Why the Monkees are Important

The untimely death of Davy Jones raises the question of why The Monkees were and are important.  They sold millions of records in the late 1960s, but beyond that -

The Monkees were the first example of something created in a medium - in this case, a rock group on television - that jumped off the screen to have big impact in the real world.   The Monkees didn't exist prior to their television series.  They didn't play clubs, didn't make demos, didn't play at all because they didn't exist, prior to NBC's television show, which ran for two successful seasons from1966-1968.

But the group sold real records to real people, and paved the way for all subsequent media creations that moved through the screen and out into the real world.  Not only groups like The Partridge Family and The Archies (which were cartoon characters with a million-selling record), but more recent creations of new media which crossed over in the real world owe a tip of the hat to The Monkees.   These range from Julie Powell's blog which served as one of the inspirations for the 2009 movie Julie & Julia, to Justin Halpern’s Twitter feed “Shit My Dad Says” which gave rise to the 2010 CBS series $#*! My Dad Says" and the best-selling book Sh*t My Dad Says, to Tucker Max's blog which begat  the best selling book  I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell (2006).

The Monkees hit in more gentle times. Strange to think of the 1960s as gentle, but they were in many ways, compared to now.  Davy Jones' "Daydream Believer" - written by John Stewart, of Kingston Trio fame- was always my favorite Monkees song.  Hey, Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, wake up and induct The Monkees.  It's too late now for Davy, but his memory and the rest of The Monkees deserve this.

After the Oscars, The Walking Dead 2.10 Meets John Stuart Mill

After an excellent Oscars with Billy Crystal - except for the cowardly ABC bleeping - it was pleasing jolt to see The Walking Dead 2.10, which was all about rules.

Rick vs. Shane: whose rules?  We've seen that before, lots of it, but this time their argument over what to do with the kid who lost his leg in town is interrupted by one of the best walker scenes all season. Shane in the bus with walkers breaking into the door, and the way he handles two of them, and the way Rick rescues him (I know he wouldn't leave him there), was itself worth the price of admish.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (farm), there's also a clash of rules also going on, between Lori and Andrea, over what to do about Beth, who wants to commit suicide.  Andrea says let her make her own choice.  Lori (and Maggie) want to do everything in their power to stop her.

Philosophy question: what would a utilitarian philosopher like John Stuart Mill, who held that you could swing your arm, anytime any way you want to, as long as you don't hit someone else's nose, have said about suicide?  No easy answer.  One way of dealing with this is to say that anyone who wants to commit suicide is not in his or her right mind, so the usual utilitarian principle doesn't apply.  But that could be a slippery slope ...

Anyway, back on the farm, Andrea gets to give Beth a choice - who slashes her wrist, but regrets it.  And since the cut is not deep enough to kill, she'll get to live.   And now she's empowered, becauses she made the choice to live, not someone else.  So she's likely to stand by that decision.

Was Andrea therefore right?  Well ....  I still say not ...  What if Beth had killed herself?  Had that happened, she'd have lost the opportunity to change her mind.

And this is what makes The Walking Dead so good - it's not just horror, it's intelligent horror, the kind John Stuart Mill might well have enjoyed.

See also The Walking Dead Back on AMC ... The Walking Dead 2.2: The Nature of Vet

... The Walking Dead 2.3: Shane and Otis ... The Walking Dead 2.4: What Happened at the Pharmacy ... The Walking Dead 2.6: Secrets Told ... The Walking Dead 2.7: Rick's Way vs. Shane's Way ...  The Walking Dead 2.8: The Farm, the Road, and the Town  ... The Walking Dead 2.9: Worse than Walkers

And see also The Walking Dead 1.1-3:  Gone with the Wind, Zombie Style ... The Walking Dead Ends First Season

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Person of Interest 1.16 Meets Wall Street

One of the good things about Person of Interest is the variety of people needing rescue, protection, and stopping in the stories, ranging from victims of criminals to victims of the CIA and lots of situations in between.  Episode 1.16 brings Reese to Wall Street - not the Occupy kind, but the old-fashioned cut-throat Gordon Gekko kind.

The person who needs protecting is young, hot-shot trader Adam Saunders - played by Matt Lauria of Friday Night Lights (Luke) - and he's (of course) got an interesting story.  Although he at first seems like just another greed guy, he turns out to have a good heart.  He was raised by his uncle (played by John Scurti - Lou aka Lt. Ken Shea of Rescue Me).  Saunders loses his uncle's money, but vows to get it back, which he does, after a tour of near deaths and Reese's help which takes them to the homeless camp where Reese lived at some point prior to going to work for Finch.


So we also get another small piece of Reese's back story, but more important, we learn at the end that Elias, the evil mastermind and POI nemesis we encountered earlier in the season, is behind the big guns that are shooting at Saunders.   I was glad to see this.  Not only is Enrico Colantoni (Sgt. Parker from Flashpoint) an excellent actor, but his character on Person of Interest promises some significant, maybe even game-changing developments down the line.  Let's have at it. 



See also Person of Interest of Interest  ... Person of Interest 1.2:  Reese and Finch ... Person of Interest 1.5: Potentials ... Person of Interest 1.7: Meets Flashpoint and The Usual Suspects ... Person of Interest 1.8:  Widmore and Ben, At It Again ... Person of Interest 1.9: Evolution of a Series ... Person of Interest: 1.10: Carter Returns the Favor ... Person of Interest 1.11-1.12: Realignment and Revelation  ... Person of Interest 1.14: Reese as Ronin

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Fringe 4.14: Palimpsest

A palimpsest is a page from which the original text written upon it has been scraped off or removed, so new text can be written upon it.   But if you scrape away the new text, you might still find enough remaining of the original text to read it.

This is the subject of tonight's episode 4.14 of Fringe.  Once, again, in at least two ways.  The proximate way is a video which has been recorded over, but which, in Walter's lab, can be optically penetrated to reveal something of the original.   The deeper way concerns the story with which we have been grappling all season - the relationship of Peter to the Olivia and Walter of this world.

I've been saying, all along, that this world, in which Peter did not exist after he drowned as a boy (or, more accurately, the Peter of this world died of a serious illness, the Peter who drowned was alternate Peter being brought back to this world) - but this world in which there was no adult Peter, but to which adult Peter returned, was really the world of Fringe for the first three seasons.

Olivia was coming to believe that.  So was Peter.  And one of the Eternal Bald Observers confirms this - I would say, beyond any doubt - when he asks at the beginning of this episode why September "did not erase the lingering traces of Peter Bishop from this time line"?  For how else could there be "lingering traces" if this world now on our screens was not in fact the same world of the first three seasons, except with Peter's existence yanked out of it?

Alas, this does not yet yield a happy ending for Olivia and Peter - by the end of the episode and all that Peter and Olivia have been through, Peter concludes that the Olivia in front of him is not the right Olivia - not his. Peter is especially influenced by finding out about Henry, the son he had with Fauxlivia, which shows him the profound consequences of being with the wrong Olivia.  But he's completely wrong, I'd say, about the Olivia in front of him not being his - certainly this conflicts with what the EBO said above.

In additional to this Shakespearean twist, we also learned a lot about the EBOs and some answers about the very basis of Fringe in this episode.  The Observers are humans from the distant future.  They're here to observe their beginnings - their emergence from us - which apparently spring from Henry, the son Peter and Olivia are supposed to have, but did not, because of  Fauxlivia and the war of the realities triggered by Walter's kidnapping Peter.   We further learn that Walternate would have hit upon the cure for Peter's illness himself, had not September accidentally distracted him at the wrong moment.  This in turn led Walter to go across to the alternate reality to kidnap Peter, to save him, which was the action that got all of Fringe going.

September has been trying to set things right ever since - this presumably being Peter from the other side (the Peter we know) with our Olivia.  (The rest of the Observers want to set things right, too, but they see things differently from September.  I wonder what they think of the current Olivia, who has now remembered Peter?) Tonight was thus a big step forward in our knowledge, but backward in the two getting together.  But Fringe is itself a palimpsest, and it's just a matter of peeling away enough false surfaces to get to this truth.

Hey, check out my essay The Return of 1950s Science Fiction in Fringe in this new anthology



See also Fringe Returns for Season 4: Almost with Peter ... Fringe 4.2: Better and Worse Selves ... Fringe 4.3: Sanity and Son ... Fringe 4.4: Peter's Back, Ectoplasm, and McLuhan ... Fringe 4.5: Double Return ... Fringe 4.6: Time Slips ... Fringe 4.7: The Invisible Man ... Fringe 4.8: The Ramifications of Transformed Alternate Realities ... Fringe 4.9: Elizabeth ... Fringe 4.10: Deceit and Future Vision ... Fringe 4.11: Alternate Astrid ... Fringe 4.12: Double Westfield / Single Olivia ... Fringe 4.13: Tea and Telepathy

See also Fringe 3.1: The Other Olivia ... Fringe 3.2: Bad Olivia and Peter ... Fringe 3.3: Our/Their Olivia on the Other Side ... Fringe 3.5: Back from Hiatus, Back from the Amber ... Fringe 3.7: Two Universes Still Nearing Collision ... Fringe 3.8: Long Voyages Home ... Fringe 3.10: The Return of the Eternal Bald Observers ... Flowers for Fringenon in Fringe 3.11 ... Fringe 3.12: The Wrong Coffee  ... Fringe 3.13: Alternate Fringe ... Fringe 3.14: Amber Here ... Fringe 3.15: Young Peter and Olivia ... Fringe 3.16: Walter and Yoko ... Fringe 3.17: Bell, Olivia, Lee, and the Cow ... Fringe 3.18: Clever Walternate ... Fringe 3.19 meets Inception, The Walking Dead, Tron ... Fringe 3.20: Countdown to Season 3 Finale 1 of 3 ... Fringe 3.21:  Ben Frankin, Rimbaldi, and the Future ... Fringe Season 3 Finale: Here's What Happened ... Death Not Death in Fringe 
 
See also reviews of Season 2: Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People ... Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb ... Fringe 2.4 Unfolds and Takes Wing ... Fringe 2.5: Peter in Alternate Reality and Wi-Fi for the Mind ... A Different Stripe of Fringe in 2.6 ... The Kid Who Changed Minds in Fringe 2.7 ... Fringe 2.8: The Eternal Bald Observers ... Fringe 2.9: Walter's Journey ... Fringe 2.10: Walter's Brain, Harry Potter, and Flowers for Algernon ...  New Fringe on Monday Night: In Alternate Universe? ... Fringe 2.12: Classic Science Fiction Chiante ... Fringe 2.13: "I Can't Let Peter Die Again" ... Fringe 2.14: Walter's Health, Books, and Father ... Fringe 2.15: I'll Take 'Manhatan' ... Fringe 2.16: Peter's Story ... Fringe 2.17: Will Olivia Tell Peter? ... Fringe 2.18: Strangeness on a Train ... Fringe 2.19: Two Plus Infinity ... Fringe the Noir Musical ... Fringe 2.21: Bring on the Alternates ... Fringe 2.22:  Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming ... Fringe Season 2 Finale: The Switch

See also reviews of Season One Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ... 17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect ... 18. Heroes and Villains across Fringe ... Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Star Trek in Penultimate Fringe ... Fringe Alternate Reality Finale: Science Fiction At Its Best

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

 

Santorum's Deficient Education

Probably Rick Santorum's blanket denunciation of colleges and universities as "indoctrination mills" is the least offensive of his 18th-century regressive, repressive views publicized in the past few weeks.  But that's because his views about contraception, for example - which he opposes, even though he always says he wants to reduce teenage pregnancies - are so far gone and off the wall.

But since I know a  little something about college education, I thought I'd mention how at variance with reality Rick Santorum also is about that.

First, I should say I'm no blind advocate of higher education.  I've always found some merit in Cole Porter's "a college education I would never propose, a bachelor's degree won't even keep you in clothes".   A university degree isn't necessary for everyone.  Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs all did just fine without one.

But the claim that a college education is a course in indoctrination is just nonsense.  Where I teach at Fordham University, no one ever told me or even encouraged me to present a specific political or cultural point of view.    That's what academic freedom is all about.

More important, I've never told a student what to think.  The goal, as every college professor knows, is to teach students how to think.  Or, in the Writing Workshop course I'm currently teaching, how to write, clearly and effectively, whatever your point of view.

Perhaps there are professors somewhere who teach differently.  But I've never met one.  And for those many that I have known, their emphasis has always been on teaching students how to think clearly.

Wherever Rick Santorum got his education, he obviously failed to learn that lesson.

Trying to Like Alcatraz

Well, I've been watching Alcatraz - seven episodes so far - the latest J. J. Abrams production.  That in itself was a good reason to watch it.  Although I disliked the ending of Lost, the series at its best was one of the best ever on television.  Alias was also superb, as has been Fringe these past two seasons.  And I'm enjoying Person of Interest.

And there other things to commend a television show about Alcatraz.  The Birdman of Alcatraz is a fine movie, and this television show is about time travel - in my book, you can go wrong about that.

But the problem with Alcatraz is that it doesn't have enough of that.   Although time travel figures in every episode, there's little about the paradoxes and narrative joy of really confronting what it's like to run into much older versions of people you  knew when you travel 50 years into the future.  There are hints of that, intersections with characters who lived through those 50 years, including, especially, Emerson Hauser played by Sam Neill.

It's great to see Neill, probably best known for Jurassic Park, on television (he was great in the Tudors, and years ago in Heartland).  And he does a fine job when he's on screen in Alcrataz.  So does Hurley - Jorge Garcia - who basically plays Hurley as a PhD comic book expert.   So does Sarah Jones (Big Love) as Rebecca Madsen.

But the problem is that emphasis on the individual stories of the people - mostly criminals - whisked into the future gets in the way of the really interesting stuff for me, which is why and how they were whisked.  Without that mechanism more in the limelight and explored, Alcatraz remains little more than a Criminal Minds without its intensity, and with intimations of immortality as yet unrealized.

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

John King Fails to Ask Santorum Crucial Follow-up Question in CNN Debate

The point just came in the CNN Republican Presidential debate in which moderator John King asked Rick Santorum about his views against birth control.

Santorum gave a long answer, mostly about the large number of children born out of wedlock, how they are so often in poverty, and how that was ruining our country.   He decried children born to children (teens).

A follow-up that asked Santorum if he realized that contraception would help with that problem was logical and necessary.  Why, indeed, then, are you against contraception, King should have asked Santorum.  

But no such question was forthcoming.

Questions from the audience in these debates are often boring.  But this kind of questioning - or lack of questioning - from a professional journalist moderator was plain and simply incompetent.

The Good Wife 3.15: Will and Baseball

The coming attractions to The Good Wife 3.15 showed Will, in danger of disbarment, leaving the office with a baseball bat.  The relative good news, as we found out tonight, is that Will isn't going off to bash anyone.  He's going off to play baseball.

He'll have a little time on his hands, because he elected to take the six-month suspension from practicing law, rather than risking permanent disbarment.  It was the smart move, but I hate to see Will give in even an inch to the forces of sloth and evil that are always at work to bring him down.

The specific story for the night was good too - keyed perfectly into what is going on right now in Syria.  Although what happened to the brave freedom fighter in Homs, on a Skype or other vid connection with Kalinda, was predictable, it was nonetheless very moving.

No so the episode's treatment of Occupy Wall Street.  A judge gives an impassioned shout-out to OWS, but it's bundled in a lame comedic thread that just didn't work.  OWS is serious enough to warrant it's own serious treatment on this show.  Memo to writers: do it.

But there are some good stories brewing in Peter's office, as he directs Cary to shake things up, and I'm looking forward to the next episode, which will be on in ... March?   Well, maybe it give Will some time to get a little baseball in somewhere.


See also The Good Wife 3.1: Recusal and Rosh Hashanah ... The Good Wife: 3.2: Periwigs and Skype ... The Good Wife 3.7: Peter v. Will ...  Dexter's Sister on The Good Wife 3.10  ... The Good Wife 3.12: Two Suits  ... The Good Wife 3.13 Meets Murder on the Orient Express

And see also  The Good Wife Starts Second Season on CBS ... The Good Wife 2.2: Lou Dobbs, Joe Trippi, and Obama Girl ... The Good Wife 2.4: Surprise Candidate, Intimate Interpsonal Distance ... The Good Wife 2.9 Takes on Capital Punishment ... The Good Wife 2.16: Information Wars

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

The Walking Dead 2.9: Worse than Walkers?

What could worse than those flesh eating, hard to kill cause they're already dead, walkers?

Well ...

We  found out early in s 2.9 tonight that Lori is ok - after killing a couple of walkers.  And her baby's presumably ok, too.

Except that Shane is sure it's his.  And Lori gives Rick what could be one of the most significant talkings to at the end of the episode.  You killed humans you love to protect the ones you love - me and Carl - right? she asks Rick.   Yeah.  Well, Shane thinks that Carl and me are his, and you're too  weak to protect us, she says to Rick.

The message is clear, and Rock gets it.  He may have to kill Shane to protect Lori and Carl from Shane - and to stop Shane from killing Rick, the way he did Otis.

It's pretty brutal stuff - worse, in some ways, than the walkers.  This second part of the second season has already established, with the gunplay in town, that humans can be worse enemies than walkers are to humans.  (Walkers after all are no good with guns.  They also have no twisted loyalties or obsessions.)  Shane vs. Rick is just the logical next step.

But speaking of walkers, I'm beginning to wonder what's really wrong with that woman in a catatonic state in the bed?   What, exactly, is wrong with Herschel's daughter?  Would be a pretty dangerous, horrendous development if she were in some kind of very early walker stage ...

See also The Walking Dead Back on AMC ... The Walking Dead 2.2: The Nature of Vet

... The Walking Dead 2.3: Shane and Otis ... The Walking Dead 2.4: What Happened at the Pharmacy ... The Walking Dead 2.6: Secrets Told ... The Walking Dead 2.7: Rick's Way vs. Shane's Way ... The Walking Dead 2.8: The Farm, the Road, and the Town

And see also The Walking Dead 1.1-3:  Gone with the Wind, Zombie Style ... The Walking Dead Ends First Season

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Rick Santorum's Wikipedia Page Is Locked

Rick Santorum's Wikipedia page is locked - or "fully protected," to the use the Wikipedia parlance - which means no one other than administrators can write to the page, make edits, make corrections.  The protection started on February 18th and will be in effect until the 21st, unless an administrator removes the lock.

An administrator is a special kind of editor, with power not only to edit a page, but block it from other editing, and block other editors who vandalized pages - for example, writing obscenity on a page.

Why is blocking a page such a drastic step?  The answer is because no one can add information to or, again, correct an error on a blocked page.   There are "talk" pages on Wikipedia, on which someone can call attention to an error that needs correction - but only an administrator can make this correction.

Why is this so important?  Santorum is, by any standard, one of the two leading candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination.  His Wikipedia page has been read more than a million times in the past 30 days.  That's pretty important.   If there's an error on his locked page, or new information that needs to be added, tens of thousands of people a day will be getting this wrong or incomplete information.

How would one know that this page is locked?  There's a little gold lock in the upper right-hand corner. 

Why was it locked?  My wife, who edits on Wikipedia, has been trying to find out.  (She was one who told me this page was locked, a few hours ago.)   You do this by asking on the talk page of the blocked article why it was locked.  Or on an administrator page.  So far, there has not been much of an answer.

Wikipedia, as I wrote in my 2009 book New New Media - I'm currently finishing a new edition - revolutionized the way we get knowledge by operating on reader/writer consensus rather than editorial fiat.  When administrators fully block a page, this cuts at the very heart of Wikipedia's advantage - not to mention our democratic process, which depends on accurate information being available to the voting public.

The page may be unlocked by the time you're reading this - but it's locked right now, and this whole affair requires some looking into.

Note added at 3:30pm, February 20:  Rick Santorum's page was just changed from "Full Protection" to "Semi-Protection," after objections to the full protection raised by several editors including my wife.  The reasons for the full protection are not entirely clear, but "edit wars" (repeated deletion and reinsertion of the same text) over Santorum's positions on contraception were at least a contributory factor. "Semi-protection" a much less extreme form of protection, in which any one can edit, as long as they have an account (Wikipedia allows people to edit who do not have accounts), which is at least 4 days old and has made at least 10 edits on Wikipedia.  The change to semi-protection is a big improvement, but still interferes with Wikipedia's ideal of anyone being able to update a page, or correct an error.

Fringe 4.13: Tea and Telepathy

Let me get the excellent standalone story of Fringe 4.13 out of the way:  Walter, adding honey to his tea, realizes that the case at hand involves a telepathic group of people who, just like bees, are able to communicate to one another at a distance and pursue shared  survival goals.

Excellent, as I said, but actually not entirely standalone, because, like most of the recent episodes on Fringe, the individual story lines mirror what is going on in the deeper, continuing story.  As we saw, and I cheered about, last week, Olivia is beginning to remember Peter.

There's much more of that tonight - Olivia basically remembers everything about her and Peter that we saw the first three years.   My explanation for this is that Peter has returned to our world of the first three years (that's where he's been as soon he came out of the lake), bereft of memory of him at the start, but now, at least in Olivia, beginning to recall.

I pretty much still think that - though, based on what happened at the very end of tonight's episode, I'm not 100% sure.  Walter thinks that Olivia, under the influence of cortexiphan, is super sensitive to Peter's thoughts and emotions.  We did see Nina do something to Olivia a few episodes back - was it administer cortexiphan?  Walter and Lee do find that some of it missing from its Massive Dynamic cold keeping.  But ... Peter realizes that Olivia knows things from her past, relative to him, but that he didn't know until Olivia just told him. Ergo: Walter's theory that Olivia is picking up on Peter's thoughts can't be right.

Realizing this, Peter finally gives in and kisses Olivia - who promptly disappears (after walking into a gas station convenience store), and we see her held prisoner somewhere with Nina.

So, ok, good writing, I have no idea what's going on - I seriously like inscrutable stories - and we see in the coming attractions that we'll not only find out next week more of what's going on, but who the Eternal Bald Observers really are (bear in mind that September said Olivia will die in all possible timelines).

That's why I said that I'm no longer 100% sure that Peter is really in our first three years timeline now.  But until I see a better explanation, I'm at least 96% percent sure.

Hey, check out my essay The Return of 1950s Science Fiction in Fringe in this new anthology



See also Fringe Returns for Season 4: Almost with Peter ... Fringe 4.2: Better and Worse Selves ... Fringe 4.3: Sanity and Son ... Fringe 4.4: Peter's Back, Ectoplasm, and McLuhan ... Fringe 4.5: Double Return ... Fringe 4.6: Time Slips ... Fringe 4.7: The Invisible Man ... Fringe 4.8: The Ramifications of Transformed Alternate Realities ... Fringe 4.9: Elizabeth ... Fringe 4.10: Deceit and Future Vision ... Fringe 4.11: Alternate Astrid ... Fringe 4.12: Double Westfield / Single Olivia

See also Fringe 3.1: The Other Olivia ... Fringe 3.2: Bad Olivia and Peter ... Fringe 3.3: Our/Their Olivia on the Other Side ... Fringe 3.5: Back from Hiatus, Back from the Amber ... Fringe 3.7: Two Universes Still Nearing Collision ... Fringe 3.8: Long Voyages Home ... Fringe 3.10: The Return of the Eternal Bald Observers ... Flowers for Fringenon in Fringe 3.11 ... Fringe 3.12: The Wrong Coffee  ... Fringe 3.13: Alternate Fringe ... Fringe 3.14: Amber Here ... Fringe 3.15: Young Peter and Olivia ... Fringe 3.16: Walter and Yoko ... Fringe 3.17: Bell, Olivia, Lee, and the Cow ... Fringe 3.18: Clever Walternate ... Fringe 3.19 meets Inception, The Walking Dead, Tron ... Fringe 3.20: Countdown to Season 3 Finale 1 of 3 ... Fringe 3.21:  Ben Frankin, Rimbaldi, and the Future ... Fringe Season 3 Finale: Here's What Happened ... Death Not Death in Fringe 
 
See also reviews of Season 2: Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People ... Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb ... Fringe 2.4 Unfolds and Takes Wing ... Fringe 2.5: Peter in Alternate Reality and Wi-Fi for the Mind ... A Different Stripe of Fringe in 2.6 ... The Kid Who Changed Minds in Fringe 2.7 ... Fringe 2.8: The Eternal Bald Observers ... Fringe 2.9: Walter's Journey ... Fringe 2.10: Walter's Brain, Harry Potter, and Flowers for Algernon ...  New Fringe on Monday Night: In Alternate Universe? ... Fringe 2.12: Classic Science Fiction Chiante ... Fringe 2.13: "I Can't Let Peter Die Again" ... Fringe 2.14: Walter's Health, Books, and Father ... Fringe 2.15: I'll Take 'Manhatan' ... Fringe 2.16: Peter's Story ... Fringe 2.17: Will Olivia Tell Peter? ... Fringe 2.18: Strangeness on a Train ... Fringe 2.19: Two Plus Infinity ... Fringe the Noir Musical ... Fringe 2.21: Bring on the Alternates ... Fringe 2.22:  Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming ... Fringe Season 2 Finale: The Switch

See also reviews of Season One Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ... 17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect ... 18. Heroes and Villains across Fringe ... Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Star Trek in Penultimate Fringe ... Fringe Alternate Reality Finale: Science Fiction At Its Best

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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NCIS 9.15: DiNozzo and the Word-Slinger

He's DiNozzo.  She's a reporter - a "word-slinger" as DiNozzo puts.  There were engaged, on the verge of getting married, nine years ago.  And she called it off.  And Gibbs puts them together on the case in NCIS 9.15, in a funny Valentine's episode indeed.

Better than usual fine lines throughout, as the team investigate a team of semi-playful vigilante superheroes, one of whom may be killing some of the others, who have in fact been murdered.  DiNozzo admires "Spandaxia" - she's dressed in a tight, gold outfit.  He reminds everyone, "this [any of the costumed super heroes] could have been Magee."  Abbs also gets dinged by this in another scene, when the superheroes mistake her regular garb for a costume.

Over at the word-slinger's house, she and DiNozzo kiss - but are interrupted by her son.  DiNozzo tries to make small talk.  Which Harry Potter movie did you like best, he asks the kid.  "The one where Harry wasn't kissing my Mom," the kid wisely cracks.  A DiNozzo in training?

Turns out that the rapacious father of one of the superheros, named ICU (because that's where he sends the villains), is behind the killings.  He using the killings to lower prices of property in the neighborhoods, which he can then buy up.  When the killer - the father's assistant - tries to escape, ICU levels him with a chop.  He bows to Gibbs - who returns the bow.  Good, again, the see how amiable Gibbs is this year.

And the last scene with DiNozzo and Wendy the Word-Slinger is suitably ambiguous.  She first tells DiNozzo to tell the woman that he loves - Ziva? - that he loves her.  But then she indicates that she, Wendy, is now ready for the kind of relationship she walked out on on DiNozzo nine years ago.

I bow to the future, always brightly opaque.

See also NCIS 9.1: Unpacking Partial Amnesia ... NCIS 9.2: Lying to Yourself ... NCIS 9.3: McGee's Grandmother ... NCIS 9.4: Turkey Vulture as Explained by DiNozzo ... NCIS 9.5: Behrooz's Mother ... NCIS 9.6: Too Good to be True ... NCIS 9.7: "You Were My Shannon, Leroy" ... NCIS 9.8: Intersections with Reality ... NCIS 9.9: Twists and History ... NCIS 9.10: Almost One Agent Short ... NCIS 200

And see also NCIS Back in Season 8 Action ... NCIS 8.2: Interns! ... NCIS 8.3: Tiff! ... NCIS 8.4: Gary Cooper not John Wayne ... NCIS 8.5: Dead DJ, DiNozzo Hoarse, and Baseball ... NCIS 8.6: The Written Woman ... NCIS 8.7: "James Bond Movie Directed by Fellini" ... NCIS 8.8: Ziva's Father ... NCIS 8.9: Leon's Story ... NCIS 8.10: DiNozzo In and Out ... NCIS 8.11: "The Sister Went Viral" ... Bob Newhart on NCIS 8.12 ... NCIS 8.13: The Wife or the Girlfriend ... NCIS 8.14: Kate ... NCIS 8.15: McGee and DiNozzo's Badges ... NCIS 8.16: Computer Games ... NCIS 8.17: Budget Cuts ... NCIS 8.18: Gibbs vs. the Kid ... NCIS 8.19: The Deadly Book ... NCIS 8.20: CIRay ... NCIS 8.21: Mask and Eye ... NCIS 8.22: "I'd Rather Have a Lead" ... NCIS 8.23: Answers and Questions ... NCIS Season 8 Finale

And see also NCIS  ... NCIS 7.16: Gibbs' Mother-in-Law Dilemma ... NCIS 7.17: Ducky's Ties ... NCIS 7.18: Bogus Treasure and Real Locker ... NCIS 7.21: NCIS Meets Laura ... NCIS Season 7 Finale: Retribution

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Best Grammys Ever

I don't remember any Grammy Award ceremony being better than last night's - and I've been watching every one of them since the 1960s.

Any one of the following would have been enough to make last night's Grammys extraordinary -

• Paul McCartney's ending medley, joined about halfway by friends (including Joe Walsh and Bruce Springsteen), in full and fabulous form, leading right up to a great rendition of "The End"
• The Beach Boys's "Good Vibrations" - with Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnson, and friends.  Like McCartney's medley, this is an intricate, complex song and arrangement, to say the least, and the Beachboys and friends performed it just beautifully and memorably.
• Glenn Campbell, also with a friends, in a poignant rendition of "Rhinestone Cowboy" - heartbreaking, really, since he's suffering from Alzheimer's (Tina and I met him once years ago, after a performance he and Tanya Tucker gave in the Catskills)
• Jennifer Hudson's powerful performance of Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" (written by Dolly Parton) - a wonderful, also heartbreaking tribute to Whitney Houston
• Paul McCartney's "Valentine" - which sounds like the best song of this kind he's written since "Yesterday"
• Bruce Springsteen's opening "We Take Care of Our Own" - with Stevie, Max, and the E-Street Band.  Another blockbuster, which I hear tell has some Occupy Wall Street inspiration.

LL Cool J was also great as the host (I've gotten to know him on NCIS-LA).  It's taken half a century, but the Grammys finally got it right.

The Walkiing Dead 2.8: The Farm, the Road, and the Town

The Walking Dead was back tonight with the second part of it second season, and I might as well get to the most stunning part:

Lori is driving into town to bring back Rick, Glenn, and Herschel.  She's not sure of the way, looks at her map - no GPS in walking dead world - and looks back up just in time to hit a walker, swerve, and crash nastily on the side of the road.   I haven't seen the coming attractions, so I have no idea what kind of shape she's in, but-

Given this is television and not a movie, it's highly unlikely she's dead.  But her baby ... I  like the hope the baby brings to this world, even with all the Rick-Shane complications, so I hope there isn't a game changer here.   We'll find out for sure, I assume, next week.

Meanwhile, Rick's not doing too well convincing Herschel to come back to the farm, until a pair of humans walk in, by way of Philadelphia, which they say they've traveled south from, and with nothing but bad news.  No hope in Ft. Benning, no real hope anywhere, just disparate groups of desperate humans.  And - they want in on the farm.  Rick and Herschel's opposition to this brings at least has the good effect of bringing the two together.

But Rick soon sees that the two from Philadelphia are not going to take no for an answer. So, in a good gun play scene that could have been from Gunsmoke or Hell on Wheels, Rick wheels around and shoots them both, before they presumably would have done the same to him.   Or maybe not, and it's never a good thing to kill humans, especially in this harrowing world.

Powerful start to the second season's second half, and I just wish I could see the rest of it now - or least next week, to find out about Lori.

See also The Walking Dead Back on AMC ... The Walking Dead 2.2: The Nature of Vet

... The Walking Dead 2.3: Shane and Otis ... The Walking Dead 2.4: What Happened at the Pharmacy ... The Walking Dead 2.6: Secrets Told ... The Walking Dead 2.7: Rick's Way vs. Shane's Way

And see also The Walking Dead 1.1-3:  Gone with the Wind, Zombie Style ... The Walking Dead Ends First Season

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Person of Interest 1.14: Reese as Ronin

A soulful Person of Interest 1.14 this past week, with Reese teaming with the kid he has to protect, as he helps him bring to justice the killer's of the kid's older brother.  The kid's talented in music and art, and well versed in the popular culture.  He sizes Reese up as a ronin - a samurai with no master, and, for that reason, with no home.  In the best line of the episode - sad and significant - the kids tells Reese that he'll someday find a home.

Until that happens, Reese will continue to work out in the cold, his only connections Finch, to a lesser extent Fusco, and now Carter.   But what does Reese really know about Finch?

Still not much, but maybe a little more.  Fusco's report to Reese about Finch's aliases confirms what we've already glimpsed, that's there's a lot more to him than meets the eye.  And Reese gets another inkling of something when he realizes that Finch has been able to get some important data when his online library was offline.

This, in turn, relates to the million-dollar question:  is there really a machine, or is the popping up of persons of interest somehow all done in Finch's head?  Reese first got a flash that Finch might be the machine in episode 1.11, and briefly confronted Finch about that.  But Reese of course got no answer, and in episodes 1.12 and 1.13 there was no mention or indication of that again, maybe just a look or two from Reese.

But the machine, or something, keeps showing us those boxes around people's heads at the beginning and throughout each episode.  Are they just  projection of what's inside Finch's head?   Will be interesting to see ...


See also Person of Interest of Interest  ... Person of Interest 1.2:  Reese and Finch ... Person of Interest 1.5: Potentials ... Person of Interest 1.7: Meets Flashpoint and The Usual Suspects ... Person of Interest 1.8:  Widmore and Ben, At It Again ... Person of Interest 1.9: Evolution of a Series ... Person of Interest: 1.10: Carter Returns the Favor ... Person of Interest 1.11-1.12: Realignment and Revelation

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Fringe 4.12: Double Westfield / Single Olivia

Another primo Fringe tonight - 4.12, co-wrriten by J. R. Orci and Graham Roland - which,  like previous episodes this fine season, tells two stories, one proximate, one deeper, which reflect the central setting this season, or of our universe/alternate universe generating a seemingly new our universe/alternate universe, because the Eternal Bald Observers erased Peter from the original our universe/alternate universe, when our Walter was taking Peter from the alternate universe to ours when Peter was a boy ...

The proximate story tonight features Westfield - or, actually, our Westfield and alternate Westfiield - being brought together by the nefarious David Robert Jones.  The result is that most people in the town are going crazy and have double parts of themselves, because their persons and alternate persons are being merged.   Walter, Olivia, and Peter are in the town, and they're ok, as are a small group of people.  Walter figures out that the small group is alright because there were no counterparts on other side who are in alt-Westfield, so this small group is unmerged.  Same for Walter, Olivia, and Peter.   All of this has a nice Twilight Zone feel - high praise indeed - with a touch of a cartoon I saw when I was kid about someone who drives onto a complex cloverleaf highway system, and can never get off it, just keeps driving around and around.

But there's something more.  Olivia also feels a little strange.  Walter tests her blood, and, unlike the mergees, who have twice the number of human chromosomes, Olivia has the right number.  Which makes sense - since Olivia was having a hot dream about her and Peter before she and Peter and Walter ever got to double Westfield.

How can this be?  Why would our Olivia in the new our side be dreaming of making love with Peter?  Well, I've been saying all along that the deletion of Peter did not really make two more realities or universes, just a not-that-different version of our universe/alternate universe.   And here's the important point about that not-that-different version:  unlike Fauxlivia, who has none of Olivia's memories, or Walternate, who none of Walter', the new Olivia of this season has all of the Olivia of last season's memories, and same for Walter.  And that's because, the new and old Olivia are not alternate versions of one another - rather, they are one and same person.

And this in turn means that, given the re-insertion of Peter into this world - the original and alt-original universes - it's just a matter of time until our new Olivia gets all of her original memories back, and same for Walter, etc.  It's already happening and the pace is increasing.  Olivia surprises Peter with a passionate kiss at the end, Walter's beginning to get it and may not want Peter to leave ... it's falling into place ...

Unless the Eternal Bald Observers do something to mess this uppp.

Hey, check out my essay The Return of 1950s Science Fiction in Fringe in this new anthology


See also Fringe Returns for Season 4: Almost with Peter ... Fringe 4.2: Better and Worse Selves ... Fringe 4.3: Sanity and Son ... Fringe 4.4: Peter's Back, Ectoplasm, and McLuhan ... Fringe 4.5: Double Return ... Fringe 4.6: Time Slips ... Fringe 4.7: The Invisible Man ... Fringe 4.8: The Ramifications of Transformed Alternate Realities ... Fringe 4.9: Elizabeth ... Fringe 4.10: Deceit and Future Vision ... Fringe 4.11: Alternate Astrid

See also Fringe 3.1: The Other Olivia ... Fringe 3.2: Bad Olivia and Peter ... Fringe 3.3: Our/Their Olivia on the Other Side ... Fringe 3.5: Back from Hiatus, Back from the Amber ... Fringe 3.7: Two Universes Still Nearing Collision ... Fringe 3.8: Long Voyages Home ... Fringe 3.10: The Return of the Eternal Bald Observers ... Flowers for Fringenon in Fringe 3.11 ... Fringe 3.12: The Wrong Coffee  ... Fringe 3.13: Alternate Fringe ... Fringe 3.14: Amber Here ... Fringe 3.15: Young Peter and Olivia ... Fringe 3.16: Walter and Yoko ... Fringe 3.17: Bell, Olivia, Lee, and the Cow ... Fringe 3.18: Clever Walternate ... Fringe 3.19 meets Inception, The Walking Dead, Tron ... Fringe 3.20: Countdown to Season 3 Finale 1 of 3 ... Fringe 3.21:  Ben Frankin, Rimbaldi, and the Future ... Fringe Season 3 Finale: Here's What Happened ... Death Not Death in Fringe 
 
See also reviews of Season 2: Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People ... Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb ... Fringe 2.4 Unfolds and Takes Wing ... Fringe 2.5: Peter in Alternate Reality and Wi-Fi for the Mind ... A Different Stripe of Fringe in 2.6 ... The Kid Who Changed Minds in Fringe 2.7 ... Fringe 2.8: The Eternal Bald Observers ... Fringe 2.9: Walter's Journey ... Fringe 2.10: Walter's Brain, Harry Potter, and Flowers for Algernon ...  New Fringe on Monday Night: In Alternate Universe? ... Fringe 2.12: Classic Science Fiction Chiante ... Fringe 2.13: "I Can't Let Peter Die Again" ... Fringe 2.14: Walter's Health, Books, and Father ... Fringe 2.15: I'll Take 'Manhatan' ... Fringe 2.16: Peter's Story ... Fringe 2.17: Will Olivia Tell Peter? ... Fringe 2.18: Strangeness on a Train ... Fringe 2.19: Two Plus Infinity ... Fringe the Noir Musical ... Fringe 2.21: Bring on the Alternates ... Fringe 2.22:  Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming ... Fringe Season 2 Finale: The Switch

See also reviews of Season One Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ... 17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect ... 18. Heroes and Villains across Fringe ... Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Star Trek in Penultimate Fringe ... Fringe Alternate Reality Finale: Science Fiction At Its Best

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The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

 

NCIS 200

NCIS gave a great present to the fans last night - including me - with a show in which Gibbs sees his life, what he might have done better, what could have been, what might someday be, as a gun is raised and fired at him in a diner.

Mike, who left this world last season, serves as Gibbs' guide for most of this.  Gibbs is understandably still haunted about Kate.  What would have happened if he had been able to catch a glimpse of Ari and his rifle on the roof?  Kate would have been saved.  And, in Gibbs' vision, Kate would have married DiNozzo, and they would have had a baby ... All good, wonderful, to say the least, but everything has its price.  No Ziva on the team in this alternate-NCIS world.

Abby and McGee are a couple in this might have been, and they come visit  Gibbs after he recalls what he put her through when she discovered that Gibbs had killed the drug dealer who had killed his wife and daughter.  Was he wrong to do kill him?  Gibbs realizes that he couldn't have done any different.

People alive and gone flit through Gibbs' vision in this diner.  Jenny's at a table, Leon's at the counter, it's all reminiscent of that great Marilyn, Elvis, Bogart, and James Dean in the diner painting. 

Gibbs talks to his mother in fine scene.  She's proud of him.   He sees his father and his younger self at a table.

But the prime moment comes when he sits down with Shannon and his daughter.  She also tells him how proud she is of him, and what he's made of his life.  He's done so much good in the world, he can't regret that.   He says he doesn't, but why couldn't he have had both - his career and his family.  Then Shannon shows him yet another vision of what might have happened if she and Kelly had not been killed, and Gibbs not left the Marines.  Gibbs is due to return home in two weeks, and Shannon and Kelly are thrilled, and then there's knock on the door and two Marines are standing outside ...

It's a painful, powerful, sage lesson.  You live the hand you're dealt, and don't look back, make the most of it.  As Gibbs has done so admirably.   And the bullet in the diner doesn't do him any harm.  He's back at work.


What had always made NCIS so admirable is the way if mixes its police and military work with real, soft-spoken human depth.  I'm down for another 200 episodes.


audio podcast: review of NCIS 200

See also NCIS 9.1: Unpacking Partial Amnesia ... NCIS 9.2: Lying to Yourself ... NCIS 9.3: McGee's Grandmother ... NCIS 9.4: Turkey Vulture as Explained by DiNozzo ... NCIS 9.5: Behrooz's Mother ... NCIS 9.6: Too Good to be True ... NCIS 9.7: "You Were My Shannon, Leroy" ... NCIS 9.8: Intersections with Reality ... NCIS 9.9: Twists and History ... NCIS 9.10: Almost One Agent Short

And see also NCIS Back in Season 8 Action ... NCIS 8.2: Interns! ... NCIS 8.3: Tiff! ... NCIS 8.4: Gary Cooper not John Wayne ... NCIS 8.5: Dead DJ, DiNozzo Hoarse, and Baseball ... NCIS 8.6: The Written Woman ... NCIS 8.7: "James Bond Movie Directed by Fellini" ... NCIS 8.8: Ziva's Father ... NCIS 8.9: Leon's Story ... NCIS 8.10: DiNozzo In and Out ... NCIS 8.11: "The Sister Went Viral" ... Bob Newhart on NCIS 8.12 ... NCIS 8.13: The Wife or the Girlfriend ... NCIS 8.14: Kate ... NCIS 8.15: McGee and DiNozzo's Badges ... NCIS 8.16: Computer Games ... NCIS 8.17: Budget Cuts ... NCIS 8.18: Gibbs vs. the Kid ... NCIS 8.19: The Deadly Book ... NCIS 8.20: CIRay ... NCIS 8.21: Mask and Eye ... NCIS 8.22: "I'd Rather Have a Lead" ... NCIS 8.23: Answers and Questions ... NCIS Season 8 Finale

And see also NCIS  ... NCIS 7.16: Gibbs' Mother-in-Law Dilemma ... NCIS 7.17: Ducky's Ties ... NCIS 7.18: Bogus Treasure and Real Locker ... NCIS 7.21: NCIS Meets Laura ... NCIS Season 7 Finale: Retribution

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The Plot to Save Socrates



"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...