I had to kind of drag Gail into this, but she got hooked big time. After watching the conclusion last night she proclaimed, “That was so much better than season one!” I can’t disagree. It will be hard waiting for season three to hit iTunes without getting spoilers.
I love Len Deighton, but I’m taking a break from him for a while. I probably won’t read him again until 2015. This book kind of didn’t meet expectations and I need to burn through my backlog of other authors. My expectations are so high because of the Bernard Samson series, which was really difficult to match in terms of action and characters.
Why am I watching this? I’ve read all the books, so there are no surprises. I know that Ned Stark gets his head chopped off and that Danerys hops into a fire and climbs out with three dragons. What’s the point? Did the books leave me wanting so much that I need to witness the violence and sex in color?
Beautiful November day for the battle for the division lead between Bears and Lions. Bears lost, but it was a close, exciting game. Bears had a ton of chances. Cutler got hurt and down by eight, McCown took the Bears down the field in the last few minutes for a score but couldn’t convert on the two-point play. Tough one.
We spent ten days in one London hotel. I took over 600 photos with an iPhone and Nikon P7000. Here’s the Flickr London 2013 set. They are in chronological order and titled with about 20 different captions to outline the distinct sections of our visit.
Gillian Anderson is a trustworthy artist I think. And my wife is a trustworthy chooser of British dramas. These things came together when Gail suggested we make The Fall our next TV show, and it didn’t disappoint. I mean, wow! It actually blew my expectations out of the water.
[link] If you forget the plot of books you love, read this!
Even though you can’t recall the plot or content, that book you read still matters. Follow the link above to get some real research on how the books you read make up a big part of you, even if you can’t remember them. James Collins says:
…it makes in intuitive sense: we have been formed by an accretion of experiences, only a small number of which we can readily recall.
Read the article, but don’t worry about remembering it.
I consumed two items simultaneously, one book and one TV series, with the word “Fall” in the title. That’s weird. This book, Jericho’s Fall, was written by Stephen Carter. I grabbed it at Open Books because I loved his first book, The Emperor of Ocean Park, from a few years back. They are two slightly different books, Jericho’s Fall is classic thriller and Emperor is a drama/mystery. I liked the drama/mystery much better, this was only so-so.
I haven’t met an Elmore Leonard character I don’t love. Within my reading purview, no other author creates fun and interesting characters in the quantity that Leonard does. I’m not just talking about the main characters either. I’m talking about secondary characters, bad guys, and bit players. This western novel carried the burden of my expectations well with a stable of awesome humans.
Let’s wrap this up. The 2013 Xtreme Hike and the Dolan/Steffen Half Marathon Collaboration have successfully concluded!!
One week ago today I was embroiled in the 21 mile Xtreme Hike that you are all familiar with. It was pretty awesome and I’m going to make it an annual thing. There were 19 of us in total and the whole group raised over $75,000 for CFF, making it quite successful. It took about eight hours to finish. It was hard, but it wasn’t anywhere close to a superhuman effort by yours truly.