P. Kirby > Recent Status Updates

The best part of this book are the little "Coming to America" vignettes.

I'm surprised I ever read this from start to finish. It's slower than the line at the DMV. The only thing that's making it entertaining this time through is picturing and hearing Ian McShane as Wednesday and Ricky Wittle as Shadow.

So far, the TV series seems to be following the main beats of the novel.

Hmmm. I have a theory regarding the killer; the story seems to be pushing the guilt of one character too hard; red herring and all.

Read this years ago, but can't remember it. Recently saw season one of the TV series, so now I picture Shadow, Wednesday, et. al. as the actors from the show.

The Cinder and Thorne threads are still the best. I like that Thorne, despite being comic relief, is good at talking sense into her. Scarlet and Wolf, however, are mildly irritating. Not enough to be rant-worthy; more like kind of bland and cliche. There appears to be no point in any of Kai's chapters except to remind the reader that he still exists.

Few reporters understand science. Fewer still have the patience sand support of their editors and the space needed to explain complicated issues. The easiest thing to do is to write a story where "experts disagree."

The worst students in my introductory science laboratories in college were journalism majors. Just sayin'.

My colleagues in private practice tell me that they would receive calls from Amgen sales, reps, informing them when they were underperforming, i.e., running short of earning the discount points.

I obtained a copy of a 2006 supply agreement between Amgen and an oncology practice. [...] It states that a practice that made a gross purchase of $422,800 worth of Aranesp in a single quarter stood to get back 18 percent of that amount--$76,100--in a rebate. Practices that made larger purchases could get back up to 21 percent on the purchases they had made.

[...]the armamentarium of penalties that the FDA can impose on companies that make unfounded claims doesn't include the removal of indication. The agency may sent warning letters, or, at worst, impost fines. [....] Warning letters were exceedingly rare, because in the Bush administration former pharmaceutical-company lawyers were running the enforcement arm of the FDA

The one upside to having a pack of lunatic, criminal uncles is that they might avenge you if you're murdered.

Fortunately, neither is annoying me enough to DNF; at times their storyline approaches entertaining; but, Scarlet and Wolf are definitely not a 'ship I'm a-sailing.
Also...the nickname "Scar"? All I can think of is the antagonist from The Lion King. LOL.

Scarlet and Wolf are okay, but I'm already wanting to get back to Cinder and Thorne chapters, because Thorne is hilarious, and spaceships....

It's good to be back with Cinder again, but Scarlet, thus far is getting annoying with her constant "Grandma" refrain.

It's funny, but I've never seen any of the movie adaptations of Lehane's work. When it comes to film, I need spaceships, swords, sorcery or other fantastic elements. But in written fiction, Lehane is my crack.

If you want to understand how the Python group operated, you need to grasp one essential fact: like Graham and I, Michael and Terry and Eric were primarily writers, not performers. So we never argued about the casting. If we had been actors at heart, we would, of course, have been fighting for the best roles.

...the story of an actor who, pausing by a fishmonger's while doing his shopping one morning, and surveying the fish lying on the slab, with their open mouths and dead eyes, suddenly exclaims, "Oh my God? I've got a matinee today!"

True story. Matinee audiences are...odd, weird energy.

Your thoughts follow your mood. Anxiety produces anxious thoughts; sadness begets sad thoughts; anger, angry thoughts; so aim to be in a relaxed, playful mood when you try to be funny.

Writing and performing in these six shows taught me an important creative principle: the more anxious you feel, the less creative you are. Your mind ceases to play and be expansive. Fear causes your thinking to contract, to play safe, and this forces you into stereotypical thinking.

And I learned that when you stop concentrating on avoiding mistakes, you relax a bit, and consequently...you actually make fewer.

...and while every time you turned on the news they were crowing about the low unemployment rate and national sense of job security, nobody mentioned that this affected mostly skilled labor and people willing to temp for no medical or dental and few career prospects.

So things never change.

Its absence from televisions screens in Weston-super-Mare alarmed my parents (even though they could still hear me every week on I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again). Dad therefore wrote me a letter asking me if I had ever considered applying for a job in the personnel department of Marks & Spencer.

Quite recently I went to see a well-known American stand-up comedian at an arena in San Jose and the audience cheered every joke. They hardly laughed, they just cheered, and punched the air triumphantly. And it occurred to me what a clever young man he was. He had come up with comedy for people with no sense of humor.

The most surprising thing that you begin to learn from audiences is just how much you can get away with. All sorts of mistakes and accidents and horrendous confusions will be happily accepted by the paying public: they will assume they missed something, or that they were being a bit thick, or that the accident was always intended to happen.

I also discovered that I couldn't abide paintings with plump angels with spindly trumpets serenading even plumper ladies with wispy underwear, and that most of the most of the more schematic modern art left me unaffected and puzzled, in a dissatisfying way.