Addendum to my report about KGB earlier this week. The ever-vigilant Ellen Datlow caught Nora giving me a masterful stinkeye:

It’s not as good as the one she threw Matt Kressel a while back, but it’s pretty good.

Two other favorites:

One of these men is a hostage of the other. You tell me which one.

Jeff VanderMeer, professional photobomber.

Today I went to the dentist. I am not a fan of the dentist, which is why I take fanatical care of my teeth. He gave me my checkup. He told me that I had done everything right.

Then he took out the drill and said, “Which just makes it sadder that I need to take care of this tooth.” Then I got a filling.

Eleventh Hour, I’m looking at you.

Last night, if you squashed it into a Post-It, was a serviceable procedural. Initial unexplained mystery! Expansion of mystery! Unrelated crime deepens mystery! Several people are presented as viable suspects! Tension builds as the unknown criminal tries to outwit the protagonists! The protagonist figures it out! There’s a confrontation, a confession, and a few sentences of partnerly banter!

Which just makes it sadder, you know?

This show needs a filling.
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I would like to remind everyone that Eleventh Hour airs again tonight at 10/9 Central, for what might well be the last time! Come witness the end of a teeny-tiny era!

I wrote up the pilot here, so you can catch up on all the dense plotting and layered characterization before tonight. Don’t be overwhelmed by the science! TV can be educational, it’s all right. (Remember, DNA is like a personal barcode, just like the milk you buy at the grocery store.)

The preview for this week contains no fewer than four lines from the Procedural Repistory:

- “Something’s put the fear of God in this place.”
- “People fear what they don’t understand.”
- “I sure hope you and your partner can get to the bottom of this.”
- “Someone around here is killing off the weak.”

That preview is less than 30 seconds long. They are not pulling any punches with this show, you guys. They were four seconds away from a woman shouting “Look out!” followed by the sound of a gunshot over a black screen.

(I don’t know why I’m so gleeful over a show that’s so spectacularly bad. Just pretend that it’s my four year old kid, and they cast him in Alice in Wonderland as the Silent Tree, and I’m clapping for him even though he can’t even stand up in his costume. I’m clapping for this show because it’s my balance-impaired toddler, and by god, someone has to clap for the poor bugger.)

Last night’s KGB was great! Several short pieces were presented, a format I loved – it really showcased the range of things Weird Tales has been publishing recently. (ETA: Man, it’s nice when you can say that and it means “any time in the last decade”, since they’ve been around since, you know, 1780.)

The bar, however, was PACKED. I stood in my usual clautrophobic-friendly position in the vestibule, and then the VESTIBULE got packed. I ended up sitting on the stairs and trying to ignore the theatre people on the 3rd floor, who were practicing True Blood levels of Southern accents. Good luck relahin’ on the kaahndness of strayungurs, ladies!

A quick dinner, and then it was off to the Dessert Truck, a tradition Liz Gorinsky started by pointing out how awesome the Dessert Truck is. To this I say, “Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou.”

They’ve brought out their seasonal autumn desserts, namely their pumpkin custard and their baked apples and puff pastry. Those both had fruit in them, though, which means they were not a dessert, but rather nutrition in disguise. I AM ON TO YOU, DESSERT TRUCK.

I made a beeline for the molten chocolate cake.

Photo by Eugenio Garcia-Palacios

They are not joking about the molten part, you guys. It was halfway between a cake and a pudding, and between the olive oil and the dark chocolate, it wasn’t even sweet. It was like being punched in the face with a box of Dutch cocoa powder. Twice.

The cake also had salted pistachios on the top, which means that as soon as you finish the cake (and by “finish” I mean “desperately hand it over to someone when you feel your arteries turning into a molten-chocolate transportation device”) you are desperately thirsty. Unfortunately the chocolate in your veins is already hardening! You can’t move! Oh, cruel world!

So I’m trying to write to deadline, desperately; this of course means it’s time to talk about theories of interior design!

…of which I have none. What I mean is, I tried to clean up my apartment yesterday and got totally flabbergasted, because while there’s plenty of room for the mess, there’s absolutely no space for me to get oranized.

This always makes me think of the one episode of Mission: Organization that ever impressed me, where some poor woman’s jail cell of a studio apartment got remade into an actual living space. It’s still small, and this sort of renovation only works on people who don’t own a lot of books, but I still think about it whenever I look at my living room and think, “This is a cesspool – be like that studio apartment, stupid living room!”

The Before: there’s more information about this on the website, which includes Puritan-level scathing condemnation of her slightly-cluttered chair. Seriously, they put “There’s actually a chair underneath all that stuff!” on the ACTUAL WEBSITE. There’s two books, two messenger bags, and a paper shopping bag on that chair. I should show HGTV the horrors of the chair in my living room that I call “Closet 2″.

Anyway, while the clutter factor is debatable, there’s no question this is a really bland apartment that needed help:

And boy, did it ever get help.
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