Home

1. According to my latest stats, I’ve gotten a lot of hits lately for folks searching for “Glen Miller.” In fact, I’ve gotten more hits for Glen than I have for Glenn. His name is actually spelled with two ‘n’s y’all.

And speaking of Mr. Miller, I gotta git back to working on my Serenade in Blue website. The site is going to be transferred over to a new server soon and once that’s complete I’m going to start a blog for it. I’ve yammered on about Glenn a few times in this blog and I’ve got more to yap about, but figured, why not start a blog on that website? Brilliant! Plus, it might help to keep content a little more fresher. I haven’t updated the site for a few months.

2. Well, you can eat all the cancer-laden potato chips you want as it’s not going to matter anymore. The world will end in seven years, according to this Op-Ed piece from the Washington Post. Okay, it’s not exactly going to end but things will really suck in the future if we don’t start taking care of some business in the next seven years.

3. Doesn’t anybody know the rules of the four way stop anymore?! Seriously.  The STOP sign does not stand for Speed Through (intersection with no concern for) Other (drivers and) Pedestrians!

4. Robert Culp. (Y’all ain’t been payin’ attention lately have ya?)

5. I can’t believe my updated version of Paint Shop Pro on this laptop doesn’t have Animation Shop with it! Bummer! And, if that wasn’t bad enough, when I went to find Animation Shop on the Jasc/Corel Software website, I find out the stand alone version is not compatible with Windows Vista! AND they ain’t gonna do any additional upgrades to ever make it compatible with Vista! What a pain in the butt! I really wanted to make some animated gifs since I have all these friggin’ screen caps of the You Know Who.

Hey y’all just making sure I didn’t royally screw up my blog here as I did something completely and totally dangerous tonight. I upgraded my software!

Whoo boy, lemme tell ya I never was so nervous to click on a button before.  But things appear to be good from this side, the blog looked right when I viewed it after the upgrade so I think all is good! If it’s not…well, another blog post will cover my Agony of the Software Blow Up: Why Coltranes Should Not Be Allowed to Upgrade Anything.

Khee!

Back in June, I submitted an essay to Newsweek for their My Turn column. The submission guidelines stated I would be notified only if my essay was picked and if my essay wasn’t selected after two months I was free to submit the material elsewhere.

Well, I wasn’t selected. And given the essays that did appear in the My Turn column from June until now I was up against some pretty good writers. One essay was even done by Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas! Spartacus! How am I supposed to compete with that? I might as well be asked to play a game of Clue against Peter Falk…

Anyway, most of the essays, if not all of them, were and are personal in nature. In fact, a lot more personal than what I wrote, complaining about the light speed technological advancement of cell phones. The most recent My Turn essay is written by a medic in the military and he writes about what it feels like when one of his patients, namely a fellow soldier, doesn’t make it.

Oh man. FORGET the cell phone. I can’t compete with life stories like that. Anything I write that’s more personal than the cell phone thing would either come out sad and pathetic or bitter and resentful. And nobody wants to read that kind of stuff. I certainly don’t.

I’m also an extremely private person, to a point. Yeah, I’m yammering away here on the Internet and I publish my stories online for all the world to see but I’m still a private person. Many of you who know me beyond the moniker that graces the top of this blog, know that already. (Although I have learned that despite the very public forum that is the Internet, you can still exist in total obscurity.) So, finding a personal topic to write about, without feeling like I’m exposing my soul to the world and having that naked experience Brian referred to in one of his previous posts, is difficult.

I’m not going to give up trying with this My Turn thing tho’. If they publish your essay, you get paid $1000. (SOLD!). So, I’m going to try to come up with another topic to write about and in the meantime find another publication to submit that cell phone essay to.

Yeah, I’m back to Bill again. Heh heh! But this is interesting tho’!

Check this out. There’s a comic version of Greatest American Hero coming out soon and via a sneak peak at MTV.com, we can see what a few of the panels look like. The four panels feature heavily on Bill and also show us Ralph. Take a lookie here.

So I’m looking at these panels and I’m thinkin’, “This is cool! Can’t wait for this to come out…” and I’m looking some more and looking at Bill and thinkin’, “Yep, that looks pretty much like him…pretty good rendering…” and then I’m realizing that some of this is looking familiar.

Really familiar. I’ve done too many screen caps of Mr. Maxwell y’all and this just proves it. Take a look…

And then I’m thinkin’, “Man, that whole diner scene looks familiar….”

Familiar?! Holy bleep! If I had capped Bill when he was looking at the television instead of turned giving the guy next to him some static about trying to hear the tv, well…it’d be almost a mirror image. Yeah, I know, the comic has a girl waitress and the screen cap is a guy and there’s a ton of other minor differences but other than that, it’s pretty obvious the art work is based heavily on that scene. Now y’all gotta understand. I didn’t go lookin’ for the TGAH caps, I already had them in my collection. Which just proves I’ve capped too much of this show.  It’s all Bill’s fault!

Anyway, can’t wait to see the comic tho’! And who knows what more similarities I might find!

Blaugh! I’m slackin’ again. I haven’t posted here for several days and I’m about due for another Screen Cap o’ The Week and I can’t decide on one. I think my brain done exploded.

Ouch. And I was doing so good too! But nothing has struck me lately to blather on about (at least, nothing I wanna blather on about publicly!) and I’m…I’m…stuck.

GAH! This is bad. Even worse is the fact that I’m writing about the fact that I can’t think of anything to write about. Although, to keep along the lines of the Coltrane Skewl of Writing posts we’ve had recently, this might be a good opportunity to talk about journaling and free form writing.

This was an exercise we used to do in one of my English classes in Jr. High. We would be given about 10 minutes or so to write something. Anything. And often mine started with “Well I can’t think of anything write about so I’m writing about not being able to write anything. Oh man, have ya ever realized that…” and then I’d be off on some inane topic of importance to a 15 year old mind. Heh!

But ya know, it worked. If you keep at it, even if it’s just still saying “yep, here I am, still trying to think of something to write–I’m so sick of adult contemporary radio…” Boom. Yer topic will come to you eventually.

And I am sick of adult contemporary radio. Kelly Clarkson is pissing me off and if I have to hear Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” one more time I’m gonna take that Louisville slugger to something other than a set of headlights. ARGH! That song can not be the only song that woman has ever recorded! But apparently it’s the only song that gets played on the radio.

Corporate radio sucks nowadays anyway. I think I’ve commented on this in a previous post but it’s worth commenting again. In fact, I’m even gonna write it again.

Corporate radio sucks nowadays anyway.

They play the same dozen or so songs every day, every week. And then boast about having the “biggest variety.” My posterior.

What really annoys me is when one of those songs that annoys the crap out of me gets stuck in my head. Like pretty much any Kelly Clarkson song. “Because of You” Kelly, I’m about ready to puke on my radio.

Gnarls Barkley can best some up my opinion of corporate radio:  “It’s Making Me Craaaaaaaaazaaaayyyy!”

Ahh. There. And lookit that, a blog post!