Sweet Mary Bejeezus Craphouse, this has been a bite of a week. You ever have one of those weeks where you’re just not expecting the hellstorm to come raining down upon you? If you know it’s coming, you have an advantage. You can hunker down. Buckle up. Duct tape everything together. But when you don’t realize it’s coming… oof. All of a sudden, it’s just wham. Glass breaking. Children screaming. Goats flying, untethered to the earth below!

That’s been this week: a whirlwind of angry goats. Bleating, bleating.

It hasn’t been one thing, it’s just been a lot of little things. The week has been many tiny goat bites, that’s what it’s been. Appointments, deadlines, juggling times, Christmas shopping.

But, it looks like it’s easing up. I think the hellstorm is going back out to sea.

And it’s taking the bitey goats with it.

Which means!

Boom. Painting with Shotguns.

• Hey, remember that good news I keep talking about that I cannot yet share? I cannot yet share it. I know, what a shitty update, right? Except, I have news about the news! The, erm, people in question have told me that a press release goes out Monday, which means I’ll be able to throw it out to all y’all come the start of next week.
• Listen up. I’m taking questions. Questions for a “Frequently Asked Questions” portion of this website. You can ask me things you genuinely want to know. You can ask me nonsense questions for which I will supply nonsense answers. You can ask me personal questions, professional questions, whatever. I’ll post ‘em up when I’ve got… y’know, more than four. (This is where you all disappoint me and make me look sad by asking me three questions, and I weep to the high heavens and eat a fist full of pills, except then I realize it was just a fistful of antacid, so now my tummy’s stripped bare of its digestion capabilities and all I can eat for the rest of my life is foods mashed into paste.)
• Related-but-unrelated: author Steve Weddle has one of the greatest FAQs over at his site. It’s… well, I won’t spoil it. Further, Steve also sat in on a Jeff VanderMeer book talk the other day, and posted some good snippets, which feature some strong-as-bull writing advice.
• Speaking of Jeff VanderMeer, Will Hindmarch has hisself a review (and then a… follow-up review?) of Vandermeer’s latest, Finch. Oh! And Will is doing a reading with Jeff… tonight, I think. Will talks about it at Jeff’s site, here.
• And, since I apparently cannot pimp Will Hindmarch enough over in these parts (what the hell did he put in my drink?), Will has written to date what is easily my most  favoritest haiku ever. To be clear, I do not care overmuch for poetry. Haiku is nice because it’s kind of “stunt poetry,” in the way that any brief, purposefully-patterned poetry is. Most haiku is… nice? It’s nice. But peep this: The smell of fall leaves / has me dreading the day that / the smell of fall leaves. That gets me every time. It’s the perfect amuse- bouche of language. What I’m saying is, Will is an excellent… well, what’s the writer of haiku called? “Poet” sounds too pedestrian? Haiku Master? Captain Haiku? Haikuku for Cocoa Puffs? Haicoup de Grace? I dunno. He’s good at them, is what I’m saying, so when you’re wondering, “Should I go buy his book of haiku?” then the answer to that question is a big fat resounding Go And Do It Now.
• Let’s refocus back on me, before this blog inadvertently becomes The Distant Hindmarches. I’ve got a project with a script that was cast early this week and is now shooting. That’s crazy. No, I can’t talk about it yet. But I’ll be sure to link to it when it’s existing for your pretty little eyes. I swear, I have like… four things I cannot talk about right now. It’s silly. Silly, I said. But I’d rather that than have no things at all worth speaking of, am I right? Point being, I’ve seen storyboards for this thing, and now they’ve cast it and are shooting it — it’ll be the first thing I’ve written that has gotten to that stage. Very exciting stuff.
• Enough about me! Let’s talk about gay marriage. (How’s that for a hard right turn? And the first person who says something about me getting “gay married” gets flogged with a folding chair.) Hey, listen, I keep seeing gay marriage legislation go up, and gay marriage legislation get shot down. The reason for this is that it’s a human rights issue, and human rights issues should not be left to legislation. Human rights — for whatever God-fucked reason — is not a safe vote for anybody, and so, it’s an issue that will forever have too few votes. Moreover, consider the ludicrousness of it: leaving human rights up to the whims of others is insane. Imagine if your right to do something important — get married, have health care, die a dignified death amongst your loved ones, eat cheese, pluck banjos — was actually left up to a vote. Human rights is some bedrock shit. Not the type of thing you should leave to a majority of safe players and bullies.
• Since we’re orbiting politics, here — can we calm down about this Nobel Peace Prize thing again? Obama has it. You may or may not agree, that’s your barrel of monkeys, and you have the right to possess that barrel of monkeys. Just don’t be an ass about it. People seem to be blaming Obama for even having it, which is a face full of stupid. If you’re so inclined to think this was a bad move (I do not), blame the people who gave it to him. Blame the Nobel selection committee. Further, yes, yes, I get it, he’s got the peace prize and he’s embroiled in not one but two wars, and we all know that wars are the enemy of peace and blah blah blah. Sure. That kind of stark black-and-white thinking should have left your brain in the fourth grade. Do you really believe the world is so simple? That it’s that easy? You don’t wave the peace wand and wait for the magical pacifist elf-glitter to rain down upon the surly throngs and create magical lasting peace. Sometimes, to create a lasting peace, you have to kill the motherfuckers who would constantly torment and torture and attack everybody. You want peace on the playground? You better be willing to kick the bully in the face.
• See? Now I’m getting riled up. I’m getting all piss-and-vinegary over here. Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan. And you’re all pissed off about that? Michael Moore said something like how he’s destroying the hopes and dreams people had for Obama? Really? You must have voted for a different president, pal. This is where the lefties get just as goofy as the righties. See, I voted for a president who had amongst his campaign promises the promise to go and kick ass in Afghanistan. Did that mean I voted for McCain? No, it means I voted for Obama, who told us long ago that this was in the cards. Obama, that poor bastard. I worry that he’ll get four years, and those four years will be historically remembered as a wash — even though we’re on the path towards economic recovery, we’re moving toward what has always been impossible health care reform, we’re fighting terrorism where it breeds rather than on a false battlefield, and so on. Oh well.
• Actually, it just shows you how people are, because yesterday, I had to drop a rental car off and get driven down to pick up our car, which was in the shop. Now, to be clear, the man who drove me — an older gentleman — was a solid guy, very nice, from Texas originally. I really liked him. One thing, though. We get down to the dealership, and he picks up a newspaper and points to an article about how Obama is trying to get some of the bailout funds to put towards job recovery efforts — i.e., using it to bailout regular Americans rather than bailing out big banks. The driver scoffs and snorts and shows it to me and makes a few choice comments about how it’s “more bailouts” and “he’s ruining this country” and “I didn’t vote for him.” Yes, but if you’d bother to read the actual article, it isn’t more bailouts. It’s the same bailout — you know, the one that didn’t raise our taxes — and the money is now supposed to go toward not banks but job recovery. Moreover, the “I didn’t vote for him” rationale is fine and good, but it doesn’t absolve you from responsibility within this country, does it? You didn’t vote for him, but We The People goddamn did, like it or not. This is one of those things where I don’t ask you to like our president. I don’t blame you if you didn’t vote for him; that’s your choice, it’s called “political process.” But don’t go being ignorant about your criticisms. You hear so many conspiracy theories about Obama going on under the radar, and it’s a thriving bacterial culture of septic nonsense. He wants to take our guns away (he doesn’t), he’s raising our taxes (he hasn’t), he’s a moon monster (he isn’t), he stole the Lindbergh baby (he didn’t, but I did, and I’ve got him on a shelf next to the Rancor Monster from Return of the Jedi).
• Okay, enough political piffle. What else am I into right now? Well, pineapple-hunting on Psych continues to be great (we’re into the third season on DVD), and the show has easily moved into my Top 10 of shows, which gives the USA Network two such entrants (Burn Notice being the second).
• Dragon Age is better, but it still has lots of outlying issues that stop it from being a great game. More on that when I finish (which will ideally be soon, but I don’t have a lot of time to play video games — it seems that adulthood has other plans for me than playing shit-tons of game-time, despite my desires to do so).
• Community and Modern Family continue to rock the savory-sweet-sour combination in their comedy. Glee is sadly off the charts and no longer on our regular viewing schedule. Steven Seagal: Lawman is hilarious, because… well, c’mon. You got big, beefy Steven Seagal down there in Louisiana hunting bad guys and offering weird Zen aphorisms and aikido references. The show has to be a scam, but it’s kind of captivating. Further, it’s plain to see just how much Seagal is convinced of his own magnanimosity.
• “Magnanimosity” is fun to say. And I think we’ll end on that.
• Oooh! EDIT. One more. My “Pauley Perrette” (Abby from NCIS) experiment… er, worked too well. The other day, I got 250 hits from search terms related to her. I’ve created a monster. A monster.