Life as we know it

I adore sci-fi movies. Alien and Predator being two of my favourites you can imagine my elation when they made Alien v Predator, shiite though that was. Life was something else entirely. The movie, I mean, the other is so ghastly the last thing I would do would be to bore you with it.
I like me some Ryan Reynolds and Jake G like everyone else but the movie was less thrilling and more disturbing because of its last scene. That was horror like they don't make 'em anymore. Whoa. No, I lie. The most awful thing I've ever seen on screen has to be Old Boy, worse than Clockwork Orange, worse than Caligula, the stuff of nightmares because some men actually sat and wrote that screenplay.
The movies are wonderful to people who don't have lives, I would think. If you read Roger Ebert you would know he lived fully through fiction. Like we now live through social media. I reach for my phone in the midst of insomnia, and reach for it again before I open my eyes in the morning. I know Brooklyn Beckham is at the gym after a skiing injury, that Skam has uploaded a new clip, that Sean Lowe's baby is the cutest thing on God's good earth, that Grigoriy Dobrygin's redheaded GF is beyond kooky, that Trump is straight up the Fifth Horseman of the apocalypse, that journalists in Syria keep me human and that Sweden has run out of rubbish. Like there's anything else I need to know.
Gotta go. Final episode of The Night Watchman just downloaded.

Pure instigation

Oh, No, I'm going to have to visit MAC again and brave the salespeople! It's not my fault. They've got  a perennial lure line called Punk Couture, names like Instigator and Pure Heroine and Studded Kiss. I can withstand anything but temptation, Oscar, how well you knew.

What just happened

You can't help but fangirl JK Rowling for her tenacity, her talent and fighting the crass and the crazed (see her Twitter), but this morning I mumbled Oh Joanne, Joanne and did the whole SMH thing. I had reached the last page of Career of Evil, you see, waiting for the sexual tension to be cut by a knife, with the same precision rendered to the limb that arrived on a secretary's desk and started the novel off. I waited. And I waited. And in the last line of the last page I realised that either Rowling has reached that stage of fame where editors are afraid to touch her, or she has lost her touch. It was all wrong.
The relationship between Detective Cormoran Strike and his partner, (we won't demean her by saying his Girl Friday), Robin Ellacott is one of the best things about Rowling's crime series, possibly better than her denouements and her sometimes too-populated pages, (I sometimes had to backread to keep track of who was who and what heinous crime each had committed), which nevertheless make for fun times. Characters like Shanker is a case in point, and no it isn't pronounced the Indian way, who reminds me of the wonderful Bubba in Dennis Lehane's Kensie and Gennaro books; how I would love to have one of them come charging over the hill to my rescue, no questions asked. Am I the only one with a Bodyguard on my wishlist?
But the genius subtleties between Cormoran and Robin, that's the thing. So to have it fended off time after time and then end on the worst possible note was aggravating and bewildering.
Do we finally look at the hitherto willow-in-a-typhoon Cormoran as broken in a battle between his head and his heart (i.e., the wuss of all wusses, make up your mind, for god's sake, Corm), and Robin as the kind of weak-willed character she herself despises, when they have been our heroes for 62 Chapters? Wtf.
Cormoran is sexy, imperfect and adorable; Robin is gorgeous, feisty and uncaring of gender when it comes to getting down and dirty in a fight, literally. But her last words show her to be indifferent to vows that are not to be taken lightly, in a setting where real love, which she has already found (and the way Rowling shows that without ever saying it is brilliant), should triumph. Well, I'm just lost.
Will I buy Book 4, Lethal White? Sigh. Of course.