YOU DON'T MIND IF I CALL YOU KATE, DO YA, MIZ HEPBURN?
So Peter just got back from his trip through the wilds of the deep south, driving his Sunfire through the bayous and trailer parks of Alabama and Mizsippy and somehow not getting arrested or beaten up, which given his occasionally aggressively inquisitive demeanor and his penchant for videotaping everything (everything) I feared as a real possibility somewhere along the line, and he brought back hours of footage (including a hilarious bit where he and his gurl Kim are watching this bayou sunset and listening to some lovely romantic music, and after a couple of minutes and just as the sun reaches the edge of the trees, suddenly a cop shows up with a megaphone telling them to move, and Peter frantically hides the camera like he was doing something wrong, but he leaves it running and you can see the lights of the police cruiser flashing against his leg), and among the souvenirs he brought back he got me a copy of Katharine Hepburn's book about the making of "The African Queen," a genuinely thoughtful gift if e'er there was one.

Nice read, if a bit quick. I wrote a song recently about Kate and this movie, turning it into a bit of semi-desperate romantical wishful thinking, which is what I think moved him to make this purchase. It's real informative on the inside dirt on this half-century old flick, even if it kind of shows her off to be a bit self-possessed and (dare I say so of a woman I have coveted o'er the decades for lo all these years) pretentious.

The pictures are great, though. I kept forgetting that Humphrey Bogart's stubble reached almost up to his eyeballs. That man was almost simian. Charismatic as hell, but especially in this flick, that dude was the most dashing and gruffly sweet monkey I'd ever expect to see. A real role model, actually, if you don't count the booze.

I'M A DRIVER, I'M A WINNER, THINGS ARE GONNA CHANGE, I CAN FEEL IT
So in the rest of my life (I have a rest of my life, and can I get a hell yeah for that), I'm waiting for shoes to drop. Job interviews to be processed, friends to get back to town, long weekends to be had, consciousness to be regained, sleep to be had, emails to be replied to, rants to finish. (Online I'm waiting too, for Randy and Metafilter to come back, and of course for the dust to die down.)

You know, it'll be real nice to get this hoax crap out of the way so I can just worry about writing my songs and doing my thing on stage, where I'll feel a lot better about performing for real people, who I can see and talk to and become friends with and shake hands with and stuff. You know, be human. (I try not to use this platform as a pulpit for telling people to come to the shows, but next weekend really feels like it's going to be a bit of a coming-out-again party. I'll be taping the show for those who don't come, but... come anyway.)

Next Friday'll be the first time that the band has played out in over a month, and I really can't wait to rehearse this weekend. I wanna hear how good the band sounds. It'll be good to hang with Sanjay & Al & Aashish anyways.

The future, the glorious future! It's very close now! I'll have a real job soon! The band will rock again! (Maybe, just floating this one out there, maybe Antimatters can get started again?) Oh, the future, where all things are possible! To life!

To life. To trouble. Life is trouble. Death, not so much. To live is to undo your belt and go look for trouble. I think we've all found plenty of life this week. Or it's found us.

Either way, may it always be so. And on that toast, good night.

MY FIRST IMPOSTOR
You know, I was thinking, this isn’t the first time an impostor has come through my life and wrecked a few things.

They get easier to walk away from, if that’s any consolation.

GONNA BE A DARK, DARK WET-RAINY DAY
So instead of sitting around and feeling sorry for myself and everyone else over the Kaycee business (or for that matter anything else), I went over to the Sidewalk last night, like I used to do in the old days (like, four whole months ago), and ran into some of the old crowd, and Eric Rosenfield had a new CD which I probably knew was coming, and Joie was wearing a Last Up Larry t-shirt, and Jordan Corbin... Jordan was what I needed to hear tonight. Dressed in a full angel regalia, with her white taffeta dress and big angel wings, weaving at the piano like Kate Bush doing a Ray Charles imitation, she went through her operatic soul-ish thing with an violin accompanist and did a real nice job of arcing her act over everyone talking throughout.

At various points, though people never actually got quiet (it wasn't really her crowd), every table at least stopped for a few moments and listened to something she sang, whether in Latin or French or English, and this beatific smile would cross their faces, and then the moment would pass and they'd go back to their drinks or their anecdotes or their hairstyles or whatever. It was a gradual thing, not all at once -- even when she hit her high sustaining show-stopper notes, they didn't stop the show. But over the course of her half hour or 45 minutes, she reached everyone in the room, at least for a moment.

All my jaded seen-too-much self asks of any performer these days is that they just genuinely amaze me, even for just a moment. And you know, it happens so rarely.

THE GREAT KAYCEE CAPER
Well, it turns out after all of last week's to-do, Kaycee Nicole doesn't exist after all.

I got duped, just like many, many others. And the hole I felt in my chest when I first heard about Kaycee's death, and which went away after having a really wonderful week in which all kinds of interesting things have happened (like life has a habit of doing), is now back, in a slightly different form.

But I don't really feel bad about all this somehow. Sure, Debbie (or "Debbie") is either sick or deranged or worse or something, and we may or may not find out if there really was a Kaycee or not, or whether she was an amalgam of three people or none or whatever. But I don't regret one thing I said or wrote, and I'd do it again. (I still have a phone message from "Kaycee" on my voicemail, if anyone wants to do a voice analysis of some kind.)

Not only have I found a lot of people through this weblog (and probably thanks in some part to the Kaycee connection) who I still believe exist and now care about (even though I've never met them, and in most cases probably never will), I happen to like the part of me that came out of my self-absorbed little mind and heart around this whole saga, and ultimately I'm glad I was able to find something to feel good about, especially these last few months where things haven't been so hot.

I knew better than to share any part of myself I wasn't prepared to lose, and while I have a lot of questions, just like lots of others, I'm willing to let whatever vibes I sent out there just go. I said what I said, I did what I did, I felt what I felt. If you became familiar with this story through me, I apologize for my part in perpetuating this hoax, but I'm not sorry for anything I've personally said. The words and my emotions were real, as am I (I swear).

And somehow, "Just goes to show ya" doesn't really ring right. This doesn't go to show anything. I've been hoodwinked into believing unreal stuff before, and it'll probably happen again, because I've always figured it's better to give the benefit of the doubt in situations like this. Now on the other hand, I didn't send money or anything else, save for good vibes and some invested time. But I understand the anger and the fear that this engenders in others (many of whom did send gifts and other things). And to be honest, Randy put an immense part of his heart and soul into this whole situation, and not only do I believe he's come clean about it (and will explain his side when he's ready to), but I believe he's hurting at least as much as anyone.

There are a lot of unanswered questions about all this, and I await the fallout and the details to come out. But personally, though I was lied to both by email and on the phone by Kaycee/Debbie/whoever, I don't feel like I personally lost anything out of this.

I've done a lot of my thinking on this already. Possible frauds aside, whoever started this needs a lot of help. Whoever they are.

I stand by what I wrote. If you'd like to discuss things with me, please do. All that I have written over the last few months is here for your perusal, and all I know and have heard, both directly from the sources and second hand, is free and available to any who want to hear it.

You know where I am. And actually, where I'll be.

SIX ACES AND COUNTING
What I love most about this story is that it took Harold Stilson more than a half-century of golfing before he got his first hole in one, and then in the ensuing 30 years, he's had six.

Everyone has things that warm their heart. For some it's a newborn baby or animal, for some it's the smell of gasoline at the track on the morning of the big race, for others it might be the thought of poor orphans shivering in the cold, eternal London winter night. (Mmmmm....)

I'm sorry, what was I saying? Oh right. The two things that really do it for me are crowd scenes (especially where the joy of a crowd spills over, like when everyone in a stadium is singing along in unison to something, or at the climax of a close sporting event, or even the national anthem - it's not the anthem itself, it's everyone's reaction, and it literally and repeatedly moves me to tears, and I have no idea why) and people who have worked really, really hard at something, way beyond the rational, and only then reap a greater reward than they had any right to expect.

That Harold Stilson is still golfing at 101 is a lovely story in itself. That he's a better golfer at 101 than he was at 30 just absolutely sends me.

CASE IN POINT
Wouldn't it be cool to open a burrito place, say, near Washington Square, and call it "Something Burritos" and just wait for everyone to roll in?

Washington Square would work because the three main demographic groups there are the NYU students, who are all WB-pretty and not-too-worldly, the aging hippies who managed to amass enough of a fortune in the last 30 years that they were able to stay in what has quickly crystallized into a pretty swanky neighborhood, and tourists. The first two groups (the first not really all that, um, swift, the second having done so many drugs and seen so much that all the places they've ever gone for munchies runs over the decades just kinda start to run together) will remember that the place actually does have two names, but might not always have the savoir-memoire required to remember both words. So on that note, Something Burritos works. You can remember it, whether you remember it or not.

The tourists will see the place, slap their foreheads and exclaim in whatever language or dialect they happen to bring along, "Och tavares! What a wild and crazy name! Only in New York City would we see such outlandish, yet honest, naming conventions!"

The place would be jammed. You wouldn't even have to serve burritos if you didn't want to. No one would remember (or care, really) what they wanted once they got in there anyways. You could just get a big neon sign with SOMETHING BURRITOS in electric love pink above a big picture of a donkey, the goofier-looking the better, and then throw the door open and watch freakdom in all its multicultural and transgenerational glory flood through your doors.

I would have loved to take credit for this idea, but Elisa and her two friends and I came up with it tonight at the Flying Burrito on (I think it's) Christopher Street. (Nice place, though they did serve their margaritas in rock glasses instead of those wide fluted things that serve the effect best. Also, apparently the drinks were terrible. Just passing on the info.)

We also figured this line of logic would work for "That Pizza Place" and "The Burger Joint," and we'd probably have to buy an entire block just to put all these postmodern establishments in one handy-dandy place so everyone, prettyboys & gurls, old stoners and the gawkers who love them, would know exactly where to go. Venture capitalists can get in on the ground floor of this major entrepreneurial opportunity by contacting Chico Rockefeller, c/o this site.

CAN I JUST SAY AGAIN
How flat out amazed by I am how many offline people know and care about Kaycee? Grey Revell wrote a beautiful song about her last week - he's been following the back story for a while himself. Another half dozen people, none of them weblogging types (I think I'm the only East Village songwriter who keeps a weblog, far as I know - please correct me if I'm wrong), came up to me tonight at the Raven to just talk about her and what she meant to them.

I'm kind of embarrassed by it. I mean, I'm a little numb, and certainly I love and miss her and thought the world of her, and I'm happy to talk pretty much any of this out with anyone. But you know, in the long run, hell even in the short run, I'll be fine. (Condolences are much better off shared with Kaycee's mom or her Big Brother.) My life continues pretty much unfettered. Soon this page will get its happy colors back, and I'll get into ranting about people who stand in the middle of the road and then get all indignant when I run them over with my bike, or some dumb song I wrote that I broke three strings playing, or something that someone wrote in their weblog that seems designed specifically to piss me off, or how there really should be a school for cellphone etiquette, or something else equally unimportant but hopefully diverting, and life, as it does whether you want it to or not, will go on.

And though I (and, I'd bet, her literally thousands of other admirers) will never forget Kaycee, for all kinds of wonderful reasons, and while I (and... etc.) learned more from her than could realistically be expected out of anyone too young to legally drink about the resiliency of human nature and the capacity people have to give and allow into their lives the things that really matter (like, y'know, love, help, that sort of thing), regardless of how bad things get, I also know that the lessons I feel I've learned are best applied forward.

So when the lights go back on in here, understand that the memory's not faded. In fact the contrary; it's an alternative to cursing the darkness.

I SMELL ROSES EVERYWHERE
You know, the funniest thing happened tonight.

I went out to Bar B (on Allen Street, Soho), as much to get out of the house after a long dull day and think about the world and my place in it as to actually see my housemate play and sing, and I walk in the door of the joint, and (I swear) three different people approach me and condole me about Kaycee.

I'm just marveling at that. These people who were even more removed from this person's life than I was were sharing their feelings about her. Hell, they knew before I did. That's amazing. So much about this is amazing.

And (And! Again, unprovoked!), Erica Smith sprayed rosewater on me, and now, well, I sure smell roses everywhere. When I said I was going out earlier tonight to smell the roses, I didn't figure on Fate's Stage Manager taking the cues so literally.

PERSPECTIVE CHECK #239876
You know, I've been feeling bad about leaving this page behind for the last couple of days while my life sorted itself out a little bit. I've been working at a job I'm not crazy about, and I got kicked out of the comedy troupe I was in because, well, because I wasn't very funny, but on the other hand I've been on interviews literally every day, and hey, my social life has been picking up, and thanks to this long-overdue manic phase I'm in right now, I'm running around a little bit, just getting some things back to normal working order. It hasn't been smooth, but I can see smooth from here, and it looks like I'm gonna make it after all.

But still, the lights do not go all the way on today.

Kaycee Nicole, an amazing, sweet, inspirational, funny, absolutely unstoppable friend of mine, passed away yesterday. She was 19.

I spoke with her a couple of weeks ago on the phone. She sounded tired, but happy to be surrounded by people she loved. We flirted and told dirty jokes for a couple of hours, and as we hung up and said how much we loved each other, she promised to come up and see me sometime. I think I can still hold her to that promise.

I've kind of said my piece about this a little bit already, though, and right now, sitting in front of my computer doesn't feel like the right thing to do. I'll be back, but right now, if you'll excuse me, I think I have some roses to smell.

HERE I AM NOW, ENTERTAIN ME
There’s not much to do in the office. The rest of the place is so full of boxes it looks like everyone’s moving. And every single one of those boxes holds lawsuits. Hundreds of thousands of lawsuits. Och, it’s a mess. But our office (I share it with these two people I’m allegedly supervising) is clean, pristine, eat-off-the-tables perfect. It wasn’t like this when I first got here, but we’ve managed to get all but eight banker’s boxes out of the room itself, and those eight are just waiting for space somewhere else. That’s fine – We needed an extra table anyway. I don’t know for what, but whatever.

It seems, like many enthusiastic new recruits, I have made the mistake of working a little too quickly for the rest of the room. There was a couple of boxes of lawsuit stuff that needed the most boring kind of logging, and which I plowed through in what the other lawyers referred to as an impressively short time, only to be greeted at the other end with sweet bugger-all to do afterward. (Help! Outside world? Anyone? Aggh, my fricken kingdom for a net connection!)

It’s been so quiet this morning (all the papers and weeklies are here, and we’ve all memorized them, word for word, in their entirety) that when I got a phone call from another agent who wanted to interview me for another job, I just took the call, and the interview, right there in full view and hearing of the rest of the office. Really. I mean, gawd, I’m a temp. They oughta know by now I want something better – better paying, better connected, better suited to my talents and needs, better better?

Oh well. I got a hot date tonight. Wish me luck. I mean in staying awake (oh yeah, the other kind of luck too, then, sure). There better be oxygen outside on the streets, dude, else some poor sumbitch’s gonna pay.

MORE ON FUNNY STUFF
This temp gig I started today doesn't have a net connection, so for the length of time I'm working there, we'll have a little experiment - either I'll write at night when I'm punchy and tired and can't form coherent sentences, or I'll write during the day, and the pieces that are already plenty long are going to be way, way longer.

Like I said, we'll see. Hopefully it'll be coherent, but as always, no attempt will be made to explain whatever makes no sense.

Anyway, tonight's entertainment was fantastic. Bayne Gibby (who I think is just sickeningly good as a writer and singer of comic songs) sang a lovely little soul ditty about temp jobs that well, maybe I just loved so much because I'm down with the temp posse yo, The Heller Boys were as energetic as hell, both Courtney Ray and Rob Blatt & Sam Riegel did some fairly amazing material to what at that early point in the evening was a soul-suckingly quiet (and in more than a few cases, very drunk) audience, but hey, the joint was pretty full (which is never, ever a bad thing).

As for me (I just know you were wondering), I reduced two guitars to complete mush in the space of a three song set. The first one was my own, which I broke a string on on the first song (see, when I can't hear what's happening, I play harder, which I know is not always the bestest solution). The second guitar happened to be up there, and it couldn't hold tune, to the point that by the end of the last song I was basically using it as a percussion instrument.

End result: I sold four CDs. Not only were these people hammered, it would seem they were deaf. Not that I'm not deserving of selling these records, but tonight... well, I'll take the cash and leave with my hide intact, thanks.

See you tomorrow. More on the job then. (Geddit? More-on the job? Moron? Geddit? Ha! I kill me.)

DYING IS EASY, COMEDY IS HARD
I guess it's time for Spring turnover. I don't think I've had one conversation this week that didn't deal with death or the end of something really major, whether in the context of renewal or not. Which means maybe it's me. But I don't think so. Beginnings and endings are everywhere. Maybe it's the season.

The weekly Funny Sheesh Comedy Game Show that's been happening at the Sidewalk Cafe (and which I've kinda been a part of in a little way) for the last five months will breathe its last this Sunday. Sure, the monthly megaparties (which remind me more and more of vaudeville, the more I read up on that era, but that's one digression too many) will continue (there's one tonight at Manhattan Theater Source, actually, and no, this was not meant to be a plug, but well, there you go) will go on, but the improv-fests and the days where half the audience would go home with prizes (not so much because there was no one in the audience of late, but more that we gave so damned much stuff away) might be going the way of the Dodo for a while.

I never watch TV anymore. There's four sets in the house, all lined up against one wall like some art statement, and we don't have cable, so they're never on unless someone wants to watch a video. But this week, for the first time in eons, I actually came home and turned on the TV, alone, and for the first time, I saw the American version of Who's Line Is It Anyway?, which if you didn't know is a damned funny weekly improv game show, which makes it relevant to something in this rambling narrative.

Now, the consensus among all the other Sunday Night comic types ran that it was not nearly as good as the British version, but there were lots of the same people, and damn it they were funny. (Colin Mochrie? Brilliant improviser. Toronto Boy. Ryan Stiles? Funny as hell. Toronto Boy. No further questions, you honor.)

That show has apparently been running opposite Survivor II and Friends, so basically ABC's been letting it twist in the wind of late, but the fact that an improv comedy show continues in prime time on a major network is a sign that not everything different or thought-provoking or worthwhile is in mainstream peril.

And Funny Sheesh will live on, too, in the monthly thing at Theater Source, and at the other shows that will continue and flourish elsewhere, at least I hope. But this Sunday's final show is going to be a little like a wake.

More on improv when I don't have to go to work in the morning. (Oh yeah, I was gonna say, I found some temporary work. And it's so incredibly interesting that I went on about this instead.)

A TALE OF TWO SITES
One.
Is transplanted Angeleno, East Side Antifolk All-Star, and new dad Grey Revell thinking about getting into the weblog business? Or did he just redesign his site for the hell of it? I'm liking the color scheme and the copperplate fonts, but I know how good a ranter he is, and the world would be only a better place if he could find more of an audience for his content and style (which is not true for everyone, or even most, or even more than a few, actually), both in song and in word.

Two.
Lance Arthur was one of the people who sold me on his vision of the Net when I was first starting to poke around a few years ago. I learned the rudiments of HTML (which is, yeah that's right, all I still know) from going through the bitchy-yet-fact-loaded design pages at Glassdog, and in the various places in which I have come across his work, I have found him to be way more clever, thoughtful, witty and insightful than most writers I know, never mind yer average online schmoe. His sensitivity and thoroughness in dealing with whatever his subject happened to be is way too rare in this take-a-potshot-and-move-on medium, and I'll miss his occasional updates now he's decided to pull them.

I trust he's going to keep producing great work, in other ways, for ever-growing audiences, and I selfishly hope I get to keep reading his work and learning from (and laughing with, and sometimes at) him, as I have for a hell of a long time now.

You know, he'll probably never read this. But I just had to make a point of saying it: I'm grateful to him for existing.

CHECK OUT POSITIVE ATTITUDE BOY OVER HERE
I hate cats. Hate 'em. Little breath-stealing parasites who treat the planet like their own personal fiefdom, no, more like all other beings don't even exist, except as providers of food, shelter and entertainment. Also I'm allergic to 'em, especially in the Spring. No redeeming qualities whatsoever.

So I'm up way too damned early this morning with this friend of mine down at the Bide-A-Wee, getting her a couple of the things because she just quit her job and now has time to properly care for them. So we're fiddling with kittens and grownup cats and the like, and going between there and the Humane Society and washing our hands about as often as your average heart surgeon while handling all these shitting shedding mewling beasts.

So whatever, so she settles on two nice black boy cats, rather docile and attentive (horrors! They must not really be cats!) and old enough to have had their shots and, um, y'know, "snippy-snippy," and we head off to Petco to pick up the 800 pounds of material needed to care for 'em (good thing I didn't much mind being a pack mule - don't tell nobody or I'll lose my merit badge for Selfishness) and we get back to the shelter and force the two critters into their new little blue sherpa bag that smelled a bit too much like vinyl and can't have been too comfortable and take all the cat gear and the screaming drooling duo all the way back to her place in Brooklyn which seemed like it was about 28 hours on two trains.

But then she picks up the tab for a decent late lunch at this vaguely chichi place on Smith Street that served an eggplant panini that was actually divine, and the cats got names (Lysander and Demetrius, or Sander and Tree if you will, which kinda works) genuinely happy to actually be in an apartment that, while still fairly small, was way bigger than the place they had spent the rest of the lives up to that point.

So my good deed done for the day (and dammit, I enjoyed it. How'd that happen? They're cats, they're evil, evil evil evil!), I come home and have a nap and wake up in time to listen to the Leafs game, which they win in the last minute (Tomas Kaberle, bis Montag, sie der mann!), and I'm thinking, for a day in which I didn't have brunch, spent the entire day with cats, and did some heavy lifting, I had one hell of a good day.

Did you?

WKRP WEEK CONTINUES
I had two interviews today. One was pretty standard, an agency gig where they ran me through a few tests, the usual. (I seem to be sucking quite mightily on the typing tests these days. Maybe I'm losing my touch. Gee, where could I be typing more than I have been these days... hm.)

At one point today, I got to meet a bigwig at this one company, who met me after screening by another worker at the same joint, and he bounces out, and after doing a piss-take on my name ("You know, you don't look like a Hightower... but uh, I bet you get that a lot" - no, actually I've never heard that before in my life), asks me, "So how are you with computers?"

Now, I'm no true expert or anything (I have a couple of Perl scripts sitting half finished that I've been playing with, and to be quite honest I couldn't pick anything out in Oracle or C++ at gunpoint), but when someone asks that particular question in that particular way, I'm pretty sure I'm not getting anything like a curveball. So cockying myself up, I'm all, "Sure. Whaddya want to know?"

He brings me into his office. "I want to know how this is done." He punches a couple of buttons and this little flash movie comes up. When I say little, it's, like, two frames. It's a dog singing Don't Worry Be Happy, and the two frames were [dog with mouth closed] and [dog with mouth open]. The toothy grin looked like the smile of a monkey had been photoshopped in (although I'm pretty sure when monkeys smile like that it means they're about to attack instead of that they're happy, but -- whatever).

Now, I'm no snob when it comes to cheesy low-rent online animation (I get as many yuks from, oh, Hyakugojyuuichi!! as I do from the infinitely more sophisticated stuff at Spumco), but really, this was about as low-fi as you can get.

I told him a little bit about how Flash works (which was about all I knew, but it was apparently enough), and pointed him to the Macromedia site where he could buy Director or whatever he needed, and all at once I realized who I was talking to.

Arthur Carlson.

Really. A sweet guy, certain amount of power, not terribly up to speed on everything that's happening in the world but by gum he means well. And I'm thinking, if I get hired here, what character would I be? According to a personality test I can't seem to find right now, I'm a Venus (trust me on this one), though in reality I'm probably more or less of a Les, with Herb Tarlek rising. You know how it is. You don't? Okey-fine, then.

Anyway. It was a little thing that happened today, but if I get hired through getting that guy's flash thing together, so help me I'll, I'll, I'll go to work! And I'll learn to love it for as long as I work there, and see if I don't!


Let me squeeze out some other links on the mighty 'KRP (So I don't drag this fetish out any more in these pages than absolutely necessary):
- America's Favorite Radio Station
- Nick At Nite's WKRP Site
- The Flimm Building
- Quotes from pretty much every episode of WKRP
- A huge bank of little sound files,
- and some more sounds, if you're into that sort of thing.

FAITH AND FANDOM
Oh, has this been a week.

I've been on job interviews pretty much nonstop all week, doing all the vaguely moronic things that are required of yer standard job applicant (I'm real optimistic that something's gonna happen on that front, and dammit I hope it's soon, but none of this is news anymore, really, at least to me, and really, who else matters, right? Right? Hello?).

But I have been having a crisis of faith.

It's been ongoing, and while the change in weather and the heightened job-search activity (and a couple of other personal things) have given me plenty of pep talk, nudging my mood back up into the normal levels not seen since, well since Clinton was President, I'm still questioning my faith.

I know that's how faith grows and gets strong, but really, I'm thinking, you know, enough already with the testing.

: : :
Something possibly less boring that's been on my mind of late - I happened across the Jan Smithers fan page (I watched "WKRP In Cincinnati" every day in syndication after school, and oh, how I dug her...), and I thought, who would I put together a fan page for?

Even just quick and dirty ones, but for people that really deserve them and don't have them (least as far as I can tell). I'm not thinking anyone in the local scene yet, because really, most of my colleagues (presently company definitely included) have sites of their own (which come off as everything a fan site would really need - lyrics, pics, clips, info, the usual). No, I'm thinking about other people who at least deserve something I could provide with minimal effort.

The people that come to mind as I've been thinking this are:

- Ada Jones, the first female recording star, who recorded a couple hundred sides for dozens of different labels on cylinder and 78 from the late 1890s through her death in the early 1920s, and had just a beautiful soprano voice (actually, I find the whole vaudeville era fascinating);

- John Otway, a rather more current bloke who does admittedly have his own site (the most excellently named Microstar!) but rather little else, and he's one hell of a songwriter who can switch pretty effortlessly between comedic and heartwrenching;

- And Frank Sidebottom, into whom I've put a little bit of work already. (The FS World Wide Shed might be suffering from a certain amount of link rot these days, and even if Mr. Radtke is still running the site, well, the "Pumpkin-Headed Bard of Timperley" deserves as much exposure as his big shorts can handle.)

I know there's many other things I'd have to do first (like actually procure some work, and clean up a few personal long-hanging loose ends, all of which could be dire), but you know, I always wanted to do something like this for someone.