My Condensed Review of "Persons Unknown"

Diverting jaunt.

Sunday newspaper comics that I skip

Cathy, Prickly City, Peanuts, Marmaduke, Rose Is Rose, For Better Or For Worse, Family Circus

Why do I mention this? On Sundays I have all the time in the world to read the comics, and I still don't bother finding the time for these. What went wrong?

Cathy lost any relevance to humor or reality back in the Eighties. Prickly City has never been funny and the politics of the strip are only annoying. Since Peanuts and For Better Or For Worse are repeats of old strips I've got a "been there, done that" feeling. I liked them when they first came out, but I'm done with them. I'm not the audience for Marmaduke or Family Circus, they skew to the extremely young or slow. I actually think that Rose Is Rose is a clever strip and I hope that they continue to make it, I just feel sorry for the main character.

I think that there are a lot of great comics out there- important comics that delight me or make me consider different viewpoints on the world around me. Candorville, La Cucaracha, Zits, Baldo & Doonesbury may not hit the mark for me every time, humor-wise, but I like their viewpoints and messages. On the other hand, Pearls Before Swine is the best current comic in any newspaper in the land.

My condensed review of Harper's Island

Wonderfully histrionic.

My condensed review of the first episode of "Justified"

Quirky.

My condensed review of the new products shown at CES this year.

meh.

Quote

"It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide"- Magersfontein Lugg

NaNoWriMo

It's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo to its friends) again and I'm jumping on the bandwagon again this year. It has only been a few days, but I'm keeping up. If you don't know, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days- that's 1,667 words per day. There is a strategy involved, to make it easier, which you can find in the book "No Plot? No Problem!" by Chris Baty (the founder of National Novel Writing Month).

By the way, I've done this before, successfully- and by that I mean that I got the word count, but the novel I wrote is utter crap. Just a few days into the latest novel and I can say without hesitation that the new one is crap too. However, I will also say that this one is less crappy then the earlier one. Maybe in ten years, or ten more novels, I'll be writing the greatest novel ever, but I doubt it.

Anyway, the process is fun and I think I'm learning a lot. If you've got access to my Twitter feed (which should be somewhere on this blog page), you can keep up with my current word count this month.