Tragic

I find it interesting how following seemingly random links on the internet can teach you something you’d never have any reason to know otherwise. I started out looking at this Metafilter thread about the web site dead.atyourage.com. You enter your exact date of birth and find out about famous/infamous/interesting people who died at your age or thereabouts.

The first person on my list was Lyman Bostock, a baseball player I’d never heard of. Apparently, he is still the only MLB player to have been murdered during the baseball season. That’s sad enough, but I went to the Wikipedia article about him and read the story of his death; it’s heartbreaking. He was a great hitter on his way to being a pretty big star, and was murdered by Leonard Smith, the jealous, estranged husband of a woman he’d only just met. Even worse, Smith was found guilty in his second trial (the first ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury), was committed for psychiatric treatment, and was released after seven months when he was deemed to be no longer mentally ill. Including that time and the time he was in jail awaiting trial, he served less than two years for Bostock’s murder. ESPN Outside the Lines also did a story on Bostock’s murder. It seems like a slap in the face of Bostock’s family that Smith has been free for nearly thirty years, even though he was found guilty of murder. As a direct result of this case, the state of Indiana changed the way that the sentences of those found guilty by reason of insanity are handles, so that people found guilty and then deemed no longer insane would go to jail, instead of be released.

Where do you go from here?

There are a lot of shows whose premises make them seem like they’d make decent tv movies, but which don’t seem supportable over the course of a season. Amanda Bynes’s new show sounds like such a program. It’s called Canned, and it’s about a bunch of young friends who are all fired on the same day. Hilarious, right? Okay, not really. But still: how do you drag that out across a season (I say one season because, let’s be honest, right now nothing about this premise screams renewal)? I guess there must be more to it than that, right? Because otherwise, it’s pretty lame. Sounds like it may last as long Jerry O’Connell’s hotel show.

Chuck vs the Predator

Oh my goodness! Chuck has been getting so good lately, and really this whole season has been pretty amazing. I love how Chuck is being seen as a grown-up, as opposed to a screw-up who creates more problems than he solves. On the one hand, I’m sad that Chuck is being forced into these situations that are causing him to harden and turn into the spy he never wanted to be. On the other hand, I recognize that he is a smart, capable person who is given way too little credit and is definitely equal to the tasks before him.

I’m so so so excited to see the rest of this season, and hope that Tricia Helfer’s stint on Chuck will be less useless than her appearances in the first 8 episodes of Burn Notice’s second season (haven’t finished it yet, maybe there’s a reason for her to exist).

I appreciate that the General didn’t lie to Chuck; she absolutely does not want him to stop being the Intersect, and actually wants to pull him further into the spy lifestyle. I think that Sarah’s confusion over her duty to her mission and her feelings for Chuck was well-played, and that the story wouldn’t have been very believable if she’d taken a firm stand either way. And Casey totally came through. I knew that he was more of a softie than he admitted (the man keeps a photo of Reagan [which the General promptly mocked], for cripes sakes), but I’m glad that when he had the opportunity to expose the depths of Sarah and Chuck’s feelings for one another, he basically played dumb.

As always, Adam Baldwin totally rocked my world, although I must say that Zachary Levi has grown on me quite a lot in the last little bit of time. I guess I’m still fundamentally the same 16 year old who swooned over David Boreanaz’s Angel, because damn it all if this new, tortured Chuck isn’t the hottest freaking thing ever.