The Johnny Bacardi Show

Well. I've had the day off today, and did I use it to fill my little corner of the 'Net with bloggish goodness?

Uh, no.

Actually, I've been running around with Mrs. B, paying bills and stuff. We got our income tax refund today, and spent most of it shopping and paying off loans. Sigh.

But the day hasn't been a total loss. I got a mention in an article on the Comics Blogosphere (I suppose that it merits capital letters by now, doesn't it?) on the website Comixpedia! I feel like my existence is justified for another day at least, and I say that with tongue only slightly in cheek. A great honor, especially since I don't write exclusively about comics. Thanks, and hello if you're coming here from there. I guess I should crank up the comics writing a bit!

Which is a nice segue to the part where I tell you that the Bowie overview is almost finished, existing right now in that peculiar purgatory known as "draft". I still have to write capsules of 7 of the top ten, but the intro, first three capsules, the also-rans and the sumup is done, so it will be along shortly. Gee, I suppose I could have finished it in the time it's taken me to write this post...!

While I'm thinking about it, I watched an interesting film last night, after I was done re-watching the Beatles Anthology: The Gathering Storm, with Albert Finney giving an excellent performance as Winston Churchill in the days before WWII. Finney was mesmerizing, he was so good.

Saw the new Indigo Girls CD, with art by Jaime Hernandez, at Wal-Mart. Didn't buy, but I got to see the back cover, which features a sketchy-looking portrait of the Girls by our Xaime. Next time, though, I think he should perhaps ask for a photo reference or something because while it did depict two women, one a brunette and one a redhead, they looked absolutely nothing like the real-life Amy Ray and Emily Saliers. Disappointing.

I think I'm gonna do it. No, not go away forever, don't get your hopes up. I think I'm going to go see Elvis Costello tomorrow night, with Steve Nieve and the Brodsky Quartet. No, they'll be with Mr. McManus, not me. EC's gonna be at the Ryman Auditorium, and the seats are pretty good, and I have a few bucks in my pocket, so why the hell not! A million billion thanks to Rockin' Rhonda of Very Black for making it possible. I'm gonna have to haul ass down to Nashville after I get off at 5- the show starts at 7:30 and it takes a little over hour to get down there, driving at legal speeds, that is...

But what about comics, you ask? I'm thinking about devoting a paragraph or three to an obscure, mostly overlooked DC comic from the early 90s, which I completely missed out on when it was being published. More I will not say for now, but I'll give a hint: it was a nine-issue limited series, and was promoted with a tagline that read "Tomorrow's Heroes- Today!"...which totally missed the point of the entire series! This series and the promotion of same was not a high point in the annals of the DC promotional department, whose lunkheaded treatment virtually guaranteed its failure. Stay tuned to find out what it is!

I'd love to write about the Andrew Helfer/Kyle Baker Shadow series, which I think was a masterpiece of black comedy and one of the best things ever published under the aegis of National Periodical Publications...but I just don't know if I can do it justice. We'll see. Another subject I'm not feeling worthy of is Elaine Lee & Mike Kaluta's Starstruck- a wonderfully complex and often downright funny SF...well, not a spoof, as such, but more of a lighthearted adventure story. I had toyed with the idea of doing a website, like my Thriller site, devoted to its whimsical complexities and highly detailed universe, but I just haven't been able to find the energy. Ya never know. I really need to redo the Thriller website too, since I lost all the original working files when I wiped my hard drive back in May, leaving me unable to update the site, and I've got a ton fo stuff from Trevor Von Eeden I'd love to add. Yes, I thought I'd backed up my files before I wiped my drive...but my CD burner malfunctioned, unbeknownst to me, and the disk I thought full of precious files was a dud. I took that burner back and got a new one, but it was too late, I had foolishly wiped the hard drive before I checked the disk. If you were wondering.

I'm still toying with the notion of sitting down and making a list of my all-time favorite comics series, from the 60's to today, and perhaps devoting a couple of paragraphs to each, an issue per day. I'm trying to decide whether I should divide this list into decades, or alphabetically, or whether to make the list 25 titles, or ten, or 50, or...well, you get the idea. Another notion that's been rattling around, BB-like, in my skull is to try and organize a sketchblog of some sort. I'd like it to be a group blog, showcasing stuff by my friends as well as myself like the always entertaining Pants Press Sketchblog- but unfortunately I just don't have that many candidates. Oh, I know some excellent artists, but they're either not on the web in any significant measure, and live too far for me to ask them personally, or are on the web and just don't blog or do anything much but email, or this or that. I look at this as perhaps a way to try and resuscitate the shriveled up corpse of my own artistic urges, but perhaps that's one zombie best left unawakened...

Oh, and Sean T.- I've taken the first step in cutting down on the load-time for dial-up modem readers by deleting image files in my blogroll space at right. For some reason, this template design loads the sidebar first, and yours was not the first complaint about this I've received. I wish I had the money to pay for site hosting somewhere and create a brand new blog page, independent of Blogger, but I don't. Hope it helps. I'd been feeling like my blog was beginning to resemble Homer Simpson's anyway. Gone is the Free Beer! Party button, since I withdrew from the race, and the valentine bikini girl, whose arms were getting tired anyway. I might delete a couple of others before I'm done, but I ain't touching Priscilla Lane. Except in my dreams.

This is it for now. Gotta go back to work tomorrow, which means shorter posts when I get the chance, but you never know so come back occasionally, OK?