Old drawing; a rough.

Idea by Ian Covel, Cleveland, England.

I watched the film LADY IN THE WATER by M. Night Shambaleau, and found myself unable to deal with it. The creature in the swimming pool is called a "Narf". I kept thinking of PINKY AND THE BRAIN. "Narf!" says Pinky.

And I guessed the whole neat plot contrivance of THE VILLAGE from watching the trailer.

Next.

A few things recently happened, making it a bit of a problem wondering if things were going well. In rained a lot. This just makes it hard for the household to do outdoor work. Then the ground got saturated. The chickens were knee deep in water (a chicken's knees, not mine), and the ground in the barn the hens are housed, caved in, filling the rat holes with water.

A high tide caused the septic tank to back up. Crud was found in the bath tubs. Toilets didn't drain. The smell was bad.

We got someone to clean out the tank, but the crud would not flow. The man was not available to tell him this, as he cleared it out while we were not present, and he was attending a funeral and was not readily available.

On Good Friday I took off in the dark to go to work. I put up my high beams, hoping to see a few deer that munch on the crops planted across the road.

I saw the mailbox, flattened. Not just baseballed off the pole, but flat. Run over and thinned and compressed. I wondered if STAND BY ME had been shown again on cable.

We phoned the police. I was at work, Giani had decided to crawl under the house to see if any of the pipes had broken a strap and were dangling. (a "v" crook prevents drainage).

The police came, and Giani was under the house. She heard the noise, crawled out with a face mask on, covered with dust and began talking to the cop. The cat vanished into the crawlspace.

Several other mailboxes were hammered, but ours was spectaculair in its demise. Did we have any suspects? Yes, we named the jerk, and the name was taken down with the hope he would at least be hassled and the cops would discover that his mailing address was a fake.

Another day in paradise.

The pipes were flowing the next day. We got the cat out by pretending to open a can.

Initially, this was Canadian poster issued by Public Health Works. I think it's pretty effective.

Did eating all of that tasty bacteria make my pseudopods look fat?

IN THE POSTAL ZONE: GOING POSTAL.

A reader who only wants to be known as "avrgjane" wrote to inquire about the postal shootings of yore, and was it still dangerous to work there? I write here that it is no longer so dangerous to work at the post office. Safer than a mall where people can come in with a gun and begin blasting away. That seems to be the new "postal": "mallrage".

The reason for a large amount of Post Office violence has vanished--the Vietnam Era veterans have retired or died, they they were the big issue. Bluntly, there was a period of time you could become a supervisor in the post office simply because you were a veteran. And a lot of these men were still in the grip of the war, what with Delayed Stress symptoms and the need to pressure others. And the point in time where the shootings were happening, the post office often had one supervisor for ten people. A bit extreme. And people who are in charge like to prove their worth. They annoyed people. They found loopholes for discipline. They filed excessive paperwork. They harassed.

And some of the people harassed were veterans themselves, and they owned guns.

And it was a viscous circle that fed onto itself.

I came across a memo in 1991 or thereabouts, being thrown away in the trash, and where I got a lot of my insight into the post office and environs, and it was from the Veteran's Administration. It was addressing the shootings, and felt that it ought to be understood, it said, that linking veterans and the postal violence as being hand in hand was not going to be accepted by the Veteran's Administration, and other situational labels would have to be looked at. Why did the Veteran's Administration need to send out a memo like that? Did they notice what other people noticed?

Very few Vietnam era veterans remain. These days vets will need to undergo drug testing. Back then, people were arriving and they had needle marks on their arms, would show up intoxicated at the beginning of the day and would talk to themselves (nowadays they have cell phones). One guy, a janitor, got into serious hot water by cleaning the women's bathrooms and try to engage the people in the stalls into conversations. He used to laugh very strangely and talk about "the hand grenade".

Things are quieter. What remains of oddballs in the USPS are the usual chaff that all business staffs have: a few flakes that spoil it for others.

I have mixed emotions about this book. Should we warn Stephen King or not?

I'll tally a vote....

EDDIE MURPHY Eddie Murphy has done several movies wherein he plays several roles, and its gotten to the place where he is playing the Mother, the Father, the Child...man's got an ego, or the idea of "incest" has never crossed his mind. Still, he could do a neat turn in David Gerrold's novella, THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF , that Mobius strip/Klein bottle exercise in writing where everyone in the book is the same set of genes.

Take it a bit further...one hundred little blue Eddies, one female blue Eddie. Eddie Smurfy.

God, I hope no one in Hollywood ever hears of this idea...

Written before MEET DAVE, another Hollywood Bomb. THE ADVENTURES OF PLUTO NASH. I guess Eddie Murphy has become the Ed Wood of actors.  Or he's a guaranteed tax write off. 

Discovered under a pile of papers was this cartoon, drawn a long time back for whatever reason (I need a reason?) and decided to drop it here for the lack of any place to submit it, and no, it wouldn't go anyplace at the NEW YORKER.

Still need to work on the lettering though...

WE DON'T WANT YOUR KIND IN OUR PUDDLE!


idea initially by Darrell Schweitzer.