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This children’s book on ritual abuse — a product, no doubt, of the ’80s Satanism scare — is the kind of thing my mom would have sold at her ¨ber-fundamentalist bookstore alongside the Jack Chick tracts and Dungeons and Dragons exposés, so for me it inspires a dull sort of dread rather than surprise or amusement. (Via.)

Even I was kind of incredulous, though, at the Pokemon jeremiad (below) that my friend Michael discovered last week.

“Snagged this from my managing editor’s desk,” texts a friend on the staff at a newspaper, following the announcement about the shuttering of Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews. “The teaser in the upper right… Oof.”

Just as the cockles of my heart were warming over Ralph Stanley’s banjo pickin’ Obama radio spot, a reader in North Florida sends along a little something that guarantees they’ll be frozen over till at least sometime next April.

The Jackson County School Board has taken action against a teacher who apparently made racial commentary on presidential candidate Barack Obama.

According to parents and students in Greg Howard’s seventh-grade social studies class, Howard on Friday, Sept. 26 asked the class a question regarding Obama’s call for change, and proceeded to write out what the letters C-H-A-N-G-E stood for.

“She told me that he wrote on the board ‘Can You Help A (expletive) Get Elected, and then laughed about it,” said Shelia Christian, a mother of one of Howard’s students.

Jackson County Superintendent Danny Sims said that description of this incident was “pretty accurate.”

Sims said Howard apparently repeated the action in more than one class, having made the comment in “a couple of periods.”

Between this and the #@&$(#& revised bailout — with its tax breaks for Puerto Rican rum manufacturers and repeal of an excise tax on toy wooden arrows — only one thing prevents me from going home and crawling back into bed: anticipating the schadenfreude flavor of tonight’s debate popcorn.

NB to writing professors searching for a colleague’s name + “pussy”: If you are going to troll the Internet for images of or information about a fellow author’s genitals, you might want to do it from someplace other than the university where you work.

Especially when your last name and first initial are embedded in your IP address.

And even more especially when the proprietor of the site where you land is a big fan of your colleague’s writing.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been more offended by a Google search. And believe me, what with my affection for Lolita, people have arrived here through some pretty twisted paths.

Maybe it’s me, but I’m thinking the Bedbug Bible Gang might want to consider rebranding for the urban market. Or, hey, if that’s outside the budget, at least drop the “just itching to” formulation.

The scene above is from Esther Fest, in which the “Bedbugs share the story of Esther in a royalty rousing episode.”

Driving around town this morning I noticed Christmas decorations up already.
Town and Country Village has a big wreath on the tower and a funny topiary reindeer with candy cane antlers and a shopping bag sitting atop the entrance gate.

Sigh. Are we through with Fall? What about Thanksgiving and all that Indian corn and the pumpkins and squash and all of that? I just bought myself a turban squash for my fall table the other day. And I still haven't finished my cornucopia arrangement.

But oh well. This is how it is. So I pulled this old illustration I did in my very first illustration class to kind of get me in the mood. The lesson here was rendering fabrics and textures realistically in watercolor. Sort of. I remember being very proud of the shine on the reindeer's nose, and the shadows on the doll. I still have both of those little guys! And notice the plaid...my obsession was showing even back then. The background was from a piece of fancy wrapping paper.

Funny how you can vividly remember painting certain pieces. The thing with this one ~ I didn't shoot reference, I just set up the still life and painted it from life. Night after night until it was finished. Those little guys posed for me without complaining, never moving, knowing (maybe) that they were being immortalized.