My friend Dave Hanson has a new comic novel out, Last Leg. Both Dave and the novel are quite funny; check out the sample chapter and see for yourself. In addition to introducing the concept of a Snugli for cats (always remembered that) the man can gin himself up to heights of literary skeeve that few mortals reach, eg, "veins full of bum vomit." He hears the music all right! Dave was the only saving grace of the Nineties National Lampoon, and has had more comedy lives than a (enSnugli'ed) cat. Maybe I'll get him drunk sometime and extract some Tales of Letterman for this blog.



I've put a link to the book's Amazon page below--sorry it's a bit clunky, but I can't be bothered to fancy it up at the moment. Mazel tov, Dave! Nice work indeed!

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...that I have a soft spot for Hugh Hefner. First of all, he ran his college humor magazine (at the University of Illinois, called I believe The Shaft--but maybe that's just too perfect). Second, in the 50s and 60s, he was a real champion of comedy and cartooning--and he remains a proponent of jazz. All good things. Third, at least until competition forced it to get unbearably sleazy, Playboy did publish a lot of damn fine stuff; between them, Esquire, and The New Yorker, magazines were genuinely worth reading. And my mom likes him, too. So I'd love to bid on some of the stuff he's auctioning. I just wish he still lived in the Mansion. Chicago hasn't been the same since. Anybody else read that early 60s profile of him? Wolfe or Talese wrote it--very good.



Also enjoyed this article about writer's workshops. Sometimes I think wanting to write should be listed in the DSM-V.

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The excellent pop culture site Retro Crush has posted its annual list of the 100 scariest moments in movies. If you like scary movies as much as I say I do (the affection tends to evaporate once the movie actually starts--witness the fact that I let Kate watch Blair Witch and The Ring for me), you'll enjoy all the glimpses of your favorites.



I never knew that the last shot of Psycho has a skull subliminally placed under Norman's grinning face. Glad to see Exorcist III get its props--but I was sorry to note that the "decomposing woman in bathtub" scene from The Shining didn't make it. Any others you'd suggest?

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Here's an interesting article on The New York Sun, a 18-month-old conservative newspaper funded by Conrad Black. It has a miniscule circulation, but is apparently outlasting its naysayers.



Also: as an alumnus of Yale's weekly newspaper, The Yale Herald, I noted with pleasure that a staffer has won a prize for investigative journalism offered by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

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A French fan, Karen, sent me some questions regarding Barry Trotter the First and Second. It's here. (If you don't want to practice your French, look for the English link on the page.)

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Try this nugget of weirdness from friend Mal. Really weird, and I really liked it.

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Friend Lee Tyler writes...

"I spent about 5 days in Romania at the start of the summer. I actually had dinner in the house where Vlad Dracul was born, which is in a really neat medieval town in remote Transylvania. Kind of cool. Equally interesting is that the government is seriously considering building a Dracula theme park and leveling some very beautiful, untouched landscape to do so. It's a horrible, horrible idea."



To which I say: Blah! Blah! I vant to suck your vallet!

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Some sites absolutely insist on being blogged. This is one of them.

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This guy does. My editor Simon calls it "the essence of Science Fiction." It's the essence of something, but what you'll have to judge for yourself.

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From an essay, "Sex, Drugs, and Music Hall," by Matthew Sweet:



"For the first time, pornography was produced in a volume capable of satisfying a mass readership. Oddly, the industry was founded by a gang of political radicals who used sales of erotica to subsidise their campaigning and pamphleteering: when, in the 1840s, the widely-anticipated British revolution failed to materialise, these booksellers and printers found that their former sideline had become too profitable to relinquish. Lubricious stories such as Lady Pokingham, or, They All Do it (1881), and hardcore daguerreotypes, photographs and magic lantern slides, demonstrate the omnivorous nature of Victorian sexuality. Don't imagine that this material comprised tame pictures of gartered ladies standing in front of cheese plants; any permutation or peccadillo you can conceive is represented in the work that has survived from the period. And it was produced in huge quantities: in 1874, the Pimlico studio of Henry Hayler, one of the most prominent producers of such material was loaded up with 130,248 obscene photographs and five thousand magic lantern slides - which gives some idea of the extent of its appeal."

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Here's an interesting take on the recent flap regarding the comic strip The Boondocks. Apparently it suggested that Condi Rice is miserably celibate, or perhaps gay.

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Via Fark, I discovered current kids discussing Pong. Very funny.



By the way, Kate had the best line regarding the Cubs' loss in the playoffs: "Wrigleyville's full of decorations, and now they have to be taken down because Christmas didn't come..." Well, there's always next year.

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Everybody's sending me links this morning! First, there's an article by Ed Park on a new Beatles book. It strikes me as a bit wanky (the book, not Ed's review) but I am a firm believer in the more Beatle stuff, the better. I was also interested to find out that Ed, like myself, first started digging the Beatles with appropriate hardness soon after John Lennon's death.



Speaking of John Lennon, apparently Yoko Ono has found more stuff to release. This time it's a DVD. Kick me out of the Beatle club if you must, but I always find solo Lennon kind of a drag; the fact was, both he and Paul were coasting, indulging themselves. The Beatles were an extremely complex web of circumstances that broke just right--sort of a feedback arrangement where the musicians and their fans and their time were all collaborating to create something excellent. I don't think they should've stayed together, a la the Stones (shudder!), I think we got their best, but all that having been said, I think Yoko doth protest a little too much about the genius of her late husband post-1970. As of course she would, it's completely understandable and there's absolutely no harm in it.



As to the November release of the de-Spectorized "Let It Be" (sure Paul, wait 'til the guy's fighting a murder rap), wouldn't you know it, but I finally just got my hands on the Glyn Johns' no-frills early mix of the album. For the first time, I actually LIKE it. And the mono mix of Sgt. Pepper has been in my CD player for a week now.



And speaking of all things Beatley, here's a new piece by Beatlefan Mollie Wilson.

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Fake firewood out of coffee-grounds? Strange but true.

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Here's another great piece by Mollie Wilson. This time it's a list of rejected hymn names. Damn you, Mollie--wish I'd thought of that.

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Here's a Bay Area magazine's amusing list of the dorkiest hobbies. All I can say is, "What? No Civil War reenactors?"

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The New York Post's Page Six gossip column reports that Woody Allen is shopping a book proposal, in which he plans to dish the dirt on his romantic life. The story is here.



Please, God, make it funny. Please protect Woody from his love of SJ Perelman, and please remove any overtly sexual details, because I don't want to think of a withered, madly rutting Allen the next time I watch Sleeper. Amen.

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Well, sort of. I just got a really nice email from a Mexican Trotterista (Trotteristo?). Omar from Monterrey, MX, writes:



"I had to travel 3 hours to Laredo TX to buy your books… I tricked one of my friends telling him that we were going to a “Busty Blonde-only whorehouse…” so he did the drive… He beat the crap out of me when he knew that we were going to a bookstore, but I got to say it was worth it… LOL."



Are people getting the crap beaten out of them to buy, say, The Nanny Diaries? NO, my friends, I DON'T THINK SO. Omar, I salute you!

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The New York Times has an article on London's newest superhero, who saws "the boots" off of immobilized cars. Read up, then go to his home page.

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Check out piece by Lee Tyler, late of the beloved Yale Record.

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This was just sent to me by a fan named Chris. I found it strangely mesmerizing...

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Last night, while working on a new book (a parody of US History, which is going great), I got the following email from a Trotter fan. I thought it was especially lively, so I'm sharing it (with the fan's permission, of course).



"When the first Barry Trotter book came out," she writes, "you couldn't even get it in bookstores. I found it by pure chance; it was hiding behind a copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and I thought that by some miracle, the fifth HP book had come out several decades early. Now, however, you can find it almost anywhere that sells books. '"Barry Trotter"? Yeah, we have it, there's been a demand for it lately.'



"Even so, I didn't know you had written a sequel until two days ago. Some friends and I were checking out some book with deformed dogs drawn into all the pages and laughing, and I spotted the second book. "It's BARRY TROTTER!!!111111" (Yes, I probably said it loud enough to warrant some ones instead of exclamation marks.)"



"Yes, we know... It's been out for a while now."



"No, no, not THAT one. Look. This one's smaller. And hardback. And it's an UNNECCESSARY SEQUEL." I stared at them significantly.



One of my friends, Austin, had no idea what I was talking about and gave me a blank look, and I was tempted to bash his head into a bookshelf.



My other friend, Ines, screamed, "A Sequel, a sequel!" and everyone in the B. Dalton glared at us. So, naturally, we had to buy it. Except none of us, being poor, jobless teenagers, had any money.



I should mention about now that before noticing BT2, I had bought a manga with my last remaining lunch money and had only about ten punds in dimes left over. Ines had a dollar in change, and Austin had like, forty dollars but was unwilling to share with us. ("I just bought you lunch, you crackwhores, now leave me alone.")



So we took out all the change and started counting it all out on the floor. Six dollars from me, one from Ines, three dollars we stole out of Austin's back pocket when he wasn't paying attention, and some leftover pennies.



Went up to the front counter. We were short fifty cents, and after spending fifteen minutes counting and recounting our money, the guy was impatient, and volenteered to pay for the remaining amount.



Then I went home and read it. You're great. You're like, a classic. Somewhere between Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, and 'Grant Naylor'.... only better."



Well, wow. That's a tremendous compliment; not only the august company, but what author wouldn't want to be so prized as to encourage stealing from one's friends? Usually only drugs demonstrate such a hold on people, but so strong is the power of reading...



Barry Trotter and the Unnecessary Sequel is oozing merrily all over a writhing UK, but it remains a well-kept secret over here (maybe if you updated the website, Mike--shut up! I'm waiting on the illustrator!). If you liked the first one, folks, ask for the second at your bookstore. Bookstores do listen to customers, even ones who have to count pennies. Having been a penny-counter for most of my life, I have a special place in my heart for those Trotteristas...

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It's time for the annual evisceration of SNL. If there was ever a metaphor for everything awful about Baby Boomers, SNL is it. (Yes, I know it's not put out by baby boomers anymore; that's my point.) At least the author of this article understands that criticizing SNL does no good.

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Another day, another interesting link from Ed. This one's a 1999 appreciation of the New Yorker humorist Veronica Geng. I, like Roy Blount in the article, have never quite gotten Geng's work--as humor. As writing, it's very interesting, but it doesn't quite make me laugh. If it doesn't make people laugh, is it humor? Sounds like a Zen koan.



And wife Kate sent this triumph of the human spirit. "The guy all the way at the bottom of the page doesn't have a chance in hell," Kate writes. "Poor guy."

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...should know about the archive on the BBC's website. The link takes you to a page on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

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