"Ripped from the headlines" is what we call a strip that actually deals with our own, real shit. Technically speaking, even when they're buried beneath irony and voiced by interlopers, it's still our shit. I suppose it depends on the mix of fact and embroidery of said fact. To mercifully bisect a short story threatening to be a long one, this is about as real as it gets.

I'll tell you all about it on Friday. It was a thing.

I spent a lot of time sitting this weekend sitting on ice and watching The Flash. One of the things that makes the show so great is nothing ever seems to happen to anyone's penis. There isn't a meta-human (at least, in the last half of the first season) that does anything like that. So it was a respite.

Committing to new shows is… I was going to say it was hard, but it's not hard. It doesn't happen unless it is (apparently) a British show about the changing roles of women. Those are always finding their way into the rotation somehow. But even in a continuum of impossibility a television show based on the exploits of gentlemen from the funny books is the least possible outcome. But… I don't know. I think this actually works. Hulu would only let me watch the last five, so maybe I missed the early days, backseat bra fumbling which makes it hard to endure shows of this kind. I started with 5, and you can too. It's like those late night offers for marvelous spatulas, I suppose: If you like it, you can keep it.

One of the best ones was a crossover with Arrow, a show I watched for ten minutes and then had to be taken to the hospital with a case of Bad Show Disease (BSD). Was I just wrong? Do I need to watch Arrow, too? It's one of those things where I don't know if I'm being open minded or I'm just a mark. Sometimes you have to allow for the possibility of the latter to truly manifest the former.

Robert and Mike are both out of town on vacation, though if you have the sorts of jobs they have (which is to say, "those which occur largely in the mind") you can never really escape it. I can't actually relax on vacation generally until the end of it, when its time to go back. For a long time I thought it just took me a while to get into the right mode, but I don't think that's it anymore. I relax because I'm coming back home. I don't need "rest," I need to do what I was meant to do. And what I'm meant to do is to talk to you.

(CW)TB out.