Fri 9 April -- Good Rockin' Friday Lessee, it's a little after 8am Mountain Standard Time here at BobCo central and I gots a new strip for you, a tender little offering entitled New York New York! Well, I hemmed and hawed and decided to spring for the plane ticket to make it out to NYC for the big Attitude 2 signing at the end of the month. I'm slightly nervous about how much this is all gonna cost, so I thought I'd try a trick Keith Knight has had some success with. That is, I'm gonna ask if there are any New York-area fans kicking around who might have, like, a bootroom or closet or cupboard I could crash at for a night or two. Is that too much? Have I stepped "over the line"? Well, we'll see. If any of you folks have floor-space to offer let me know, cuz that would be awesome. Movie reviewing Every so often I get an e-mail from somebody who says they like my movie reviews as much as or more than my cartoons, which is fine by me. Regrettably, at Vue they've got me doing the wee litle out-of-the-way pictures rather than the big Hollywood crap that I'm more comfortable with so I find I'm tossing up reviews to movies nobody's likely to get a chance to see. Like this one, Gaz Bar Blues, a little French-Canadian offering about a gas bar. And while I'm at it I might as well toss up my review for Godsend, a weak attempt at clone-baby horror starring Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romjin-Stamos and Robert DeNiro. Buy My Book! The link is here. And while yer at it, buy my poster, too! I need the money! Fri 2 April -- April Fooling Well, now, let's see... whadda we got for all you patient readers out there? I think I got a cartoon kickin' around somewhere, lessee... oh yeah. Movie ass I'm still getting into the movie reviews over at Vue so I'm not getting the big movies I used to get at See. Thus, the only fully-realized review I have for y'all this week is for a wee little Canadian comedy called Seducing Dr. Lewis. I have't written up anything solid for Hellboy, though if I get a chance I'll whip something up this weekend. Cerebus and Sim and Alan Moore I don't know how many of you are big enough into comics to have heard of Cerebus the Aardvark, the 6000-page comic opus from Canadian Dave Sim. He started Cerebus way back in 1977, vowed to do 300 issues, and finally finished the 27-year task last month with the publication of issue  #300. In the meantime he's managed to alienate most everybody with whom he comes into contact with his ferocious antifeminism and his condemnation of what he calls the "Marxist-feminist-homosexualist axis". Anyway, I'm in kind of a Sim mood so I thought I'd toss up a couple of Sim-related links. Here's a recent incredibly defensive interview he did for the Onion's AV Club (*update note: this link goes to the A.V. Club's current feature interview which is no longer the Dave Sim one). Here's a link to his "Tangent" series of essays, in which he lays out what he considers to be the definitive word on why women are inferior to men. But here is the real gem, a dialogue he had with comics-master-turned-Magician Alan Moore on the occasion of Moore finishing "From Hell", which was later made into a crappy movie. Crappy movieness aside, Moore's comments on magic, reality, creativity, art and everything in between are breathtaking; I highly recommend checking them out. Another Plug for Attitude 2 Featuring the following: Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), Jennifer Berman, Max Cannon (Red Meat), Barry Deutsch, Emily S. Flake, Marian Henley, Justin Jones, Keith Knight (The K Chronicles),  Tim Kreider, Aaron McGruder (Boondocks), Kevin Moore, Eric Orner, Greg Peters, David Rees (Get Your War On), Mikhaela B. Reid, Neil Swaab (Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles), Brian Sendelbach, Tak Toyoshima (Secret Asian Man), J.P. Trostle, Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man), and Jason Yungbluth (Deep Fried). And me! Check it out! Apparently they're having a biggish bash in New York to celebrate the debut of this fine book, also apparently tons o' fine people are gonna be there, so I'm hemming and hawing on whether I should go, even though it'll cost me a ton and even if I go and sell books at this thing I have to hand over all the profits to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, which licks it. Nonetheless I'm tempted. Buy my book! I just want to take a second here to profusely thank those of you who already have bought my book; seriously, you folks are keeping me alive, supporting not just me but all the freeloading wieners out there who read this site but never buy anything. You rule! And to you freeloading wieners, don't worry, I love you too you cheap bastards. But buy a book already! Fri 26 March -- Kinda forgot it was Friday Usually I'd have some excuse about how much I was drinking last night but the drinking wasn't too intense at all, comparatively speaking. No, it was just one of those honest, "What day is it again?" things that happen sometimes when you don't have a steady job. Anyway, a cartoon, only four or five months behind the times, a little take on Lost in Translation called Moviestuff? Hmmm... it seems I already uploaded my review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Dawn of the Dead, so all I've got for you this week is my rather tepid review of the rather tepid Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith/Ben Affleck's latest. M'man Richard Clarke I gotta say, watching Clarke slice-n-dice the Bushies all week has been some of the most honest pleasure I've had in some time. I mean, it's not like anything he's saying is new. It was perfectly obvious from the start that the Bushites were grossly incompetent in their attitude in the runup to 9-11, obsessed as they were with National Missile Defence and cheeseball Cold War scenarios and oblivious to the actual grave and gathering threat, just as it was obvious that they always intended to go to war with Iraq no matter what happened. It's just nice to see guy on the inside lay it all out in such a calm, controlled way. Man, I watched Clarke on Larry King, and it was a beautiful thing. Every time Larry would throw him one of the White House spin-type questions, stuff  like "you wrote one thing in your briefing and another thing in your book, isn't that a contradiction?", Clarke would patiently and succinctly explain A) that this whole line of questioning was just flak thrown up to deflect inquiry about the important issues, B) that of course he spun stuff when he was working for the president, pumping up the good and downplaying the bad, because otherwise he would have been instantly fired, and C) that the real issue is that the Bushites absolutely dropped the ball on terrorism in marked contrast to the Clinton administration. He was great, throwing out zinger after zinger; I particularly like his "trapped in amber" comment, where he explains how the administration was trapped in all the Cold War scenarios and analyses they'd been working from ten years ago when they last held power and never noticed or cared that some stuff had changed since then. So, go Clarke go! The Bushites are planning to run on their national security record, which stinks worse than anything else they've done. If we can get the meme out there --"Far from doing everything they could to prevent the disaster, the Bushites were incompetent and negligent in the runup to 9-11 and criminally opportunistic and oblivious in the follow-through"-- we, and by "we" I mean extant humanity, might have a shot. Here's hopin'. And don't forget to BUY MY BOOK Do it! Fri 19 March -- I hate it when this happens But happen it has. Because See didn't run Dog Killer a couple of weeks ago, and because Vue is running it this week, I have to hold off for a week on a new cartoon in order to get the site and the papers sorta back in sync. So, no new strip this week. However, I've got a couple of bones for y'all. In lieu of posting a new Bob strip, I'm gonna fling you guys a tease page from "LoveBot Conquers All", now appearing in the ever-lovin' Ultimate Book of Perfect Energy!!! Colors by Nathan Fairbairn. The whole shebang is available in color at www.graphicsmash.com if you're willing to pay, and the last few pages are coming up for free every week on Wednesday, so if yer curious you can check out the action over there. Movie Reviews I was pretty worried about the switch over to Vue since I didn't figure I'd be able to cover movies for them like I did for See. Well, it's a bit early to get too excited, but things look good on the movie-reviewin' front, and I've got two for you this week. First is Charlie Kaufman's awesome and chilling new Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; the second is the pale and needless remake of Dawn of the Dead. Read 'em and weep uncontrollably. Um... yeah And that's about all I really have for y'all this week, I'm afraid, other than to re-plug the ol' Attitude 2 book, which features the following: Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), Jennifer Berman, Max Cannon (Red Meat), Barry Deutsch, Emily S. Flake, Marian Henley, Justin Jones, Keith Knight (The K Chronicles),  Tim Kreider, Aaron McGruder (Boondocks), Kevin Moore, Eric Orner, Greg Peters, David Rees (Get Your War On), Mikhaela B. Reid, Neil Swaab (Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles), Brian Sendelbach, Tak Toyoshima (Secret Asian Man), J.P. Trostle, Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man), and Jason Yungbluth (Deep Fried). And me! Check it out! Fri 12 March -- Something or other Well, it's been quite a week, lots of stuff coming and going and happening. Let's see how much I can cram into one update. New strip: Move to VUE Weekly Well, that makes all of 'em. As of this week I've run in all the major papers in Edmonton, from the Gateway to See Magazine to The Edmonton Journal to The Edmonton Sun back to See Magazine and now to VUE Weekly. Long story short, in the wake of See not running Dog Killer I talked to the folks at VUE, they made an offer that See didn't feel like matching, so I went over to VUE. I wasn't looking for a fight with See, and it was a hard choice since it means giving up my movie reviewing, at least for now, but the folks at VUE made a persuasive case and See didn't seem to care if I left. I'm hoping everybody got what they wanted, and I wish the folks at See the best of luck. Finally! I've been waiting for this frickin' thing for weeks and finally, finally, finally it showed up! Edited by alt-comics superstar Ted Rall, Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists is a treat and a half. I'm in it, duh, but so is pretty much everybody else except for the folks Ted got in the first book. So in Attitude 2 we've got Alison Bechdel (Dykes to Watch Out For), Jennifer Berman, Max Cannon (Red Meat), Barry Deutsch, Emily S. Flake, Marian Henley, Justin Jones, Keith Knight (The K Chronicles),  Tim Kreider, Aaron McGruder (Boondocks), Kevin Moore, Eric Orner, Greg Peters, David Rees (Get Your War On), Mikhaela B. Reid, Neil Swaab (Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles), Brian Sendelbach, Tak Toyoshima (Secret Asian Man), J.P. Trostle, Shannon Wheeler (Too Much Coffee Man), and Jason Yungbluth (Deep Fried). Whew! That's a lotta URL! Click on the image above to order the book from Amazon! It's cool! and while we're at it... Buy My Book! It occurs to me that I'm not making a big enough deal about Lovebot Conquers All. I've lived with it so long that I forget that all you web-only folks haven't seen it unless you threw down and bought Bob the Angry Flower: The Ultimate Book of Perfect Energy!!!, also affectionately known as the UBOPE. Lovebot Conquers All is hot stuff, folks, the best work I've ever done. I take all the storytelling skill I've built by cramming feature films into 7-panel-cartoons and I blow it all out onto a roller-coaster ride of craziness, building characters, yanking the story this way and that... well, hell, why don't I just let another satisfied customer speak for himself? "Really, when I sat down to read it, I thought it was going to be a quick laugh, a fast crushing of hope, and a final non-sequeter but instead I got a poignant and insightful look into the dating world, the drinking world, and the world at large.  I laughed, I cried, I said "Oh no, it's Dick Cheney's Heart!" out loud.  And then I said, "Holy crap," when I finished it.  I believe I was officially stunned." -- Greg from Phippsburg, ME I don't mention this enough, but LoveBot Conquers All is currently featuring on GraphicSmash.com, with increasingly awesome colors by my good buddy Nathan. You have to pay to access the archive, but they put up free new pages every week, and we're getting to the good part pretty quick so you can take a peek at it over there. And then you can come back here and buy my book, now either with a credit card or PayPal! Dog Killer fallout Well, I wanted response and I got it. For a few incredible days my real mail was actually outnumbering my spam and virus e-mails. Plenty of folks wrote in to complain or praise, and also quite a few wrote in to See Magazine and they ran a bunch of those letters. Nice. So, a quick semi-random run of comments I got in the past week: "lovely, touching, joyful"   "Weird ick. Not funny ick."  "the very essence of Bob"  "lately your cartoons just haven't been saying anything to me"  "kind of a weak punchline"  "lacks a certain something, lets call it humor for now"  "Why on earth should we need to see the detail of a dog's head being blown apart?"  "SICK AND WRONG!"  "it's just ugly"  "we had to put a dog to sleep about two weeks ago, and I didn't particularly need such a graphic reminder of that day"  "sensitive, gentle even"  "the beat between the sixth and seventh panels MAKE this cartoon"  "a funnier punchline would have brought more emotional contrast for the reader"  "you should do it in color"  "this comic just makes me feel depressed and blase"  ... and a few more... "way too gross, way too real-life violent, too misogynistic. I don't think I'll be visiting the BTAF site again anytime soon."  "it's just crap. Pure crap"  "a crummy strip"  "one of the most emotionally stimulating Bob comics yet"  "If anything, what Bob is doing strikes me as both very compassionate and -- at least for Bob -- very humane, both in the act itself and in the way he carries it out."  "that one strip made me feel awful"  "I find myself wondering whether we were really *meant* to find the strip funny.  The feeling I get is that Steven had something he wanted to say, and he chose to say it through the strip, breaking from his usual medium of humor to make sure the point got across"  "I saw Passion of the Christ on Saturday.  I'm still processing that one.  But that one panel of yours I found disturbing.  Boy, am I fucked up or what?" Lottttts of responses. Angry complaints, vociferous praise. I knew I liked Dog Killer a whole lot, but it was pretty depressing to read ten letters in a row saying how it sucked or just left them with nothing. I admit, I thought it was pretty rich that I could run a strip featuring a decapitated baby without a peep but if you hurt a dog --even a cartoon dog-- people freak. But the folks who liked it really liked it; farm kids tended to see the humor a lot more easily than people raised in the city. Some people accused me of just whipping up controversy for its own sake, to which I say "no kidding". My whole purpose in doing the strip is to get reactions from people, and from the beginning I knew this would get people. Indeed, I was hungry for their reactions. Dog Killer is based on true events, which is to say that the father of my friend Pete used to perform this exact service back in the day, putting dogs down for farm families who couldn't afford the vet's fee. And he did it with a shotgun, though he was never stupid enough to hold the dog's head down with his bare hands. This story ate away at my brain. It was so offensive, such a hot button, such a raw nerve waiting to be plucked. First I saw it as a movie. All I had were two things: the title and the conviction that it had to feature realistic effects shots of the dogs' heads getting blown off.  As I played with that image, the instinctive flinch when one imagines it, I eventually realized it was a cartoon and snickered evilly to myself as the panels appeared in my mind. I already had the "cruelty" idea from Down, and this was the perfect followup. Bob would kill a dog, but the strip wouldn't be about Bob being cruel to the dog, it would be about the strip being cruel to the reader. People ask what the "point" of it is. It can have lots of points, but the thing in my life it came from was that I was wimping around and refusing to face up to things and being a big baby until eventually I realized I had to grow up, snap out of it and be a man. I had take some cherished notions, look them in the eye and blow them away out on the back lawn just like an old dog. And of course the essence of that process is that you have to see it, you can't look away, you have to face it and do it. And that's why it has to be so graphic and that's why you can't cut to a wide shot or a shot of Bob's face. Anything less than seeing the dog's head explode is a cop-out. I feel it's a pretty finely crafted strip, if I may say so. Just as Bob gently, soothingly presses the dog's head down and blows its head off, I take the readers and gently, soothingly, hold their heads down and force them to watch a dog's head get blown off. It's all about the pacing. To people who get mad about it, you knew what was gonna happen. Nobody had a gun to your head. You could have looked away at any time. I zoom right into the dog's face, hold you there, hold you --then blow him away in front of you. If you've got my sense of humor, you emit a startled laugh. If not, you read the punchline and don't think it's funny enough to make up for how rotten seeing that dog's head explode made you feel. I'm just playing with your emotions here, people! That's all! Fri 5 March --Throb throb throb... Man, my head hurts. Cheap beer + cheap wine + staying up all night drinking + being mad as hell at See Magazine for chickening out on this week's strip add up to a slow, slodgy Steve Notley for y'all this morning. But I must press on, no matter the cost! This week's strip: Does this cartoon amuse you? Enrage you? Sicken you? Tell me about it. And hey! Are you an Edmonton-area See Magazine reader who would like to have gotten the chance to see this cartoon in the paper? Let them know. Or hell, if you think they made the right call you can congratulate them. Whatever. Bob Goes PayPal Yes, it's finally happened. After years of pointless foot-dragging and delay I've finally set up my books page so that folks can order books using this new-fangled PayPal payment system. This is something people have been bugging me about for some time now, so I hope all you PayPal-positive people take immediate advantage of this sexy new system to order some books and allow me to earn the money I need to live. Because that would be, y'know, hot. Quick note about McNally Robinson Just to let all you Calgary folks know that you can purchase my fine books at the McNally Robinson bookstore, and apparently that also means that you cats in Winnipeg and Saskatoon can get your local McNally Robinson store to send copies for purchase, if that's what you wish to do. And why wouldn't you? The web site is, unsurprisingly, www.mcnallyrobinson.com. Reviewness As promised I gots a ton of movie reviews for the edification of all. First is Starsky & Hutch, second is Ashley Judd's limp new thriller Twisted, and third is the deliciously pandering Decoys, a wee little Canadian horror-comedy about women who are space monsters. Nice! APE pictures Scott Beale over at Laughingsquid.org has some photos of the most recent Alternative Press Expo up at his site; check them out if you will. Have I forgotten anything? Oh, probably. But given the malleable nature of the Internet, I can go back later and insert whatever I need as though it had been there all along. Yes! Fri 27 Feb -- Whew! Oooookay, let's see... back from APE, Boston is a receding memory, let's see what's on the plate this week. Well, a cartoon, of course, this week entitled Last week's retarded broken link Many of you folks took the time to let me know that the UBOPE link last week was broken, or rather, it pointed to a location on my hard drive rather than to the proper base directory file. Since I was out of town when all these handy tips started flooding in I couldn't really do anything about it until I got back except fume at my dumbness. The problem stems from the fact that up until recently I was doing my web editing with an old version of Netscape. Yes, Netscape. It was annoying, primarily because it had this way of insisting on putting a gay 2-pixel border around any linked image if I didn't specifically go back and change it. So a couple of weeks ago I downloaded a newer version of Netscape and started editing on that, only to discover that this new program has a way of converting all links to hard drive locations rather than allowing them to remain relative to the local directory. It even did me the favor of screwing up every single local link on the most recently archived set of updates, forcing me to hand-fix them all. Why am I using Netscape? Idiocy, friends. Pure idiocy. NeedCoffee Awards I'm please to announce that the Ultimate Book of Perfect Energy!!! is a finalist for a 2003 Golden Chazzie Award for Best Graphic Novel/Collection from NeedCoffee.com alongside Craig Thompson's Blankets, Alex Robinson's BOP!, Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran's Orbiter and Neil Gaiman's Sandman: Endless Nights, a worthy slate of co-nominees. What are Goldne Chazzies? Well, why don't I throw up a quick link to their Chazzie award FAQ in order to explain it? No good reason? Then I will. Lovebot Lego I was just in the middle of doing this update (okay, I hadn't started yet) when I checked the Inbox and discovered this cute lil' fella, a Lego version of Lovebot sent in by a fan. I append it thusly: Awwwww.... so cute! So how was APE? APE was good. I must admit, Saturday kinda sucked. I could tell the books weren't moving at the rate I'd hoped, and with everything working supposedly in my favor (fabulous new book, great table placement, colorful new table display) and still not to sell felt like a pretty inescapable cosmic vote of non-confidence. Thank Christ (or should I say, thank the Christ) that Saturday was followed by Sunday, which reversed evil fortune and provided the money I so crave and need for any sense of artistic self-worth. Plus, and this only came to me later, Sunday was a lot looser and more human; rather than standing there mechanically doing my pitch ("Bob the Angry Flower comics, straight up from Canada! Comics on every element of the human experience, from quantum physics to bad punctuation to girls whose shoes are too big!"), I actually got to have some real conversations with fans and passersby, which makes a hell of a difference. So I wanna thank everybody who showed up, Saturday and Sunday, and if any of you want to send me copies of the digital snapshots you took, I'd love to put them up on the site (that is to say here). Whoops! Almost forgot to plug my book! And let's just check that baby to make sure the html is working... see, it wasn't! Damn you, Netscape 7.whatever! Quit monkeying around with my HTML decisions! Movie reviews None this week, but next week I should have a whole smacking pile of them, including Starsky and Hutch, Decoys and The Girl in the Window (I think that's what it's called). As for the Passion of the Christ, I didn't get back in time to review it for See, and I haven't seen it yet, but when I do I'll try to put together some thoughts about it for y'all just for the site, even though I'm not getting paid. And I guess that's it for now I hope to have a surprise for you folks next week, a response to a long-standing request from dozens of fans. I'm not gonna say what it is just yet, so feel free to imagine that it's your longstanding request that will be addressed, but don't get too attached to the idea, cuz it probably won't be your particular thing I'm doing. But for some of you, your prayers will be answered! Wed 18 Feb -- Away to More Madness!!! Whew, I gotta say, this month is a confusion for me, off to Boston, back for a week, off again to San Francisco for APE.... I don't know what's real any more. Well, at any rate, here's this week'c cartoon: APE APE APE!!! Yes, it's roughly this time of year again, which means I'll be alive and present at the Alternative Press Expo, this year at the Concourse Exhibition Center (620 7th St.) this weekend, Feburary 21 and 22. And I got the same sweet spot I got last year, which means that Keith Knight and I will be pretty much the first thing anybody sees when they walk in. Righteous! Though I will say that what often happens is sure, they notice you, and the do their whole walk-around, and by the time they get back to you they're all "Oh, I spent all my money. I hope you'll forgive me," and I have to smile and pretend like hey, I don't care if you buy my book, whatever dude, when really what I want to say is: "You blew it, man or chick. If you're walking out of here without my book you're a damn fool. Get out of my sight." Speaking of which... Buy my book! And while you're at it, buy my poster! Speaking of books... Last week there was something of a tremor in the geek world at the news that George Lucas was finally going to release the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD. There was some bitching, in which I joined, about the fact that he insists on only releasing the late-90s Special Editions with Greedo shooting first and all that shit, with the additional statement that he's never, ever gonna release the original films as they were. So, in the spirit of an artist's compulsion to go back and fiddle with something that's already done rather than produce new work, I hereby offer the LoveBot Conquers All Special Edition. So, crack open your UBOPE. (What? You haven't bought one yet? What the hell's wrong with you? Don't you care about the awesome LoveBot Conquers All storyline which only appears in it?) Grab a felt pen (test it to make sure it's not gonna soak through the page!), turn to p. 139 and black out the second word balloon in the fourth panel such that it appears thusly: True, it's a tiny edit, but I feel if you re-read the story after making the change it'll flow better. Of course, it's up to you; if you're all for hard-core Bob the Angry Flower UBOPE purism, disregard my sound advice. Movie Ass I know, I've been way out of the reviewing game for a couple of weeks, but if yer interested here's my rather glowing review of Adam Sandler's latest, 50 First Dates. Fri 13 Feb -- Back from Madness!!! Not, frankly speaking, that Boston was all that outrageously mad or anything. But since this update's been so delayed (largely on account of how I stupidly decided to download a fresh copy of Netscape to do my HTML editing on, only to discover that it's splooging unwanted code throughout my pages) , let's first jump into this week's strip before doing anything else: Boston stuff As I said, a pretty good time. The M.I.T. panel went fairly well, with good attendance even though it was obvious most people were there for Randy Milholland of  Something Positive. And why not? He's a funny guy. Nonetheless, there were some sounds of recognition when I mentioned a couple of strips, so at least some people knew who I was. Thanks to all you cats who made it out! An enterprising fan took some o' them digitalized photos of the event; here is a link to a page of thumbnails, if you're curious. Also in Boston (or, techincally, Cambridge) was/is Million Year Picnic, an excellent comic store that hosted a wee BtAF signing on the weekend. Major props and shoutings-out go to Tony Davis, owner/proprietor of the Picnic, who very generously took me out for lunch and everything. Cool. Boston-area residents, if you're looking for UBOPEs, get them at the Picnic. Forward, ever forward And now I'm back for a slender week before jetting off to San Francisco for the Alternative Press Expo, which I'm hoping will be metric tons of fun. Certainly I'm looking forward to getting a chance to hang out with my esteemed colleague Keith Knight of the K Chronicles, and I'm already thinking about the BBQ beef brisket I'm gonna have at Tommy's Joynt the very day I arrive. Man, it's gonna be sweet. And tender, and succulent. Book TV Way back in November a crew of TV people filmed a segment about Bob at the UBOPE launch party. Apparently over the last week or so that segment has been airing on Book TV, a channel I don't get. I did, however, manage to catch a glimpse of the longer 5-minute version at ACCESS TV yesterday, and it's pretty good; thankfully they concentrated on showing the strips and the comments from my friends and kept footage of me to a minimum. From what I understand, the 2-minute version of the segment will be airing this Sunday on CLT (that's "Canadian Learning Channel") on "The Word this Week", 9:30 pm MST, so there's that if anyone cares. Bush in 30 Seconds Last week I posted a proposed script for a "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad, and this week I have a link to a quickie version of the ad whipped up by fan Eric Blumrich. Not bad, though I'd put longer pauses in between the captions... y'really gotta take the extra seconds to watch the Dummy sitting there in order to get the full efffect. And not to belabor the point, but... BUY MY BOOK! Wed 4 Feb -- Boston Madness!!! But before we get to the Boston Madness, let's quickly throw the new strip up here two days early on account of the fact that I'm departing for Boston for some madness. The strip: And now...  Boston Madness!!! Sorry I keep saying "Boston" so much, but I'm really looking forward to this wee little di-pronged Bob adventure. First we've got the M.I.T. panel where I'll be yapping alongside the dudes from Something Positive and The Everyday Happenings of Weeble and Bob, and then we're gonna go drinking if we're not drunk already by the time the panel rolls around. And then, two days later, as the poster suggests, I'll be appearing for a signing at Million Year Picnic in Cambridge, MA (not Harvard, as I erronously reported for ever so long a time on the books page). So, if any of you cats out there Boston way wanna come out and meet me for some reason, here's your platinum-plated opportunity, all gift-wrapped and handed to you by Mother Fate. Movie reviews None this week, I'm afraid. I'm out of the loop. I'll be back with more in the future. My Own Personal Bush in 30 Seconds Ad Of course, I'm not so slick that I can actually produce this ad, but I present to you its script. If any enterprising video-editing jockey wants to make it, they're more than welcome. It's pretty simple; all you need is one piece of publically available footage. Here we go: FADE IN: INT. SCHOOL CLASSROOM. DAY President George W. Bush sits at the front of a Florida elementary classroom as the teacher conducts a reading lesson. Subtitle: Emma T. Booker Elementary School, 9:03 am, September 11, 2001 Chief of Staff Andrew Card enters and whispers in George's ear: Subtitle: "We're under attack." Card exits. Bush sits there for a moment. Subtitle: GEORGE W BUSH Bush sits some more. Subtitle: MAN OF ACTION Bush keeps on sittin'... Subtitle: DECISIVE LEADER Bush sits and sits. Black screen with title: FIVE MINUTES LATER... Bush still sittin' there, working things out for a few more seconds, until... FADE OUT * * * And can all you folks believe that last week George W. Bush actually said that Saddam refused to let weapons inspectors enter Iraq? And nobody called him on it? Like, does anybody remember anything anymore? And hell, while we're at it... Look at this fabulous book I'm selling! Wow! Zow! Must buy at once!