Welcome!
May. 26th, 2009 | 06:09 pm
writing, weird chicago, appetite for deconstruction, pirates of the retail wasteland, I Put a Spell On You
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Fun!
May. 17th, 2008 | 08:44 pm
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Open letters
May. 16th, 2008 | 11:12 am
I'd fart in your general direction, but you'd put it in a jar and sell it. Jerks.
Dear Mr. President:
Bad form, Mr. President. But good news: I still don't think you're QUITE as big a jerk as Andrew Johnson was! Of course, he didn't have his finger on the same sort of button that you do.
Dear. Mr. Roosevelt:
You got robbed in 1912, and I know YOU wouldn't have taken this kind of crap from the oil companies. I'll be back in the ballroom you're supposed to haunt several time between now and election day if you want to make any statementss. The MAINSTREAM press has unfairly ignored you for too long, Colonel.
Dear Oil Companies:
Oh, what the hell... pppppppppppbbbbbbbbbbbtttttttttttttt.
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(no subject)
May. 15th, 2008 | 07:34 am
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Woohoo!
May. 14th, 2008 | 11:10 am
Here's the blurb sited:
PIRATES OF THE RETAIL WASTELAND, by Adam Selzer (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, $15.99, 9780385734820 / 0385734824) "Pirates of the Retail Wasteland follows the exploits of a group of cynical, disaffected, and talented high school students who rouse themselves from their torpor to try and save the last non-chain business on their town's strip -- a grungy, congenial coffee shop called Sip. Selzer's character are dead-on, and his readers will thoroughly enjoy this one." --Kenny Brechner, Devaney, Doak & Garrett Booksellers, Farmington, ME
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Current Reading
May. 14th, 2008 | 07:21 am
Working on editing the Weird Chicago book today, trying to keep it from turning out to be the size of a phone book. The draft of the first three chapters is about 340 pages long!
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Jerks.
May. 13th, 2008 | 11:15 am
Taking it to get fixed later at a low low cost of $160 bucks. For now, I took the opportunity to politicize the event:

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Oh, YAY!
May. 12th, 2008 | 03:16 pm
Now he's running for president as a libertarian. Oh, frabjous day! Let me dig up my kickin' shoes...
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Ugh
May. 12th, 2008 | 06:50 am
But the soreness didn't hit my throat til about noon.
It MAY have been compounded by taking a mile-or-two walk in the rain yesterday morning at 6, or maybe it just felt like it was time to strike. It knocked me out HARD all day, and today doesn't look promising.
Anyway, got til Friday to be over it.
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what what
May. 11th, 2008 | 02:09 pm
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Tour - yay!
May. 11th, 2008 | 12:29 am
But it all went to hell after that company split up; we stayed friends, but couldn't work together.
Til tonight. Tonight was our first time working together in about a year and a half.
It was great - we kicked back old times, brought some of the more venerable jokes out of storage, came up with a couple of new ones. Hit a couple of old haunts, if you'll pardon the pun, that aren't usually on my tours anymore.
Weird Chicago Tours have gotten WAY better in the last several months, as we've developed enough solid stops that we can run different tours every night and never have one fall apart, and as we've incorporated more of the research that we'd been sitting on. Having Hector back makes me feel like we've got the band back together.
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Getting an early plug in...
May. 9th, 2008 | 07:52 am
It is, by far, the hardest book to write I've ever done. There are four main narrators (two male, two female), including:
Jennifer Van den Berg: An over-scheduled, Shakespeare-obsessed free spirit who dreams of running away to be a hippie while her dad plots a break-in to steal the master word list for the bee from the school.
Chrissie Woodward: the school snitch who realizes that she's been working for the wrong side all her life after she uncovers a web of corruption in the principal's office.
Harlan Sturr: a class clown who spends his nights planning his own funeral, he sees the all-school bee as his last chance to leave his mark on Gordon Liddy Community School.
Mutual Scrivener: a new student, previously home-schooled by his fanatical parents, who has been enrolled in school just to compete in the spelling bee; he befriends a headbanger and a wannabe-witch and becomes fascinated with heavy metal - and Jennifer van den Berg.
This was a tough one (and the sequel was even harder). The plot is WAY more complicated than most of the other books I've written, and tying all of the threads together and setting up the sequel was a lot of work. Sometimes I felt like I was collapsing under the weight of the thing. I wanted to satirize the spelling bee genre, but I wanted it to work kind of like, say, 'The Princess Bride," in that it's a satire, but it still stands on its own. I remember seeing Princess Bride in a theatre when I was a kid and being absolutely swept away by the story. I caught a joke here and there, but had no idea that it was really a comedy. Obviously, few kids are going to get jokes about Richard Nixon's secretary, but I stand firm in my belief that what happened to Nixon is one of history's greatest farces. You need need to get the references to enjoy the story - it's just a special bonus that'll pay out dividends to kids who come back to the book when they get older. To some kids, the book can just function as a really ripping mystery story with a lot of jokes thrown in.
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Tour!
May. 8th, 2008 | 09:06 am
No one looks back at middle school and thinks "boy, those were the best years of my life!" But I look back on it fondly for three reasons:
1. I had a good group of smart friends, who helped me become who I am.
2. It was at least better than high school for me.
3. I've blocked out 90% of it.
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Towards a New View of Education
May. 8th, 2008 | 08:29 am
There are probably a few degrees left out there that will get you a job (education, perhaps), but if you want to get a good job now, your best bet is really to skip (or at least delay) college and get an internship instead, with a part-time job at night to pay the bills). Let's look at the breakdown:
4 years unpaid internship:
- a marketable skill and experience in the field
- no student loans
4 year degree:
- no experience, even if you do learn a skill.
- years of student loans.
Maybe there are places out there where it's different - in some cities, I imagine, a college student can get a paid internship. In the towns where I went to college, those didn't really exist. To pay the bills, we had to work regular old nametag jobs.
This doesn't mean that I'm telling people not to go to college - no, no, no. I don't regret going, because I came out smarter than I was when I went in. It's simply time to re-evaluate WHY we go to college. You go to college to become a smarter, happier, well-rounded person, not a more financially successful one. People in college who aren't there to get any smarter really, really ought to rethink their path.
Maybe things will change when the economy starts to recover. But as of right now, an undergrad degree is about like having a high school degree thirty years ago. Go to school to get smarter, not to get richer.
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Weird Chicago: The Book!
May. 7th, 2008 | 10:15 am

Check out that fine photo in the main frame - it's by Ronni!
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inflation
May. 7th, 2008 | 07:12 am
slim jim - .99
can of jolt cola - .65
Spider-man comic book - 1.50 or so.
2008:
slim jim - 1.20
thing of jolt - 2.99 (they don't make it in cans anymore - just big 24 oz things)
Spider-man comic book - 3.99
But the simple joy of a Slim Jim, a Jolt, and a Spider-man comic book hasn't changed a bit.
The whole thing they did lately where Peter Parker and MJ made a deal with Mephisto to erase their marriage from memory (along with whatever else Marvel thought was convenient) to save Aunt May's life was one of the bigger cop-outs in comic book history. And that's saying something.
BUT now Peter Parker is a single guy in his mid twenties struggling through life, trying to make ends meet and deal with his groovy, How I Met Your Mother-eque group of pals (with Harry Osbourne as Barney to Peter Parker's Ted), dealing with the pressure of having been a fast-track gifted student with nothing to show for it as an adult, is, quite frankly, MUCH better than having him be married to a supermodel. They've been trying to write their way out of that for years. Getting out of it had to be messy. But from what I've read so far, it was worth it. It helps that the newer issues have been a whole lot funnier than Spider-man has been in years.
Spidey is back where he should be: a wisecracking everyman that I can identify with, with Gwen Stacy dead (and never having had an affair with Norman Osbourne, which was just icky) and J. Jonah Jameson barking out orders.
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Hmph
May. 6th, 2008 | 12:42 pm
Unfortunately, I'm just as unemployable now as I was a few years ago. By then, a college degree was worth about the paper it was printed on; the only thing employers were looking for was specific experience in the field. My 11 years of experience in the retail and restaurant industries actually worked against me; people would look at my resume and suggest that I apply at the new Starbucks. Eleven years of work, a college degree and a spotless police record might have gotten you a job once. Now, it's about the same thing as having a high school degree and some light babysitting on your resume twenty years ago.
Let this be a lesson, kids: don't go to college to get a job. Go to college to become a smart, well-rounded person. Your education is all you're likely to get out of college these days - take advantage of it. Entirely too many people get out of college just as stupid as they were when they went in.
Nope. Being self-employed is the only thing that's ever worked for me. I have three sold-out tours this weekend, plus a step-on (that's where I just show up, get on some group's bus, and tell the driver where to go) for a school group that had me last time they were in town - back when I worked for a different company - and wanted to have me again.
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More ads!
May. 6th, 2008 | 11:25 am






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Weird Chicago - but where are the sea monkeys?
May. 6th, 2008 | 07:13 am
The cover, like most of our print ads, is based on old EC Comics:

Just the other day we got the idea to have some comic-type ads in it that related to the content, so I've spent the last couple of days happily crankin' 'em out. Here're a few:






We intend to have a page at the beginning of each chapter, mixing in a few actual newspaper ads for events that ended in disaster, performances of Hamlet downtown starring John Wilkes Booth, etc. I've made about 30 so far.
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Spidey Sense is Tingling....
May. 5th, 2008 | 10:04 pm
But I still say Aunt May should have stayed dead after issue 400.
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Polka!
May. 2nd, 2008 | 08:13 am
The book, "Lost and Found" is about a kid who wants to be a spy and tries to break into the lost and found room. I had to figure if this was going to be the kind of book where...
... the lost and found room turns out to have some sort of treasure in it
... there's really nothing there but old mittens
or
... it turns out to be only the antechamber to a secret room where the janitor is holding a polka band hostage.
In other words, is the kid REALLY spy, does he just THINK he's a spy, or what? There are a lot of subtle choices that have a huge impact on how the book works as a whole here.
I tried it each of those ways (and a few more, besides) before finding the right way to do it. But, after draft upon draft, I've got one that I'm excited about.
And now I don't know what the heck to do with myself this morning. Hence, I'm working on some new Back Row Hooligans songs. I have a real itch to do another album right now, and hoping this'll cure it.
Here's a new song for today; I don't think it'd fit in on the album, but I sort of want to record it just because it would really fun to film a video for it. It's an instructional dance number.
THE POUR IT ON YOUR HEAD POLKA
Take a gallon of milk and pour it on your head, pour it on your head
a bottle of cola, gotta pour it on your head, pour it on your head
nice, cold lemonade, pour it on your head
iced vanilla latte, pour it on your head
and don't blame me when you get grounded!
Take a bowl of dog food, pour it on your head, pour it on your head
a box of cereal gotta pour it on your head, pour it on your head
refreshing apple juice, pour it on your head
communion wine, pour it on your head
and don't blame me when they kick you out of church!
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Weird Things At My Place
May. 1st, 2008 | 11:49 pm
- A coat hanger bent into a neat shape by Bob Dylan
- the doorbell from a house where Jim Morrison used to live (I built this into my desk)
- a strand of Charles Dickens' hair (also now built into the desk)
- souvenir key from the 1933 World's Fair
- Copy of the Des Moines Register announcing Nixon's resignation (I'm holding it in the author photo on my next book)
- Counting Crows guitar pick from the 1997 tour
- Chunk of driftwood signed by all three members of Ben Folds Five
I've really got my eye on "battle flag" waved by supporters of the Bull Moose party in 1912, but, you know....memorabilia doesn't really MEAN anything. It's just cool. I can't really pay THAT much for cool stuff. Unless it's a wii. Which is more than just cool.
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Wiiiiiiii!
May. 1st, 2008 | 12:41 pm
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Rock!
May. 1st, 2008 | 07:38 am
In fact, I suspect this is going to be one of those albums that gets into my brain and makes me deconstruct it until I think there are grand designs and concepts underlying the whole thing until it becomes a sort of epic that is intertwined in my imagination. One of those albums that comes out every now and then. You know the kind, probably.
Go buy this record. You can go to Itunes and have it in under a minute.
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Song idea
Apr. 30th, 2008 | 11:25 pm
If I were a spider
and you were a piggy...
You'd have to sing "spider" with a third syllable - drawing out the i sound oughta do it. I haven't gotten past that first line yet, though.
I sort of have it in my head to start writing songs again and recording another album, but most of my brains are telling me "NO! Don't do it! No time! No room! You didn't even sell half of the first (very small) printing of Clark Street Carols, and you know you aren't gonna wanna go play in bars again to plug it!" "Yes," I say back, "that's very wise, but I still sort of feel like making an album again, if only to make sure my hands are always busy." And it shouts back "You wanna keep your hands busy? Why not finally get your guitar skills past 'advanced beginner?' Maybe even get THAT far on piano! THEN maybe you can think about an album again!"
My brain makes some good points sometimes.
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Cross-post from the Weird Chicago Blog
Apr. 25th, 2008 | 06:46 am

Does this dragon look like Trogdor to anyone else?
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Today I've...
Apr. 24th, 2008 | 02:10 pm
... biked out to the West Side to get a picture of Crazy Pipe Man for the Weird Chicago blog
... polished off a few chapters for a fantasy book proposal
... played a little bit with the top secret middle grade project
... did a bit of promo work for Pirates.
... started compiling the podcast we recorded at the old courthouse / gallows site on the overnight ghost hunt the other day, and worked on an ebook about the Chicago gallows.
Been a pretty productive day, over all.
So why do I keep feeling like such a bum?
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Victory is Mine!
Apr. 23rd, 2008 | 11:03 am
"No student in the gifted pool would ever put their A at risk by making a video they know would offend their teacher. Not in Marin County where I work, at least."
Bwhahahaa! Most of the gifted kids I've run across (and knew back then) LIVED to offend their teachers. Can Marin County really be so full of wenises compared to wild and crazy suburban Des Moines? Half the point of the book was to point out that most "gifted kids" aren't weirdos who tuck their shirts into their undies - they're miscreants who read from the adult section at the library.
But the BEST part is that the guy read it after a librarian had asked him to - apparently, some teacher objected to said librarian letting a sixth grader read it. In other words - I've been challenged in another library! That's just about the finest badge of honor in the YA field!
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tweet?
Apr. 23rd, 2008 | 10:11 am
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Boo!
Apr. 22nd, 2008 | 06:51 pm
My job rules.
I'm hoping that this can mess with my sleep schedule a bit; lately I get tired and head for bed WAY to early, and get up WAY too early as a result.
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The Cereal Report - 4/22/08
Apr. 22nd, 2008 | 04:24 pm
ALDI CHEERIOS - there are some cereals that you can get the off-brand version of and never know the difference - Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Frosted Mini-Wheats and Sugar Crisp come readily to mind. Others can occasionally be better (certain off-brand versions of Cap'n Crunch are less likely to tear up the roof of your mouth than the normal incarnation), and others are hit and miss (frosted flakes, peanut butter crunh, lucky charms). Given the general simplicity of cheerios, one would THINK they would be hard to mess up, but I've yet to find a good off-brand version. The off-brands tend to be a bit...insubstantial compared to the real thing. Trader Joe's probably comes closest, but I can still totally tell the difference. Aldi generally does a fine job of duplicating name brands (it's often the stuff from the same factory as the name brands and happens to be in a different label), so I gave their cheerios a shot - no dice. I've had worse, but they lack the substance I expect from cheerios.
FRUIT LOOPS with DARKBERRIES - the "darkberries" look lke blue-and-purple versions of the regular cereal bits. When I had a bowl of this stuff, I THOUGHT I detected a slightly more black-berryish taste than you normally get from Fruit Loops. It may have just been my imagination, but, in any case, here we have a cereal variation that's actually at least as good as, and possibly even a tiny bit better than, the original. That's not something that happens every day! Sure, now and then you get that rare off-shoot, like the late, lamented frosted version of Rice Krispies that had marshmallows in it. Often you can't tell the difference, like when they add a new charm to Lucky Charms. This may be like that, but without a bowl of the normal stuff to compare it with, it's impossible to be sure. Worth a shot, though!
Next time on the cereal report.....well, it depends on what's on sale next time I hit the store. Rule number one of cereal buying: never pay full price for the name brand stuff. Wait for it to go on sale!
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Time To Bring the Rock!
Apr. 21st, 2008 | 02:05 pm
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Passover
Apr. 20th, 2008 | 09:10 am
I've always thought that, while Passover is, by nature, a religious holiday, it's a holiday that can be just as meaningful without the religious angle. No matter who you are or where you came from, it's a sure bet that somewhere along the line, the people who came before you had it worse than you do, and, no matter how hard you've worked, it's useful to remember that you didn't get where you are all by yourself. Everybody has had help - if not from a slave who fled Egypt and wandered in the desert for forty years, then maybe from a teacher or a parent, or even from some politician or pamphlet writer two hundred years ago. Probably all of those and millions more. Because of something they did, your life today is better. And it's nice to be reminded of this and appreciate how good we have it today; to become accustomed to luxury is a sad thing indeed.
Passover is a holiday similar to Thanksgiving - the main idea is to stuff yourself and be thankful that you can. If you're not religious, you can still be thankful to your forefathers, or Squanto or Thomas Paine or whoever - the point is that you didn't get here by youself. No one does. And remember that the way you live can help other people down the road get to a better place than they would have been without you, whether they ever realize it or not.
A couple of years ago there was a letter to the editor in the New York Times from a Rabbi reacting to a recent study in which people prayed for hospital patients to see if it affected the health and/or recovery of the patients (which, for the record, it didn't). He pointed out that prayer is not an ask-and-you-shall-receive sort of vending machine - there are lots of different ways to pray. He related a story of a doctor telling a woman that he was sorry she had to go through all of this right before surgery, which made her feel as though she could go through anything. That was a prayer, and it worked.
You didn't get here yourself. And whenever the people who came before you did something to help us get where we are today, intentional or not, that was a form of prayer. And it worked.
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7 Songs
Apr. 19th, 2008 | 09:21 am
Seven songs I'm into right now:
1. Valentine's Day in Juarez - The Ike Reilly Assassination
2. Cowboys - Counting Crows
3. When I Dream of Michaelangelo - Counting Crows
4. Lost in the Shadows (The Lost Boys) - Lou Gramm, I think
5. Nothing Came Out - The Moldy Peaches
6. Thief - Belly
7. Thunder On the Mountain - Bob Dylan
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More from the Kankakee library...
Apr. 18th, 2008 | 10:53 am
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MORE Piracy!
Apr. 17th, 2008 | 06:15 pm
Angelique from Denver sent us this:

Robert Abbot from Michigan got this great shot:

Indie Street Cred Points all around! Most people are putting them in three places: where the book ought to be, a blank space on one of the tables, and near the "title search" computers.
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Fan Art!
Apr. 17th, 2008 | 08:45 am
Here's some great artwork from Vickie Stankewicz of the Kankakee, IL library (which is one of our great nation's best libraries):

Paste this in your blog for one point!
Longtime readers might remember that if I ever run for congress, Greedo is in my Stump Speech, in which I'll introduce The Han Shot First Bill. Finally, some legislation on which we can all agree!
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Yarrr, me mateys!
Apr. 16th, 2008 | 06:36 am





Add this banner to your blog, webpage, etc:
And click the banner for MORE ways to join in the motley crew of buccaneers! Extra prizes will soon be announced!
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The Cereal Report, April 15th
Apr. 15th, 2008 | 03:12 pm
CHOCOLATE PEANUT BUTTER POPS
The logo here implies that these are a chocolate peanut butter flavored version of Corn Pops - they left the "corn" out, perhaps wise to the fact that the mixture of chocolate and corn wouldn't turn people on much. The best cereal of this flavor is still the late, lamented E.T. cereal. The recent champ, of course, is the Reese's Cereal, which is pretty good. This new entry from Pops doesn't look like Corn Pops at all, and doesn't have that chewy texture, either. Instead, it looks, feels, and, frankly, tastes about like Cocoa Puffs. There's to MUCH of a peanut butter taste - even less than there is in Reese's, in fact. There IS, however, a corn taste. If you want a good choco-peanut butter cereal, your best bet is still to mix peanut butter Cap'n Crunch with Cocoa Puffs; doing it that way has the added benefit of letting you control the chocolate to peanut butter ratio.
DINO S'MORE PEBBLES
Back in the 80s, there was a smores cereal that was essentially Golden Grahams with some chocolate and marshmallow added. It was GREAT. But eventually it went the way of O.J.s (the cereal that tasted like orange juice) and the Ice Cream Cones cereal (YUM!). Some years back, it was replaced by another S'mores cereal that really screwed up the graham cracker part. I LOVE Smores. But smores flavored stuff is hard to nail - the Smore candy bar is awful, and even the Ben and Jerry S'mores ice cream leaves a little to be desired. The get the chocolate, all right, but the marshmallow lacks the necessary "toasted" flavor, and the graham cracker taste gets drowned out by everything else. So I wasn't that hopeful about Smores Pebbles, which are mostly chocolate shaped chunks a bit more substantial than your average pebbles, bone shaped graham cracker pieces, and "marshmallow boulders." And, in fact, the stuff is terrible. The bone shaped pieces don't taste like anything, and the chocolate pieces taste more like cardboard than anything else. The marshmallows DO have a pretty good taste, but they're few and far between and so tiny that I don't know who they think they are calling them "boulders." One bite had the perfect Smore taste, but the rest of them didn't taste like much, and the texture is more like gerbil food than fruity pebbles.
I'll finish the box of pops. I'm not sure about the pebbles yet, but I won't throw them away immediately, like I did with the sugar-free alpha bits a couple of years back. Someone had BETTER have gotten fired over that one.
Next time on the Cereal Report, I'll be seeing what this "darkberry froot loops" business is all about, and try Aldi's take on fake cheerios, which no one YET has managed to do well.
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Tuesday!
Apr. 15th, 2008 | 07:58 am
The problem is, right now I feel like the main character is coming off like Oliver Twist: flat and uninteresting in an interesting world. I need more on him than this. It's a step up from having him be Paul Dombey (imagine Tiny Tim staying alive for a few hundred pages as a main character instead of being a footnote - by then, you're ready for the little bugger to hurry up and die already), but not where I want him to be. And making the narrator Dickens/Fielding AND modern is quite a balancing act.
side note; I'm still digging this song "Cowboys" on the new Counting Crows album like crazy. Certainly the most exciting and dramatic song they ever did. One wrong move and it could have sounded like a comic book rock song, like, say, Meat Loaf or My Chemical Romance. But through a regular balancing act, they kept it in that Springsteen's Nebraska / Flannery O'Connor vibe. Never thought I'd hear them do a song in which the singer re-imagines himself as a murderer.
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Avast, Ye Scurvy Scalawag! It's The BE A PIRATE CONTEST!
Apr. 14th, 2008 | 06:57 am
music: something really hip, obviously, since I can dispense indie street cred.
There are lots of ways to enter:
1. Copy and paste the following text into your blog or webpage to post this banner:
.
That's worth one indie street cred point. You can also make your own banner - just make sure to link it to adamselzer.com. Extra points MAY be given, especially if you generate a whole lot of linkage.
2. Download the official "pirate flier," make a few copies, and plant them in the YA section of any book store that isn't currently stocking Pirates of the Retail Wasteland. CLICK HERE to download the flier as a pdf file, or CLICK HERE to get it as a jpg. Two fliers come to each page - just print 'em up, cut the pages in half, and get 'em in the stores! Send in pictures of the fliers in your local bookstore (or coffee shop, library, etc) to us here. Each store you hit is worth 2 indie street cred points! All pictures will be posted in a special gallery soon!
3. If you've already read and enjoyed the book, post a review on amazon for two points!
4. Make your own promo video on Youtube - there are a few of them available here as examples. Send us a link - you'll get 2 indie street cred points right away, plus a bonus point for every 50 views you get! Send a link to the video here - we'll have links to everything here soon!
5. Send in "fan art" for the book (or for How to Get Suspended and Influence People) - the number of points each piece of art is worth will be determined by Adam after you send it in. Art will be posted online!
6. Come up with your own creative way to promote the book, pirate-style. Email us your idea for approval first; we don't want anyone running around naked and shouting "Pirates!" and expecting to get street cred points for it. That kind of thing doesn't get you points, only citations for indecent exposure. And it'll make Adam look like an alleged smut peddlar - just like Leon in his first book, How To Get Suspended and Influence People. Points awarded will vary depending on the stunt.
EXTRA POINTS MAY BE AWARDED FOR CREATIVITY!
Prizes include everything from eyepatches and fake mustaches (fool your friends! baffle your teachers! get into r-rated movies!) to signed copies of the upcoming book I PUT A SPELL ON YOU. And EVERY prize comes with a certificate of Indie Street Cred, a link to download mp3s of Pirates Always Cheat at Bingo by The Back Row Hooligans AND at least one other song, and a coupon for a discount on a Weird Chicago Ghost Tour.
For a complete list of prizes and all of the "void where prohibited, part of this complete breakfast, etc" fine print, go to adamselzer.com.
YARRRR! I'd be remiss if I didn't credit
kidlit_kim for this!
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Let's all sing "ho ho," for here comes Jolly Joe!
Apr. 13th, 2008 | 03:51 pm
Polka is the new alternative music.
That's right. All you emo kids can just go cry in your cereal! I'm chatting with a comcast representative (who I'm pretty sure is a robot) right now about getting them to add RFDTV so that I can watch The Big Joe Polka Show. Big Joe rules.
In fact, if you spin around his website, polkacatalog.com , you'll find most of the bands I name characters after. Why, just about every character in the upcoming "I Put a Spell On You" was named after a polka band. THe rest either came from "Our Mutual Friend" or the Nixon administration.
I've gotta use my ability to determine what's hip now, because I'll be selling out soon!
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Fun with Offensive Lyrics
Apr. 13th, 2008 | 03:28 pm
This can also be used in conversation, as in "man, that koopa crazy!" and "Koopa please!"
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I have got the right stuff
Apr. 12th, 2008 | 11:43 pm
I was young enough when they hit the height of their popularity that there wasn't any social stigma for boys in my class to like them, and, now that I watch these videos for the first time in YEARS, I can see why i liked them - they were like cool older brothers. I didn't have a cool older brother. I WAS the cool older brother. Or, anyway, I was the older brother.
Watching them as an adult, I can usually tell when they're lip-synching in the concert clips and know exactly how choreographed the off-stage clowning around probably was, but these guys sure as hell did work their butts off. Everyone lip syncs in dance shows, anyway. Odds are pretty good that none of the girls at the concerts could hear 'em, anyway. And if they were all on coke to keep going (not out of the question) and had hotel rooms full of naked girls every night (I understand that was the case), I sure never suspected it at the time.
And, of course, it's a rush of nostalgia for me to see all this again. When we think of 80s nostalgia, we usually go for the cartoons, the toys...you know. The stuff we never really outgrow. But let us all be honest - we watched this, too. We grew out of it (I remember hearing kids saying the new kids were "really more of an 80s thing" in EARLY 1990), but we watched it, all right. All of my friends did. Even the ones who, a few years later, were consumed with heavy metal vomit parties, drugs, etc. They were already listening to GNR in 1989. But they owned copies of "Hangin' Tough," too.
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The BE A PIRATE CONTEST
Apr. 12th, 2008 | 11:13 am

There are lots of ways to enter and earn points! Why, you can earn an indie street cred point right now by posting the above flier (or your own version of it) on your own blog. See how easy it is? Just copy and paste the following text into your blog:
Thanks a million to
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And May Omigod Have Mercy On Us All
Apr. 11th, 2008 | 09:17 am
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Rock!
Apr. 10th, 2008 | 08:02 am
I don't know what went wrong with Counting Crows - they put on the best live show in the business and that guy can write like nobody's business, but somewhere along the line, it became uncool to like them. People started lumping them in with a lot of really inferior prep rock bands, I guess, or somehow got the idea that the singer tries to pass himself off as "sensitive," which he really, really doesn't.
Since it was acoustic, they didn't play the best song off the new album, which is called "Cowboys," a song about wanting to make a difference in the world and ending up going horribly awry. Which is sort of what happened to them, only they take it to a fictional extreme in the song, which opens with a line that I think could have come right out of Springsteen's "Nebraska:" "If I was a hungry man with a gun in his hand and some promises to keep / who wanted to change the world / what's as easy as murder? / it's all headlights and vapor trails / and circle K killers." And then it ends even better - "come on all you cowboys, all you blue-eyed baby boys / come all you dashing gentlemen of summer / I'll wait for you where saturday's a memory / and sunday comes to gather me / into the arms of God, who'll welcome me / cause I believe / oh I believe." And he's singing it like he just swooped into town jumping off a freight train with a cape fluttering in the wind behind him. In the first song of the album, he's presenting himself as Columbus. By "Cowboys," he's turned into John Wilkes Booth. Which helps him get away with the Columbus part. It's a fun band to deconstruct. Never thought I'd see them write a murder ballad!
"Cowboys" makes the pieces of the album fit together so well that I assumed it was probably the last song written for the album; I was able to ask him about that yesterday. And I was right!
Man, what a song. They're playing a normal show at a club tonight; it's a private show for a college, but I'm gonna see about smuggling my way in.
Anyway, I'm off to do a morning ghost investigation at one of the hardest places to research I've ever found. The tenants of this building seem to have gone their own way on what address to use over the years, and the years (mainly the 1950s) when it was a front for a mob prostitution ring covered up a whole lot of the tracks. It's gone back and forth between being a law firm, a scuzzy hotel, and a strip club many times over the years. Now it's a nice restaurant.


