Bev Vincent

It’s early days—there isn’t even a cover yet—but it’s never too early to pimp forthcoming projects. Amazon is now taking pre-orders for Volume 2 of The X-Files: The Truth is Out There anthology, which contains my short story “Phase Shift.” I don’t know the entire list of contributors, but these folks are mentioned on the order page: Kelley Armstrong, Jon McGoran, Hank Schwaeble, Kami Garcia, Hank Phillippi Ryan, David Sakmyster, Sarah Stegall, Glenn Grenberg, Tim Waggoner, David Farland. The anthology, edited by Jonathan Maberry, will be out in February 2016.

Event-filled days chez Vincent lately. Our daughter, who got married this summer, moved to Okinawa over the weekend, which meant a lot of organizing and re-organizing in advance of the Sunday morning flight. The biggest issue was the cat, which required a lot of special preparations and planning for the flight. My daughter and her husband hired a company to handle most of it, but there were still a lot of last-minute issues. The cat departed on Wednesday and arrived at her destination on Friday evening (local time).

It takes a long time to get to Okinawa. In general, about 24 real hours of travel time, plus the fourteen-hour time change. Our daughter left on Sunday morning and got to her new home on Monday evening, after three flights and a harrowing taxi ride. As a result of the big move, we inherited a lot of stuff, either for storage for the 4-5 years they’ll be overseas or to donate/sell.

One of the major items was her car. I decided that, since it was nearly a decade newer than the one I drive, I’d take it on and get rid of my 11-year-old Scion tC, which had less than 44,000 miles on it. I wasn’t looking forward to the process of selling it, though. Can be a hassle. If we took it to CarMax, I figured we wouldn’t get nearly what we could through a private sale, but I wasn’t relishing the though of having to deal with all that folderol. My daughter had sold a bunch of stuff through a community website, which I figured had less of a crazy quotient than Craigslist, so I decided to give it a shot. I took a few pictures of the car in the driveway and posted a 250-word classified on the website. Within a few hours I had no less than seven or eight inquiries about it. Apparently there’s a lot of interest in low-mileage cars, no matter the age. Made me think I should have asked for more!

Anyhow, I showed it to one family for their teenage son after work. They liked it but were going to look at another car. Then I heard from someone who really wanted it. They had cash in hand and wanted it right now! So I had them come over to look at it. I couldn’t believe it—just as I was about to start it up to demonstrate something, the battery chose that moment to kick the bucket. Fortunately, they were highly motivated buyers and we were able to swap out the battery and seal the deal. So, in just under 12 hours, I managed to sell my car. End of ordeal. They should all be so easy. (Well, it could have been easier if not for the stupid battery.) But my days as a huckster are over, I hope. I’m no salesman.

Now we just have to unload all the extra stuff stacked up in the garage and our house will be more or less back to normal.

I’ve been watching Narcos on Netflix during my morning exercise sessions. It’s a fictionalized account of a couple of DEA agents in Colombia during the time when Pablo Escobar rose to prominence. Interesting stuff. They dub in a lot of period news footage (Nancy Reagan and the “just say no” campaign, shots of the real people being portrayed). It’s quite good.

Then we started tearing through the fourth season of Longmire on the weekend. The move to Netflix means that the episodes jump from 42 minutes to pretty much an hour each, without the need to stage mini-crises around commercial breaks, and the show benefits from this. The third episode is especially harrowing. The camera angles are experimental at times, and the production values are quite good, giving the show a richer look. For some reason, though, I seem to have gotten a pretty good knack for identifying when a character is telling a big fat lie, even though the cops on the show don’t glom onto the fact until later. Still a decent show, worth a binge.

I also did a binge rewatch of Season 5A of Haven so I can prepare a recap essay for News from the Dead Zone and to refresh my memory of the show for the launch of 5B in a few weeks. I’m supposed to get a screener of the first two episodes this week, too, so I can help promote the final season. I’m glad to see that Kris Lemche will be back in his role as the Darkside Seeker. He was on the set when we visited last year and I had a lot of fun joking around with him. Unfortunately the nice long interview I did in the morgue that Lemche “crashed” has yet to surface, and I’m beginning to think it never will.

Looks like we’re going to be getting new next door neighbors fairly soon. The SOLD tab has gone up on the realtor’s sign. I can’t say we’ll miss the previous neighbors and their increasing pack of barky dogs. We never really got to know them. The neighbors, not the dogs, I mean. We got to know the dogs very well.

At least they didn’t bring as much baggage with them as the family that moves into the new house in the excellent thriller The Gift, which we saw yesterday morning. The husband and wife move from Chicago to L.A. for his job. She had to leave her job behind, though she’s doing some stuff online. There are hints of possible instability in her past. It’s a new start, perhaps time to add to their family, though that has been problematic in the past. Then he (Jason Bateman) runs into someone from high school while they’re out shopping. Dude is a little creepy. A little stalkerish. The guy is played by Joel Edgerton, who also wrote and directed the film. Bateman’s Simon (as in Simon Says) remembers him as Gordo, though in private he recalls him as Weirdo. He seems a little off kilter, and he keeps showing up, often bearing gifts. Is he obsessed with Simon’s wife, Robyn? Did he do something to the family dog, Jangles? And what really happened back in high school?

There are a few jump-scares, but mostly this is a taut thriller with a very well developed story and characters. Edgerton’s script leads you in all manner of directions and raises any number of suspicions, some of them legitimate, some of them red herrings. He also manages to shift the viewer’s allegiances throughout, until he punches everyone in the stomach with a wholly substantiated but unforeseen revelation. My wife, who generally doesn’t like scary movies, really enjoyed The Gift, because it was all about the characters. No guts or gore. Highly recommended.

We also watched a documentary called Iris, about Iris Apfel, though I’m hard pressed to explain what it is she’s famous for. She became renowned for her rather quirky fashion taste, I guess is the easiest way to say it. She likes gaudy bangles and intriguing textiles and somehow parlayed that into celebrity. She’s in her early 90s and still does all these interviews and talk shows about fashion. Her husband, who turns 100 at the end of the movie, just died this month, I see. It was an oddball film—were she less famous, she could have been featured on an episode of Hoarders, or perhaps even an entire season—but a look at something with which we have no direct exposure, so that’s always interesting.

Hannibal went out with a bang and a few stabs and lots of blood. It was a very strange, entrancing series. In this incarnation, it’s almost a love story between Hannibal and Will Graham, and the final moments were very Reichenbach Falls, although if you didn’t wait for it there was a post-credits scene not to be missed in which Gillian Anderson looked quite ravishing and delectable. Even if there is never a Season 4, which looks like less of a possibility with each passing day, it was a good way to end things.

Last summer it was Styx and Foreigner. Last night it was Toto and Yes. Gradually I’m finally getting the chance to see in concert all the bands who I first discovered in high school or as a university undergrad, many of whom I still listen to this day or have recently rediscovered.

Styx fell off my radar for a long time until I stumbled upon their 2003 album Cyclorama, which is very good. That was when I learned that they’d brought on Lawrence Gowan as a singer-keyboardist, the guy I knew of as just Gowan, a well-known Canadian performer from the early 80s. I started filling in the gaps and then they came to the local concert pavilion last summer, along with Don Felder from the Eagles and Foreigner, who put on an impressive show, too. I’d seen Tommy Shaw before when he toured with the Damned Yankees back in the early 90s.

Similarly, I’d lost touch with Toto until something put them back on my radar again and I caught up. They have a new album out, Toto XIV, which is very good indeed. I’ve been looking forward to this concert for a few months, and I was surprised that they were the support act. Turns out it was almost a co-billing. Toto played from 7:30 until 9:00 and Yes played from 9:15 until 11:00 or so. Toto had the bigger stage presence, with two keyboard players (Paich and Porcaro), a percussionist in addition to a drummer, two backup singers, in addition to Steve Lukather, vocalist Joseph Williams and more. Lukather is amazing on the guitar, but I see he’s still “old-school”—plugged in. A roadie had to lurk behind him to make sure his guitar chord didn’t get tangled up. Yes was just five guys: drums, bass, keyboards, guitar and vocals.

I was surprised that the pavilion was in its small configuration for the concert: no lawn seats were sold. The Pavilion has 6500 reserved seats and can put another 10,000 people on the hill, and it routinely sells out the full capacity. For this show, it was all reserved seating. A rainstorm passed through in the mid-afternoon, so I was glad we wouldn’t be sitting on the hill, but as it turns out, no one was. They seemed to know in advance that this was a concert with somewhat limited appeal. It was certainly an enthusiastic audience, albeit a relatively small one.

I’m much less familiar with Yes’s music. I knew a few of their songs, but not most of them. I appreciate their musical talents (Steve Howe still has his guitar chops, Geoff Downes can still play his wall of keyboards with the best of them), but their songs don’t grab me the same way many other bands’ songs do. I have a hard time latching onto them. They meander and seem to be without structure in some cases. I guess that just comes from not having listened to them for decades, as I have with the other groups. The lead singer can reproduce Jon Anderson’s sound pretty well (I liked Anderson’s project with Vangelis from the 1980s), though he looked a little like a cross between a religious cult leader and Kid Rock. It was fun watching them (the bass player was impressive, though Chris Squire’s shadow hung over them literally and figuratively), but I just didn’t connect to the music in the same way. I was on my feet for much of Toto, but I sat back for Yes, mostly. I remember feeling much the same when I saw Emerson, Lake and Palmer many years ago: the musicians seemed to be offering a master class in music performance rather than putting on a show. But that’s just me. The English bloke sitting next to us was having the time of his life during Yes.

I think that leaves only Kansas as the one major band from my college years that I haven’t seen in concert.

My review of The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film just went live at Cemetery Dance Online.

We watched a couple of documentaries and a couple of films this weekend. First, we saw An Honest Liar, a documentary about James (“The Amazing”) Randi, the magician and escape artist who has been one of the leading crusaders against fraud, especially from people who claim to have magical or mystical powers. Uri Geller has been one of his lifelong nemeses.

I’d forgotten that Randi was born in Canada. He became a magician and illusionist at an early age, joining the circus instead of graduating from high school. However, he reached a decision point when he realized that he could use his skills for ill or for good. He’s taken on faith healers and psychics, and has posted $1 million of his own money to anyone who can prove psychic abilities. He executed elaborate cons to show that PSI research at reputable institutions was fundamentally flawed, and he coached the producers at the Tonight Show on how to set up Uri Geller’s demonstrations so they were guaranteed to fail. He then started following Geller on the talk show circuit to reproduce everything Geller had done the previous day to show that there was nothing magical about it. His credo is that magicians are the most honest people around: they’ll tell you they’re going to lie to you and fool you, and then they lie to you and fool you.

On a more personal level, the documentary revealed some surprises about his long-term relationship and a deception that was either perpetrated upon him or with his full cooperation for a quarter of a century. We’ve always liked Randi and his JREF organization’s goals. We came away from the documentary liking him even more. But, man, those eyebrows. They’re a ZIP code all their own.

Then we watched A Year in Champagne, which is a companion film to A Year in Burgandy, which we watched a few months ago. It examines the production of champagne wine in northeastern France by showing what goes on during a typical year at a variety of vineyards and companies. The year chosen happened to be a particularly gloomy one and it looked like the crop would be a complete failure, but season-end conditions improved enough so that, although the crop was small, it was very good. A fascinating look at the way champagne emerged as something associated with celebrations, and the people who’ve made it for centuries.

Yesterday we saw Ricki and the Flash, starring Meryl Streep as a woman who abandoned her family to pursue her dream of being a musician. A crisis emerges when her daughter’s husband divorces her and her ex-husband (Kevin Kline) is ill-equipped to manage her volatile emotions. So he puts in a call to Ricki (who the family knew as Linda) and asks her to come back to Indiana. This opens up all sorts of old wounds and issues. Ricki’s partner, in the band and off, is played by the most excellent Rick Springfield, who still has his guitar chops (and looks much better than he did in True Detective, see above) and delivered a surprisingly emotional performance as a sensitive guy trying to break down the borders of a somewhat closed-off woman. The script was by Diablo Cody, and it makes some very interesting (and, from my perspective, good) choices about what threads to follow and how to wrap them up. There’s no tidy bow at the end, but there is the possibility of further healing of broken bonds. It gave us a lot to talk about at the pub after the matinee. Good music, too, all performed by the actors and musicians.

Then, in the afternoon we watched an Australian film called Strangerland starring Nicole Kidman, Joseph Fiennes and Hugo Weaving. It’s set in a small, remote Australian town prone to dust storms. Kidman and Fiennes have moved there to get away from some family problem that occurred in their previous domicile. They have a 12- or 13-year old son who likes to go walkabout at night and a 15-year-old hypersexual daughter. There’s unexplained tension in the marriage that is exacerbated when the two kids go missing one night. Everything from everyone’s past comes out in the subsequent investigation, led by Weaving’s town sheriff. Strong performances, but things sort of meander without much explanation and the film has one of those dreaded “French movie” endings where the credits start rolling and you slap your forehead and say, “Oh, no!” An intriguing movie, but ultimately less than satisfying, although it’s got Nicole Kidman, and that’s always good.

I went to a book signing last night and came home smelling of smoke.

No, it didn’t turn into a book burning.

I first met Michael Koryta at Necon in 2014. We hit it off quickly and I found myself thinking that if he lived closer, he’d be the sort of guy I’d like to hang around with. A seriously smart guy, and very nice. He also happens to be a helluva writer.

I’d been introduced to his work by accident. I was using my computer-fu for my pals at Cemetery Dance, helping them extract the text from an obstinate pdf. All the running headers and footers and page numbers were giving them fits. So I took a crack at it and managed to come up with a solution to the problem. As it happened, the pdf was Koryta’s The Prophet. I figured, since I had the file, I’d load it onto my iPad and read it. I was majorly impressed.

Those Who Wish Me Dead was his 2014 novel, a full-out thriller set in Big Sky Country. Impressive. I managed to get an eGalley of his latest, Last Words, the beginning of a series, and was also impressed. I think I’d known he was coming to Houston on his book tour, but all of a sudden, on Monday, I realized it was going to be the following day, publication day for the new book. I sent him a DM on Twitter and said to give me a shout if he was bored yesterday afternoon. He had an interview to take care of, but in between that and his appearance at Murder By the Book, he had an hour or so, so I met up with him at the bar at his hotel, and then drove him over to the bookstore.

Following his own tradition with MBTB, he read from his next book instead of the current one. They’re parts of a series, and he originally decided to shift the second book from third person to first to indicate the growth and evolution of his character, Mark Novak. He was some 300 pages into the book when he realized it wasn’t working, so he went back to the beginning (oh, what a brave decision that was) and started over again in third person. However, before he made the choice, the decision had been made to include the first chapter as a teaser in the hardcover of Last Words, a fairly rare occurrence. Even rarer, now that the chapter is a lot different than it will be in Echoes, when it appears next year.

He asked me to stick around after the signing, so we went out to dinner. As a nod to being in Texas, I suggest barbecue. The original Goode Company Barbeque is only a few blocks from MBTB, and it was a good choice. By then it was nice enough that we could sit outdoors while we had our dinner and Texas beer (Lone Star for him, Shiner Bock for me). That’s where the smell of smoke came from—we were downwind from the kitchen, I guess. I could still smell it on my clothes this morning. A nice smell.

Anyhow, it was a pleasant evening. Had a great time chatting with Michael about everything under the sun. Took him back to his hotel, as he had to catch an early flight this morning for the next leg of his book tour.

We watched American Sniper on the weekend. It had been on my radar for a long time, just never got around to it before. I’m glad we saw it. I had a different impression about what happened to him after he came back after his last tour of duty. As good as the film was, I have to wonder how Eastwood and the producers and the studio executives and everyone else who sticks their collective noses into a movie allowed it to go out with that scene of the baby played by a plastic doll. Surely the scene could have been shot differently so it wasn’t so blatant. As long as it was breast feeding, it was hardly noticeable, but once Cooper’s character started waving it in front of the camera, it left no doubt that this was not a real baby, crying noises in the soundtrack notwithstanding.

We also watched a documentary on Netflix called The Search for General Tso. While nominally devoted to determining the origins of the ubiquitous dish, it also explored Chinese immigration into the US and the reasons why they scattered across the country after originally concentrating in San Francisco. It’s not a long film, a little over an hour, but it presented some interesting information about how American Chinese food evolved because the Chinese understood that they had to adapt the cuisine to the local palate, which gives rise to such weirdnesses as General Tso’s Alligator in Louisiana. They tracked down the originator of the dish, an aging Chinese man from Hunan Province who lived in Taiwan, who was flabbergasted and dismayed by the variations of his invention presented to him. A fun, light, entertaining program that will likely leave you with a sudden urge to head off to the local Chinese takeaway.

What’s a person to do when your spouse is out of town for the weekend and the daytime high temperatures are hovering around 102° with a heat index over 110°?

I had a plan and a backup plan. Fortunately, everything came together for the main plan because in hindsight i don’t think the backup plan would have worked out so well. I had this idea that I’d go down to the coast, where it would be 10-15° cooler, set up a canopy on the beach, bring along a cooler of beverages and a chair and write to the sound of the Gulf of Mexico’s constant waves. It was a romantic idea, but I don’t think it was that much cooler down there, and a few minutes out in the blanket of heat late on Saturday afternoon told me that it probably wouldn’t have been terribly productive time.

Instead, I went out to Trivia Night on Friday evening. The first time I’ve ever done that, and it was a lot of fun. Sponsored by a local organization that liaises between local businesses and schools. They organize the district science fair and mentoring programs, stuff like that. This was a fund raiser for their organization, the third year they’ve done it. There were some corporate teams, but I ended up sitting with five strangers. We sat at table 12 so when we were tasked with coming up with a team name, I suggested “The Dirty Dozen,” but since there were six of us, we modified it to “The Dirty Half Dozen.” There were eight rounds of ten questions and we did surprisingly well. We were the leaders at the midway point and ended up coming in second overall, losing out to the returning champions from last year. One of the rounds consisted of a baggie containing ten pieces of breakfast cereal that we had to identify. That was pretty clever, I thought.

Then on Saturday, the HPD ridealong I’d requested a couple of weeks ago came together. I had to be at the South Central station at 6:45 for roll call, so that meant getting up early. I was assigned, as requested, to a female officer, as I wanted to hear her perspective on the job. How her colleagues treated her, and how the public did. It was a fairly uneventful tour of duty—the officer kept looking for something interesting to show me, but the closest we came was a wellness check at a house where the resident hadn’t been heard from for four days. The front door was barred, so HFD was called in to pop the gate and then break down the door. Everyone expected to find a body inside, but the house was empty, so the resident will return home to a surprise. I learned all about the new street drug that is turning people into zombies and got the inside scoop on how cops handle certain kinds of routine situations. It’s been a decade since my last ridealong, so their tech has been upgraded a little in the interim. Cops have to be experts at distracted driving, as they’re always responding to messages on the computer, over the radio and on their phones, sometimes simultaneously. I think she was disappointed that it was a boring day, but I got a lot of material and we got to spend most of the time inside the air conditioned car!

Yesterday I watched a documentary called Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, which tells the story of how a director’s vision for an adaptation of the Jules Verne novel went off the rails. The movie ended up being made, but with a new director (after Stanley spent months on the script and preproduction), but went through various cast changes and suffered from the presence of two demanding and cantankerous actors: Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. It was filmed in a remote section of a remote section of Australia—an hour through the rain forest from Cairns, which is way up on the northeast corner of the continent, near the barrier reef. I spent a week there on vacation, a little before this film was made, I believe, and it’s beautiful but a long way from everything, and prone to bad weather. The movie makes one wonder how on earth films ever get made. This was a case of giving a guy a ton of money and plopping him down in the rain forest and letting him hang himself. Fascinating stuff, even if you’ve never heard of Richard Stanley.

I also saw the last part of True Detectives. The show had big boots to fill, and for the most part it didn’t live up to the standards of the first season. The plot was as convoluted as hell, but that’s almost a noir tradition and in the final analysis did it really matter? There were the good guys (a bunch of broken, wounded men and women) and the bad guys (corrupt politicians, etc.) and the very bad guys (Russian and Mexican gangs) all bumping up against each other. It was Chandler-esque and Ross Macdonald-esque and Ellroy-esque all at the same time, which isn’t a boon to the intelligibility quotient, but all in all I thought it was worth while.

I stuck my toe into the Sense8 waters. I’m not sold on it yet, but I’ll watch the next episode to see where it’s going.

It’s been nearly two years since we saw the mercury rise past 100°F (37.8°C), but we’re making up for lost time. Triple digits day in and day out, with heat indices in the 108-109° range. Fortunately, I’m not outdoors very much, so I barely notice. The heat radiating from the (black) seat in my car actually feels kind of nice when I drive home at the end of the workday.

Cemetery Dance announced a couple of relevant things recently. First, the signed/limited edition of The Dark Tower Companion is almost done at the printer and should be shipping by the end of the month. Their eye-catching notices start off by saying, “Stephen King Says This Book Will Delight Dark Tower Fans!” Well, who can argue with that? This massive book is still available from CD for the bargain price of $60, and it has material (mostly pertaining to the Marvel graphic novels) not found in the NAL trade edition, which is also still available, by the way. The timing is decent given this week’s announcement that the Dark Tower movie will be in theaters in January 2017.

Then came the official announcement of the CD Select series, which consists of eBooks containing about four stories from a single author. Here’s the promo copy:

This new series invites some of our favorite authors to spotlight a sampling of their own short fiction: award-winners, stories they consider their best or that had the most impact on their career—or neglected favorites they feel deserve a second look.

Long-time fans will enjoy revisiting some classic tales. New readers will find this series a handy introduction to each author’s best work.

Each Cemetery Dance Select mini-collection includes an exclusive Afterword where the author explains the reasoning behind each selection, and provides insights into the writing of each story.

Check out their webpage for a list of the authors from the “first wave,” which includes me. The eBooks are available from all of the usual online vendors.

I finally bit the bullet and deleted Under the Dome from the DVR. I almost did it at the end of Season 2, but I decided to give the show another chance to redeem itself. The two-hour premiere was a train wreck. Still, I watched one more episode because it promised to “answer all the questions.” I wasn’t impressed.

I am still digging Mr. Robot, though. “Was that what you wanted to hear?” Eliot says to his therapist after admitting to creeping her, and just about everyone else in his life. She was stunned, to put it mildly. And then there was that bit on the roof. I kept waiting for her to get up, gasping, but no.

My latest essay at Stephen King Revisited is now online. It’s called A brick heaved through a window, and it’s the history behind Cujo. The title comes from a comment King once made about the way he wanted the book to impact people.

I received word from the good folks at Cemetery Dance today that their limited edition of The Dark Tower Companion is almost done at the printer and will begin shipping in late August. Can’t wait to see this one. I signed a galley at NECON, the first time I’d seen one, in fact. All of my proofing on it for them was done with pdfs.

I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10 yesterday. I was very cavalier about it. I didn’t do a special documents backup (I have a dedicated terrabyte drive that constantly backs things up for me). I set the upgrade going and left for work after I clicked all the approval buttons that needed clicking, trusting that it would all happen without me needing to be present. And it did. Nary a hitch, and the interface and computing experience is only slightly different than before. It seems a little slicker and faster. I’ve discovered one program to date that no longer works, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. Support for it had ended years ago, and the complaint the program made when I tried to launch it was “This program requires Internet Explorer 6 to run,” so that gives an indication of its vintage. I was able to migrate the data from it to a newer, supported program, so nothing was lost. I worried that my manuscript submission tracker wouldn’t work, but it started up without a problem. It’s almost like having a new computer. Almost.

We saw Mr. Holmes on Friday evening. It stars Sir Ian McKellan as a 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes, retired to the coast of England, keeping bees and battling the onset of dementia. Laura Linney is his housekeeper. She has a young son who is always trying to get Holmes to “do his thing,” where he tells someone where they’ve been based on observation.

Holmes is struggling to remember his final case, the one that caused him to walk away from his lifelong profession. He knows it must have gone terribly wrong, but Watson’s account of it is benign. He begins to write it down, with the young boy as an eager audience, and bit by bit it comes back to him. He’s also just back from a trip to Japan where he acquired some Hiroshima herbs that are supposed to improve his memory.

It’s a charming, slow-paced film that doles out its secrets reluctantly. There are few whiz-bang feats of observation, but Holmes hasn’t completely lost that faculty. However, he does learn a lesson about the perils of telling the truth and the benefits of the benign lie. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, and the little boy is a real charmer, going toe-to-toe and head-to-head with the great detective and the illustrious actor who plays him. The aging process is very well done (we see Holmes in flashback some 30 years earlier), and there’s always a glint in McKellan’s eye. Nicely done.

We also finally found time to watch the two-hour finale of Battlestar Galactica. It was mostly satisfactory, though there were a few things that were hard to swallow. I didn’t mind that Starbuck’s nature wasn’t explained. I decided for myself that post-Earth she was an angel, like Baltar and Caprica’s companions, one that was visible to everyone who needed to see her, which was apparently everyone. I thought the decision to eschew all technology at the new planet was a little glibly handled. A plot necessity that should have involved more angst and discussion instead of being simply accepted by everyone. Adama’s decision was mystifying. We both thought he was going to crash the raptor into a mountain or something, but instead he simply went into isolation. To what end? And I could have totally done without the 150,000 years in the future bit that locked the story into a specific timeframe that causes no end of logical issues. Still, it was a great show while it lasted, and we’re going to move on to Caprica next.

I put up a few book review recently. A mixed bag of the very good and the less-so:

• The Murderer’s Daughter by Jonathan Kellerman
• The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
• Numero Zero by Umberto Eco
• Last Words by Michael Koryta
• Wind/Pinball by Haruki Murakami

There’s been a lot of bashing of True Detective, Season 2, but I’m glad to be sticking with it. I think there are only two more episodes and it looks like the rubber is starting to hit the road. Also, a fascinating beginning to the “tooth fairy” (Red Dragon) storyline on Hannibal. It is interesting to come to this point after having experienced the entire history between Jack and Walt and Hannibal. I’ve also picked up Mr. Robot and Humans, both of which are off to good beginnings, though I like the former a bit more than the latter. One thing I’ve grown to appreciate about British television shows is their casual multi-ethnicity. Characters are black or Asian or whatever, and nothing is made of the fact. They simply are. The android who is brought into the family home in Humans is Asian, but the only controversy is that one was purchased at all, not its appearance. Wayward Pines lived up to its name, going wayward in its final episode. It was always one of those on-the-fence shows for me, but even if it is miraculously resurrected for another season, I’m done with it.