Vacation. Good.

I’ve spent the last two days catching up on my comics reading and watching season two of The West Wing, a Christmas gift from friends ( along with seasons 1 and 3,thanks Bridget and Nick!). The experience just reconfirms my opinion that the first four seasons of this show were some of the best tv writing around. I can’t want for Sorkin’s new showbiz series this fall.

I’ve been rereading Grant Morrison’s run on X-Men.
Morrison is a crazymad talent, able to take old, washed up ideas and boil them down to their essence. The result is something that looks familiar but veers off in directions that no one else would ever dream up. That’s what he’s done here or in JLA over at DC. His non-superhero work in mostly strange, experimental efforts that recreate an acid trip on paper (or so I’m told). I love The Invisibles, but I still don’t know what the hell was going on there. His current Seven Soldiers line at DC is a melding of the two. It’s well worth reading.

Tonight Norma souped up some egg nog and we watched a couple of movies. The Brothers Grimm was entertaining in that typical Terry Gilliam ignore-the-gaping-plot-hole-while I distract-you-with-this-pretty-piece-of-wackiness way he has. More enjoyable was Must Love Dogs, a chick flick (yes, I’ve watched so many chick flicks that my man parts have dwindled to the approximate shape and appearance of those on a Ken doll). This movie proves my point that anything with Diane Lane in it is watchable.

On the writing front, I have to polish my column for the local magazine and send it off this week. I also have two stories I want to finish. I’m still pecking away on the PI novel, too.

We’re getting a new furnace installed this week. It should be a simple process. Little do the installers know: this is Justice Land, a strange, alternate dimension where nothing is simple and everything goes awry!


Is my secret girlfriend Rachael Ray a debt skipper? This article seems to think so. Say it ain’t so, Rach!