Well.  Hmm.  It pretty much sucks.  Not that this exactly qualifies as a news flash.

As careful readers will have surmised, things haven’t been going particularly well lately.  In addition to the loss of Hobbes, my grandfather is in rapidly declining mental and physical health, and the retirement community I moved him into in January has asked me to uproot the old gentleman instanter and consign him to a skilled nursing facility.  So I’ve been scrambling to find him a new home — preferably one that de-emphasizes its physical and professional resemblance to Bedlam and/or Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor, while simultaneously hacking away at two scripts that are now overdue on a near Jonah Goldbergian scale.

Meanwhile, in a Secure, Undisclosed Location, S.Z. — never the hardiest lumberjack in the greenwood — has been felled by the flu.  When I spoke to her the other day, she was feeling a bit better — nearly well enough to read Renew America — but it seems that Flossie…

…yes, this innocent, yet oddly smug-looking character — ate her glasses.  Or at least, chewed them to the consistency of a veteran rawhide toy.  I know that sounds like a lame excuse (“I couldn’t finish my blog post, the dog ate my eyes!“), but s.z. offered to provide photographic evidence, once she got new glasses so she could locate the camera.  Anyway, the upshot is that her present inability to focus on the computer screen is denying her the spiritual engorgement to be found from the works of Doug Giles, Nathan Tabor, Pastor Swank, and other low-hanging Fruit Loops.

The bottom line is, we’re going through a rough patch, but we’re not about to pull a Bérúbé and defect to another blog (even if Sadly, No! would have us).  So in the immortal words of the Country Bear Jamboree attraction at Disneyland:

Please Bear With Us.

*Image courtesy of Yesterland, for all your dead Disney attraction needs.

Now a word from our sponsor | 24 Comments »

Seattle Dan is a contributor at the General’s place, and also the proprietor of Jackson Street Books, a fine independent bookstore which stocks, among other fine, independent books, Better Living Through Bad Movies. And he’s been kind enough to post a review here. Feel free to join in the chaos in the comments.

The Book | 1 Comment »

Well, it’s been a tough week, and neither of us really feels like going out to celebrate.  But I’m afraid to simply ignore the occasion, for fear of inviting the bitter fate of Jimmy Wilson from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode, I Accuse My Parents.

As we all know, it was the failure of Jimmy’s parents to remember his birthday that sent him reeling, first into the arms of a kind-hearted but mobbed-up chanteuse…

“Tell you what, Jimmy.  You come by my place tomorrow morning about noon and I’ll fix you an old fashioned birthday breakfast.”

…and then into the Underworld, where Jimmy performed shadowy errands for a ruthless Mafia capo (renting cars, picking up packages, storing important papers in a safe deposit box) before two thugs mercilessly beat the crap out of him in an alley, despite Jimmy’s clearly telling them that it was his birthday!  After that, of course, he has no choice but to run away, traveling via an I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang-style montage, until, starving and desperate, he botches an armed robbery in Kansas which tragically culminates in Jimmy’s victim hiring him to flip burgers.

So, as I said, it’s been a lousy week, and I really don’t think I can handle it if the whole thing climaxes with Mary joining the Black Hand and going on a three-state crime spree because I didn’t make a big to-do about her birthday.  So just to be on the safe side, I’m ordering Chinese.

Birthdays | 9 Comments »