my way out. I put the story aside for the rest of the day.

Except somewhere around midnight, I woke up with a handful of bullet points rolling around in my head. If this, then that, then that, then something else, and it would all work, and it would be even better than I’d planned for the story, which I’ve been battling off and on for the better part of two months. I’ve written entire other stories in the interim.

I was afraid that if I waited until morning, I’d forget all my perfect little additions and changes, so I got up and went into another room to write down these ideas. I got most of them, and the one that I’d forgotten to transcribe was still with me when I woke up several hours later. So now I know I can finish the story. Funny how things work, sometimes.

We watched Collateral Beauty, a movie that has a lower Rotten Tomatoes score than what’s-his-name’s approval rating. Way lower, although audiences seemed to like it. I thought it was okay, up to a point, and then it went a touch too far, and then another. Will Smith plays the owner of a small ad agency who loses his daughter and goes into a spiral. He writes letters to Death, Love and Time. If you’ve seen the trailers, you know that much, and that the incarnation of those concepts show up in his life to respond. What the trailer doesn’t tell you, and what seemed like a pretty terrific idea, is the reason why those concepts are personified by the people they are. They’re there to bring him back to reality so he can make some crucial decisions about his company, and they also connect with his three major partners in the firm—a guy who is having Love problems, a guy staring Death in the face and a woman who thinks Time is running out for her. Pretty slick. Good actors, all, too. But then the movie makes a couple of BIG REVEALS at the end that just destroyed it for me. Sure, there was some foundation laid for one of them (“if only we could be strangers again”), but it requires a lot of the audience to truly buy into it, and the other one was just, well, pointless. Did they expect the audience to go “oh, my gosh?” We didn’t. I just groaned.

We’re on a Stephen Fry binge. We watched the six episodes of Last Chance to See, in which he joins up with zoologist Mark Carwardine to revisit the endangered species that Carwardine had sought out twenty years earlier in the company of Douglas Adams, which was turned into a book of the same name. Now we’re watching Stephen Fry in America, in which he visits all 50 states in six episodes, scrutinizing America through the eyes of an outsider, sort of a pop-anthropologist. He ends up in some very unlikely places (a coal mine and a nuclear submarine, both of which are small places for a man of his stature, a body farm, a parole hearing) and meets a lot of people who have no earthly idea who he is, except for Sting, who does. It’s fun stuff. Light entertainment. He’s a bit of a scaredy-cat some of the time, though. Not quite the intrepid traveler that Michael Palin is.