My presence has been, shall we say, minimal of late. Many reasons for this.

First and foremost, the daughter got chicken pox, then croop, then an ear infection all in the same month. Somehow during the most recent illness both mom and I also got sick.

As one of the more recent strips alluded to, I began school again.

Also, I started a new job.

Plus, it appears that Time Warner, under no circumstances whatsoever, wants me to give them money for cable tv and internet access. I have tried pleading with them, yelling, crying, I even offered to bake and Fed Ex them some cupcakes but all to no avail. They are dead set on never coming into my place of residence and installing said cable. My wife asked the other day, “Do we have a cable bill yet?” to which I replied, “What the hell can they bill us for, they haven’t provided any type of service.” Apparantly, they are content with heedlessly pushing back our installation date wily-nily. At this rate, I fully expect to have my cable modem installed sometime around April 2009.

Anyway, as a sort of piece offering for my flagrant absense I offer the following slice of internets goodness as a peace offering.

Couldn’t really think of a title here, so I figured I would ramble a bit until I felt like there was certainly the hint of something being said without, in fact, anything actually being said.

I feel I have achieved this goal.

Now then, the following image was co-opted from Poor Mojo’s Newswire (which itself, co-opted said image from Boing Boing, which itself co-opted said image from L-space…and the internets continue to spiral on…)

Having just finished reading (and, ahem, listening to the audio book) Making Money I look upon this diagram and think that it does a disservice to the discworld series.

You can certainly pick up any of the books, at any time, and start reading. Pratchett does such a good job of summarizing past events when it is necessary that you don’t need to have read everything that has come before. Case in point, in Making Money he references some events from Feet of Clay. Now Feet of Clay is a standard, Pratchett length novel, but in Making Money he talks about some of the events in Feet of Clay for a paragraph, but that’s all the reader really needs to understand the context in which the events in the current novel are happening.

But to break the novels up into several “mini-series” within the larger framework of the universe takes away from how Pratchett developed the world. He did not sit down and write five novels based on Ryncewind and then said “Now I’m going to write some books on the City Watch.” The entire universe evolved organically from Pratchett’s mind. The narratives came up out of the ether and Pratchett put them down as they came. There was no prescribed path through the world as he was creating it.

Maybe I take slight offense at trying to break the series down like this because I read it in order of publication and I believe that everything I do is best. I can certainly understand the desire to break the novels down into more easily “digestable” chunks, rather than thinking about 30+ novels as a series (and this list doesn’t take into account all of the anciallary works like the Mapp’s, the Yearbooks, Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, the RPG, etc.).

On some level, this is just me being nit-picky. Whenever anyone comes into the book store and asks for a recommendation in Sci-Fi and Fantasy I always bring up Pratchett. The more people that read him, the better the world will be, I believe, so if such a breakdown helps someone approach the series I should certainly support that.

OK…well…maybe I had no real point then.

India, for me, represents a sort of amalgam of a holy place and a fairy tale. It has long been a dream of mine to visit India and take a holy pilgrimage, of sorts. I’m well aware that things like the plague are still prevalent there, but I think that is all part of the, for lack of a better term, charm.

In my mind, India’s rich religious history coupled with its, even today, untamed natural wildness makes the country seem like no other place on earth. This opinion has been confirmed to me by both Indians and Westerners who have visited there. A professor of mine once told me of a summer when he spent 2 months in India. He went with no itinerary and no real idea about what he would do once there. He did know someone who lived there, but he admitted to me that he was in a state of near anxiety for his entire trip because of how different from his normal life it was.

So one can hardly fault me for proclaiming (even before I have seen it) the new Wes Anderson film to be one of the five greatest films ever made. The mystical algebra works thusly…

Wes Anderson + (Jason Schwartzman*Owen Wilson*Adrien Brody)

—————————————————————————————————— = greatest film of all time

India + a train

But I suppose not everyone shares my near maniacal fixation with all things India. Nevertheless, I give to you this trailer, so you might judge for yourself…

Why the fuck didn’t I know that Brian K Vaughn (yes THAT Brian K Vaughn, and that one too…) was brought on to the writing team for Lost at the end of last season?

Where the hell have I been?

What inane bullshit have I been doing instead of worshiping at the newest shrine consecrated in the holy and sacred religion of “Vaughnomism”?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course, but one I’m sure both exsulis and Jezmon (hey, by the way, nice to see you here…now where are the other two?) would have answers for in spades.

The prescribed “method” for the way things are supposed to work around here are, I post on Monday, I post on Wednesday, I post on Friday and “tada!” we put up a comic. Erratic is certainly a word one could use to describe how we’ve been doing things. Much in the same way big is a word one could use to describe the universe.

But do not despair, with help from the ever gracious exsulis, we are slowly but surely stumbling toward a real website, instead of our url slapped on top of a wordpress template (thank you, wordpress, for your free template!).

And in my defense, I did have a post written, or at least started, that was going to go up on Tuesdayish, but I didn’t really finish writing it. Plus it was on the “serious” side, which is a side I find quite perplexing and disorienting. Also, the article it referenced is something like 5 days old at this point, which in internets years is like 20,000. That shit may have already become fossilized!

So’s anyways, work continues, as it tends to do. And I thank all of you (or, maybe I should say, all 5 of you) for your patience.

One last piece of miscellaneous information. I’ve really been into the new Spoon album of late, and while checking out their site I came across an old news post that said they were playing a show on July 12 at “Cafu Nord” in San Francisco. I assume they meant Cafe Du Nord

which is a pretty small club, literally, a ten minute walk from my old apartment in San Francisco. Don’t believe me? Well see for yourself…

Sometimes, and by that I mean, often. I fucking hate living in the god-damned suburbs! Sure, we own a house, which is certainly better for the kid, but fuck I miss being able to drink heavily in the full confidence that I can, probably, stumble the quarter-mile necessary to reach my bed. Hell, I miss being able to drink heavily, period!