Blógünder Schlock

I skipped out on Penguicon this year (it’s my favorite out-of-state convention), and it’s probably a good thing. All of Tuesday night was spent making trips to the bathroom to shout at the porcelain, and while this sort of thing usually kills a day or two, I was still running a fever and losing precious sleep Friday night, and stumbling around all achey like a zombie on a no-brains diet on Saturday.

Penguiconners, I missed you this weekend, and for this you should be thankful. Whatever I’ve got, you don’t want.

I colored two pages of Bonus Story before falling ill, and then, in spite of the illin’ an’ chillin’, I actually managed to bang out a week of comics on Friday and Saturday. They’ll probably need touch-ups when Smart Howard checks back in for work Monday, but most of the heavy lifting is done.

I know, I know… the buffer is supposed to give me time off for sickness, but with book deadlines crushing me, and conventions coming in May (Hello, Leprecon!) I really don’t want to lose a week just because the new entrees from Panda Express thought so much of themselves they demanded I taste them twice.

When I called my friend Bob Defendi to let him know I couldn’t join his game Wednesday night, I told him I probably wouldn’t be eating at Panda for a looong time to come. “The taste of chinese food on the way back up is one of those memories that just won’t let go,” I said. Bob told me that would be a great first line for a book. It made me laugh, but laughing still hurt a lot.

Sorry for the huge quantities of “Too Much Information.” I’m sure you’ll agree (to complete the song lyric in the title of this post,) “these are the things we can do without.”

While that number might look like a date in the Schlock Mercenary universe, that isn’t why it’s important. That is the number of victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, five years ago.

But numbers lie to us, hiding real meaning. The loss of these individuals is an ache still felt worldwide. They were not numbers in life, and should not be numbers today.

The 2996 website seeks to honor the fallen as individuals, eulogizing and paying tribute with the help of over 3,000 volunteer bloggers — each of whom signed up to write about one of our lost.

From the site… “We will honor them by remembering their lives, and not by remembering their murderers.”

UPDATE: The original site exceeded its bandwidth and was turned off by ehostpros.com. A mirror can be found here. 

Schlocker Jonathon Green (who also happens to be married to novelist Laurell K. Hamilton) forwarded this link to me this morning. I shall now quote from the article:

Television personality and environmentalist Steve Irwin has died from a stingray wound while filming off north Queensland…

Irwin had been filming a new documentary called Ocean’s Deadliest with friend and manager John Stainton at Batt Reef, off Port Douglas about 11am.

“He came over the top of a stingray and the stingray’s barb went up and went into his chest and put a hole into his heart,” Mr Stainton said. “It’s likely that he possibly died instantly when the barb hit him…”

Three things:

1) I really liked watching Crocodile Hunter. I laughed at how outrageously dangerous it seemed, and chuckled at Steve’s aussie-isms.
2) It was funny joking about what might kill Steve Irwin… right up until the point that something killed him.
3) I’m going to have to explain to my kids that the Crocodile Hunter is dead. They’re going to miss him at least as much as I am.