Health care reform: here we go again. For anyone who was old enough to be paying attention in the early nineties, there’s a depressing familiarity to the current debate.

I’m slowly emerging from what may have been one of the most intense, busiest periods of my working life — particularly the last month or so. It’s been very frustrating, to have so much going on, and to not be able to write about most of it. I’ve had some extraordinary experiences over the past few months, and come the fall, I hope to be able to lift the veil of secrecy somewhat.

I can say this: one of the joys of the past six months or so has been working with people who give a damn about what they’re doing. This has not always been my experience in recent years, with publishers and so on. But both with the album cover and with the children’s book, I had the great good luck to be collaborating with people who were genuinely focused on the quality of the end product.

And I’ve just received an advance copy of the actual, physical, published kid’s book, and I couldn’t be happier. When you’re in production on something like this, there are a million details you have to work out, and even when you’re working with good people it seems like you’re inevitably going to miss something — but the Mayor turned out exactly as I’d hoped. I really couldn’t be happier with it.

The book, which I wrote about in more detail in this post, will be available in stores in September (as will the PJ album — it’s going to be an exciting fall). And there are pre-order links on the very official Very Silly Mayor placeholder homepage.

All about US: the American right responds to the turmoil in Iran.

CNN trying to look cutting-edge by using Twitter is like 1950s radio trying to look high-tech by describing what’s on TV.

That is all.

PS My own Twitter feed for random thoughts of insignificant length pooped into space to float away silently is here.

All best wishes to my friend Derf, who is currently recuperating from open heart surgery.

The entire week I spent in Seattle, it was sunny and warm. Since I’ve been back on the East Coast, it’s been grey and drizzly and cool.

These are not the weather patterns to which I have grown accustomed!

Tom-You’ve got to come up with some new material. The dim bulbs that actually get political information out of the Creative Loafing and Rolling Stone might actually not notice but your hard-on for Glen Beck is starting to get reduntent. I mean to a point that your otherwise ridiculous comic is actually outdoing itself in how retarded it really is. Come up with some new stuff would ya?

Great point! We don’t want to be “reduntent”! Why, in the last six months, I’ve mentioned the right wing’s most popular rising commentator at least twice!* I hope my editors at Rolling Stone don’t get wind of this, particularly in light of the fact that my work has never appeared in Rolling Stone!

Glenn Beck’s fans apparently have the same distant, somewhat strained relationship to reality as the man himself …

________

*In the cartoon, which this letter references. Mr. Beck admittedly comes up more often here in the informal setting of the blog.

Tonight, 7:32 pm, during the Dodger game, regarding the LAPD:

“The thin blue line between us and the jungle.”

Not exactly the best choice of words, given some of the notorious chapters in the LAPD’s history.

I’m sure he didn’t mean the implication. I’m sure he’d be horrified if he ever hears about it. Everyone eventually says something that carries a meaning they didn’t intend, and for a lot of people, it’s probably at least once a day. Vin has been on the air for, what, 10,000 hours in his life? And now he says exactly one objectionable thing. It would be different if he had a track record or a past as a shock jock or something. But he doesn’t. This is Vin Scully here. I think we can just wince painfully, appreciate the sentence’s pure badness as a form of accidental art, and move on.

I only mention it because if it can happen to Vin freakin’ Scully, one of the most beloved and gentle broadcasters in the history of baseball, it can happen to any of us.

If there’s any controversy about it — and who the hell knows these days — let’s be clear about the feeling in this corner.

Mulligan.

Yikes.

Thinking that changing the color scheme on your blog will somehow help the protestors in Iran has to be the wankiest thing I’ve heard since … well, since about anything that came out of the rightwing wankosphere circa 2003.

Clear-eyed conservative realism translated into English.