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Fri, Jun 23, '06-- That game... What's it called? Well, that was fun. Going back to Canada for North Country Fair, I mean. The fine and friendly folks, the joys of the Bushmaster, the Game 6, the scrotoss. Ah, the scrotoss. So revealing. Abrupt segue into displaying this week's strip:  So that's the cartoon. Also, I've got a book out. The book is real and rather nice. In addition to the Booklist review quoted in the June 15 update we have another amiable thumbs up from Bookloons: "...not all the punchlines will leave you laughing..." -- Bookloons Kidding. Really, they liked it. How Do I Get This Incredible Book? Good question. You can get copies from Amazon by clicking the image above. Or better yet, bug your local bookstore to order them from IPG (Independent Publishers Group), or your local comic store from Last Gasp or Cold Cut. Or you can ask the folks at Tachyon Publications what stores they're in. What you can't do is buy them from me because I don't have them to sell. Which feels kinda weird, but that's how it is. So go ahead, order them from Amazon, ask for them in bookstores, let the cool winds of lady fate waft them into your eager hands. But What If I Want a Signed One? Hmm. Tricky. I guess you'd have to come to San Diego Comic-Con and buy one from me at my table. That would mean you'd be forced to endure a few moments of my company but really, the risks are worth it. Thur, June 15 -- Sh-Boopy, sh-Boopy! Weeeee! Days are of craziness! PopCap did an all-day wigout at Habitat Humanity yesterday. Full-on earth-moving, ditch-digging, wheelbarrow-trundling, dozens of people working for hours to accomplish what one man with a BobCat could do in minutes. Yes! All right! As a result of this physical exertion there was drinking. Badly timed, one might say, as I intend to leap onto an airplane tomorrow morning to go back to Edmonton where the north country awaits. But it wouldn't be right to dash off to Canada without presenting you (the world) with this most newest cartoon 
KILLLLLLLLLLLLLL!!! I have seen Dog Killer. It exists. It feels clean and good in my hands, as it will in yours. I will with you now share a review that evidently appeared in Booklist: Notley's syndicated Bob the Angry Flower exemplifies the new science-fiction comics. Instead of rocketing around the galaxies, it generally stays on terra firma and lets the aliens come to it. It features robots, especially the lugubrious author's alter ego, Lovebot, and, getting brainy for a change, quantum phenomena, as when Bob, instead of just chopping a "spunky crippled kid" up with an ax, whacks him with a "quantum waveform decollapser" that renders the annoying child into innumerable, identical, possible spunky crippled kids. Trenchant references are made to highbrow fantasy (Kafka) and sf (Brave New World), but Notley is obviously most inspired by 1950s "sci-fi" flickers and their progeny of giant reptile/bug/thing attack yarns (though the big critter that most excites him is the already-big-enough bear; see the long, wordless story in the center of the book, "Pure Action"). And he's incensed by the Bush administration. Bob is pretty transparently another Notley alter ego----the main one--yet he also seems an ambulatory bud from The Little Shop of Horrors' Audrey. Energetically drawn, top-drawer madness. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Yeah! Take that, Publishers Weekly! Buy this book! It rules! Oh yes, almost forgot... Oilerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrssssss! Fri, June 9 -- So Tired! Man, I was up late last night, mostly composing the post that appears below this one. Stupid dumb Oilers, making me drink and stay up all hourst! Didn't get to sleep until 4:30 a.m! But please, please, don't let my problems distract you from the great and wonderful work being done in the world in the name of goodness, stuff like the formation of a spankin'-new 
And Dog Killer? I am told that it exists, that it's been printed, that it's being shipped this very moment. I hesitate to break out the party gear and hard drugs until I actually hold one of the suckers in my own fingers, but the folks at Tachyon say it turned out pretty slick. Oh boy oh boy! Can't wait! Order now! June 8 -- Back from Canada! And once again in America! So beautiful, both here and there! Ahhhh.... life. So brilliantly delicious. How can one mortal stand the exultant delights of champion-friend DJing, Fort Edmonton-going, Scrotoss-playing (the detailed details to which I hope to link further in the week), fall-apart-on-your-fork-beef-eating, stay-up-till-one-the-next-afternoon-poker-playing, slab-o-pork-masquerading-as-bacon-eating, then to return to foosball, funny-joke-making and homeless-guys-on-the-street-talking before retiring, patiently, to home and bed and web site with a quick update knowing that I have a funny cartoon idea ready to draw tomorrow, or at least I think it's funny? Readers and ladies, he simply can't. But he must anyway, because God says so. And What of the Oilers? I tried to avert my jinx wherin every game I watched the Oilers lost, but to no avail. Indeed, apparently they were creamed eight ways to Tuesday. It hurt even experiencing it only through the occasional NHL.com update and sad-yet-brilliant post-mortem on Covered In Oil. Horror! Calamity! Deep depression, icy cloud of doubt! And yet! I admit, I know nothing about hockey and only care but recently. But! Are not the greatest Cinderella stories and heroes' tales born from black adversity? After the tragedy of Roloson's breaking in Game 1 and the team eating their own dinks in Game 2, is not the final prize all the richer? Should we not thank the Fates for delivering to us the makings of real valor, shinging in possibility, a glory forever unwon in the world where the Oilers swept or near-swept the series? We should be grateful for these losses where is forged the true iron of victory. GO OILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fri, Jun 2 -- Land, home, native Ah, back to Canada! I've missed you so, these long months. I've been hearing about all these wild times people are having up your way. I've heard even that there's some excitment and gaiety attending the fortune of the Edmonton  Impending Disaster Dept. Meanwhile, here in America Rolling Stone magazine asks Was the 2004 Election Stolen? in an article that just as easily could have been titled "How the 2004 Election Was Stolen." Key lessons emerge. If you're going to steal an election, go big. Steal it all over the place. Take the hardball campaigning and crank it up to include stuff like jamming your opponents' phone lines, stiffing his strong areas on voting machines and locking down the vote count with a fake FBI terror alert. And if at all possible, it really helps if you can be in charge of the entire election process. Some folks deride the idea of a stolen 2004 election stolen as wild conspircacy nutcasery. Too many people would know about it. Someone would talk. It would get out. But that misses the point. Do water molecules conspire to form a snowflake? Is there a fiendish inner cabal of H20 molecules twirling their moustaches and sending secret messages out to all the rest? No. What there is is a seed, some dust mote or salt crystal around which a few molecules of water can clump in a pattern, and then from then on other molecules just tumble into the pattern. There doesn't need to be some intelligently co-ordinated conspiracy if there's a more general understanding that everyone in a position to do so will abuse their authority and swamp the system with an avalanche of dirty tricks. It's a wonderfully decentralized system. Sure, you've got high-up party operatives moving around the country sharing tips and techniques with each other and the local campaign staff, but it's not one thing, one big potential smoking gun, one secret plan to Rig The Election, it's just lots of stuff all over. And the best part about it, at least for current interest, is that it works best on off-year elections. There's talk, less idle these days, of the possibility that the Deomcrats could reclaim one or both houses of Congress in the upcoming mid-term elections. If the Bush administration continues to fail, which seems likely, the election could actually become competitive. Certainly the media will play up the horse race angle as much as possible, and I bet as Election Day nears it'll be considered a tight race, possibly with a Democratic edge. And then what's gonna happen? Surprising Republican gains! Huh! Who'da thunk it? And with all these crazy electoral irregularities, too! Whadya know? Golly! Those Japanese A reader sent a link to an odd Japanese television show (perhaps called "Outwitted?") that seems to consist of six Japanese men, one large and black, sitting around a table in a library playing a simple tile-turning game in which the drawer of the death tile is subjected to various tortures such Huge Balloon, Hitted Hip, Bad Smell Air and of course the Slapping Machine, which is why the reader sent the link in the first place. He warned me it starts slow and it does, but it becomes strangely more compelling as time goes on, largely because the contestants, forbidden to make any noise, are forced to supress ever more insistent laughter. It's weird-O. Wed, May 31 -- X-Men followup I've written up a quick review --more of a stream-of-consciousness recalled-viewing diary, really-- of X-Men: The Last Stand. It's in the Movie Reviews area. Fri, May 26 -- X-Men! I haven't seen it yet but I go at noon tomorrow. I have it on multiple authorities that it's very disappointing. I'm trying to keep up hope though, perhaps dig a good moment here and there out of two hours of ploo. Cars, though. Cars is gonna be good. Bonnie Hunt will be Cars's secret weapon just as Ellen Degeneres was with Dory in Finding Nemo. Mark my words. Going from talkin' about American computer animation to Japanese cel animation, we have 
Another Review! A couple of weeks ago I linked you to a glowing review of Dog Killer from Michael Arnzen's Goreletter, and this week there's a review in Publishers Weekly. This one's not so positive; in fact they pretty much nail me to the wall and make a strong case for not buying the book. Ouch. In DK's defence, I will say that the final books will look much nicer than the faxy 150 dpi advance copies that went to reviewers. And, what the hell, you gotta be somebody to get panned, right? Fri, May 19 -- Impeach Cheney So I'm in bed trying to fall asleep, going over the events of the day and thinking about what I'll do tomorrow, when it hits me. Oh shit --the site! I knew I forgot something! I can't fathom how I could have forgotten, either, especially since I rather like the strip I have for you this week,  Fri, May 12 -- new book If I was super on my game I'd have been pushing this a bit more vigorously earlier on, so forgive the bigness of it now. No, the book is not quite actual. But if you were to follow the magical trail of electrons and radio waves the above image has to offer with but the twitch of a finger, you could find a place where you could put money down for the hottest, freshest copies when they do exist. It's sort of weird not being the publisher this time around, but the folks at Tachyon say that Borders has ordered several hundred so they may very well appear in bookstores somewhere near you. As far as I understand it Last Gasp is so far the main comic store distributor and Independent Publishers Group is the main bookstore distributor. What can I tell you about it? It's 160 pages with 28 pages of color, annotations, the fabulous Robot Gallery with entries by Edmonton's own Darren Zenko. It's got Uh... and a sign? and Cookie Mines and Ore Sledge and Those Wacky Americans and all kinds of funny cartoons in there! Yahoo! It's a good book. You should buy it. But why take my word for it? I'm the mug whose book it is! Of course I want you to buy it! Well, Michael Arzen of Gorebits, who got an advance copy from Tachyon, feels much the same way. He's posted a review on his Goreletters newsletter/blog/whatever it is. Serious! he likes the book! I didn't pay him or anything! Cartoon? Yes.  Oh, and I just wanted to tack this in here so I could find it later, but I read an article entitled, Walking People Up the Crazy Ladder that caught my interest. Perhaps it might yours as well. Fri, May 5 - Safe, for now Well, my weird computer noises seem to have abated somewhat, so for now I'm just gonna hope that everything doesn't up and explode on me or at least that it'll give me a bit of advance warning before it does. Besides the adavance warning it's already given me, that is. Have I cartoon for y'all? I do. It's a work cartoon, a cartoon about working, specifically a cartoon about working on that damnable  Whence Dog Killer? Should be any day now. I don't wanna give the word until I know the printers have it complete and are churning, but that word is imminent. It's gonna be a bit strange this time around since I won't be selling it direct off the site, but trust me, when it's available I will post to the heavens all the places it can be acquired. Direct from Tachyon, I believe, as well as through Amazon, and we're gonna try to get this one into bookstores and comic stores as well. Last Gasp is the comic store distributor so if you're keen for a copy it woudn't hurt a bit to bug your local store du comique and tell them to order it from Last Gasp. Last Gasp! Fri, April 28 - Computeryness So my computer's starting making this unsettling sound. It's not the high-pitched chirping of a hard drive in distress, but rather a low, almost imperceptible waa-wa-wa-waa-waaaa, like a quiet little far-off motorcycle revving, that's making me think it's a fan or something. The problem is, I sometimes find myself hearing the same sound even when the computer's turned off. Am I losing it? It makes me nervous about having my computer on for too long. Indeed, I already shut it off once this evening before remembering, "Shit, I gotta do an update!" So here I am, updating, and I can hear that underlying little moaning noise even over the sound from TV in the other room, a TV I might add which is currently emitting a movie about a mammoth smashing up a small town. Given these circumstances of general computer queasiness it's curiously co-incidental (at least to me) that this week's cartoon goes by the fancy monicker of  Weird. In the time it took me to put that link up there my computer has stopped making the noise. Or at least I've stopped hearing it. Maybe I *am* losing my mind. Fri, April 21 -- Exhausted! Folks, I don't know why but I'm almost completely empty of energy this evening. It's prevailed all day; even coffee did little to perk things up. So I hope y'all forgive me if I just swack this cartoon up here and fall deeply, dreamlessly asleep.  Thanks! Have a good weekend, you crazy kids! Fri, April 14 -- Something about Ants This is indeed something about ants. It's a cartoon about ants. It's called  APE? Man, I love San Francisco. Cafeteria-style beef brisket and cute girls wandering the halls of a comic convention; it's like a dream. APE was pretty good. I gabbed and wore the hat and pointed at the galley of  a fair bit. I realized a bit late in the game that it's better for sales to sell the thing you actually have to sell rather than the thing you don't. Ate some completely delicious pork and chicken with cartoonists and friendly strangers alike at a Burmese restaurant. Got given or bought a big pile o stuff I haven't even started to go through yet. Not bad. Towards An Intelligent Intelligent Design It's a shame that Intelligent Design is a pile of nitpicky gotchas and misreadings of evolutionary theories driven entirely by politics and unconcerned with the truth. If the guys working on it were scientists, if it were actually science, it could be quite interesting. I mean, the basic premise of Intelligent Design is that evolutionary theory is not enough to explain the existence of present-day life on Earth and that intelligent agency must play some role. Now, if they were scientists, they'd be digging into the guts of this, the hows of it. How does the Designer implement the design? What would be the telltale signs of a Design intervention? Are all lifeforms created at once in their present forms, or is there a process, with materials or design principles from one lifeform used to make the next? If the Intelligent Designers actually came up with protocols to test for this stuff, it could be pretty cool. Cuz hey, it could be true. The Designer doesn't have to be Bible sky-man God like the Intelligent Designers believe. It could be anybody who created us or found us and tampered with us. I'm not saying it's likely or that we have any reason to doubt the broad sweep of evolution, but if somebody had been poking around in our biological history, it's the Intelligent Designers who could create the tools to sniff 'em out. If they didn't suck. Fri, April 7 -- Ook ook, Eek eek Yes, it's that time of year again (or rather it's actually a different time of year but we won't get into that) whenin the Alternative Press Expo occurs!  Check out the cool poster ol' cartooning buddy Keith Knight did for 'em this year! I'll be down like always, pushing books old and new. Okay, so I won't actually have Dog Killer quite ready to sell. But I will have some galley proofs and Pure Action minicomics along with posters and stickers that I actually remembered to pack. I will be wearing the hat. If you're in the city this weekend, come on by and assail me with a howdy! Whoops! So busy getting ready for the con I almost forgot to upload the new strip! 
Fri, Mar 31 -- Don't be Fooled! Fri, Mar 24 -- Oh you lucky people! You get to share in my excitement and passion for the possibly groundbreaking research into Mach's Principle by reading 
Do You Want to Know More? You should. It's totally awesome and if he's right it could lead to all kindsa crazy space-age stuff as well as fundamentally alter our understanding of reality. I highly recommend checking out WoodwardEffect.org where links and articles and videos abound. Fri, March 17, 2006 - Get Into It! Fri, Mar 10 - Pzow!zow!ZOW! I've drunk a lot tonight, or a lottish, and yet I don't feel too super drunk. Is my mind playing tricks with me? Am I being gamed by my own brain? Hard to say. In any case, I have another cartoon for you. Whenever I do thing-specific strips I try to include enough fill-in info so that people who've never heard of the specific thing can kind of piece it together. Have I succeeded in this instance? Certainly, familiarity with and repeated play of a particular classic 80s arcade game would not harm anyone's comprehension of  Tues, Mar 7 - Bush the character I've often thought that it's best to think of George Bush as a grand tragicomic character in a novel, carved by history and experience into the least responsible man on the planet and then handed the writs of power at a crucial time. What storytelling! In this same vein we find James Carroll at Boston.com making similar points in his Bush, Lies and Videotape article. Fri, Mar 3 -- Hilarity! You heard me--cartoons are funny! I mean, sure, maybe not all the time, maybe not this or any particular strip, but over the long run, statistically speaking, it can be said with confidence that cartoons are  Else? I have actually been doing a lot of Bob stuff lately, it's just that it's largely been material for Dog Killer. I don't want to give away too much of some of the special book-only material that'll be available in May, but here's a wee taste of one of the features, "Pure Action."  Almost Forgot! A reader wrote in to say that the New Orleans Puclic Library is accepting book donations, and he went on to say I should mention it here. I now do. Tues, Feb 28 - Damn, this site sucks! Fri, Feb 24 - Gurp Gorp Well, nobody blew me up, though frankly I didn't think they were going to. No giant post here, no huge point to make, I just wanna bask in the  Fri, Feb 17 - Treading Lightly So here's a cartoon that didn't quite make it into Edmonton's Vue Weekly but I figure some of you out there might be amused, a little ditty all about  True Story, Swear to God... So I was reading this comic I'd picked up on a whim, Web of Romance, from Marvel's "I Heart Marvel" line, and it was pretty good. Really good, actually, a great little Valentine's Day story. And I was thinking "What young buck did Marvel get to write this?" so I flipped to the back page and bam, Tom Beland. Tom Beland? Who's Tom Beland? Well, he's a cartoonist I often see at the cons alongside Keith Knight, and he draws a comic called True Story, Swear to God. And bizarrely, at least from my standpoint, the very issue of TSSTG hitting the stands this week, #16, features an appearance by a flower-headress-wearing cartoonist most familiar:  It's really a very mild portrayal, especially considering I once unflatteringly drew Tom as a Kingpin-like lumpen mass of human flesh. I urge folks to go pick up some of Tom's stuff. It's so sweet-hearted you actually won't wanna barf. Fri, Feb 10 - Time to Freak Out Over Taxes! Fri, Feb 3 -- February already! Christ! Fri, Jan 27 -- Tories Win Fri, Jan 20 -- Gork! I kinda forgot I had an update to do this evening. I've been watching Neon Genesis Evangelion, you see. Gimme a couple of weeks to process it and I'll be able to barf it all out to you in cartoon form. But for now we must content ourselves with this other slice of Japanese culture and the heartstirring effects of  Aaaaaaaand... that's it. Anything else? Nothing's leaping up and demanding head time. Well, nothing besides the debut of Underworld: Evolution, only mentioned here because a friend reminded me of its existence, the sequel to the rather lame Underworld. And I just picked up Karaoke Revolution Party, the fourth installment of Konami's ferociously successful Karaoke Revolution series of games in which a microphone is the joystick and you can actually watch the pitch of your voice change on the screen. Insane. I don't myself own a Playstation 2 but I've placed the seeds at PopCap for a drunken post-Friday-meeting karaoke party so we'll see how that turns out. Fri, Jan 13 -- Almost got the date wrong But I didn't. It was close, though... I felt certain it was only the 12th. Is time accelerating? Don't dismiss the idea too quickly. Anyway, I thought this was the appropriate time and place to share some candid thoughts about  Beyond that, not too much. I saw Munich and Hostel. I don't have reviews though I will say they make interesting counterpoints to each other on the topic of revenge. Fri, Jan 6 -- Whap! Another cartoon, a mere two days later. Some pondering on  And for no particular reason, a somewhat demented review of Herbie: Fully Loaded is available on the reviews page. Wed, Jan 4 -- OH SIX! Yep, it appears we made it and life resumes. Kickass! Here's last week's cartoon, suckas. 
Thurs, Dec 22 -- Last Post of '05 I'm actually putting most of this together Tuesday night, but whatever. I'll be in Edmonton next week, separated from my updating machinery, so no update until after Jan 2. I know some people do their updating remotely but I don't wanna hear about that blasphemous sorcery. So, here's the cartoon:  Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Solstice (shit! last night! we're under the hump of dark! ever lighter from now till June! party!) and holiday greetings of every shade to y'all, folks! Catch you next year! Fri, Dec 16 -- 16th? Is that right? The 16th? I don't know why I'm always so amazed that time continues to flow and years come to an end, yet every time it sneaks up on me. Soon we won't have 2005 to kick around any more. It'll be all latter-half-of-the-first-decade-of-the-21st-century. How lame is that? Anyway, I'm sure you're all very interested in my attempts to get a cell phone so let's just roll right on into  Else? Saw Kong. Haven't completely digested it yet. Liked it but didn't super-adore it. While I enjoyed a lot of scenes, my socks remained unblown off throughout the proceedings. Don't get me wrong, there's a ton of stuff in there, rampaging dinosaurs and icky bugs and vertiginous swoops, things to hit the buttons of people with some specific fears. But I must admit I wasn't going "Yeah! YEAH!" coming out of the movie theatre. I now find myself with Batman Begins as my favorite movie of the year, a position I could have hardly imagined at the beginning of the year. Life! Always throwing curveballs at you! Tues, Dec 13 -- Unexpected Update Perhaps not totally unexpected, in that I did half-promise in the previous update to have a Narnia review up, but I've been breaking a lot of half-promises lately. Not that one though: the The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe review is up on the reviews page. Fri, Dec 9 -- No Smoking Yes, it's true. The Great Seattle Smoking Ban of '05 came down yesterday, banishing all smokers to a 25-feet-from-the-door safe distance from public places. The last shining tower of smoking tolerance is crumbled to dust. You're certainly not obliged to care but, well, there it is. I'm kinda pumped for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. How pumped? THIS PUMPED:  Who knows? If it goes well I might even write a review. Fri, Dec 2 -- Snow! Here, in frickin' Seattle! I mean, sure, none of it stayed, but still. What the hell? I eat out a lot so I suppose it was inevitable I would eventually do a strip called  Oof. So dumb. Managed to have the above image link to an arcane spot on my computer all day. Should be fixed now. Anything else? Well, the new PopCap Packet Newsletter just went out so I suppose I could throw up the most recent PopStrip.  Man, it's been a while since I've done one of these. Bad Notley! Bad! Fri, Nov 25 -- Late Again... Well, you know how it is, you get drunk on red wine and you're shooting lime juice in your eye and snorting shots of vodka and the ultimate result is that it takes you a long time the next day to wake up and update your web site. You know how it is. Anyway,  Fri, Nov 18 -- SLEEPY! Man, I gotta get out of this habit of forgetting all about the update utnil Friday morning. It's not serving anybody's interests, particularly those of a  Else? Ah, the book's so close to being done I can taste it like salt. And suddenly there are a bunch of movies I wanna see, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Walk the Line, Jarhead, and then a little down the line The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and King Kong. Things are lookin' up! Satisfaction is on its way! Fri, Nov 11 -- Inkin' Inkin' I'm inkin'. After a month and a half of pencilling, I'm inkin', seven pages a day for two days now. It doesn't leave me a lot of time to think about anything else. But at least this time I remembered to do the update. I'll be more babbly once this book's done, but it ain't done yet. Anyway, the cartoon: 
Fri, Nov 4 -- I can't count Jeez, that's depressing. The biggest burst of e-mails I've gotten in the last couple of weeks has been from folks tipping me off that I had the date in the update below wrong. Thanks to those who wrote in. Fri, Nov 3 -- Hip, hup... Fri, Oct 28 -- Eek! Got drunk, slept in, late for work, gotta update site!  Fri, Oct 21 -- Yoof! I totally forgot about the update until this morning!  Fri, Oct 14 -- Slim Not me, but the update. I've been drawing, drawing like a beetle, pumping out extra pages for el booko Dog Killer, so as a result this week's update is a little slim. Pretty much just the cartoon.  Indictments comin' closer... Fri, Oct 7 - So Sleepy! I've been drawing comic pages all week for Dog Killer and I got plenty more to go. Not that that's why I'm sleepy. I simply stayed up too late last night. Still, though... um... what was I talking about? Oh, right.  Serenity Very satisfying. I never quite had my ass blown off but I enjoyed it throughout. Got some thrills, got some chills, learned some secrets about the bad men and it just felt good to hang out with these characters again and watch them do their thing. Little moments here and there added up to me with a smile on my face the whole time. True, I'm not sure exactly what to make of [ ]'s death and I kinda gotta wonder why if they could place a person-to-person video call to Mr. Universe they couldn't transmit the secret message to him directly rather than having to personally deliver it, but these are trifles, not enough to take the burnish off the warm glow the movie gave me. Better still I now know the punchline to the old joke that goes, "So a neopsychic girl turned brain-damaged killing machine walks into a bar..." I also saw A History of Violence and Corpse Bride over tha last couple of weeks. Corpse Bride: Beautiful to look at, and I mean gorgeous, but somehow slightly verveless. After superdigging Danny Elfman's music for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I was surprised at how flat his work here left me. As for A History of Violence, very good, and rather different from the movie I expected, much more of a thriller structure. I liked it but it's kinda odd; for a movie that purports to examine the effects of violence on people and relationships, violence sure turns out to be the right choice and perfect solution pretty much every time it's employed. For all its gore A History of Violence is curiously tidy in that regard. Crazy Fan Art And here's a drawing/painting/Photoshop a fan by the name of Darren Calvert drew. Hokey smoke! It sure kicks the hell out of anything I could do! The web site is DarrenCalvert.com.  Fingers crossed... Could it be...? Might some serious indictment start falling like holy rain on the Bush administration? Oh please please pleasepleaseplease... Oh! And hearty praise goes to the Republican-controlled Senate for voting 90-9 against torture. Good on 'em! The previous update is here. |
