We call Pepto "stool blackener" at my house.

And because it deserves its own special post....Happy Birthday to the hilarious, smart and always interesting Teppy, Editrix Extraordinaire!

Happy Birthday, Steph! May it be the beginning of a (more) restful year.

I feel no shame in wishing on Mitch McConnell a really bad case of shingles. Something that won't kill him or even be permanently disfiguring or disabling, but that will make him feel horrible for a long time.

Happy Birthday, Teppy!

Happy birthday La Tep! It sounds like Tim has gotten it off to a fabulous start.

I wish Mitch the Bitch a horrible case sudden and intense non-medical responsive vertigo. He'll be unable to work, but it's not fatal. Be miserable you nasty human, miserable for the rest of your days.

Happy Birthday Steph!!!!!

You know what's fun? Being a comic book writer and telling your artist what to draw and then...they do it.

So I don't think I've updated you all on the status of the Giapetta project.

We've been meeting with Disney Publishing for the last several months. For a variety of reasons, our tech is not a natural fit for books, even books with toys attached. But we've come up with some scenarios to make it work, and because Disney is VAST and it grinds VERY SLOWLY you just have to work with them as best you can.

Last month Disney had us meet with some of their publishing partners at this mega publishing expo in NYC. That went okay but the virtue of doing one of these things is making new contacts.

So being the plucky cold-callers that we are, my friend/co-partner Ellen marched into one publisher's booth (not Disney affiliated) and said, "Hey, we've got this cool project that might interest you, do you have five minutes to look at it?"

And the publisher, Kira, looked at our demo, which is a digital comic that I wrote about the girl character Giapetta, and it shows off our tech on the iPad and it's cool and funny and flashy. Kira said, "We don't do anything with digital technology so while it's cool, that's not of interest to us. However, I *love* your character and your comic. If you had a finished product I'd buy it from you on the spot. I know we could sell it."

So, Fred, our main partner has fronted some seed money to me and Dani - our illustrator - to put together a pitch. Which is why I'm having a variety of characters drawn up and I just laid out a big splash page scene for Dani to draw.

Who knows what will become of it. My current motto after all the near misses is "Nothing means nothing until the check clears." So I don't get overly excited about what MIGHT happen.

However, I am actually getting characters drawn (like Capt. Tanderson) and storylines synopsized and we will have a receptive publisher look at it. And that's cool.

Awwww, FUCK. Another mistrial. That's as bad as an acquittal.

I assembled the Dyson last night, but I couldn't use it much since my wife was watching TV. In the tiny bit of vacuuming I did, it picked up a LOT. That may have more to do with the lack of vacuuming than the effectiveness of the vacuum. I need to use it in the living room which I vacuumed recently, but I may not be able to do that until the weekend due to the TV issue.