Gregory answered the five questions I asked him. Anyone else up for a go? Let me know, or if you know Gregory better, ask him! It would be pretty cool to see this thing propagate around Blogistan.

Greg also mentions the film Road to Perdition. Here’s a film on which I apparently beat him to the punch, quite a while ago. Ha!

(BTW, Greg, is something wrong with your comments, or is it just my computer? I occasionally try to leave a comment, but when I click “post” it simply reverts to the zero-comments window.)

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Lately I seem to be more of a “linker” than a “writer”, as far as Byzantium’s Shores is concerned. Maybe it’s the stunningly gorgeous summer we’re finally having in Buffalo, after we got that three-week “rain every day” stretch a while ago, and maybe I really do need the hiatus that I’m scheduling for next week. It’s not so much that I lack for ideas on things to drone on about; it’s more a “motivation” thing to sit down and crank out more of the essay-style stuff that’s the meat-and-potatoes of blogging. I actually have plenty of ideas on stuff to write about. Who knows…but substance will return here. Oh yes.

(And it’s not a motivation problem as far as writing-in-general goes, because I’m motivated as hell to do my fiction stuff; I just wrote two reviews for GMR; and I have a pro bono copywriting assignment that I’m excited as hell about. It’s pretty much limited to doing essays for the blog, which seems to me a big indicator that I should take a fallow period.)

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Sometime today I will hit 19,000 hits. Woo-hoo!

In related news, Glenn Reynolds just absently waved a hand by his ear, thinking he’d heard a gnat buzzing by.

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The movie of the week here is The Wizard of Oz, which has never been as high in my estimation as in a lot of other people’s, but I do appreciate it. There’s a lot of good stuff there, and I even noticed something last night that I hadn’t seen before. There’s one scene where I swear a guy commits suicide….

But seriously, in the early scene where Dorothy meets the magician-psychic guy, he is shown clearly rifling through Dorothy’s belongings to glean little bits of information about her, so he can then repeat them back to her and look as if he’s an actual mind-reader. It’s too bad more people don’t catch on to this and realize that this is what all so-called psychics do. Especially that creep on Crossing Over, who I think really needs to be taken off and devoured by those shadow-beasties from Ghost.

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Just a heads-up to my regular readers: I’ll be taking a four-day hiatus early in September, most likely between the 4 th and the 7 th. (That covers the Thursday through Sunday of Labor Day weekend.) This will simply be one of my occasional “recharging of the batteries” breaks in posting, the periodic enjoyment of which keeps my stuff here from becoming banal and repetitious. (Shut up, you. Mr. Poo, indeed.)

ADDENDUM: That’s what I get for not reading the calendar that actually identifies the holidays; Labor Day Weekend is actually next weekend, with Labor Day falling right on the 1st. I sort of thought that Labor Day worked the same way that Election Day works (i.e., it can’t fall on the 1st), so clearly I was in a bit of error there. Whoops. Thus, I shall actually move my mini-hiatus up one week, to August 28 through the 31st. I thought about keeping the dates the same, but I wanted to do my hiatus during the actual holiday weekend since my traffic tends to nosedive on holiday weekends anyway.

I’ll tentatively plan my next hiatus, after that, for Christmas Day and the two days before it, December 20-22.

(blinks)

What now?

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Time for a writing update: I haven’t actually made my 1000 words-per-day target lately, but I did reach a natural finishing point for Chapter Three. Now I’m going to begin…chapter four. Yep, we’re livin’ on the edge, here. Hold on!

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In the “Not Quite as Good News as a Paying Gig, but Good News Nonetheless” Department, I met this morning with the bosses of a Buffalo arts institution about doing some copywriting for them, on a pro bono basis. If they like my work – – and why wouldn’t they, right? – – not only will it be valuable experience for me, but they’ve also agreed to help me out in marketing my services. This will be of enormous benefit, as I decided when I started doing this that I was going to avoid cold-calling like the plague.

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Mickey has been building his own computer for a while, and he seems to be almost done. It’s pretty nifty-looking, although I do wonder if he might need to put a sticker on the side of it so birds don’t think it’s empty air and smack into it.

Mickey also reports that The West Wing is coming to DVD in the US. This is, of course, a good thing.

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This is why swimming in the ocean with seals doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea.

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Gregg Easterbrook’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback column returned last week, and this week he’s got his AFC Preview up. I don’t know…I lost quite a bit of respect for Easterbrook back when he wrote his ludicrous attack on Senator Hillary Clinton, and well, I just don’t find as much fun in reading him since then. He seems to be shifting into a mode of “Look how smart I am”, which is weird considering how many details he gets, well, wrong.

Just focusing on his notes about the Buffalo Bills in today’s column (you have to scroll a bit), he makes an unbelievably dumb statement that makes me wonder if he’s watching football games on a black-and-white TV set from the 1950s or something:

“Not only did Buffalo toss out a good-looking uniform and bring in an ugly one, the Bills abandoned the colors of the American flag – not to put too fine a point on it, the single most successful color scheme in world history – for a look based on a color that appears to be Nineteenth Century Rusting Russian Dreadnaught Aft Bulkhead Cyanic.”

Now, reading this, one gets the impression that the Bills went from using red, white, and blue to something like, oh, orange and teal. I grant that the Bills’ new uniforms aren’t nearly as spiffy as the ones that saw them go to four consecutive Super Bowls, but geez, look at this pic of their new road uniform, and you can see other shots of the home uniforms here.

This is what Easterbrook considers “abandoning the colors of the American flag”? As TMQ might say, “Ye Gods….”

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