Woke up this morning with a head full of snot and my lips gummed together. I feel like an old diesel that's very low on oil. I'm going to keep to the positive side, slam a few quick-hitting immunity defense drinks, and hope this is just a cold and not that flu. I don't have the world's greatest respiratory system.

In honor of Gygax, last night Chats & I put in the episode (the final in the collection) of Freaks & Geeks where the Geeks play D&D with Daniel. Damn that was a good show. I'd really like to know what those fuckwits replaced it with rather than give F&G a second season after blowing the whole first season shuffling it from slot to slot and taking it off the air for weeks at a time to accommodate playoffs.

But I've got a few interesting (to me) liner notes

• Got my first royalty statement for RESOLVE. Yay! I hit my personal goal in hc sales to have a viable career. Of course, the goal will vanish again as the returns mount up, but for a while, in theory, on paper, I did hit it. It's like one of those baseball records with an asterisk after the number. There was an increase is copies shipped over EXILE, which is good, but all this is pretty airy-fairy until we see what sticks. Anyway, that's writing. Bad day, good day. Age of Fire chokes, Vampire Earth does well. Who needs bipolar disorder, just get yourself a career as a novelist.


• Saw a nice tribute to Gygax in The Cimmerian.


• For some reason I've got Geddy Lee's Bob & Doug parody song "Take Off (to the Great White North)" on infinite loop in my head, despite not having heard it since like 1982. Was it the WFC update we got in the mail? Memories of having it play on the radio while dealing with the demi-lich in Tomb of Horrors?


• Boy, do the pundits like pulling the cord on the emergency chute or what? I guess that's a talking head's job, to keep talking and keep the drama high with OMG OH NOES THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS TEARING ITSELF INTO BLOOD-SOAKED RIBBONS, but if you've got a sense of the rhythms of an election you know that how things look in March and how things look in the stretch after the convention are two very different things. Just ask President Dukakis. I still say the smart money is on Obama; he's run the sharper, more disciplined campaign and after the last two keystone kops presidential runs the superdelegates, who are going to decide this thing, will gravitate toward the guy who won't stumble in the homestretch. With Hillary you just never know when a skeleton will fall out of the mausoleum-sized closet or Bill will go off, messily.

Oh, crapola. I'm sick.

The guy's got pancreatic cancer and (at least according to the Enquirer) he's got about five months.

He made a lot of movies that were both awesome and laughable at the same time. I'm going to feel guilty making fun of him now.

I suppose a moratorium on Roadhouse jokes is in order.