HICCUP

It's easy to get off track, isn't it? You get busy and then trying to catch up seems so daunting that you just give up for a while. Or at least that's what I've done over the course of the blog. Not the worst thing in the world, obviously, but it does become a pattern. That happened over this past weekend and then I started work on Monday and here we are at Wednesday morning already. I'll do my best to cover what I've been taking in the last few days...

I've been spending quite a bit of my time watching 24 Season 2. Last night I finished the 12th episode, getting me halfway through the series and up to 8:00 PM on the day when Jack has to stop a nuclear bomb from exploding in L.A. I'll have more to say once I finish the season, which I hope to get done before Season 6 starts on Sunday night.

As I mentioned the other night, Jill and I watched three more eps of The Office Season 2 - "The Fire," "Halloween" and "The Fight." The show is so funny and uncomfortable all at the same time. How great was the fight at Dwight's dojo between he and Michael?

Speaking of "The Office," I also saw the new ep from last week, "Back From Vacation." Steve Carell was just brilliant - his walk up the warehouse stairs when Jan wanted to talk to him through his reaction to what she tells him...wow. I also watched the rest of the comedy Thursday night lineup on NBC: "Scrubs" ("My House"); "My Name Is Earl" ("Our 'Cops' Is On"); and, for the first time, "30 Rock" ("The Baby Show"). I'd been reading some good things about that last one...the jury is still out for me. I'll give it another try this week.

Grant and I also continued our viewing of The Simpsons Season 8 with "Homer's Phobia" and "The Brother From Another Series." The first one has John Waters guest-starring as a gay man whom Homer has a problem with and the second is the introduction of Sideshow Bob's brother Cecil, played by David Hyde Pierce. Good stuff.

I've also watched the newest "How I Met Your Mother" ("First Time in New York"), as well as plenty of sports-related shows and all the of the NFL playoffs I could catch and partss of Bulls games and the Florida/Ohio State game and some college basketball and so forth.

On Monday, I finished the Dec. 2006 issue of F&SF. It lead off with another Guth Bandar tale by Matthew Hughes, "Bye the Rules"; I really like Hughes and these stories about the collective unconscious are very well done and such a cool idea (the collective unconscious has become conscious is recent stories). We also got a new M. Rickert story, "The Christmas Witch." There was plenty to like but it's not one of my favorites of her work. "Dazzle the Pundit" by Scott Bradfield and "Damascus" by Daryl Gregory were solid - the former being a lighthearted tale of a talking dog who become a lecturer at a German university and the latter being a darker tale of women deliberately infecting others with a disease that allows them to see hallucinations they believe are manifestations of God. And it's not F&SF without a Robert Reed tale - this one ("Pills Forever") deals with the realities of how people have to live in order to have long, long lives. Not his best but he is always, always worth reading. I also skipped the Susanna Clarke story, since I just read it in her collection a few months ago.

Comics? Check. I read Fables: Wolves, the 8th trade collection of the Vertigo series (I'll probably go a bit into depth on this soon). I also read 52 #35 and Fell #6.

Here's the music I've been listening to: Band of Horses, Starlight Mints, What Made Milwaukee Famous, Pernice Brothers, My Morning Jacket, The Mountain Goats, Ben Kweller, Margot and the Nuclear So and So's, Nada Surf, Tapes 'n Tapes, Led Zeppelin, The Shins, and the 5 albums I've recently downloaded from eMusic (more on those very soon). And John in the Morning on KEXP.

I think I'm about caught up...