Take your economy car and your suitcase
Arrgh! I just lost another painstakingly written rant to an error during the site update upload. This is the second time this has happened in the last seven days! When will I learn to save these rants before trying to upload them? I'm too annoyed to try to rewrite it this time. I guess I'll try again on Wednesday.
The guest strip gallery has been updated with two strips, including Rikk's take on Questionable Content. Relive the magic.
Man, I am so grouchy now. I'm as angry as a horse! A horse named... HidalgSITE UPDATE FAILED
Sam Logan
Spit out the gum it doesn't work
How? How did this happen? How does a man responsible for one of the worst albums of all time to one of my favourite albums of the year?
It's probably a combination of things. 35 years later, Shatner has traded in his bizzarro wailing for a quieter, more intense sort of hamming. There is still the token weird cover (of Pulp's "Common People," which you will either love or despise,) but for the most part, this time the lyrics are his own. And surprise... they're good, covering the spectrum from clever satire to sincere introspection.
His voice changes to compliment the message -- at times he is an author reading you one of his short stories, or a guy having a conversation with you in a bar, or a crazed preacher giving a sermon from his podium. The accompanying music, written by the incredibly talented Ben Folds, covers an equally broad range of styles -- gospel, jazz, tango, western, rock -- but is a perfect fit with the lyrics every time.
I'm a big Ben Folds fan, but that's not why I like this CD. No question, he is a huge contributor to the album's quality, but most of these songs sound nothing like his usual work. Folds is an incredibly gifted songwriter, and as it turns out, Shatner is a pretty solid writer. They're a heck of a team, and it's a killer disc.
Go figure!
Sam Logan
Kishinda Sono Kokoro, Sore Understand
Why yes, Andrea is talking about the same woman. Thanks for noticing!
Can I have a "behind the panels" moment? One of the cool things about comics is how the flow of the visual action can reinforce the flow of the dialogue, even when it has little to nothing to do with the actual subject of the conversation. It's something I try to do in almost all of my comics where the joke is entirely "verbal" rather than visual. And long story short, I was particularly happy with how today's turned out. Though, it kind of makes me feel like an egomaniac to deconstruct my own comics on my own website, so I think I'll just leave it at that for now!
I've mentioned before how I love to slave away making music mix CDs, toiling for hours on end to get that perfect combination of songs in the perfect, logical order. It's a kind of anal hobby, but oh well, I did it again anyhow. It wasn't intended at all, but I notice now this one is surprisingly heavy on music from outside of North America, drawing pretty substantially from Japan and, to a lesser extent, the UK and Australia. It just goes to show that music knows no borders, or... or some similar sentimental mumbo jumbo.
I think we just had a Hallmark moment.
Sam Logan
