I'm back

I'm back at the old blogging keyboard and more boring than ever. And I mean that sincerely. The social aspects of this blog, which gave it the bare scintilla of appeal it had, like a garish pink tie on a maggot-infested corpse, will not be resurfacing for the indefinite future. As I'd noted before, chronicling all that just makes me depressed. So no more exciting but ultimately tragic rejection stories.

Anyway, I'm pretty much an anchorite these days, at least compared to those wild times when this blog was young.

Classes start up again in a week. I'll take one or two more classes in the summer of 2007 and then I'll start student teaching the next fall. Unless I'm dead, which is a definite possibility. (If I don't die of old age, I may well just keel over from sheer uselessness.)

[Cue up Bowie's "Chubby Little Loser," though I'm only two of those things.]

So, what did I get for Christmas, which after all 'tis the season for avarice and self-interest, and for reckoning up all the swag?

• A five dollar gift certificate at Satan's Own Video Store, Blockbuster. I bought Kurt Russell movie Soldier used. Not bad for a crappy action flick.
• A fifty dollar gift certificate at The Gap, which I have not used yet. Clothing is not my primary interest, nor even my tertiary interest.
• The Gap Red book, a photo album with mostly celebrity ad shots. Some nice pictures, though there is a photo of Ian McKellen propped up on an elbow and giving the camera a come-hither look which fingering his nipple, and this is a sight that you can never unsee.
• Kurt Busiek's graphic novel Tarnished Angel, which is one of my favorite Astro City stories, though the premise is suspiciously close to the "Bobo" Bennetti story in James Robinson's Starman.
• The first volume of Fantagraphics' Popeye Series. I'm a huge admirer of Walt Kelly's Pogo, Krazy Kat and some of the other brilliant early newspaper comics that expertly turned the English language inside out while providing hilarious insight and political commentary. E.C. Segar's Popeye is right up there with the best of them (and to me, Pogo will always be the best newspaper comic ever). Just a beautiful book.
• The Complete Peanuts, 1953-1954. I've talked about my admiration for Schulz' masterpiece before here. Simply astounding work.
• A boxed set of Marx Brothers movies, including A Day at the Races, A Night in Casablanca, and A Night at the Opera. I've only seen a couple of the short films that came with it so far, and I have already had to go to the emergency room twice to get my busted gut fixed. Plus they gave me something for my knee, which got some extra-hard slapping.
• An off-brand mp3 (MP3? they both look funny) player that holds four hours. Great for walking the dog. I am fully in the 21st century now, buddy boy! Yeah! I'm digital!
• Some money and some joke gifts.
  

I'm doing something creative on the Intertubes that I'm not going to talk about here. I will say, however, that it's great to be working on a creative project.