Ho. Ly. Crap. So last night we settled in for some quality TV watching, and we were up to last week’s two hour Prison Break Lollapalooza. Wow! It was tension like we haven’t seen since the first season! So tense! So nerve-wracking! So good! And what with the bang at the end, my prediction is it’s only going to get better. I await the next episode (already banked on the DVR) with excitement. And not just because Wentworth Miller, if it’s even possible, got even hotter since last season. Rowr.

Dave’s comment from yesterday’s post reminds me of another TV-related thought. The other night we were watching the Halloween episode of the show Chuck wherein the main character and his friend wear a sandworm costume. This is a feature from the book Dune by Frank Herbert which I read approximately 86 times in my youth, and which is set on a desert planet where water is extremely scarce. (Yes, there are more books in the series but they aren’t worth reading. I didn’t even finish the third one.) Anywho, I’ve been thinking about Dune a lot lately because of the drought, and so when they mentioned the sandworm in the show I was all, “Of course, a perfectly legitimate costume; good show, boys! I would have dressed like Muad’Dib if I’d been there!” Until I realized how incredibly dorky that is. Like, off the charts dorky.

In other literary news, I finished The Last Chronicle of Barset last night. I must admit that the concluding chapter illustrates Trollope’s tendency to wallow in his own thought processes behind the writing, too much for the narrative so that it becomes all about him rather than the characters. Usually I admire this device which is a pet of his because he recognizes a level of sophistication in the reader by not pretending that the story is real and the writer-as-narrator doesn’t actually exist.  This particular episode was rather too much and included an element of self-pity just to make it more interesting. Just one of the reasons why he is more of a B-rated Victorian novelist. I recognize the minor factors that hold him back from discovering greatness, but it doesn’t make me love him less. I shall move on to The Way We Live Now which has some characters that overlap with some of the characters from the Palliser series, and I might even start in on Romola by George Eliot, since Dice convinced me to purchase a hard-to-find copy at the Bookery I while we were in the I-thac in May.

See? Dorktastic today. I must redeem myself. Tonight I’m going to a girls’ dinner with the female half of the Canadians and our friend N. These two lovely ladies are about as far from being dorky as possible, so hopefully some of their class will rub off on me. In between bites of delicious fried chicken. Y’all.