Would the classic mini-series V stand up at all today? Probably not. Especially not that puppet alien baby. The series that followed it barely stood up back in the 80's. But damn, I watched and loved it all. I drew paint-dripping V's on my notebooks at school as often as I drew blood-spattered smiley-face pins (If you don't get that reference, I pity you).

V is ripe for a remake though. Until then, well, I'm equally thrilled to see a sequel by the original creator, coming out as a novel. I still have all original novels that came out during V's hey-day. It was good stuff, especially when they told the tales of fighting "visitors" in locales other than L.A. I'll gladly give this a read.

(And hey, VPers --  it's published by TOR -- wonder if PNH had anything to do with it?)

I'm a TV junkie, but what's a junkie to do when there's a strike? Ignoring, for the moment, that there's probably plenty of good stuff on over the next few months (Lost, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica coming back in April, The Shield someday soon, etc.), strike or not, let's pretend that the only place we have to turn for good TV programming is... the Web!

That's the basis for a new thing I'm going to try to write each week (hopefully) at AppScout (part of the PC Magazine Network) where I'll review a show you can only find online (or mostly online). I wrote the first one today, reviewing Wainy Days, a show I just discovered. I watched the entire backlog of episodes (each is approximately four minutes long). It's gross, crude, rude....some might call it moderately retarded. There's at least one stomach churning bodily fluid reference (episode called "The Bank") that almost made me yack up some Chinese food. So, of course, I love this show. Read my review and then check it out.

I've been tagged, like an errant deer! Thanks, Yeff.

Here's what I'm supposed to do:
- Link to the person who tagged you. (that would be Yeff.)
- Leave a comment on their blog so that their readers can visit yours.
- Post the rules on your blog. (Obviously)
- Share the seven (7) most famous or infamous people you have met. Or go with the original 7 weird things about yourself. Or with Sandra's change and list your 7 favorite writing websites. Lots of choices!
- Tag 7 random people at the end of your post.
- Include links to their blogs.
- Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I definitely can't think of seven in/famous people I've met. I don't get out enough for that.

• I shook hands with Lou Ferrigno in 1978 at a car show in Buffalo. He was still the Hulk at the time. He didn't look happy to be at a car show.
• I have seen or passed both Avery Brooks (in his DS9 uniform on the Paramount lot) and Richard Dreyfuss (in NYC near Carnegie Hall) and Sharon Lawrence (at a hotel in Disney World during the 25^th Anniversary of the place). Didn't speak to any of them. Only Sharon looked happy.
• Does Leo Laporte of TWiT/TechTV count as famous? Why not. And he's a good guy.
• I spent an hour on the phone with Mark Hamill once when he did an online Q&A with the readers of FamilyPC on AOL. I had to type in his answers. (Oh, and The Dark Knight guys should totally dub in his laugh over the late Heath Ledger's as the Joker. Hamill's Joker was da bomb.)
• Had dinner once with Neal Gaiman in Cambridge after a CBLDF reading. But he was on one end of the long table, and my friend Ezra and I on the other. But we've traded e-mails since.
• Hey, I know the Internet's Cory Doctorow! Eat it, suckers! How many of you can say tha... oh. Shit.

Fine, seven eight nine weird things about me:

• I work from home, so I don't always get dressed during the day. (Is that weird, or just gross?)
• I once played Dracula in a play in high school. It was a musical. Got to lay in a real coffin on stage waiting for my cue. I was off key. I was thin.
• In high school, I ate McDonald's French fries almost every single weekday at lunch. Which is why I'm not thin now.
• I had a higher SAT score than my wife, even though we're both pretty sure she's much smarter than me.
• Scared of Bigfoot... blah blah blah, it's been covered.
• I've only shaved my beard off completely once since 1997 and that was so I could dress up as Uncle Fester. For work.
• I once cried at the point in Superman the Movie when Lois Lade died in the earthquake, cause Superman was so distraught. My mom made fun of me. My brother still does. Dad was probably asleep.
• I've currently got 15 episodes of Cartoon Network's Ben 10 on my TiVo to watch. That show rocks.
• I'm as Democrat as they come, but I still miss my old Ford Explorer.

Okay, here are the suckers people I'm tagging and who I don't expect to do this at all, and I'm breaking the rules by not commenting in all their blogs, but if they find it, they find it:

• Josh (chapter11studios) and Penny (Tigermommy)
• Jason (deciphering life)
• Dan (Lepus Lepidus)
• Allyson (paraphrasing)
• Naims (true stories and essays)
• Dr. Laura (Head Med Rush)

About the only thing about this video that doesn't make me soil myself is the cheesy music.

Yes, 30 years after the Bigfoot mania of the 1970s, I'm still scared to death of Bigfoot. Jesus.

I am fully cognizant that this may be the most irrational fear in the history of irrationality. Bigfoot, is, for one, a benevolent creature of the forest who, by all accounts,cares only about eating berries and being left alone.

Second, he's (probably, hopefully) fiction.

And third, he's a superhero!

But this damn 39.7 second Patterson Sasquatch film has always freaked me out, and digitally enhancing it so he walks smooth as a 70's pimp doesn't make it any less so. (Here's another view.)

Who's really to blame for my cowardice to the skunk ape? Leonard Nimoy and my parents.

Nimoy was host of In Search Of..., the only documentary program that was a staple of my life. And the Bigfoot episode didn't make the ol' Sasquatch out to be very benevolent. Watch it here.

And my parents, well, they just had to go see some 70's Bigfoot-oriented monster flick (probably this one) at the drive-in in Bath, NY, and dragged my brother and I along. I cowered behind the bucket seats of the AMC Pacer, hands clamped over my ears, begging to leave, to please let me know when it was over, anything, because, for Christ's sake, we were RIGHT NEXT TO THE WOODS. Bigfoot could come out at any time and bash in the back window and pick me up my scrawny neck!

My mother, full of sympathy, told me to shut the hell up or she'd give me something to cry about.

Just goes to show you parents out there... you never know what stupidity will scar your kids for life!

Note: These are the same parents who did not take me to see Jaws. Go figure.

And for those keeping score... it's almost nine years later, and I have still not watched the DVD I bought of The Blair Witch Project. Scary+woods=Eric in Mental Shutdown.

My parents got a new dog. Another Sheltie. Cute in the pics I've seen. I hope he's not as high-strung and yappy as their late Sheltie, who was cute, but kinda insane. I think that may just be bred in tho, like hunger is bread into Labs.

My wife is now the proud owner of an iPod Touch! Yes, she bought the toy I thought I wanted months ago and then chickened out on. She's promised me I can play with it all I want, as long as I don't trick it out so much that I break it (no jailbreaks for me.). But I'm NOT paying $20 bucks for the new apps... Apple better pony them up for free. Or deliver a refund. Something.

New keyboard on the wife's MacBook Pro, too. That's what took us to the Apple store up in Syracuse in the first place. I hope she'll learn to not HULK SMASH the Escape key now when something doesn't happen instantly, but... probably not.

In the news: The Joker is dead? Dude was a good actor. Fucking shame.

...of writing a shit-load of words in my novel. And while I'm usually paralyzed on weekdays after spending the workday writing for my day job, today's a holiday. So, I'm writing. Since Saturday, I've manage to regurgitate 6,200 words on to the digital representations of pages, finally reaching the spot I should have been at on November 29, 2007, had I stuck with my NaNoWriMo schedule. It might have been a blessing, cause I've got a much more exciting and (dare I say it) realistic* way to get my characters to Australia now, thanks to some help from the honest-to-gosh American Military (in the form of my buddy, Major Kayser. Thanks Bill!).

*Realistic, of course, is a relative term when your novel features extra-dimensional-alien-pig-men that vomit acid.

Six months ago today I took the plunge back into the waters of Ziff-Davis, the company that first gave me a home and career (outside of food service) back in 1992.

One of the best moves I made in 2007, and maybe one of the smartest moves I've made in the last five years toward my job satisfaction.

It doesn't hurt that I get to write excellent stories like How to Become a YouTube Star. Somehow, the art department managed to depict an almost perfect likeness of me from high school on the opening page (left). Seriously, that looks like my first driver's license photo. I wonder if they called my mom for a picture...

Here's to six more months. And, hopefully, years.

Did you hear the collective geek-gasm around 8:55pm Eastern last night (Sunday)? It was when the brand new Terminator TV show -- which had the biggest series premiere numbers of any show in three years (since LOST?) --managed to stick with the continuity of the movie (T2, rightly ignoring the third piece of crap) yet used the well established time travel gimmick to also change it up completely. Bravo.

I can easily name the last three movies I saw more than once in the theater -- and they were all sequels. Spider-Man 2 because I had to go a second time with the Wife (she wouldn't stay up for the midnight premiere). Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace because I was TRICKED. I shouldn't even admit it. And it's technically a prequel, yeah, whatever. I'm ashamed.

But long before those two, way back in 1991, I saw Terminator 2: Judgment Day three nights in a row at the movies. Totally worth it then, and so was this new show. Brav-fucking-oh! This, The Wire, LOST, The Shield... who's going to even notice a strike?

It just occurred to me, people have been asking how I feel and it didn't help that I claimed to have tonsillitis and plague and monkey pox then never posted a follow up.

So...I saw the doctor on Monday. I expected she's witness the raw-hamburger at the back of my throat that used to be tonsils and she'd have me strapped to a gurney and prepped for emergency throat surgery right there.

Instead, she very politely said (and I'm paraphrasing), "You're on the mend. Go home and stop being a big whiny baby. 'Boo hoo, my froat hurts. Waaah.' You make me sick."

Begrudgingly, I feel better, but my throat still hurts when I swallow. I wish she'd found something actually wrong.

She did give me more Vicodin, however, so it wasn't a total loss.

A couple of people from VPXI have blogged this week about their dogs catching and/or eating rabbits. Traumatic moments, I'm sure... I recall with sickening clarity the number of dead woodchucks and rabbits my grandmother's dog used to drag back to the farmhouse as a kid. One time, the dogs led me through a field to find a half-dead woodchuck which snarled and hissed as we came close, but the dogs would not finish it off while I was present, for some reason. Perhaps to save my virgin eyes. Not that they had a problem with slopping its entrails all over the gravel driveway later. And after you've gone through the family chicken and/or pig slaughtering day on the farm, what's a few intestines?

My dogs today, however, have no longer realize most wild-life even exists. And it's my fault, for they're trained too well.

About seven years ago, one day I let our oldest Labrador, Siren, outside at my in-laws house. I watched her stalk, chase, and capture a squirrel in the snow. But I yelled, "LEAVE IT" as Siren pounced... she looked at me with mild disappointment, but let the squirrel go up a tree. She's never chased one since. (If only that worked for when I tell her to stop eating clumps of dead grass clippings.)

Since we've lived in Ithaca again, we're over-run by rabbits. I have counted as many as eight of them frolicking in my backyard, no doubt prepping to make more. For some reason the wascals love to get inside the small fenced in area we have for the dogs. You'd think this would make them sitting ducks (Wabbit season! Duck season!!), but after yelling at the blonds (Kylie and Caper) on the single occasions they thought a rabbit might be fun to chase... the rodents have since become invisible to my mutts.

I let the dogs out back last week and there were three members of family Leporidae inside the fence. The long-eared galloots bounced right off the chain link in abject fear, trying to muscle through the small gaps. I told Caper, "Get 'em! Get 'em. He's RIGHT THERE. Caper, there's a damn rabbit three feet from you... Ah, jesus." Meanwhile, Caper looked at me like, What are you talking about? Do you have a cookie?

I'd almost be relieved if the Labra-dolts would at least bark. They only do that if they see a deer. Or a UPS guy.

If it weren't for the fact that they vomit when least expected, I'd almost call life with these dogs a little too laid back.

Jon Steward and Stephen Colbert are back on the air tonight. But I won't be watching. Unlike Letterman, they didn't cut a deal with the Writer's Guild of America (WGA) to go back to work with their writers. So the show is writer-less Even Colbert and Stewart write for the show, but they can't write any jokes ahead. But they've got contracts to fulfill so they have to preform even if no one puts words in their mouths. Can't blame them. But I won't be watching until Viacom and the rest of the shit-bird studios cut the writers the deal they want. Daily Show and Colbert Report are off my TiVO until then.

I'm exhausted. This after a so-called 9 hours of sleep... I think whatever creeping cruds I still have (my theory: strep throat turned to tonsillitis) is making me snore so much at night that I'm getting apnea. I'm convinced I'm depriving my brain of oxygen the more I lay down. I'm going to see my doctor at 2:30 today and find out if I can get these lymphoid throat cloggers yanked. I want to swallow food again without wincing.

Luckily, illness didn't stop me from having a relatively productive weekend of writing on Beta Test. 2,700 words in all and I got to finish my big chase scene (A stolen ambulance! Exploding oxygen canisters! Creatures with acid vomit! It's all big-ass fun.) I threw in another budding romance for a couple of minor characters and managed to have my favorite character, Bonk the Labrador, bonk someone in the crotch. Again. My critique group on the whole finds that gag unfunny. But dammit, it's the most realistic thing in the book. So I keep using it, over and over. Sometimes, you just have to have faith.

Last night, I watched the best first chapter of the best book I'll probably watch all year: The first episode of The Wire's final season aired on HBO, and it was made out of pure awesome, sprinkled with awe-inspiring. Each season is like a meticulously crafted novel, with characters weaving in and out of each other's lives. It's breath-taking. Once The Shield and LOST are both back, then this television thing will really get off the ground. Who'll even notice a strike then?

Hey! First time in a week I've gone almost three hours without a sinus headache, achy throat, or sputum! w00t.