Need a laugh?
I’m conflicted. The dissonance of firing up the blog again, rooting on my Phillies, and hoping to get out for my birthday this weekend despite such unending pain existing half a globe away is acute. Yet I just passed an hour listening to Episode 5 of the podcast Strike Force Five while doing some graphics work for an upcoming project and the only reason I’m not incapacitated from cackling out loud nearly the entire time is that my asthma’s so bad I’ve kind-of unconsciously trained myself not to push out breath as I’m silently convulsing in hysterics.
Strike Force Five united late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers in a series of highly candid, very lightly structured conversations, sponsored to bring in money for their staffs as the strike by the Writers’ Guild of America halted production of their programs. Twelve installments were released over six weeks.
I don’t always get auras with migraine episodes, and the only kind I get when I do is a strong but fleeting scent. One from not too long ago that’s stuck with me is the aroma of Big Red gum.
Ad screenshot © 1979 Mars Wrigley via Bionic Disco.
I’m pretty sure I haven't chewed or even thought much about it in close to 40 years. I certainly didn’t remember it being such a distinct sort of cinnamon — and that surprise of specificity is a recurring theme with the smells, be they a brief reminder of the brand of cigarettes Dad’s parents smoked or the musty, vinegar-ish scent of the wood in parts of Mom’s parents’ house. I’ve smelled garlic, not as prepared with any particular dish that I recall, and the breath of my late cat Pebbles.
A friend and I mark the second week in October, during which our respective birthdays fall, by sending each other videos.
We’ll throw fresh material into the mix but it’s mostly old reliables. I’ve shared a
few on the blog in years past; the one that hilariously interprets lyrics to Joe Cocker’s performance of “With a Little Help from My Friends” at Woodstock [4:06] — a.k.a., to us, “I Did Some Wonder Loaf (Hoggify)” — I rather inexplicably have not ere now and it is among my favorite things. While the video’s been around so long that its original link/uploader is lost to the mists of time, I’m pretty sure the mysterious Dan’s name has always popped up at the end.
I want to share this H.T. Webster cartoon from 100 years ago before maximum relevance is lost.
Webster’s “Idea Dynamo” automating the creation of new cartoons, drawn for
The New York World in 1923, looks amusingly — if not eerily — prescient given conversations we’re having in 2023 vis-à-vis artificial intelligence.
I’m very late in sharing the news that my pal Bully has resumed bringing joy to the masses at his blog Comics Oughta Be Fun!.
A couple of Januarys past — which might have been a Sandman issue — Bully, the
little stuffed bull who is a fuzzy, cuddly bane to oppressors of the righteous and vulnerable, returned after sadly but understandably closing up shop in June 2020. He continued to live out the message of his blog’s title on Twitter with the help of trusty human friend John DiBello, then made the world brighter for those of us who rarely venture there by firing up Fun! again, filling in posts from 2021 and forging ahead with his mission to chronicle every instance of, well, just what it says on the virtual tin, via the continuing feature Today in Comics History.
I’ve had Don McLean’s “American Pie” on the list of things to include in this
series from the start.
Once upon a time, I figured that when I did finally write about the song it would be
in large part to annotate or explicate it. That was before. It was before cyberspace got quite so full; before I realized that with age the mystery and myriad possible interpretations of the lyrics grew more interesting to me than any definitive answers; before McLean slowly began to break his silence on the subject, most recently and distinctly in a documentary that premiered on the Paramount+ service last month called The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s “American Pie”.
