Brian's quite remarkable blog of wonder.

i just saw the best movie ever. Network (1976). they really don't make movies as biting and satirical and amazing and realistic as this anymore. holy. wow. wow.

i was wondering when this was finally going to happen. they are making a Garfield movie with a weird freaky CG Garfield. you can view the trailer at that site. i almost shat my pants when i went to IMDb and saw that the screenplay is by one Joel Coen, but upon further research i found out it's NOT the Joel Coen who makes GOOD movies, but it's some other guy with the same name.

i love it, it's snowed four times or something, and it's not even technically winter yet.

so while it was snowing last night, somebody's bright idea was for me and jake and danny to drive to Tiffin to bring taco pizza to Jay's house in the middle of the country. scary. but nothing bad happened.

literally almost everyone i know is sick, and it's an incredible miracle i haven't caught it yet. although i just know that i'm going to catch it at just the perfect time so that i'm sick and miserable on the train to New Mexico.

so yeah, i'm going to Albuquerque for a week with family to go visit some more family for Christmas. and i'm going to be gone until after New Year's.

i'm revisiting the Babe the Blue Ox album i bought last February. good and stuff.

last week was an intense one. a lot of things happened. a lot of them were bad. a few of them were good. actually, i can only think of one bad thing that happened, but because of the nature of it, i've been seeing the world through the shades of negativity.

well, what happened was this: on Saturday afternoon I dropped my computer keyboard on my foot. yes, one of those stupid plastic computer keyboards fell a foot and a half onto my left big toe, and it hurt about fifteen times more than you would expect it to. i don't know why. but since then i've been in acute to mild agony. i've been limping pathetically around town. i've been taking Ibuprofen like candy, but the pain is still there.

why would a toe hurt this much??

it's darkening my spirits considerably. it' s making me NOT want to do anything. i'm just glad i work at a job in which all my left foot has to do is operate turn signals.

comics buffs around the world will no doubt be overjoyed that the instant classic pop culture phenomenon Quid Pro Quo is back, and better than ever. well, it really IS better than ever, i think! the art is sure a shit of a lot better. i doubt anyone has actually seen it yet though, owing to my belief that self-publicizing is shady and generally arrogant, and also something that i'm just too lazy to do. which of course leaves the problem of how to get people to see it.

hey, and my brother is turning 22 today! that boggles the brain.

it's time for me to get off my lazy ass and start cartooning again. perhaps inspired by Berke Breathed's recent return to comics, i am going to start doing QPQ strips again on a relaxed weekly schedule. my plan is to do QPQ on the weekends and spend weekdays working on AABH. i don't know how long that will last, but i feel that i need to discipline myself on these projects SOMEHOW.

last night they showed the original pilot episode of Seinfeld. that was so WEIRD. there was no Elaine. Jason Alexander was skinny and had hair. Michael Richards looked and acted exactly like he did in UHF. half the episode was Jerry's stand-up. it was like some dream.

i don't usually get mad at bus passengers, but i did today. there's a snowstorm going on, and so it was difficult enough to drive, but at one stop this guy comes up to the front of the bus and asks me, "is this the quad?" after pondering how you could be so idiotic as to point to the former capitol of the state of Iowa and ask if it was a dormitory, i explained that it wasn't and that the route i was driving, Pentacrest, doesn't go to any of the dorms. "you'll want a Red Route or a Hawkeye Interdorm," i explained.

next question: "should i get off this bus, then?" yes, you should get off the bus. ok, then after he gets off, another passenger comes up and asks if i go to Reinow, a dorm, and i say the same thing: "take a Red Route or a Hawkeye Interdorm." then ANOTHER passenger comes up and asks the same thing, and i tell them the same thing, and then about seven other people all get off the bus.

i mean, several people got on my bus without a clue as to what it was or where it was going. they must have been totally indifferent to their possible destination, or too shortsighted to think about it. i felt like i wasn't doing useful work at all. i felt like i might as well have been making sandwiches at Panera. those people were challenging how much i cared about my work. i don't often think this, but i'm beginning to get concerned that most people in the world don't have a fucking clue what's going on, and survive by following people whom they think know better.

that was just supposed to be a stupid little story and it turned all long-winded. oh well.

i just finished reading "An Ocean In Iowa" by Peter Hedges. it was brilliant. it was one of those novels where you almost wonder if the author downloaded your knowledge and custom-wrote the book for you.

i like depressing stories about childhood.

ok, now i'm starting Hedges' other novel, What's Eating Gilbert Grape (i saw the movie a while ago and adored it).

ok. no more pretense. i don't like living here at all. i like my roommates, but i just don't like how everyone for miles around owns a huge subwoofer and even when the music is turned almost all the way down, the bass notes cut through and resonate and interfere with my thoughts. i really hate living with people. i don't give it a lot of thought, because there's nothing i can do about it, other than never being home which is how i've solved the problem so far. but blah. it gets annoying at 2 in the morning when i am trying to read or something.

it's snowing!!

it's snowing, and it's early December! just like the good old days... the last two winters in Iowa City it didn't snow at all until late January.

back in the day we used to get at least two significant snowfalls before Christmas. or maybe i'm just romanticizing my childhood.

my band, Dirty Sixty, rehearsed again yesterday. we made a tape. wow, and we actually sounded almost like a real rock band. we were all incredibly impressed. we played the beatles' Free As A Bird, and then we played my song Admiral Flagpole, and on the tape that turned into a long jam, which inexplicably turned into a hardcore version of Lance Armstrong, another Sixty original. and who knows what THAT would have turned into, had i not broken my high E string... what a shame. so i moved over to the piano and jake moved over to the drums, and we wrote a sort of rudimentary song, which has the working title F'jam Band.

what impressed me so much about last night was that we only rehearsed one cover... and the rest of the songs were originals.