If you haven’t seen it yet, head over to EW.com and take a look at this week’s cover of Entertainment Weekly. It is, quite possibly, the best cover in the history of magazine covers.

At least until someone hacks Esquire’s liquid ink cover to make it say “Boobies”.

There’s a scene in the the George C. Scott flick “Hard Core” where he discovers what his daughter’s really been up to in California and, in a moment of pure insanity, he makes the decision to follow her and bring her back home. In context, it’s a powerful and moving scene.

Out of context it was just begging for a Corky Romano mashup.
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It’s that time of year again - time to start thinking about what presents to buy people and what presents to ask for. The first part is easy for me, finding cool presents people actually like is my super power. The second part is even easier because I never get what I really want.

Now, I don’t want to sound ungrateful or imply that I’m dissatisfied with what I get. That’s not the case at all. In fact, I’ve always felt a little guilty when people I’m not currently sleeping with buy me things. It’s just that, when asked what I really want by people who ask the question seriously, I have an answer already prepared. But what I’ve always told people I want nobody gets me because they think I’m not being serious. Or, in Valette’s case, think it’s too strange. Because what I really want, odd as it may be, is an assortment of Swiss Colony sausages, cheeses, and mustards. Maybe some petitsfours. Yes, that’s right, those “assorted gift baskets” that you sometimes see being sold from kiosks at the mall. And, yes, I’m serious. I’m a fan of sausage and cheese on crackers.

But now you see why I don’t get them.

My sister once told me that those gift baskets are a “fallback gift” that people buy when they want to be considerate but don’t really know someone well enough to pick out a real gift. I can’t help it. Every year when the Swiss Colony catalog showed up (yes, my mom bought them for people she wanted to be considerate of but didn’t know well enough to get a “real” gift), I would look through it and ask for one or two things. I never got them.

This year, however, I’m changing my tune. I’ll be happy without sossiges and pettyfours because, for the second year in a row, the publishing gods have smiled down upon me with brightly colored collectors-edition smiles. Last year, Los Bros Hernandez and my lovely girlfriend brought me the superrific classic Love & Rockets compendiums featuring all the Maggie & Hopey stories, which I loved, and the Palomar stories, which I glossed over back then but loved reading now. Anyone who’s read Ford or floated around any of the Ford-related forums knows I consider Los Bros a major style influence.

That was last year, tho’, and between Love & Rockets and Del Rey’s compendium of Robert E. Howard’s original Conan Stories, I thought the decade could bring me no more surprises. I was wrong.

Hooray! Pogo! Collected and for reals! And not going for $800 on eBay! Pogo! Pogo! Pogo! Pogo!

I have an uncle that I never really got along with. In fact, he was always kind of a jerk to me. And, I suppose, in my 9 year-old way, I was a jerk right back. But there’s one thing I can thank him for, and that’s having Walt Kelly’s Pogo in the bathroom reading rack instead of boring old magazines. There’s a reason Alan Moore, Bill Watterson, Berke Breathed, Robert Crumb, and countless writers and artists count Kelly as an influence - Pogo is pure genius. And every re-reading I’ve discovered jokes and references I didn’t understand before. I can’t wait to find even more.

Now, to start that letter writing campaign to Santa.

“You know the difference between an Alaskan hockey mom and my penis?

Lipstick. Let’s go do something about that.”

There will come a day when I look back on the things I’ve done with my life and wonder if I lived it properly. When I get to this day, I will remember that, yes, I have.

So here’s the story, and JR is my witness that it’s true.

There’s this site, ShaveThePussy.com. It’s an ad for feminine hygiene products that features a flash game that simulates … um … “trimming the bush”. Not only does it let you shave a virtual vag, but it rates you on your performance, lets you name your creation and, if you get 10/10 points, you win something.

I got 10/10 points. But, more importantly, my entry was on their front page, if only for a little while. And I’ve got a screen capture to prove it. And trust me, it’s really worth looking at in full size on Flickr.

Other than emails around the family, I’ve not said a whole lot about our governor turned VP nominee. But, as you may have heard, her Yahoo email got hacked and some of her emails, the less damning ones for some odd reason, made their way onto 4chan. The hack has brought to light not only Palin’s duplicity in keeping secret the daily operations of our state, but also the lengths the McCain/Palin campaign will go to to blame others for their crimes. It was this quote that, I think, makes that most apparent:

Yes, that’s called public clamor. This is the problem with the Republicans. They ignore criticism from anyone who’s not one of their own but, of course, never get criticized by their own. It’s a brilliant Catch-22 in their favor. “We don’t hear anyone complaining about this except the Democrats.”

When you are a public official you work for everyone, not just the people who voted you into office, and you are responsible to them all.

How anyone can continue to back the Republican practice of deception and manipulation is beyond me.

Dear retail slaves of America,

I would like to discuss with you something that’s becoming increasingly common in your sector. Something that bothers me to my very core and that I think you should be aware of. That something is:

“I can help who’s next.”

NO, no you can’t.

Seriously, I understand that I go all English faggy on a good number of things, but those things are all bad grammar or misuse of words or, shudder, quotation marks. This sentence, however, this “I can help who’s next” is not bad grammar, is not a misuse of a word, and is not even incorrect. As a sentence, it is 100% grammatically correct. But it’s not true. The reason it’s not true is because it means something completely different than what you think it means.

Who’s next is a fact that is completely beyond your control. You can’t help who’s next, the same way you can’t predict who’s next or choose who’s next. You can see who’s next if you look. You can ask who’s next if you can’t see. You can help the next person. You can even help whoever is next. You cannot help who’s next any more than I can help despising you for crimes against the language.

Please, for the love of Pete, unless you want to be a retail wage slave all of your life show some pride in your education. If for no other reason than I can stop embarrassing my girlfriend by correcting you in public.

Back when Valette and I were just passing internet acquaintences, back when she spent more time asking JR for help on PHP then me, I would read her posts about Melissa’s death and wonder how I would react in a similar circumstance.

Two years ago, my sister died of complications from lupis. She was admitted to the hospital with liver failure and within days she was dead. I’ve had the two years since to come up with the answer.

See, I’m not very good with emotions I don’t like. I tend to put things aside until I can process them rationally. There’s no sense in going over pains you can’t do anything about, right? When my grandmother died, I did just that - put it aside. As a result, I all but stopped talking to my grandfather to avoid being reminded of it.

When my sister died, my brother showed up at my office to give me the news. This man who I’d always idolized, the man I’d looked up to most in my life, was completely devastated by Elaine’s death. That was more shocking to me than the news of her death, which I’d been expecting.

I held things together up until the funeral, when it finally sunk in that I would never see my sister again. There were, of course, lots of tears from the family over the issue, and lots of “we need to keep in better touch”s were passed around afterwards. That never really materialized, and I’ve tried to use my anger and hurt over that as a way to cover how much I miss my sister, but in the two years since she died it’s become clear that it’s not working.

The truth is, I miss my sister. I don’t know if I’ll ever find a way to make sense of what that means to me. It’s taken me this long just to figure that much out.

I’ve closed commenting on this post to everyone but friends and family. Thanks for your understanding.

Sadly.

So here’s the dealio: I’ve been elbows deep in a personal project that has taken me the better part of two decades to get up the gumption to finish off. And no, I’m not talking about the next Ford chapter.

This project will be completed (in Beta form) within the next week, week and a half. And what I need now are some nerds.

Now, let me be more specific - I need nerds who play or have played table-top RPG’s for peer review of this completed work. Preferably, I would like nerds with access to a gaming group that would be willing to give a new system a trial run, but I’ll settle for nerds who are familiar enough with gaming that they can give an honest review of a system’s mechanics.

If you’re interested in going over an RPG system and evaluating both the mechanics and the content of the book, give me a holler by email at anything at my domain.