BOOKS. eureka: brain box blues

a few years ago, when the tv show eureka first premiered, i thought id give it a try. i really loved it! the show is about a sheriff who works in the town of eureka, a scientific sort of utopia where the government has holed away thousands of scientists in this small town, and they have come up with amazing technological advances. the characters are a ton of fun, especially sheriff carter, the main character. he's really the only sane one in this town full of crazy scientists! having watched the show for the past four seasons, i decided to give the books a try.
'brain box blues' is about a strange invention that can supposedly see the last memories of someone who died. the story starts with a top secret case and they need to see what the last memories were of an important government official who was recently killed. its up to the scientists at global dynamics to get the information out of the box and make some sort of sense of it. of course, the purpose for getting these memories is kept under wraps until it becomes more and more obvious that there are some hidden motives behind the information being harvested.
the story itself is pretty good, it plays like a big episode of the show. it was fun to read all the different characters, who the author does a great job of recreating. the different actions and events are true to the show and its attitudes. a quick and fun read!

COMEDY. colin quinn: long story short

the latest stand up special from colin quinn takes a very different approach to the old 'stand there and tell jokes' formula that most comedians use. instead of just stories and jokes following no particular pattern, quinn tackles one subject matter for the whole duration of his show. granted, the topic is pretty big: the history of the world! this structure is really well done as quinn, with the assistance of photos and animation on the screen behind him, goes through all of recorded history and takes a critical look at whats gone wrong and whats gone right, all the while adding his own hilarious two cents! he starts with cave men, jumps to the greek and roman empires, then in to christendom, finally traveling around the world visiting each continent and giving his perspective on their respective histories. quinn does a fantastic job of playing the history teacher- in fact, if it wernt for all the bad language, this thing could almost be shown in schools! my only real experience with quinn was his role as saturday night live's weekend update anchor, and i was very pleasantly surprised at how funny and clever he really is! and he's pretty good at accents from around the world too! all in all this is a pretty impressive stand-up show, i enjoyed it so much that i plan to watch it again soon!

TV. camelot

i'm not particularly drawn to the legend of king arthur, but my wife loves that kind of stuff, so we decided to watch the new camelot show on starz. i have almost no knowledge of the legend itself other than the most basic of information: arthur was a king, he had a round table with knights, a cool sword, a strange magician merlin, and some creepy chick who lives in a lake. other than that, i dont really know anything about it, so watching this show will be learning a completely new mythology. in the first episode we see the king killed by his daughter morgan who then tries to take the throne, but merlin reveals that the king has a son who has been in hiding for the past twenty years. merlin then makes work of getting the hidden son, arthur, to accept his true fate of becoming the king of england. the story wasnt all that interesting to me, but as the episode reached its climax and arthur begins to take the role of king and fight against those who oppose him it started getting good. i can honestly say that i dont know where the story will go from here, but it should be fun to find out!