It Happens...

Saturday, April 2 5:06 PM

Have you ever been out and about in the world, and received that look from a stranger? The one that's clearly a reaction to something about your personal appearance that causes you to instantly realize that he or she has just seen something that you should have seen in the mirror that morning...and instantly corrected?

It's the day before I close my office for the week. Tomorrow, punch-drunk and early, I leave for the Conference On World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Which has a great many implications, none of them conducive towards my spending today with my feet up on something, drinking something else and watching a third thing altogether on the tee-vee box. Instead, it's the Death by A Thousand Errands torture. Money was magically transmuted from meaningless slips of paper from my publishers to binary sequences at some nameless computer and then, finally, into slightly more meaningful slips of paper. Dry-cleaning was picked up. A thingamabob that I misplaced a few weeks ago was re-purchased at Radio Shack.

Laundry was another factor. Everything I usually wear is in the wash, so after rooting through my drawers for a clean shirt I unearthed a rather nice tee shirt from the makers of the Stuffit file-compression utility. Basic black — always the right choice — with the slogan ".SIT Happens" across the chest. How wry; that's Stuffit's three-letter filename extension. I enjoyed a good-natured chuckle as I slipped it on.

And life was skittles and beer as I took off on my errands, until the clerk at CVS glanced at my shirt and gave me The Look. I was thrown. Did he see me carefully candling all those bottles of Diet Pepsi, looking for one with "FREE SONG" printed under the cap? If he was...screw 'im. Nothing in the iTunes promotion says "Consumers are forbidden from taking advantage of the fact that there's just enough air at the top of the bottom to see of the top half of the top line reads 'FREE' (song) or 'PLEASE' (try again)."

No that wasn't it. I figured it out the moment I looked down at my chest. I had tossed a shirt on over the tee but I didn't button it...so the wry, sardonic slogan was only partially displayed. The clerk only saw "...IT HAPPEN...". He filled in the missing letters incorrectly, and then he leaped to the mistaken but forgiveable conclusion that I was one of those acrylic-trucker-cap wearin', "American Idol"-votin', ringtone-downloadin', ride-pimpin' yokels who, either in whole or in part, is responsible for Why Things These Days Have Gotten As Bad As They've Gotten.

I felt compelled to open my shirt a little further to reassure him that the slogan was not as he imagined it to be, and the fact that I was wearing a shirt that poked sarcastic fun at those shirts clearly demonstrated that I was on his side.

Alas, I didn't have time. Radio Shack beckoned and when an electronics parts store calls — even one located in a mall — men like me listen. After I launder this shirt I will attach a Post-It to the front to remind me that there's an Exception Code associated with this garment. It'd be a shame if I wore this tee shirt to an important job interview, and blew the opportunity because of such a silly misunderstanding.

Sure, I could just button up my shirt...but I've always believed that when you show up in an open shirt and cargo shorts, you send an important message to the interviewer: you have faith that he or she is intelligent enough not to be impressed by trivial surface details.

And it's worked out great so far: I've been successfully self-employed since shortly after college.

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CoWA: Diva Mode

Monday, April 4 2:17 AM

Suffice to say that if I'm ever at a party and I meet Diana Ross and she goes on and on and on about how she can't travel across the street without at least nine trunks of ball gowns, I'll find the strength to smile and nod instead of making a snide comment. For the purposes of this post, I have made out a list of all of the electronics I've brought out here to Boulder. The idea was that you'd see the list scroll on and on and on and you'd be Duly Impressed with my Geek Cred.

But the first two items on the list are 1) 15" PowerBook (1.25 GHz); 2) 15" PowerBook (667 MHz) and I wonder if there's really any point in continuing. I have crafted a lifestyle for myself which — either in reality or just in my own mind — I cannot function for a full week with just one laptop. If there's no such term as "Geek Diva" then I hereby officially smash a ceremonial bottle of champagne against its prow.

Humor me. Or, perhaps, pity me. Lilith 7 (Item One) has a pair of stereo speakers built right-in, and they are indeed fully functional. But look: I'm going to stop typing for a moment so you can hear what this "West Wing" DVD sounds like with this set of Altec Lansing inMotion speakers plugged in:

(...)

So you see why I like to travel with additional gear. The "West Wing" DVD is an apt choice: in my organization (or, again, maybe just in my own mind) I am indeed the President. My office moves with me...not just the hardware that I need to get my work done but the Environment which helps me in my ongoing quest for Le Mot Juste. Dickens was an amazing novelist and one can only imagine what kinds of heights he'd reach if he could write with the dip pen and the inkwell and a portable home theater setup.

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CoWA: The Underpitch

Monday, April 4 2:20 AM

It's April, which means that it's time for another week at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Originally conceived 57 years ago as a way to bamboozle the University into bankrolling an address from then-UN Ambassador Eleanor Roosevelt, the Conference has evolved into sort of a sport of freestyle intellectualism, where about a hundred people from all backgrounds and professional disciplines get together to talk about the issues of the day. I've been speaking here for so many years that I no longer know how many years I've been speaking here.

And yet it's a miracle that I ever started coming at all. It was my good pal Larry who recommended me to the Conference's organizers, and he encouraged me to accept the invitation by giving me absolutely the worst pitch imaginable.

"So how long of a talk would I have to prepare? An hour? Maybe ninety minutes?" I asked.

"Actually, you'll be speaking on anywhere from eight to ten public panels, over the course of a whole week."

"On my usual topics?"

"Mostly. But the organizers often like to have people talk on subjects they know absolutely nothing about, to bring in additional perspectives."

"Umm..."

"In fact, up until recently, it was an actual rule. And they didn't tell you what you'd be speaking about until you'd actually arrived on campus."

"Great gravy! I have to believe that there's some sort of honorarium involved...?"

"Far from it. It's an all-volunteer effort."

"They'll only cover my expenses?"

Silence. Troubling.

"They will cover my airfare and stuff, right?"

"Not as such," Larry said, slightly apologetically. "But they will get you a room."

I considered this.

"I suppose I could use some of my frequent-flier miles," I said.

"That's what most people do. Plus, they'll put you up right near campus."

"There are hotels that close-by?"

"No, they'll find somebody in Boulder who has a spare room or something."

It was my turn to be silent, and I did such a good job of it that Larry actually tapped the microphone of his phone to make sure that it was still working.

"So to recap:" I finally said, drawing in my breath. "You're encouraging me to give up a whole week of my time to come to Colorado at my own expense, where my only weapons against a large audience of people who are expecting me to know something about the legacy of FDR's New Deal will be my wits and a microphone."

"Actually, they usually don't have enough mikes to go around, so panelists wind up sharing."

"Noted. And I'll be sleeping God Knows Where, the guest of God Knows Whom, on that half of the country where the Manson Murders took place?"

"You've got it."

"And you've been attending this thing for more than a decade?"

"Haven't missed a single outing, since the first year I was invited."

And like untold hundreds of men and woman have done throughout the Conference's 57-year history, I closed my eyes, commended my soul to God, and accepted the invitation.

After all, Larry is one of my best friends, as well as a valued consiglieri. If he walked up to me carrying a greasy, wriggling paper sack and said "Andy, take off your wristwatch, put your hand in here, and don't ask me why" I'd do it. I'd hesitate, sure, but under the circs I'd be calmly confident that either (a) I'd wind up discovering that Live Eel Pizza is even tastier than a fried Twinkie, or (b) I'd be the victim of a cruel prank, but a really good one. The sort of thing where even as you're cursing and blotting the half-gallon of ice water from your crotch, you're thinking about where you can buy a funnel of your own, and who among your circle of friends might be dumb enough to jam it into their pants and then try to tip a quarter into it off of their forehead to win a dollar.

And now, the padwan has become the teacher. Well, not really. But I am trying to get some of my friends interested in attending, and my best argument about the overall ginchiness of the Conference is the fact that I keep coming back time after time after time, and that I consider it to be one of the highlights of my whole year.

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CoWA: Here to There

Monday, April 4 3:51 AM

Today was the Travel Day, also known as "one of many, many incidents that will surely come up when I die and finally have an opportunity to confront God and make Him explain Himself." My flight was at 7:55 AM, which meant that I had to leave the house at 6 AM. And because I quite sensibly keep my metabolic clock set to Alaska Time, it meant that I'd need to be upright and mobile just a few hours after I'd normally go to bed.

Can it really be demonstrated that Daylight Savings Time serves any useful purpose at all? It might have had some relevance during the twenty years when we were all between World Wars — setting and re-setting clocks over and over again is one way to keep busy, I suppose — but nowadays any middle-school teacher who's truly committed to facts and honesty would tell their class "You really only need to know things about Daylight Savings Time: it's 'Spring Forward, Fall Back,' and its chief function is to screw around with Andy Ihnatko, a writer who lives in Boston, Massachusetts."

How can you not take it personally? You're packing for a trip and you check your watch and you think, wow, I'm ahead of schedule and maybe I can take a nap or something before I leave...but your next realization is that it's after 2 AM and you now have to give the Universe one hour of your time. It's like you landed on one of the bad squares on a Monopoly board. You're sitting on top of the world one day, but the next, you're handing all of your cash over to your big sister and reminding yourself to check the lid of the box to see if it's really possible to put four hotels on Boardwalk by buying "on margin."

So last night was a no-sleep situation. I got a bit of a nap on the flight — just long enough to miss my complimentary half-can of Pepsi and a cellowrapped cookie, and to miss the first ten minutes of "National Treasure" (which I found delightfully dopey) — but overall, I arrived at Denver International with a severely-underclocked CPU. I was met at the central terminal by a student volunteer holding a sign, and after thankfully being advised that I did indeed have time to shop for, purchase and consume my first solid food in 18 hours, I and the two other speakers who arrived after me were on our way to Boulder.

It's cool when you establish such a longterm relationship with a region that you can see it change from year to year. The drive from the airport to Boulder takes you through endless stretches of prairie. This always gives me the willies; as a lifelong New Englander, I find it reassuring to have a ready supply of hills, trees, and rocks to scramble behind in case it once again becomes necessary to shoot at Hessian mercenaries.

But if the landscape does nothing for civil defense, it sure is purty to look at. Alas, every year I note the appearance of yet another bleak, Soviet-style condo development that looks as though some giant kid had upended a bucket of Legos onto the carpet. Why the devil would anyone want to squirt hundreds of absolutely identical buildings into an area where you know that they'd be the region's only visible feature? I'd like to think that real-estate developers would consider the needs of bored highway passengers like me, but even if all they care about is filthy lucre, do they really consider blandness and utter conformity to be a selling point?

Eventually (thankfully) we pass through the valley where there's a pasture of moo-cows to the left and another one on the right, and we're in Boulder.

I'm relieved to discover that I'll be staying at the same house I've been in for the past few years. Accommodations tend to stay the same, if possible. Hosts are relieved to find that they've been assigned a speaker who doesn't make noises or messes, and isn't apt to startle a visiting clergyman by cooking scrambled eggs in the nude. Speakers are relieved to find that they won't be sleeping in a hammock out on the porch, and that their hosts won't be barging in every half-hour to try and sell some more Amway products. So "why mess with a good thing?" is a strong motivator.

I think I've had four different hosts over the years, and in all that time I only ever encountered one problem: I'd been put in a guest room with no phone jack. No internet access of any kind. A hamster in a cardboard box with no air holes; a freshly-minted English Lit major who's just handed his resume to a job interviewer and seen the expression on his face; a man with a fear of enclosed spaces nailed up inside a coffin and buried, his only companion a walkie-talkie through which someone constantly reminds him that there's no possible escape and that nobody has ever truly loved him...all of these are apt metaphors for what I experienced when I was forced to confron the possibility of spending a week without ever having a single moment alone with just my thoughts and a net connection.

But there was a second guest-room in the house where a pal of mine was staying, so I was able to change residences a couple of days later. I've been here ever since. Not literally, although God knows if I could fake a slip-and-fall and somehow con my hosts into believing that being removed from their home would interfere with my recovery a la "The Man Who Came To Dinner," I'd be all over it. My hosts are endlessly friendly without going so far as to insist that I join in on Family Banjo Sing-Along Night, and their house is borderline spectacular. Clearly it cost them a few sheckels, but it's so tastefully built and furnished that the moment this thought occurs to you, you reproach yourself for thinking something so uncouth. I've been in expensive houses where the design motif was "get a load of how much money I have!" and others where the owners live in a camper parked out back because they, themselves are terrified of breaking something. Nothin' doing, in this case.

The only troubling part of this property is a recent addition: a "For Sale" sign. My relief at learning that I'd be staying in the same place as previous years was muted by the realization that this was the end of the line. But I'm glad that I learned this at the very start of the week. I'll appreciate the beauty of this place while I'm here. I'll also be sure to pocket any books or objects d'art that have caught my eye over the past few years. "Carpe Diem," and all that.

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CoWA: Why am I still here?

Monday, April 4 10:30 AM

Damn and blast. It is now 8 AM and judging from the readout on my Work-O-Sensor, I probably don't have time to finish writing a book preface that's due today and still make it to campus on time for a a panel that I desperately wish to see ("Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism"). And unfortunately, this preface is for an editor who lives only a two or three-hour drive away from me, so an ass-kicking is indeed a practical retributional option if I fail to deliver.

My pal Bill Nack is on that panel so I've just padded downstairs in my work clothes (the clothes I woke up in, with adjustments for modesty) where he's eating breakfast, to tender my regrets for missing his session. I answer two or three Hunter Thompson trivia questions (chiefly Doonesbury-related) while I snag a Diet Coke from the fridge and then it's back here to work.

Oh, well. Nearly everybody at this conference is going through much the same sort of thing. It's impossible to take a week off, so hundreds of businesses and projects will be managed from hotel rooms, guest rooms, and (I suspect) from audience seats of panels that are too cool to miss out on.

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Nearly Gone

Saturday, April 9 2:55 PM

Greetings from the smart, tastefully-appointed living room of my host's home here in Colorado. In ten minutes' time, a student will roll up in a van and take me to Denver International for my trip home to Boston.

One of the (many) freaky things about attending this Conference is that I spend an entire week without watching any TV at all. I've been guesting in the same home for three years now, and there isn't a set in my quarters. And no, I didn't miss it; not a bit. One, because I (quite properly) regard television as entertainment and distraction, not as a touchstone to my reality; Two, because I don't give a dam about basketball, much less amateur basketball such as the NCAA Finals that took place last Monday; and Three, because I know that this week's episodes of "The Shield," "The Amazing Race," "The West Wing," and Drew Barrymore's appearance on the Letterman show are waiting for me on my TiVO, safe at home.

Otherwise it's entirely possible that a small amount of freaking-out would have taken place, followed by a trip to a bar and my finding out how much money is required to convince two dozen rummies to wedge the establishment's TV off of ESPN for an hour.

I'm watching a rebroadcast of the Pope's funeral right now. We're a half an hour into it with another 2.5 to go. I missed it, both literally and figuratively. I was indeed raised Catholic, nd while I never had that dramatic moment where I decided (and then smugly announced) that formalized religion was an intense sham designed to keep people stupid and easy-to-manipulate, it's true that I Haven't Been To Mass in quite a while; this is not a topic that makes my Mom happy, but on those rare occasions when the topic comes up I'm careful to explain that I and the Church never broke up; I just moved to a different city, and while the parting was entirely amicable and we promised to keep in touch, the phone calls and emails just sort of tailed off after a while.

This international live broadcast of the Pope's funeral mass is an important event for Catholics. It actually fills the same role as most family funerals. It's an excuse for far-flung members of the clan to get together, remember a person of which everybody was at least partially fond, and celebrate bonds that can probably never truly be broken.

I don't know if I'll go to Mass any time soon. Maybe. It's the same answer as I always give. But the death of the Pope provokes Thought, and at the end of the Thinking I come back to my belief that my Catholic upbringing was a good thing, and that I learned lessons that I continue to carry through each and every day that I convert oxygen to carbon dioxide.

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Blather, bibble and drone.

Saturday, April 16 6:20 PM

I'm in the office tending to a little but of business. I flip the TV on and find myself watching something that looks like, but can't possibly be, a tribute to Ray Charles, on ice. Though on second thought, it seems like the perfect choice. If the show's producers have any sense, they'll be booking a tribute to Stevie Wonder next: surely the only artists who'd approve this sort of thing would be those who've never actually seen an ice show.

Okey-doke. First off, my thanks to all those people who helped me debug my new podcast, chiefly by emailing me every time iPodder tried and failed to grab the latest posting, pointing out that I'd forgotten to close an XML tag somewhere, and then referring to me as a "galloping chowderhead" or somesuch. You tease because you love, I know. Granted, that sentiment isn't clearly implied in one particular missive — honestly, phreakpwnr282@gmail.com...I have known the touch of a woman, not that this is germane to the point or any of your business — but it got the job done.

If you haven't gotten into Podcasting, it's as simple as downloading a free podcast client (I use iPodder 2.0) and plugging in the URL to my podcast feed (http://homepage.mac.com/andyi/Sites/cwop/cwop.xml). Audio files will start to arrive inside your music library all on their own as if my magic, the same way that cookies for porno sites appear in your browser history, according to the explanation you give to your boss, spouse, or both.

If you haven't gotten into Podcasting and you're still at that smirky, disdainful stage of your personal development where you sneer at anything that's (air-quotes) "Hip" (close air-quotes) or (air quotes) "Trendy," (close air-quotes), I urge you to forge a higher, better being from the raw ore of your life experiences, and also to just click the direct links below:

"Nanotechnology: Who, What, Why, When, Where"
"Call In The Stunt Guy...er, Animator"
"Lost Without My Instant Access"
"Voicemail, Email, Text Messaging: Redefining Communication"
"Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Buffy are Over...Oh, My!"

I'm going to keep the Podcast up, although I will assiduously stick to the Mister Ed Rule: "Mister Ed should never speak, unless he has something to say." New material will only appear sporadically, yes, but hopefully when a new podcast appears on your iPod you'll have some sort of reason to think that it won't turn out to be twenty minutes of play-by-play commentary on how my breakfast is going.

Those of you who are actually interested in that sort of thing will have to lurk in the bushes outside my kitchen. Just ask the Kaiser Permanente boys to scoot over a little.

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Conference On World Affairs: Monday

Sunday, April 17 1:22 AM

I'm proud of the fact that even through all the hustle and bustle of maintaining a full speaking schedule alongside something keeping up with something close to my normal weekly workload, I blogged diligently and consistently about my experiences at the Conferenc on World Affairs, with only one single gap in the narrative. Yes, this gap begins on Monday afternoon and ends on Saturday morning, but please...stack this performance against that of all those people who can have as many as three gaps in just one day of their blog.

Clearly, these people don't care about you, the reader, as much as I do.

When last we left our intrepid explorer, he was bitching about having had to spend Monday morning writing the foreword to a book, instead of attending a way-cool panel about Hunter S. Thompson as planned. Fear not: the foreword was finished on schedule, thanks partly to judicious cutting-and-pasting from a bunch of old term papers that I keep on my hard drive for exactly this purpose.

Which left me with plenty of time to shower, shave, curse myself for showering before I shaved (electric razors tend to irritate moist skin), get dressed, and then hit the road. My host's house is just about the perfect distance from campus. It's a little less than a mile, which at a brisk 4 MPH walking pace can be covered in less than ten minutes. After five minutes of maintaining that pace at Boulder's 5400-foot altitude, you're sure to pass out right there in the sidewalk; a ten-dollar tip presented to the paramedics promptly upon revival will convince them to drive you to campus instead of the emergency room. If you plan ahead you can even arrange to have the ambulance meet you at the point where you intend to pass out, thus shaving another few minutes of commuting time.

I only had one panel on Monday: "Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Buffy are Over...Oh, My!" I was really looking forward to it; it sounded like it was right up my alley, with plenty of room for broad discussion. No wonder...it wasn't until I reached campus and met with the moderator that I was reminded that I'd actually suggested the topic (or something like it) some three months earlier.

I was also really looking forward to meeting the other speakers. Melanie Cordan is a character animator, and while it's true that the scale and prominence of one's professional credits is insignificant when stacked against the amount of pride taken in simply being able to make a living doing what you love, the fact remains that she's worked on "The Lord Of The Rings," "Shrek" and "Toy Story." The Total Awesome Coolness of all of that cannot and should not be overlooked. Judith Dushku is a university professor specializing in international issues. As a parent she's even more proud to describe herself as the mom of Eliza Dushku, star of "Tru Calling" and "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer."

Melanie and Judy were both CWA first-timers, and this would be their very first panel. Judy asked to go last. Melanie and I expressed the sort of ambivalence to the speaking order that can only be settled by either waiting it out until somebody dies, or through the ancient art of rochambeau. Rock-paper-scissors seemed the more practical solution, all things considered, and one paper-to-scissors later, I found myself batting first.

(You can click on the the title's link to hear my opening remarks.)

At the Conference on World Affairs, each speaker talks solo for a little more than ten minutes and when everyone's had their turn, the moderator throws it to the audience for comments and questions. This session turned out as great as I'd hoped...actually, it was probably my favorite panel of the whole week. It was a hallmark of what I love about this Conference. You may not know what the panel's about when you sit down behind the microphone, but you, the other speakers, and the audience get to work it out together over the course of ninety minutes of back-and-forth. This one, we ultimately discovered, was about the new vogue for telling sweeping, epic stories on an enormous canvas.

I enjoyed the talking bits and I enjoyed the listening bits, and I left the room with lots of new ideas that only came to me during the back-and-forth. It just doesn't get any better.

Melanie and Judy had to scoot to their next panels, but I was free as a daisy. Or a bird, if you prefer. Actually, Judy was delayed by hordes of "Buffy" fans who were lining up to tell her how much they adored her daughter. Judy's smile was so broad that it actually interfered with cellphone transmissions.

I headed to one of the greatest places in the world, at least to a guy with my unique dementia: a university bookstore. These places are the real deal, catering to people from every sector of the world and who have every possible prejudice about their writing materials. Which means that the store don't just stock a pen. They stock every pen. Within five minutes of my arrival, I emitted a happily little yelp and leaped upon a display of pocket notepads: they had massive quantities of Clairfontaine Model 8626's. The perfect specimens...small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, big enough to hold lots of info. Quality paper that really takes ink well, with a stiff backing board and double-loops of thick wire that stand up to abuse. Just a few weeks earlier — driven mad by hunger for a fundamental stationery item — I actually bought a notepad in a drugstore. This is the equivalent of the alcoholic having to resort of chugging Scope but now, I find myself giddily well-supplied for the rest of the year.

By the time I came down from my bookstore high, it was nearly 4 PM so I high-tailed it to the campus' cathedral-like auditorium. Every year, Roger Ebert spends an entire week discussing one film with the audience. This year, it was Fellini's "La Dolce Vita." I'd never seen it before (I bought the DVD a while ago but it's been sitting in shrinkwap ever since, awaiting a day when I could clear everything away and focus solely on the movie) and I was pretty bloody pleased that I'd be seeing it on a huge screen with about 700 other people instead of alone on my humble Sony 27".

This was Day One of the process, which meant that Roger would just press "Play" and let the whole movie run from start to finish as-is, without any amendments or interruptions.

I'm sitting here at my keyboard trying to think of a way to write "I fell asleep at least once" which doesn't make either me or the film look bad.

It's probably a lost cause. Yup, it's a classic. Indeed, it's one of Ebert's most favorite films. But Damn, was it boring. Like most Fellini films, "La Dolce Vita" isn't a linear drama. The basic thrust is that you're here to observe Marcello, a young-but-nearing-middle-age gossip reporter, during an extended period of his life when the stink of his immediate environment, filled with glamour and decadence and wealth and barely-masked insanity, is really starting to seep into his clothing.

Nothing wrong with a character study. Perish the thought. But consider that this movie takes three hours to unspool. Meanwhile, in "The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King," the exact same amount of time is spent showing thousands of men battling thousands of monsters, while Frodo finally makes it to Mount Doom and destroys the One True Ring, simultaneously vanquishing Pure Evil and laying the groundwork for the Age of Mankind to finally bloom. Plus there's a giant spider attack and there's kissin' and all kinds of other stuff going on! I feel confident in saying that Peter Jackson could have taught Fellini a thing or two about how to fill three hours' worth of screen time.

It's just very, very difficult to put on a successful three-hour character study. "I think the director forgot to have things happen," I thought, and when you're thinking of lines from "Mystery Science Theater 3000" during a film, you know you're not having a good time. You also get that feeling when you realize that you've just checked your watch for the nth time, and when you find yourself checking your watch and then checking the time on your cellphone (because you know it's synchronized to a network and thus more accurate) you know that this is one Enduring Classic that never quite figured out how to work the clutch on your personal Enthusiasm Generator.

Still, I stuck it out. I wanted to give the film a fair chance and I didn't feel like my opinions would be valid if I left before the end. And earlier in the day I'd told my friend Larry that we'd meet up afterward and go to the Monday night party together, so I was pretty well stuck.

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It's fun to watch other people exercise.

Monday, April 18 1:13 PM

Patriots Day here in New England means so many things to so many people. And by suppertime, many of us will even remember that this holiday marks the start of the American Revolution and the Battle of Lexington and Concord. We are, after all, a people for whom the grand tapestry of American history is something that's experienced in the streets and the buildings of daily life, not in a dusty volume. It's a shame that the rest of this country doesn't think enough of their motherland to spend thirty seconds a year watching an edited summary of a battle re-enactment on their local evening news.

On those odd few years when the Red Sox fail to win the World Series, Patriots Day is the region's tip-toppiest day for televised sports. You can definitely be forgiven for blowing off work to plop yourself in front of the tube all day. Pre-race coverage of the Boston Marathon begins at 9 AM and will continue live (on some channel or the other) until the men's and women's winners are duly laureled. Most area residents will be flipping between the Marathon and the traditional Red Sox home game (bottom of the second inning at the moment; Sox lead 1-0 against the Blue Jays, off of a Kevin Millar RBI single).

When some folks complain about media consolidation, they ought to cite days like this one; programs of local interest are all too rare in these days of ClearChannel and EvilCorporateLizardScumBastard International MediaCorp. And New England is home to one of the few remaining members of the species: "Chronicle," a nightly half-hour newsmagazine of locally-produced stories. These types of programs once blackened the landscape in deafening herds, but just try to track one down today. Norway rats and feral cats were introduced to the animal's native breeding and feeding grounds in the form of national syndicated shows like "Wheel Of Fortune" and the various mutant drop of "Entertainment Tonight." Which is fantastic news for anybody whose life is directly impacted by the news that Paris Hilton may or may not be getting a new co-star in the next season of "The Simple Life," but it's terrible for those of us who are at all curious about what's going on in our actual communities. Today, the Lexington re-enactment gets thirty seconds during the local news. Back In The Day(tm), a local morning show would be absolutely delighted to find themselves with such a cheap, cool, and easy way to fill a half an hour of airtime.

Yes, yes..."tell us more about the War, Grampa!" Thank you. That's very kind. Nice.

Haw! Sox now lead 5-1 after an inning of solid, consistent hitting and baserunning. I've been "watching" it here in the office through the magic of MLB GameDay. I might have to pack up for the big commute to the TV downstairs so I can watch it on cable.

Before I go, however, I will recommend that you swing on over to my Flickr photoblog sometime. I went to the MIT Flea Market yesterday, and an album of Adventure is now available for your perusal.

I've been coming to the Flea (technically known as the Swapfest) for more than ten years but I haven't been to one in almost a year and a half. It seems like I was out of down on every Third Sunday Of The Month in 2004, so really, nothing was going to prevent me from attending the first one of 2005. It was like getting ready for the first day of school, back when I was young and naive and unaware that formal education was just a way of keeping the sheep from breaking away from the herd, of course. I was so excited that I set two alarm clocks. I woke up before the first one went off and was giddily on the road by 7 AM.

It had indeed been awhile since my last Flea, so I was pretty surprised when I arrived at the corner of Portland and Main Street in Cambridge and saw how much things had changed.

The MIT campus has been undergoing a big development boom recently. The Flea has traditionally occupied a five-story parking garage and two lots on either side but now there's a new, nearly-complete building on what was the event's main outdoor lot. The whole Flea has been forced to scoot over to compensate. I can't say that it made much of a difference, except of course for the initial blow to my precious sang froid.

It really was a perfect day. The weather was almost aggressively nice, with the sun, the earth, and the atmosphere serving up a cackling "screw you" to anybody who was forced to spend the day inside. I always come to the Flea hoping to find (1) basic maintenance supplies and consumables for the office (yes, a multiranging frequency counter is, too a basic office supply. Shut up!); (2) cool stuff which I absolutely don't need, but which is far too cool and too cheap to just leave behind on the table; (3) cool stuff that I absolutely positively cannot buy (because it's either too expensive or too ungodly useless and impractical even for me) but which fill me with several minutes of Happy Thoughts just to learn that such an item exists and is for sale somewhere; and finally (4) an unplanned encounter with at least one friend who has no lunch plans. Done, Done, Done...and Done.

And there's also the intensely pleasurable experience of observing — and becoming a part of — a massive conclave of geeks, freaks, nerds, dweebs, gomers, anoraks, and poindexters. When the Postal Service finally chooses to honor us with a commemorative stamp, and it's decided that as a still-living person they can't use a portrait of Eddie Deezen, their artist will bring his or her sketchbook and pencils to the MIT Flea for inspiration.

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Chuck, Lucy, and now Pig-Pen

Tuesday, April 19 12:18 PM

It's not easy being a mindless malleable weak-willed consumer; you have to be ready to go on a moment's notice, just like a firefighter. When you're reading someone's blog and they mention that a new volume of "The Complete Peanuts" is now on store shelves, you need to grab the wallet and the iPod, leap straight to the Bat-Poles, and roar off towards the mall without pausing to ask yourself if you're wearing shoes or if that kid playing in the street near your driveway managed to dive off of his Big Wheel in time.

The Lord (or possibly the Scottish holding company that operates a local mall) gave me exactly such a test last night, and I'm relieved to report that my Ninja-like skills haven't atrophied: enormous retailers can still count on Andy Ihnatko to do what he's told. In fact, I went above and beyond the call of duty: Barnes & Noble had the new issues of both "American Heritage of Invention & Technology" and "Smithsonian Air & Space." Sweeeeeet.

And then I swung by Toys 'R' Us to pick up a new Big Wheel for the kid. I checked the front grille of my car and was relieved to discover bits of brightly-colored plastic but no bits of fabric or hair. So I knew that (a) there was no need to go on the lam, and (b) things will be a lot less tense at the next neighborhood block party if I do the right thing as soon as I return home.

Of course, rushing right out to buy the latest "Complete Peanuts" didn't make me feel like a mindless consumer. No, it made me feel like a man of good taste. Every single one of Charles Schulz' strips is being reprinted in sequence, starting from Strip One, with zero omissions; this is the third book in the series, covering 1955-1956. And what a tremendous gift to the public this series is. "Peanuts" was a remarkable achievement no matter what standard you apply. Artistically, creatively, commercially, in terms of both its impact on contemporary and future artists and its impact on Society as a whole...clearly, "Peanuts" was the Beatles of newspaper strips. And if I can somehow manage to keep body and soul together for the next sixteen years or so, I'll finally get to read all of 'em.

Isn't it remarkable that Schulz's work is still generating so much excitement and pleasure? Fifty years after these strips were first published, they're so loved and respected that the appearance of a book of reprints can cause people to drop what they're doing and rush out to buy it before the store closes.

I sure don't operate on a playing field where the word "legacy" ever enters my mind — if my ego were that big, it would have to pay quarterly taxes — but as with most every other tidbit of Schulz' life and work, inspires me to keep working, working, working. If I could attain just a fraction of Schulz' commitment and inspiration, I'd have good cause for jubulation.

Of course, if I ever attained just fraction of Schulz' wealth, then I'd probably never work another day in my life. Which, sadly, is only one of the many differences between my work ethic and Schulz's.

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24-Hour Arty People

Wednesday, April 20 11:18 PM

I'm betting that some of you are aware of an annual event — more of a challenge, really — established by artist Scott McCloud. The Event takes place this Saturday and God help me but I think I'm going to participate.

In some fashion.

Probably.

I'm still wondering if I ought to wuss out, actually, so I won't describe the nature of the challenge. But suffice to say that it's the creative form of bungee-jumping. It's risky. Dangerous. When you fail, you think "Jesus. Why did I think this was going to work?" But when you succeed...man, what a rush.

I imagine. I don't know. Ask me again on Sunday morning, when I might actually know what I'm talking about.

I ran a half-marathon a few years ago and at the moment, I'm going through many of the same feelings that I experienced in the days before The Big Day. I knew that I wouldn't do a particularly good job of it and I was fairly confident that the experience itself would be pretty awful...but what hauled my butt out of bed at 5 AM and deposited me at a starting line at 8 was the knowledge that in life, there are certain incredibly valuable things which you can only learn through acts of heroic stupidity.

If I do indeed jump off that bridge with a big rubber band clipped into my ankles, you'll see it happen right here.

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I might as well exercise...I'm in a bad mood, anyway.

Thursday, April 21 10:17 PM

The weather here in Boston has finally stopped goofing around and has committed itself to pleasant, springtime climes. Which means that it's time for me to resume taking my regular Constitutionals.

I slacked off mightily over the autumn and winter. On those rare occasions when I made it to the gym at all, it was chiefly to avail myself of the steam room and the carwash-grade water pressure of the showers. Which over the course of the past five months has done wonders for my pores but not much for my resting heart rate, or my chances of beating John Candy's record for Greatest Number Of Consecutive Years Spent Without Dropping Dead From A Massive Coronary.

So the last of the snow has finally been boxed up and shipped off to the needy, and with it went my last excuses for not exercising. Which is not to say that I actually started, of course. I'm a creative professional. Coming up with new, weather-unrelated excuses is something I can background-task while I heat up a bowl of microwave chili.

Mostly, I've been dabbling with the theme of Equipment, which is pretty ironic when you think about it. The whole reason why I chose Constitutionals as my preferred mode of exercise was because walking -- unlike scuba-diving or leading the Ottoman armies to glory -- requires no training or special equipment. There's nothing to buy and nothing to maintain. So long as you're lucky enough to live in a part of the country where there's an Outside within an easy commute of your TV, you're good. Step One, take step one. Step Two, repeat Step One. Congratulations...you're exercising.

But honestly, does any man — and in particular, any male geek — engage in an activity for the sake of the activity itself? No, of course not: it's all about the accessories:

I can't take my Constitutionals because the battery in my watch is dead. I've tried walking without my heartrate monitor and it's just no fun. I strap the sensors across my chest (happily, the strap also Lifts and Separates, making me look ten years younger) and the watch does all the thinking for me. If my heartrate's below 130, there's no point to my being out there and I should either pick up the pace or duck into a restaurant and ask for a lunch menu. If it's far above 160, I cut myself a little slack because in my case, that number marks the border between making it home tired but satisfied, and getting there in the back of a cab. And if the readout is zero, then I can put those final 14 seconds of consciousness to good use by deciding what I'm going to say to Jesus and Mark Twain when I meet them at the big welcome-home party later in the day.

An Eveready 2032 was located, purchased, and installed. Onward to

I can't take my Constitutionals because I need to fix my Hydration System. I've read a lot about proper exercise techniques and everyone seems to agree that getting thirsty is the mark of a true dope. You're supposed to keep drinking, drinking, drinking as you go, and the importance of this concept was buttressed by lots of charts and graphs and tables which I sort of hopscotched over by agreeing to throw money at the problem. The CamelBak M.U.L.E. is a small backpack that keeps up to three liters of water as closeby as a plastic tube that dangles off a shoulder strap. I pulled mine out of winter storage and was instantly reminded that (a) you're meant to wash its water reservoir out with bleach before putting it away for the season, and (b) bacteriae and fungi thrive in moist, dark environments.

A new 3-liter Nalgene TPE Bladder was purchased, rinsed with hot water, and installed.

I can't find the thingamabob for my iPod. You know. The little wired remote. Because, you know, God forbid I spend two minutes and thirteen seconds listening to a song I don't like. Since the day I ripped my very first CD, I've worked very, very hard to keep narrowing my attention span. I refuse to see all that progress undone for want of a handy "Next Track" button.

The remote for my iPod Photo was located after much rummaging. Which brought up a similar issue, viz

I don't have the right kind of earphones. My usual phones are silicone earplug-style Shures. Trotting along Route 1 in a disoriented state while wearing earplugs that shut out all sounds of oncoming traffic would seem to work contrary to the Constitutional's stated goal of extending my life.

Walkman-style headphones (easy to flick on and off as I cross streets, or strain to eavesdrop on a domestic dispute that's wafting out through an open window) were located and purchased; I bought the cheapest pair from the best manufacturer, with is usually a winning algorithm.

I don't own a copy of "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough," recorded by Cyndi Lauper.

The song was purchased through the iTunes Music store.

Even I knew that I was just making crap up at this point, so I had my first official Constitutional this afternoon. It went swell, particularly after I finally stopped stabbing the "Next Track" button, unholstered my iPod, and manually put it into Shuffle mode. It had been obediently working its way through its list of Artists. "Yankovic, Al" was tolerable, but he quickly gave way to my collection of Yevgeny Kissin CDs.

Kissin is one hell of a pianist but if he's ever going to inspire me to keep my legs pumping it'll be by chasing after me with a big knife, not through his recording of Schumann's "Kreisleriana" sonata.

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Friday Hustle

Saturday, April 23 2:38 AM

Boy, what a treacherous, Tiger-filled evening this was. In the ninety minutes immediately following dinner, I wrote a little item for Macworld's big Tiger issue, filled out my scorecard on Tiger's new features, finished my formal Tiger review for the Sun-Times (I solved a two-day-old problem by giving up, filing my last draft as-is, and telling my editor that I just plain need some extra space for this one), and granted an immediate interview to the San Jose Mercury-News on a story, not unrelated to Tiger, which will break tomorrow. Both the reporter and I needed to file stories at the top of the hour, so the interview was uniquely direct and productive.

Minutes after the interview ended, I filed my column, the scorecard, and my Macworld piece, and then I grabbed some pages out of the printer and trotted out the door along Kinkos general vector. For me to receive a certain piece of software on Monday, I needed to fax in a signed NDA today. As a card-carrying member of the Push-Button World of Tomorrow, I haven't had a functioning fax machine in my office in years. It's just too (ugh) analog.

As I rinsed my dinner dish and put it in the dishwasher earlier in the evening, I thought I had a pretty casual evening ahead of me but phone calls and emails quickly tipped everything sideways on me. That tears it: from now on, I communicate with no one. My day always goes more smoothly when I remove the Humans from the equation.

Which is not to say that there's no upside to having them around. If I didn't answer the phone, that software wouldn't be arriving on Monday. If I didn't file that Macworld stuff, I probably wouldn't get paid for it...and that cash will be bankrolling my trip to the San Diego Comic-Con this summer. Still, I'd never keep them as pets. Too much trouble.

Speaking of pesky humans, I had another one of those baffling panhandling experiences tonight. While I was in Kinkos signing my NDAs, I was approached by a moderately well-dressed guy who spilled some sort of epic tale that I didn't fully understand. The first bits of it were sort of drowned out by my own inner voice saying "Who the hell is this, why is he speaking to me right now, and am I meant to sign my name here or just print it?" But I pieced together some sort of story about being stranded and needing seven bucks for gas, and all things considered it was worth giving him a buck and a half in pocket change. After all, there have been many times in my life when I wished I could have ended an awkward social situation by just paying the other person to go away. At the last family wedding I attended I think I actually offered to pay some third-cousin's fiancee $20 to shut up about the damned 2000 election, already. If he'd taken it, I wouldn't have had to fake that siezure.

I had a similar encounter during my last trip to London, come to think of it. I was waiting for an Underground train when I was approached by a well-dressed businessman who claimed to need twenty pounds to get to the airport. He seemed embarrassed and insisted that he show me his airline tickets.

I gave him a couple of coins (two pounds, I think), and here's why: either the guy was legitimately in an awkward and embarrassing situation, in which case helping him out a little was the right thing to do, or else this was all a con...but a good one, a well-rehearsed and well-costumed one, and thus one that was worth two pounds just as a theatrical experience.

You'll note, though, that in neither case did I unholster my wallet. If this turned out to be a panhandling ruse, I was cool with losing a buck and a half. But if it turned out to be a robbery ruse, I wasn't at all okay with him snatching my wallet from my hands and running off, or taking note of the $11 in cash I carried therein and resolving to jump me in the parking lot. I worked hard for that money, after all.

Well, not really. But there's still a principle at stake.

On my way home, I was slightly delighted to discover that the local art theater had re-acquired "Million-Dollar Baby" for one final, limited run. The ten-minute drive thus stretched to about two and a half hours.

I most certainly did not cry at that bit near the end when [spoiler] has to [spoiler], and [spoiler] [spoiler]s that [spoiler]. Anyone who says otherwise is a damned liar.

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) PREAMBLE

Saturday, April 23 11:57 AM

The challenge of 24-Hour Comics Day is simple: in one unbroken, 24-hour period beginning on April 23 and ending on April 24, create a complete, 24-page comic book from start to finish. Story, words, pictures...everything.

The Rules:

1) No help. This is supposed to be a solo effort; you can't be writing the last half of the book while a pal is drawing the first half.

2) No preparation. You can't line up an outline of what you want to write or thumbnail sketches of what you want to draw ahead of time. You can't line up all of your research and visual reference. You can't even come to the table with a basic idea already in your head. You're supposed to sit down, be inspired by a dent in the doorknob to your bedroom, and run along from there.

3) The clock STOPS at 24 hours and zero minutes. It's not a true 24-hour comic unless it's done in 24 hours or less. If this means that the last three pages are stick figures with hastily-scrawned captions...so be it.

4) It doesn't count unless you publish your work, ideally by submitting it to the 24HC website.

This is, indeed that intellectual and creative bungee jump, that Act of Heroic Stupidity that I referred to a few days ago. It's insane. It's silly. How can anybody create anything of any quality in 24 hours? And yet today, hundreds of people will try to do exactly that, and many of them will succeed, handsomely. On the 24-Hour Comics Day site, you'll find books filled with the fruits of past 24-Hour Comics Days and a Google of the phrase will turn up a few comics that have been posted online.

Yes, many of them read like the sort of term paper that's written in the study hall between phys. ed and Western Civ. But just as many are just plain amazing...they're testaments to the baffling and thrilling mytery of the creative process, and to the ancient advice that if you want to create, the key is to just sit down and do it.

I've admired the concept ever since I heard of it and on every 24-Hour Comics I've been peering through the chain-link fence. Those kids seemed to be having so much fun kicking that ball around. But then I would adjust the ribbon on my Little Lord Fauntleroy hat and continue walking to my violin lesson.

Not this year. I am going to close my eyes, commend my soul to God, and do it this year.

Naturally, I am making a couple of adjustments to the Rules. So behold! 24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition):

Wimpout 1: I will be creating a 24-hour audiobook, not a comic.

Yes, I draw, but I haven't drawn 24 pages of artwork in the past 24 months, let alone hours, and I've never drawn sequential art. Secondly, I'm really quite bad at it. If "American Idol" has taught us anything, it's that there's a vast and highly-amusing gulf between Something That An Amateur Does For Fun and Something That A Professional Does For An Audience. My artwork is, indeed, very Eliminated At The Baton Rouge Auditions-like.

So instead, I'll do what I'm (supposedly) good at: writing. Okay, Andy...but why not make this "24-Hour Novel Day"? Because one of the most important rules of 24CD is to publish the results at the end of 24 hours. I swear, I was gonna do 24-Hour Novel Day (actually, 24-Hour Novella day). But the idea of "publishing" a first-draft, stream-of-consciousness story without any time to rewrite, revise, or edit really skeeved me out.

The solution, then, is to end the day by sitting in front of a microphone and reading the story. It works for me because I don't think of myself as an audio performer. So if this audiobook sucks...well, okay, then. I'm still free to rewrite and revise the story later on.

It's a subtle and weird distinction, but there it is.

However, this doesn't let me off the hook: 24 hours after I start the clock, there has to be an MP3 of the audiobook here on my blog, ready for download. Naturally, it'll also be up on my podcast.

Wimpout 2: I will actually be coming to the table with a preconceived idea.

In fact, I'll be writing a story that I began a few years ago as a serial on this very site. But I'm willing to give myself a mulligan on this one because the only thing I'm taking with me is the basic concept, not the story. IE, "A sci-fi adventure film that's inspired by the straighforward and satisfying storytelling of the movie serials of the Thirties," not "Luke Skywalker is a farmboy whose life and dreams are stuck on a desert planet. Little does he know that he's about to be thrust into a larger world of action and adventure, as an escape pod loaded with two droids has crash-landed just outside of town, hotly pursuited by the elite troops of the darkest and most powerful force in the Galaxy."

I'm labelling this as a Wimpout, even though I don't think my sitting down with a vague idea of the story's setting and tone is really counter to the spirit of the Challenge. To be honest, I don't even know how strict adherance to the "no preparation" rule is even possible. All jokes about Divine Ethernet aside, creativity isn't something that you turn on and off. Ideas come. Smart people write them down before they're forgotten.

The story I'm about to write is actually the second one I came up with. If I first decided to do 24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) at 12:00 PM last Monday, I had a story idea by 12:05. By that evening, I knew the story's beginning, middle and end, and had begun to fill a notebook with ideas for characters and scenes.

With all of that work already in the can, writing my original idea would be a cheat, not a Wimpout...so in fairness, I've made a substitution. I don't see how anybody can truly start 24-Hour Comics Day with a true clean sheet of paper unless they determine beforehand that they're going to pick up the morning paper, pluck a phrase from the front page, and go on from there.

Wimpout Three: Length of the finished work is to be determined.

It's hard to know how I could even declare a target length for an audiobook. With a 24-Hour Comic you just key in the number of pages you've completed, hit the "Enter" key on your calculator, hit "+/-", key in "24", hit "+", and you know how many pages are left to go.

(I use an HP calculator that uses stack-oriented reverse-polish notation).

Back when I was considering a 24-Hour Novella, I thought the target would be 24 single-spaced pages, or (minimum) 24 pages of single-spaced text sized to fit on standard printed comic pages. But I've no idea how typewritten pages will translate to recorded audio.

Let's just say, then, that the audiobook has to be at least 24 minutes long, with at least 15 minutes of it backed by a manuscript, not stream-of-microphone-consciousness filler.

Even with the Wimpouts in place, this will be tremendously challenging and I can hardly wait to start. Usually, it takes me two months to write a novella. And the time isn't the biggest handicap: that two months boils down to maybe five full workdays. Every time I get stuck, I put it aside for a few days or even a few weeks, and then I return to the story with fresh eyes (and perhaps not quite such a firm conviction that I Suck).

I'll come back to my original statement that 24-Hour Comics Day (even 24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition)) is like a creative bungee-jump. You either succeed dramatically or you fail dramatically. The only guarantee is that it'll be a true Experience for the participant, and highly amusing for other people to watch.

Okay...I've written 1600 words talking about 24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition). Does this count against my total?

The clock starts at 12 noon. At 12 noon on Sunday, come back here and download the audiobook. I'll be blogging sporadically (but inconsistently) as I work.

Annnnd...GO!

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) HOUR ONE UPDATE

Saturday, April 23 1:38 PM

1100 words down, twenty-two hours and thirty-one minutes to go. The opening bit:

In retrospect, it was fairly odd that the FedEx box that my personal assistant brought into the room on that Thursday morning wasn't packed in dry ice. It turned out to contain both the seeds of bitter resentment and the fuel of what could potentially become a decades-long animosity and both of those commodities tend to spoil without constant refrigeration.

There are many reasons why I retain a personal assistant, and this is one of the most important: I have moved mountains to engineer a lifestyle in which nobody expects much out of me before the hour of 11 AM. In some instances, this can be achieved through stunning fits of brilliance that explode from your general vicinity only very late at night. With other people, spectacular and highly-public incompetence early in the morning is the way to go. It's a balancing act that requires continuous adjustments, but the point is that it can be done.

Forgot to buy soda this morning. I have half a thing of milk in the fridge and all the tap water I can drink but I'm not confident that these supplies are enough to see me through my upcoming labors. Damn and blast.

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) HOUR FOUR UPDATE

Saturday, April 23 3:27 PM

2700 words down,twenty hours and forty-five minutes to go. The most recent couple of paragraphs:

And here you know everything you need to know about my friend Arlene. Well nearly, except for three things: One, that we used to date in college; two, that it didn't work out, partly because she moved to North Carolina to get her doctorate in fine arts, but mostly because she turned out to be not nearly as heterosexual as she had led me or herself to believe; and third...actually, I suppose there's no need for a separate Item Three. Once you've parsed the whole lesbian thing, you've got the complete picture.

I held the door open - gay, straight, bi, lesbian, transgender...good manners are nature, not nurture - and led the couple into my sitting room. Arlene looked just as I remembered her from about eleven days ago.

Things are going swell, except for one bit where the line "SCENE TO COME LATER" appears in the place of something important that I haven't figured out yet. But I was so profoundly stuck on how to introduce an important prop that the only solution was to flee the scene of the literary crime.

I notice that Arlene now seems to have a doctorate in fine arts. I was pretty sure that earlier on, I mentioned that she was a librarian. Um...okay, then.

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) HOUR SEVEN UPDATE

Saturday, April 23 7:39 PM

6322 words down, sixteen hours and thirty minutes to go. The most recent couple of paragraphs:

"There is great truth to what you say, sir."

"Regrettable, but what can you do?"

"Shrewdly-put, sir."

Throughout this exchange, Arlene and the little woman were conferring. Beth was as angry and as outspoken as I'd ever witnessed her in the previous thirty minutes in which I'd known her, which is to say that I was able to sense her emotions without the aid of some sort of telepathic helmet device seen only in X-Men comics or perhaps the Hammlecher-Schlemmer holiday catalogue.

I'm starting to get a little worried about the Audiobook aspect. I've been reading some of this story aloud, and there are plenty of sentences that read like a charm but which turn into barbed wire when spoken aloud.

Out to stretch my legs. I was prepared to stay up for 24 hour straight but I'm making steady progress and I now know exactly where the story is going and how it ends. So with luck, I'll finish writing it tonight and then edit and record it tomorrow morning before my noon deadline.

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) HOUR ELEVEN UPDATE

Saturday, April 23 11:30 PM

10,117 words down, with just under thirteen hours left to go. I'm writing the final scene right now and the two main characters are wrapping things up. It's astonishing that this story actually has a beginning, a middle and an end. I suppose there's something to that Million Monkeys/Million Typewriters thing after all.

No excerpt this time. I've just scrolled through the last few pages and I can't find a couple of paragraphs that won't give the ending away.

Oh, well, just to be consistent, feast your eyes:

I am about to write something unbelievably and perhaps unforgivably sexist, but say it I must:...

...It seems as though Beth found herself...

...And he came to realize that if there's one...

I think I'll reach The End on this in about an hour or two, and the manuscript will weigh in at 12,000 words. Then comes the scary part: I'll have to actually read the mother. Obviously I won't have time to actually write a second draft. It'll probably be like what an unscrupulous used-car dealer does to prepare a vehicle for sale. Paint the tires black, dump a boatload of additives into the gas tank, raise the gas pedals a little...lots of cheap, quick fixes. At the end it'll be a terrific simulation of an actual, functional product.

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) HOUR FIFTEEN UPDATE

Sunday, April 24 3:25 AM

Finished the manuscript, which now weighs in at just under 13,000 words. Eight hours and fifty minutes left. I'm only just starting to read through it and make the necessary basic fixes. Damn and blast, there's a good bit at the beginning that relies on Arlene being a librarian, but there's also a good bit at the end where she really needs to be an artist. Is there any way in hell that I can make her a librarian who paints on the side?

I also need to find a simple way to establish some history between two characters. The whole second half of the story relies on it. I didn't know that at the beginning, of course. If I'm lucky, I can accomplish this with a couple of lines of dialogue, but I don't have enough time to manufacture that kind of luck.

Lots of overly-talky bits, too...in its current state, this story definitely suffers from "first-draft syndrome." Which is why I normally let things cool down for a week or two after I finish a first draft. You're no longer proud about What A Clever Writer You Are and suddenly, all of these lines can either stand or fall on their own merits.

I'm hoping to finish spackling and caulking by 5 AM so I can get a few hours of sleep before I record. Then we proceed to the problem of recording fifty pages of manuscript and God knows how long that'll take.

Final line of the story:

He withdrew...suitably cowed, I thought.

Two emails have arrived from people who, solely after reading these little excerpts, have correctly guessed the sort of story I'm going for. I suppose the rest of you will know by noon.

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) HOUR 22 UPDATE

Sunday, April 24 10:02 AM

Two hours left. Had a good night's sleep, which is a bad thing because I meant to wake up earlier today. About two hours earlier. Damn and blast.

So I just need to record this story and get it up on my servers before noon. But I can't get my microphone working properly...I've only just now discovered that the little button-cell that powers it is dead. I can either (a) make a desperate dash to the drugstore and buy a fresh one, or (b) see if I can pull together an alternative. I know I have the gear here in the office, but whereas my wearable microphone and the USB audio adapter are always kept together in a box in a known location, the components that make up an Alternative Solution are scattered all over the place.

Damn (DAMN) and blast (BLAST!). This procedure has become needlessly exciting.

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) HOUR 24 UPDATE

Sunday, April 24 11:54 AM

Okay. At this point I should probably start putting myself in a frame of mind where I'm ready to accept that I'm not going to be able to assemble a functional recording studio and read fifty pages of manuscript within the next twenty minutes.

The drugstore didn't have the right battery, and regular stores won't be open until noon. Damn damn damn and blast, blast, blast. I should have checked my recording equipment before I started 24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition). Instead, I had faith in the system. That never works out.

The actual problem was that I've lent my usual microphone out to my sister. No problem, I thought, because I knew I had a second mic in my audio drawer...but because it's not The Usual Microphone I haven't used it in ages and I didn't even consider that it'd need a fresh battery.

Okay. Well, I could declare that the end-result is a novella and not an audiobook (at 14,000 words, it certainly qualifies)...but no. It still sort of creeps me out to shove out a first-draft manuscript in front of an innocent and trusting public. So I'll get my microphone up and running and record the audiobook as planned. By Noon, Pacific Time, let's say.

It's tempting to declare this a Four-Wimpout Edition of 24-Hour Comics Day, but remember that my declared goal was to deliver at least 15 minutes of written, prepared audio. This story could easily bring in triple that.

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) HOUR 28 UPDATE

Sunday, April 24 3:24 PM

I'm now three hours past my 24-hour deadline for 24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition), and eight minutes past the three-hour extension that I gave myself.

So okay. This is somewhat less than a complete success, deadline-wise. Blame my hardware troubles, please.

You can also blame the fact that I had no idea how printed pages would translate into spoken words. I have now recorded a little less than half of the manuscript...and SoundStudio reports that the file-in-progress contains more than forty minutes of audio.

So before you start to punk me out, reflect on the fact that at the end of all this I've written, recorded, and given away a ninety-minute audiobook.

The recording is going well. There's plenty of stumbles in the thing, but they're quick and rare. Besides, my goal is to get this thing done, not to create something slick enough to sell on Audible.com.

Besides, I'm concentrating more on having fun. There are four voices in it and it's proving a neat trick of agility to shift from line to line. The next scene to be recorded is the one where three different people speak at once. Including a woman. I might need to swallow an ice pack or something before all this is done.

Okay. So: the new goal is to have it finished and uploaded here by noon Alaskan time.

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24-Hour Comics Day (Special Triple-Wimpout Edition) HOUR 30 UPDATE

Sunday, April 24 6:13 PM

It won't be long now...I've finished recording the audiobook, and I finished recording an intro, and I finished recording an "easter egg" for the very, very end. The entire package clocks in at one hour and twenty-four minutes. Or: a full hour over my minimum target length!

Or: six full hours over my target deadline. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

iTunes is converting the file to an MP3 as we speak.

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24-Hour Audiobook FINISHED (link)

Sunday, April 24 7:40 PM

Finished.

For your audio pleasure:

JEEVES AND THE OBJECT CLASS
A 24-hour audiobook by Andy Ihnatko
With characters created by P.G. Wodehouse.

1 hour and 24 minutes, 20.1 megabytes [Download]

And now I'm off to get my first meal of the day!

UPDATE: At the request of...well, let's just say A Lot Of People, I've replaced the original 40-megabyte audio file with one half its size. I knew that the first one I posted was gi-normous but honestly...after working on this for more than 24 hours straight, I was eager to finally say "It's done and it's on the server."

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No, I can't talk about it. Really. No. No!

Thursday, April 28 11:36 PM

OK. My desktop Mac died yesterday. Unfortunately, was the most anti-social form of dead, the sort in which the patient refuses to acknowledge the awesomely complex sequence of events that have successfully been completed in the interests of delivering 110 volts of alternating current to that little socket at the back of its case.

Which in my opinion is the very height of arrogance. You know what Step One of this process was? Step One was to wait a million years for moss to fossilize into coal, that's what it was. There's a simpler Step One, but it involves releasing the fundamental cosmic forces bound inside the very building blocks of matter itself, a process which, if not done with the utmost of care, unleashes demons that will render the landscape uninhabitable for generations to come.

And again, that's just Step One. A hell of a lot of effort went into delivering electrons to the business and of that power cord. And yet this Macintosh couldn't be bothered to move them the final eight inches from the end of the power cord to the CPU. It just frosts me, that's all. It's prima-donna behavior. No, don't make excuses for it.

So I disconnected everything and plopped it on the workbench. A solid ten minutes of work with an airgun and a brush revealed that there were actual circuits under that mummy-like blanket of gray, which was good news. But twenty minutes of further work with a multitester and a probe failed to reveal any power getting to the logic board, which was bad news. I could have sworn that there was a Magical Power Manager Reset Button on the logic board but I couldn't find it straight away and I couldn't find a tech note for it on Apple's support site.

Off to the Apple Store I went. I'd been looking for an excuse to go to the Chestnut Hill store, anyway. Just a week ago I heard that a pal of mine had started working there, and I've needed a new power brick for my PowerBook ever since my original one got fried in Colorado.

I am happy to say that the Genius Bar people treat all customers as equals. They don't play favorites. Despite my fabulousness, I waited 45 minutes for my turn at the Bar. This is only fair and I'm pleased that they didn't leapfrog me ahead of people who'd probably already been waiting there for an hour.

When I got to the head of the line the guy dropped the side panel, pressed the Magical Power Manager Reset Button, and that was that.

All right, then.

In my defense, all week long my poor head's been filled with bees. I've had to spend most of my time preparing last-minute Tiger coverage, and every ten or twenty minutes someone calls or iChats me regarding all of Wiley Publishing's books (including all of mine, and including my upcoming Tiger book) getting banninated from the Apple Stores.

It occurs to me that this is probably the last time I will write something and have to pretend that I know nothing about the CMPOS. I shall miss this regular, offhanded deception. Most mornings I'd read the obituary page and laugh. Twenty, thirty, sometimes forty poor bastards who went to their grave knowing nothing about [CENSORED] or [REDACTED], or how easy it is to [CENSORED] with [CENSORED], thanks to [CENSORED].

Oh, I could have done something to help them avoid that fate. But did I? No. It's also possible that I willingly concealed information that might indeed have saved their pitiful lives. Would that dude in Leominster have been stabbed to death with a rake if he'd been inside, fascinated by the process of creating [CENSORED]s with [CENSORED]'s new [CENSORED] infrastructure? Well, sure, if the neighbor had followed him inside. I imagine that whatever he said to the guy that got him so pissed off that he went and stuck a rake inside him must have been pretty hot stuff.

I've just realized that it's not the deception that I'm going to miss. It's the power to arbitrarily and carelessly control the lives of people I've never met and never will. Perhaps I should join a few school boards, just to keep those skills alive.

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