First: I recently read "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science" by Atul Gawande which was quite good. It's a book of essays on surgical error: what happens, how it happens, the consequences (both personal and wide ranging) and what can and has been done. He goes into the positives and negatives of the culture of medicine as well as telling more personal stories, it was really interesting and I reccomend it to anyone involved in medicine (especially surgeons!) though I don't know how similar the australian system is to the american.
Second, I watched season one of "Supernatural". I watched the first few episodes when it was on tv but found it a bit too scary and wasn't engaged by the monster-of-the-week format. Cam eventually got into it and told me there was an interesting plot later on, but I was still put off by the fact that the premise isn't my sort of thing: you know that nothing will happen which permamently changes the basic formula of two brothers alone, moving from place to place fighting bad stuff. So there's huge limitations on where Sam and Dean's lives and relationships can go, and there's no chance for a real ensemble cast with complex unpredictable plots, which is my Thing.
( Read more... )