I bought several books last week: a
Pearls Before Swine collection,
Ghosts/Aliens by Trey Hamburger,
Too Many Curses by A. Lee Martinez, and
I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have To Kill You by Ally Carter. I only went into B&N for
Too Many Curses, but Ally Carter's book caught my eye during my search. Since it was now in paperback, I snagged it. Then I decided I also wanted a
Pearls Before Swine collection and went hunting in the humor section. That's when
Ghosts/Aliens caught my eye. The book is strange, absurd, and a bit stream-of-consciousness, but absolutely hilarious.
I also bought my first laptop this week. It hasn't shipped yet (come on, Dell!), and I hope it arrives before Christmas. It's not a gaming rig (that's what my computer at home is for), though I'm going to see if it'll play LOTRO, but it is a good machine and it was cheap. I wanted something that can play movies, connect to the Internet (duh), handle MS Word, play some casual games and so on.
It's not my intent to try to single-handedly save the economy, but damn it, I'm doing my best!
Also been watching season one of
Jericho and
Burn Notice. I like both shows. I was reading some old threads elsewhere about Jericho and some of the complaints people had was the way the town's residents were occasionally doing really stupid stuff, like using the electricity to power the tavern's jukebox. I feel a lot of these complaints have little merit, because I feel that in the first few months after something that apocalyptic, people would still not want to give up everything they had before. It would be very hard to comprehend the depth of the change that just occurred. And also, just being in full-on survival mode for too long isn't healthy. You can't just try to survive. You have to have more than that. So a post-apocalyptic society does need stuff that isn't entirely for survival, like alcohol (for drinking), art, music, dance.
Burn Notice is about a former CIA spy (named Michael Westin) who gets burned for reasons he doesn't understand. He gets dumped in Miami with no money, no information, and a bad reputation in the intelligence world, and he can't leave town. He takes odd jobs as a sort of private investigator/mercenary. The show is a strong mix of action, humor, and suspense, and the actor who plays the lead is perfect as the sardonic and often highly-amused spy who smiles the most when he's pissed off. You can practically read behind that smile,
I could easily snap your neck right now. And sleep just fine afterward.To round out the cast, the other full time characters are his mother, his ex-girlfriend (a former IRA guerilla bomber), and his best friend, a retired spy (played by Bruce Campbell). Every episode generally runs an A-story and a B-story. The A-story is the "monster-of-the-week," the PI work he does. The B-story usually involves his attempts to find out why he received a burn notice.
The show is part
McGuyver in that he often rigs up spy equipment and bombs out of common household supplies. But unlike McGuyver, the hero is a lot more hardcore. He
will kill the bad guys, even going so far as just putting the gun to their heads and squeezing the trigger (though sometimes he just stands back and lets other people do the killing). I was a little worried after the pilot episode (where he popped two shots into the heads of a couple of bad guys) that they were going to tone down the nature of his character. In fiction, sometimes people just need killin', and I hate when the studios want to pussify the hero because they're afraid no one will like a protagonist who is cold and calculating.
I've seen about 8 episodes of season one, and while they might have toned him down a bit, he will at least set people up to die knowing that is the result of his actions (like handing over a firebomb to a guy to use against his crime boss and then watching to make sure it's used). And in fairness, they can't have him capping people in the head all over Miami. The body count would be rather obvious. Still, I hope there's no pussification of the character, or I'm going to be very disappointed with the turn of the show.