THERE MUST BE A WAY to get rich selling extra spaces as attachments for Scrabble boards…
BUT WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?!?!?
QUIZ SHOW OVERHEARD ON THE TV as I entered the living room:
That’s right, ‘Illuminati’ is the answer! You’ve won $100!”
Ol’ Thinkypants Groks
“HEY, MAN, IF YOU WERE in high school when the original Star Wars came out, you know exactly what I mean.”
Touching With Words
THE FIRST TIME I DISCOVERED that my words had an effect on other people was when something I wrote made other people cry.
The people were my fellow high-school English students, and the topic was a personal essay we’d been assigned. My take on it was to write about loneliness, and I wish I still had the essay because I can’t even remotely reconstruct it after 31 years and thousands of more words down the line.
“Starbase 33 Minyan”
According to the Official Couch Potato Handbook, each official Couch Potato Viewing Lodge must have its own name. Ours is the “Starbase 33 Minyan,” mostly due to a love of science fiction in general (and Star Trek in particular). The photo at left illustrates our motto, an SFnal riff on the Lubavitcher Hasid motto “Bring Moshiach (the Messiah) Now!” (Could I have ‘shopped a combadge, I’d’a done.) Sometimes, a blog is just a good place to download your brain.
The Purist’s Question
HOW MUCH CAN YOU CHANGE something before it no longer resembles the original — yet still call it by the same name?
5 Thoughts: Comic Strips
1. THE MORNING ISN’T COMPLETE WITHOUT checking into the daily comics page and some of my favorite parallel universes. I scan most of what’s there (as my friend Gary Nordstrom says, “If the author went to the trouble of writing it, as a fan I should take the trouble to read it”), and while my eternal favorites are now but shrine-emplaced memories (Pogo, Calvin & Hobbes, The Far Side and Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy) here’s a handful I look forward to each day. What they have in common is strong characterization, technical competency and good writing, but that’s not all:
2. Get Fuzzy. The only “funny animal” strip that “gets” the animal mind (in the way that Jack Vance “gets” the alien mind). Darby Conley’s Satchel Pooch and Bucky T. Katt are, well, not quite human — and they’re rendered that way, as they muddle through each day trying not to give Rob Wilco (their human roommate) one of his perennial headaches.