This has been a week. Honestly, the month where we offer the year’s Free Comic Book Day books is always a rough one. Usually, it’s something that’s done around Thanksgiving (the January catalog goes to press the first week of December), but with a later Free Comic Book Day in 2021, it was this month, … Continue reading Deadline Week
Category: Life
After a couple of mild winters, this year has brought the snow. Since the beginning of the year, I think there’s been a snowfall at least once a week, and for most of the last month there’s been snow on the ground. It hasn’t been warm enough to melt the last snow, and the next … Continue reading Investigative Cemetery Explorations
Pennsylvania has been blasted with snow since yesterday. The forecast had called for anywhere between 8 and 24 inches of snow, and I think the total came in closer to the lower end of that spectrum. I cleared the sidewalk this morning, then cleared my car. Then it started to sleet and another phase of … Continue reading A Frumious Snow
This week, Funko announced POP! figures based on beloved 1990s sitcom Frasier. A Funko POP! figure, for those three people whom I envy for having successfully avoided them for the past decade, is a vinyl figure of a pop-culture icon (celebrity, comic books, film, musician, etc.) that stands about 3 3/4″ tall, has a weirdly … Continue reading A Puzzling and Troubling Absence
Yesterday morning I had to run an errand in downtown York. The local Democratic Party office offered a virtual inauguration package — a party bag of two bottles of sparkling cider, plastic glasses, buttons, flags, and other stuff — with a donation, and I thought that sounded cool, so I ordered one, which necessitated a … Continue reading An Abandoned Church
I’m working out of Diamond’s offices this week — publishing deadlines. I happened to walk through the lobby area yesterday, and what did I find? A Christmas tree. Even though there’s only a small staff — less than twenty most days — on site, even though almost no one would see it, they still put … Continue reading Early January
I have no idea when I am now. What day is this? What month? What year? I have no idea. It’s not the short weeks at work due to the holidays. It’s the isolation. There are no rhythms now, no structure. Days feel indistinct and indistinguishable from one another. What does Tuesday mean? Or Saturday? … Continue reading When Am I?
Do I need to say that 2020 was an awful year? Must I? Let’s watch a Carl Sagan video before I get to my annual review of the first post of each month. This is not the “Pale Blue Dot” video I was looking for. I went through my blog archives, I went through my … Continue reading 2020: The Year In Review
We had our first snowfall of the year in Pennsylvania today. It started off with a wintry mix… …before changing over to all snow noon-ish… …but accumulation was nil. It was just a hair too warm, the ground was wet, and the result was a sloppy slushy mess. It stopped about three, and by 4:30 … Continue reading Snow Day! (Sort Of)
This version of “Silent Night” performed on the theremin is magnificent. It also puts 1950s sci-fi B-movies in mind — not unlike Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, a long-time holiday favorite of mine — and so I wrote a new verse for “Silent Night”… Silent night, holy night.Mars attacks with laser light.Saucers flying through the … Continue reading Christmas on Mars
Some photos and commentary from the last two weeks. Last Friday, November 29th, marked the 50th-anniversary of the release of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. It’s also the day that Jem Roberts’ book, Fab Fools, was in my mailbox. This isn’t a book about the Beatles as musicians. It doesn’t concern itself with when … Continue reading Scenes of Recent Life
In today’s mail, I received a package of Christmas cards from the National Cathedral. They’re asking for money. I get packages like this every year from charities like the Alzheimer’s Association and Colonial Williamsburg. This is the first year I’ve been on the National Cathedral’s list. It’s a little strange, yet also cool, that this … Continue reading Cards in the Mail