Happy April Birthdays!

Hey, that's me!

Thirty

We returned home late last night from a vacation that, per my policy of not inviting criminals to rob my home, I didn't mention publicly until it was over. Too late now, criminals.

Karen and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary this week. I'm reluctant to say that. When I was a kid I knew people who'd been married for 30 years and they were all old. You tell people you've been married 30 years and their eyes light up and twinkle like they've just seen a yawning baby panda. Sometimes they applaud. I hate that. Don't patronize us. We're not cute.

Though sometimes we are totally adorable.

I might as well own it.

For our honeymoon in '84 we drove down the California coast into Baja, a trip that included a stop at Disneyland. Last week we went back there again.

Long-time readers already know I love Disneyland. I'm old enough (married 30 years!) to not care how you feel about that. Grown-up Brian can nod along with criticism of Disney as a corporate cultural hegemon spooning pap to generations of  bourgeois rubes, but when I walk through that gate I'm 9-year-old Brian who spent every Sunday watching Uncle Walt's World of Color on a black-and-white TV in South Dakota. That's worth something to me.

Also, unlike most of the rest of the world I'm familiar with, Disney often lives up to its own Guest Experience standards. Many times this week, staff went far above and beyond to make our visit a better one. I like to encourage that wherever I find it.

As a fun side project, I brought along a print-out of photos we took on our honeymoon with the goal of recreating them. Our daughters, who went with us this week, suggested we do the same with photos of their first visit, which was in 1992 when they were 4. We didn't spend a lot of time on this; things move fast in the Magic Kingdom, there's usually someone waiting to pass through the space you're occupying. It is cool and eerie to think, "This is exactly where you and I stood three decades ago." It's also fun to see how much/little both the park and we have changed.

In both 1984 and 2014, I tried to pull the sword from the stone to assume my rightful role as king. The fact that I'm sitting here typing blog posts instead of issuing edicts answers as to whether I succeeded. (I also just noticed that I crossed my hands wrong. Oh well. No do-overs.)

A magnificent edifice both then and now. The castle's not bad, either.
We wondered if that tree on the left is the exact same one.

Small world. We didn't have many honeymoon photos with both Karen and me in them,
the selfie having not been invented until 2005.

The low wall Karen leaned on in 1984 is still there, but it was part of the queue for a "Meet the Frozen Princesses" thing and we didn't want to stand in line for two hours just to get this shot. So we stood two feet to the side.

I'm proud of this shot. The location wasn't easy to find (a quiet little nook near It's a Small World)
and we took a minute to try to line it up right. 

This was also a good shot to get. We explained our mission to Mickey and his human aide, and both went out of their way to make it fun for us. Also, Mickey has evidently grown at least a foot over the past three decades. Bet you hadn't noticed!

Accelerating the DeLorean to 88 mph and zooming ahead to 1992, here are my daughters Laura and Robin with the passage of 22 years.

The girls were good sports. They had better things to do than humor their old man, but did their best.
In return, I promised not to embarrass them. I lied.

Growing up as my daughters had absolutely nothing to do with their choice of sweatshirts in 2014. Nothing.

Finally, going back to 1984 for a photo of me because it's a segue to a quiz.
Q: Aside from my gray hair and thicker midsection, what differences do you notice in these photos?

A: Strollers.

A plague, an infestation, a blight. Strollers.

Of course parents have always had strollers, but a modern stroller isn't the flimsy collapsible aluminum-and-cloth contraption of the past. Now they're SUV strollers, with mag wheels and environmental controls and cup holders. Their greater bulk seems to foster a greater sense of entitlement, as moms and dads bulldoze through mobs and beach their rolling behemoths wherever they want.

I'm gonna say this with all sympathy and compassion, as a man who's pushed a double-wide stroller through many a park and mall myself: leave them home. If your child needs a stroller to navigate Disneyland, they're too young for Disneyland. They won't remember any of it and are too small for most of the rides. All they'll see are knees and butts, and they'll be overloaded and howling by noon. Bunk the baby with grandma; you'll both have a much better time.

Another big difference between then and now: iPhones. Even in our last visit to Disneyland a few years ago, I hadn't noticed so many people entertaining themselves and their families electronically while waiting in long lines. Karen's phone had an app that listed the wait times for every ride and restaurant in the park. It's revolutionary.

In particular, we saw dozens of people playing this game in which one person holds the phone to their forehead with a name or phrase on its display (e.g., "Mickey Mouse") while the players give them clues to who or what they are. I get the game; I just don't get the forehead. Wouldn't it work the same if you just held it in front of you? (BTW, I'm only posting this photo of strangers on vacation because none of their faces really show. I'm a good citizen.)

Disney is heavily promoting toys and accessories from two particular movies right now. My daughter Laura doubted that Captain America would appreciate the irony of being displayed on the same shelf as "Frozen."

Huge crowds. If I knew 30 years ago what I know now, I don't know if I'd have gotten married during the popular spring break season. The weather wasn't great: gray and cool our entire visit, and it rained us out of the park our last night. We only saw clear sunny skies on our way out of town. But neither my wedding date nor the weather are Disneyland's fault, and we had a very good time regardless.

Thirty years. It sounds like a long time but doesn't feel like it.

It's all right.

Noiseless Cartooning In Technicolor!

Friend O' The Blog Jim O'Kane has done a magnificent thing, made even better by his letting me share it.

Way back in the 20th Century, Jim majored in Radio, Film & TV Production. More recently he's been fiddling with Adobe After Effects, which puts the power of Industrial Light & Magic on your desktop. A few days ago he applied his light and magic to my webcomic, The Last Mechanical Monster, and produced this:



For comparison, watch the first 50 seconds of this:



(The reference to "Noiseless Cartooning" corresponds to a credit for "Noiseless Recording" in the original, although I do draw as stealthily and lethally as a ninja, so it fits.)

That's funny and thoughtful. Also pretty darned good effects rendering, I think!

I'll append Jim's clip to the next installment of The Last Mechanical Monster, to be posted on Tuesday, but wanted to debut it here today. Thanks again, Jim!

The Ides of March is My Favorite Holiday

There was a scene on the TV show "Modern Family" in which the pregnant Gloria complained about being tired.

"You just woke up, how are you tired?" asked her husband, Jay.

"Maybe because I'm turning food into a human!" snapped Gloria.

I thought that was hilarious; I'd never heard it put like that before and it's exactly right. Turning food into a human. No chemistry lab or industrial plant on Earth can do it, yet it happens every day.

That's amazing! Alchemy! Transmutation! Everybody should be going up to pregnant women all day long and shouting, "You are doing the most incredible thing in the universe!"

Twice as impressive? Turning food into two humans. I've seen it myself. Twenty-six years ago, in fact.

Best day of my life and second-best isn't even close.

Happy Birthday, Girls. See you home for dinner!

This plus even MORE food equals....

....this. Amazing.

More Twain

Still reading the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2. It goes down best in bite-sized chunks.

In earlier posts about both Volume 1 and Volume 2, I complained that Twain's novel method of writing his autobiography--dictating whatever stories happened to pop into his head depending on that day's news, a letter from a friend, or a long-buried memory--gave a great sense of immediacy but didn't lend itself to introspection. Reading the book feels wonderfully like sitting on the porch listening to Clemens spin yarns and gripe, but doesn't dig into what he really thought about the Great Questions. Back in March 2011, deep into Volume 1, I wrote that "Readers wanting Twain to declare his true opinions on race, religion, and so on may be disappointed. He never really tackles a big topic and says, 'Here is what I think about that and why.' Did Twain believe in God? I don't know and he doesn't say."

Well, in Volume 2 (dictations of June 1906) Twain lets God have it with both barrels.

He's got no use for the capricious fire-and-brimstone Old Testament God but, maybe surprisingly, even less regard for the gentler New Testament God, whom he considers a hypocrite who was maliciously stingy with his miracles. How good and merciful could God really be if the millions of people who'd never heard Jesus's Good Word or were born before his time could never, according to the theology of Twain's day, get into Heaven? What kind of raw deal is that? At least you knew where you stood with the old angry God.

Twain also draws a line of critique from the contemporary work of Charles Darwin, but not the obvious one. Rather, Twain embraces Darwin's insight that natural selection is built on death: terrible, cruel, bloody death. "The spider was so contrived that she would not eat grass, but must catch flies, and such things, and inflict a slow and horrible death upon them, unaware that her turn would come next. The wasp was so contrived that he would also decline grass and stab the spider, not conferring upon her a swift and merciful death, but merely half paralysing her, then ramming her down into the wasp den, there to live and suffer for days, while the wasp babies should chew her legs off at their leisure. In turn there was a murderer provided for the wasp, and another murderer for the wasp's murderer, and so on throughout the whole scheme of living creatures in the earth . . . . The ten-thousandfold law of punishment is rigorously enforced against every creature, man included." Where, wonders Twain, is the merciful good in such sadism?

Nor is he much convinced of virgin birth or Heaven, considering the testimony hearsay of the flimsiest kind. "If we should find, somewhere, an ancient book in which a dozen unknown men professed to tell all about a blooming and beautiful tropical paradise secreted in an inaccessible valley in the centre of the eternal icebergs which constitute the Antarctic continent--not claiming that they had seen it themselves, bu had acquired an intimate knowledge of it through a revelation from God--no Geographical Society in the earth would take any stock in that book."

Yet for all his criticism, Twain never declared himself an atheist. That seemed to be a bridge too far for him, and he spoke well of faith in other contexts. I infer that Twain probably believed in an Almighty Creator, he just didn't think that any of the world's religions had a very good handle on Him (I'm reading between the lines; other readers may reach different conclusions). Nor did Twain have a high opinion of His work.

"In His destitution of one and all of the qualities which could grace a God and invite respect for Him, and reverence, and worship, the real God, the genuine God, the Maker of the mighty universe, is just like all the other gods in the list. He proves, every day, that He takes no interest in man, nor in the other animals, further than to torture then, slay them, and get out of this pastime such entertainment as it may afford--and do what he can to not get weary of the eternal and changeless monotony of it."

Fin de Siecle
One unexpected reward I'm getting from reading Twain's autobiography is much greater insight and respect for his literary successors. The autobiographical excerpts above are from 1906. They are complex, ornate sentences that sound stiffly old-fashioned to our 21st Century ears. They take effort to follow. Keep in mind that Twain's autobiography was dictated and faithfully transcribed by his secretary. That's how he spoke.

Not 20 years later, along came writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Woolf, who read as very modern. Sentences are direct, descriptions are spare, dialog sounds like how people actually speak. It's like the difference between Dutch Old Masters and Picasso.

I'm no literary historian, but the shift from 19th to 20th Century style must have been seismic for both readers and writers. I get why Hemingway et al were a big deal in a way I didn't before. To put it in more modern pop culture terms: nobody too young to have seen "Star Wars" in 1977 can really appreciate how it was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. It influenced everything that followed, which they grew up immersed in. I've heard people criticize "Citizen Kane" or Hitchcock films for being "too cliche," not understanding that Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock pioneered those narrative and cinematic techniques that only became cliche after everyone copied them.

It's very difficult to put yourself in a pre-Lucas, pre-Welles, or pre-Hitchcock state of mind and see them fresh. But I begin to feel that reading Twain has put me in a pre-20th-Century-literature state of mind that deepens my understanding of the great changes to come. The 1920s must've come as a hell of a shock to a lot of book lovers.

Insult of the Day #12
I can't leave a post on Twain without providing the next in a series of Mark Twain Insults of the Day. Today's target: humanity.

There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of the gods, but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims, without bashfulness, or any sign of a blush, that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it, but I cannot bring myself to do it--it is like hitting a child.

Happy March Birthdays!

In Praise of Brainiacs

I don't have time to write this well but wanted to capture it before it wriggled away:

Historically, smart characters have had a hard time of it in fiction. Bespectacled dreamers in white lab coats, heads in the clouds, often the first to be killed by the alien or germ du jour. Sometimes insane. Typically good only for providing exposition before the real men of action take over and blow the threat to smithereens.

"What does it want from us, Doctor?"

"It's no doubt here in peace, probably more scared of us than we are of it."

SCREEXX-PEW-PEW-PEW!

"It vaporized Poindexter! Fire at will!"

Growing up a nerdy science-oriented kid, positive role models of brainy characters who were actually cool--perhaps even heroic!--were scarce. Wherever they appeared, they instantly became my favorite characters in the cast. A couple of recent deaths reminded me of some brainiacs done proud.

Harold Ramis died today. An accomplished comic, actor and director, he'll always have a sublet in my heart as Egon Spengler, the smartest Ghostbuster. The only non-fraudulent scientist on the team, Egon understood the danger of crossing the streams (giving me my favorite bon mot suitable for nearly all occasions, "Important safety tip, thanks Egon!") and, frozen in fear before a giant marshmallow man, still had the presence of mind to explain that he was "terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought." Egon's so smart, that's how he speaks in a blind panic. In a cast of more colorful characters and flashier actors, Ramis's Egon was all dry understated reaction.

One of my favorite moments in the film is Ramis being completely silent.

I don't mean to minimize Ramis's life and career, and today's very real loss to those who knew him, by focusing on one role, but Egon Spengler provided services to science and culture beyond the part he played in "Ghostbusters."

As did Russell Johnson as the Professor in "Gilligan's Island." I'm serious, as were astronomer Phil Plait and other real-life professors who eulogized him upon his death in January at 89.

As a former chemist, the only serious technical error I see
the Professor making here is his choice of lab assistant.

The program was a comedic farce, but Johnson played the thankless role of the castaways' straight man with dignity. Everybody got to be zany but the Professor, but that's all right; he was a rock you could count on to keep his head while everyone else lost theirs. He was also the most handsome and virile man on the island. That's not a trivial point. The Professor was probably the hunkiest scientist in popular fiction until at least MacGyver.

Unless you count Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock, whose sex appeal was legendary. In fact, writer Isaac Asimov shrewdly anticipated this entire blog post in 1967 when he wrote an article for TV Guide titled "Mr. Spock is Dreamy" in which he concluded, "Women think being smart is sexy!" Quick clarification: unlike the gentlemen above, Mr. Nimoy is not dead. However, he has been in the health-related news lately, which is how ideas get connected in my brain and turned into blog posts.

So smart he built a computer in 1930 out of stone knives and bearskins.
Also dreamy, probably to Shatner's chagrin. 

Spock brought to the party his prodigious intellect, great physical strength and, most importantly, coolness. As I write this, I think that's the chain linking the Professor, Spock and Spengler: cool. (If this essay had been better written, I would've set up that insight from the start instead of discovering it at the end.) Observant. Analytical. Rational. Spock channeled his frightening, deeply buried passions into intellect--surely the greatest metaphor for adolescent angst in mid-20th Century pop culture. Nimoy has often said that the number of actual scientists and astronauts he meets who say they owe their careers to him is enormous. Though I'm not a scientist or astronaut, I'd say I'm one of them.

"Ghostbusters," "Gilligan's Island" and "Star Trek" were not real science. Far from it. But brainy heroic characters like these make a difference, especially when they hit you young. They matter, in ways that deserve to be taken seriously. The twig is bent.

A Gentleman and a Scholar

This looks a lot like the 2012 softcover edition of WHTTWOT until you notice the red logo at the bottom . . . .

As I may have written here before, having WHTTWOT become an actual schoolbook is just about the best outcome I could've ever imagined for it. Like, beyond. I understand that it will be available through the regular book club we all remember from our childhoods, but that Scholastic's primary interest is using it in its Nonfiction Focus Program.

I don't know a lot about that program or how it works. What I gather is that Scholastic has put together several levels of books grouped by subject and complexity, ranging from Levels A to Z. A teacher or school would purchase a level as a package and get multiple copies of ten or so books that go together and support the curriculum. WHTTWOT is in Level Y in which "books feature similar themes to previous level (increasingly mature themes), with more explicit detail; requires critical reading skills to evaluate the quality and objectivity of the text." So it's for the smart kids.

Thanks to Scholastic, and Editor Charlie and Elisa Garcia at Abrams, for helping my book find new life that exceeded my imagination.

The Evening Star

Just wanted to share this lovely photo I found of the Evening Star following the setting Sun down behind a distant dusky mountain range. The star's about halfway up the sky, one-third of the way from the left side. See it?

I expect you're thinking that's a pretty picture but nothing remarkable. You've probably seen a thousand sunsets like that yourself.

How mischievous of me not to mention that this sunset took place on Mars, and the Evening Star is us, photographed by the Curiosity rover.

Because Earth is closer to the Sun than Mars, Earth is an evening and morning star there, just as Venus and Mercury are to us. A Martian would never see the Earth directly overhead at midnight.

What elevates this photo beyond "Gee whiz!" all the way up to "Holy moley that's one of the best space photos I've ever seen!" is that if you download the full-resolution version here and take a real close look, you can see a simple truth we take for granted: we live on a double planet. This picture doesn't just capture the Earth, it shows our Moon.

Doing some quick math, I'm pretty sure you'd be able to see both with the naked eye. Earth had a magnitude of -1 (comparable to an extremely bright star like Sirius, or Venus or Jupiter from Earth) while the Moon's magnitude was about +2.7, same as a mediumish-bright star. (The magnitude scale is weird; it's both backwards and logarithmic. Negative numbers are brighter than positive numbers, and the limit of the naked eye is about Mag +6). The apparent separation of the Earth and Moon when this photo was taken was about as large as it gets, say 380,000 km, and JPL says we were 160 million km away, making the separation as seen from Mars about 8 arc-minutes. A full Moon as seen from Earth is about 30 arc-minutes across, so the Earth-Moon pair as seen from Mars is separated by a distance about equal to one-fourth the diameter of the Moon.

By way of comparison, the famous star pair Alcor and Mizar in the handle of the Big Dipper are about 12 arc-minutes apart, and Mizar's magnitude (+2.2) is similar to the Moon's in this photo. Alcor-Mizar are not difficult to see. Also keep in mind that the Earth and Mars are relatively far apart right now. Sometimes that 160 million km shrinks to one-third that distance.

Easy peasy!

Imagine what ancient Martian astronomers would have made of us, watching this pair of stars--the piercing blue one among the brightest objects in their sky--circle each other every 26½ days (Martian days just are a little longer than Earth days). Imagine the mythology they'd create to explain us. We'd be gods to them; maybe a parent and child? We would be the most awesome and mysterious thing in their heavens.

This is a view humans will get to enjoy someday. I envy them.

No Names Please!

See if this makes any sense . . .

I've realized that my attitude toward comics is captured in the above matrix.

At the upper right (yellow) are comics that I both like and respect. Their subject matter, approach, humor (if appropriate), and other content appeal to my taste and interests, and I think they're done with professionalism. I figure they represent about one-quarter of the comics I see. A fair portion of cartoonists I know (bearing in mind that I don't know that many) do work that falls into this category.

At upper left (green) are comics I don't like but still respect. They're not for me but I can understand why they're for somebody. They're skillfully done, I can appreciate the artistry and craft that went into them, but for some reason they just don't spin my beanie. An obvious example is children's comics: I can look at one, think "that's an excellent children's comic," and have no desire to read it myself. Also many Underground comix. I figure these represent about half the comics I see. I'd also say that a fair portion of cartoonists I know do this type of work--maybe equal to the number in the first group.

At lower left (blue) are comics I don't like and don't respect. Somebody's making, publishing and buying them, but I don't know why. I consider them incompetently executed and fundamentally unappealing to anyone. I literally don't understand how their creators have careers. In many ways these are the most puzzling and frustrating to me, especially when they succeed wildly. Sometimes I wonder if I'm wrong. Or insane. This is another quarter of the comics I see. I know a few cartoonists whose work I'd place here--not many, but sometimes they're just so darned nice I have to overlook their perceived creative faults.

At lower right (red) would be comics I like but don't respect. I couldn't conjure a single example; the dashed dot and question mark represent a theoretical possibility that such a chimera could exist. You might think a "like but don't respect" comic would be a trashy guilty pleasure, but the fact that it gives me pleasure also makes me respect it--it's doing something right--which lifts it up into the yellow.

Boiling it down, I like and respect about a quarter of the work I see. That's about right. I'm a grumpy comics consumer who, it turns out, doesn't really enjoy a lot of comics.  I respect about three-quarters of them, but the number I'd actually want to sit down and read is pretty small. The rest I find inexplicable.

I think I'm more lenient with other arts. I can watch a movie or TV show, read a book, watch a play, listen to an orchestra, eat a meal, and find something to like in almost anything. I'm pretty easy-going. Maybe I'm tougher on comics because that's where my own ambitions lie. The people making them aren't just there to entertain me--they're my colleagues and competitors. My standards are higher. Their tricks don't fool me.

By the way, I know this works both ways. Over the years I've sold or given copies of my books to various cartooning acquaintances, and I would bet a million bucks that fewer than one-quarter of them get read. That's all right. I probably didn't read theirs, either. We can still be pals.

Misty Watercolor Memories

Last night Karen and I dug through a few boxes of old photos, looking for one event in particular but finding much more than we counted on. We probably hadn't looked through these pictures in 20 years. Most of them covered our lives roughly between college and babies, which in retrospect wasn't as long as it seemed at the time.

In addition to asking each other "Who is that?" and replying "I have no idea," we dug up some gems. I don't know if these'll be anything but tedious to anyone except me, but I wanted to post a few. My rule is that I won't embarrass anybody but myself, so all my friends and family who I have compromising pictures of can rest easy. Once you see these photos, you'll know me as well as people who've known me for 35 years....

Renaissance Faire geek, age 17ish. My costume doesn't look like much but my gang of friends and I comprised a very impressive court, in which I played a lowly page (in fact, the Yellow Page; that's a joke). This is the part where I don't embarrass my friends by posting their pictures. The deal was that if you dressed appropriately and worked a booth for half a day, you could get into the Faire free. Nice deal! I still have the puffy shirt.

Astronomy geek, age 20 to 23ish. This was in my university's small observatory, where I did a little research with a mentor and ran the public viewing program for a couple of years. It got cold up there!

Double-decker bus geek, age 20 to 23. You may sense a theme emerging. One of my jobs in college was driving these authentic London double-deckers in a student-operated city transit system. In some ways, I still consider it the best job I ever had--although the towel I'm sitting on reminds me how hot it could get in that little cab over the engine with no air conditioning (the towel keeps the next driver from sitting in your sweat puddle). 

Luckily, cute chicks dig geeks. Here I'm 23 and it's nearly graduation. I can tell because I swapped my mortarboard for a straw bonnet belonging to the lovely young lady who was my girlfriend at the time, who later became my wife for all time. "No, don't leave college, never grow up!" I shout in vain through my monitor. Dumb kids. Also: cotton sundresses. That's all I'm saying.

My first job out of college was as a cub reporter for a small daily newspaper. High-tech VDTs! Note the emergency typewriter standing by just in case. This is actually the main newsroom at the home office; my first full-time job was in a basement corner of a tiny satellite office that we had to evacuate when the fumes from the darkroom (i.e., converted bathroom) got too strong. I'm 24 or 25.

Young dad. Very young dad. 31? I still have that tie and shirt, and maybe the belt. I think I need to go shopping.

Finally, for friends and fans of my Mom, this was shot when I accompanied her to Rapid City, South Dakota for her 25th high school reunion. I was 24, she was 44. 

History. Sometimes it kicks you in the teeth, and sometimes it helps you to your feet. It's a volatile companion but usually welcome. Thanks for indulging me.

Happy February Birthdays!

Happy January Birthdays!

Writer Mark Evanier, whose blog is a daily stop of mine, has been posting a series of songs from a 1950s' record called Bugs Bunny's Songfest. The LP included birthday songs for each month of the year, most sung by Warner Brothers characters voiced by Mel Blanc. Mark tells the whole story here.

I've never heard these songs before and think they're kind of charming. I can just imagine being a kid having a birthday party back then, putting this record on my old portable plastic phonograph, and having Daffy Duck or Tweety Bird sing a song just for me.

That's what passed for "fun" in the old days. I wasn't around for the Fifties but was sufficiently Fifties-adjacent to testify.

I thought it'd be fun to post each song on the first of its appropriate month to convey my best birthday wishes to you all. This is in lieu of cards, gifts, or wishing anybody salutations on Facebook, which I don't do because I find it somehow creepy. (Note: a small number of people will continue to receive cards and/or gifts from me as well.) For a moment I worried that I might forget to post future months' songs on the proper day, until I remembered that Blogger lets you schedule posts in advance (I should have remembered instantly; I've got a month's worth of my webcomic loaded up that way). So I think I'll take a few minutes and set that up now.

January's late because I just discovered these songs. Sorry and Happy Belated Birthday, Januaries! All you Februaries will get your song on Saturday. Patience, Decembers.