I AM AWARE THAT TIME IS PASSING, and merely a week remains before the JOHN RODERICK SINGING AND TALKING CONCERT at the Montague Bookmill.

I HAVE MEANWHILE LEARNED the happy news that prior to Roderick, David Rees, the famous cartoonist and craftsman, will be giving a rare, live ARTISANAL PENCIL SHARPENING DEMONSTRATION.

LET ME TELL YOU, you do not want to miss this demonstration of this TIMELESS AMERICAN HANDI-ART, especially when it is given in a beautiful old gristmill by a little river.

I HAVE ALSO BEEN REMINDED that 8/20 is also the MONTAGUE OLD HOME DAYS, where the people of Montague gather on the Town Green, steps from the Bookmill, and eat hot dogs and play games. So come up and make a day of it. JUST BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT FROM MONTAGUE DOES NOT MEAN YOU CANNOT ATTEND, as all stoning of outsiders has been suspended.

THE WHOLE DAY WILL BE A POSTCARD that you send to yourself. And when it arrives, inevitably, in 17 months, you will be glad you attended. Don’t write in the space for the stamp!

BUT: don’t ask me what time the concert starts. I’m not sure. I guess around 8PM. I WILL LET YOU KNOW.

BUT ALL OF THESE DETAILS REMAIN IN PLACE

FRIDAY, 8/20, in the evening, following Montague Old Home Days,

JOHN RODERICK will sing and talk and play guitar

PRECEDED by an Artisanal Pencil Sharpening demonstration by DAVID REES

AND INTRODUCED BY ME, John Hodgman

AT THE MONTAGUE BOOKMILL, which is found at 440 Greenfield Road, in Montague Center, Massachusetts.

AT THE NECESSARY PRICE OF 10 dollars.

FOOD AND DRINK AVAILABLE ON SITE.

That is all.

I REGRET MY INTERNET SILENCE. As you know, I am passing these humid months in the small Massachusetts town known as INTERNETLESS HILLS, only occasionally descending down from the mountains to buy coffee and steal broadband and news of the world.

ONE EXAMPLE OF SUCH NEWS: while listening to the local radio station, I heard a woman describe a forthcoming local stage show thusly: “It is an exploration of the cultural extinction of New Orleans, as told by a person who is half man, half wolf.”

(!!!!!)

I ONLY WISH I could offer you such a show.

AS IT HAPPENS, I CAN OFFER only this:

JOHN RODERICK, of Seattle’s own “The Long Winters“, who is NOT half wolf, but merely Alaskan, which is to say : ONE QUARTER CAVE TROLL…

SINGING GOOD SONGS written by his own hands…

ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 20th, sometime in the evening…

AT THE MONTAGUE BOOKMILL, a creaky former gristmill that has been transformed into a creaky used bookstore/cafe/comfy-armchair-storage-facility, and a very fine place to write books of fake trivia.

PLUS THERE WILL BE OTHER SURPRISES THAT I WILL REVEAL LATER.

AND THERE WILL BE A SMALL CHARGE of 10 dollars, in order to cover the cost of transporting a quasi-cave troll from Seattle.

I HOPE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS NECESSITY, and are not dissuaded.

FOR WHILE THE FAMOUS MOTTO OF THIS BOOKMILL is “Books You Don’t Need in a Place You Can’t Find,” it is in fact EASY TO FIND if you live in New England and have the Internet.

AND I PLEASE ENCOURAGE YOU TO FIND IT, for this will be a very enjoyable evening, much like the hot time we all spent together with Jonathan Coulton some years ago, when it was so humid and awesome that apparently cameras could not even focus properly.

DID YOU FORGET WHAT I WAS JUST TALKING ABOUT? If so, here is John Roderick again. I hope I will see you there…

THAT IS ALL.

SOON, I SHALL BE RETURNING to good old Internetless Hills, MA, where the women are strong, the men are designing websites, the radio is public, and Leonard Nimoy’s nude photography is on PERPETUAL EXHIBIT.

BUT BEFORE I HAVE EVEN ARRIVED, some news has developed up in the Pioneer Valley.

THOUGH I AM ANGERED by the region’s refusal to FREEZE COMPLETELY IN TIME until I get back, I am nonetheless happy for the following developments.

DEVELOPMENT A)

THE BILL DWIGHT SHOW is back.

BILL DWIGHT, as you likely do not know, is a former Northampton City Council-Person and, in the words of his patron and mentor Ms. Rachel Maddow, the world’s oldest functioning video store clerk. And until recently, he and Jaz Tupelo hosted a morning radio talking-hour of important local issues, corn reports, and endless in jokes that I found so delightful that I would often drive down from my mountain retreat just to visit them and/or forcibly take over the show on one of Bill’s many, many vacations.

THEY WENT AWAY for a while, parting with their radio station for reasons that are still opaque. I don’t want to get into it, but it seems that they all parted ways over the kind of passionate, personal, but ultimately short-sighted dispute that is typical of small towns. And also large towns. And major world governments. All around: a shame, I say.

BUT NOW THEY HAVE RETURNED, using the internet, and I am glad to have them back. Please give Bill and Jaz your INTERNET EAR.

AND DON’T FORGET their ardent supporter and long time friend of this imitation blog: BILL SCHER.

DEVELOPMENT B)

AS MENTIONED ABOVE, it was Rachel Maddow, a VALLEY-DWELLER and Northampton’s former morning DJ, who first discovered Dwight.

(INDEED, she is his first guest of the revived NON-RADIO SHOW).

AND NOW IT IS VIA BILL’S new site that I discover this video of her speech to the graduated women of SMITH COLLEGE last Sunday. It is a wonderful argument AGAINST PERSONAL TRIUMPH, and not surprisingly, it is very PRO-ALCOHOL. I encourage you to start watching it and then continue until it is finished.

DEVELOPMENT C)

IN OTHER NORTHAMPTON NON-VISUAL BROADCASTING NEWS, the current voice of the Valley’s radio morning, MISTER MONTE BELMONTE, has joined TWITTER, an internet service. PLEASE FOLLOW HIM.

DEVELOPMENT D)

SOME OF YOU MAY HAVE DISCOVERED via television yesterday that I am appearing all this week on WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE. I provide a “life-line” called “ASK THE EXPERT.”

APPARENTLY, they did not realize I am only a FAKE EXPERT ON FAKE KNOWLEDGE when they invited me to do this, and as a result, A LOT OF PEOPLE WHO WANTED TO BE MILLIONAIRES ARE NOW ONLY THOUSANDAIRES. Those of you who saw my terrible Orthocenter/Anacostia River one-two punch of dumbness yesterday know what I am talking about.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS? I had no idea either, until the Springfield Republican informed me that one of the people I advised is a teacher at Westfield State College, which, as the name implies, is in a field and in WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS.

GO WESTY!

I HAVE NO MEMORY if I this Professor Philip Ettman is one of the people I helped or hindered over the course of the week. But you can watch at 12:30PM EST today and every day this week to find out, and also to watch me wear a different outfit for each show, even though we shot them all in one day.

FINALLY)

I DO NOT KNOW WHY the comments no longer seem to be accepting your original submissions of words on this site, and instead only listing trackbacks and pingbacks and other internet terms I do not understand. I WILL TRY TO PUSH SOME BUTTONS AND MAKE THAT DIFFERENT. But for now, I say: THANK YOU FOR AT LEAST READING, EVEN THOUGH I HAVE ROBBED YOU OF YOUR ABILITY TO SAY “MEH” TO  ME. I am grateful.

That is all.

UPDATING:

AS I CONTINUE TO READ THE INTERNET, it occurs to me that Maddow’s point echoes that of Solzhenitsyn’s, although with better jokes:

“If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then their carefree consumption. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.

It is imperative to reappraise the scale of the usual human values; its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline. Only by the voluntary nurturing in ourselves of freely accepted and serene self-restraint can mankind rise above the world stream of materialism,” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, address to Harvard, 1978.

QUOTE courtesy Andrew Sullivan.

AND ALSO, still have not found a way to fix the comments section.

I CONTINUE TO HIDE OUT in Internetless Hills, Massachusetts, with occasional trips to Progressive Valley to steal internet from the coffee shop.

SO I APOLOGIZE FOR “light posting,” which is really a disgusting way of describing MY LAZINESS HERE ON THE IMITATION BLOG.

MOSTLY I have used my emergency internet (TWITTER) to draw attention to the David Rees/Jamba Juice conflict. I am surprised this is not getting as much attention as health care and people being arrested in their own homes.

BUT NOT AS SURPRISED AS I AM by the number of people on the Internet who are willing to defend a major corporation’s patently loathsome campaign to convince workers to take vacations in their cubicles over an independent political cartoonist who gives most of his profits to land mine relief charities.

I REALIZE NOW that, as powerful a sentiment as INTERNET ANTI-COMMERCIAL UTOPIANISM may be, it is always trumped by INTERNET CONTRARIANISM.

(IN OTHER WORDS: the mehs have it.)

I WILL DISCUSS THIS SUBJECT and others tomorrow from the bully pulpit of the Bill Dwight Show, a radio program here in Progressive Valley normally hosted by Bill Dwight, except Bill Dwight is going on an ACTUAL VACATION and not just drinking juice and pasting up pictures of beaches in his cubicle, LIKE A HUMAN.

DAVID REES will be joining me by phone, and he will tell me WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING IN THE WORLD. This will happen from 9AM to 10AM tomorrow morning, EST, and I hope you will listen.

That is all.

IF YOU ARE A FAN OF KNIFE THROWING

and

YOU ALSO WANT TO SEE JONATHAN AMES STABBED WITH A KNIFE

then

THIS EVENT IS NOT FOR YOU

because

THE KNIFE THROWER KNOWN AS “THROWDINI” is “the fastest and most accurate impalement artist” in the world, and so will only be throwing knives NEAR Jonathan Ames,  and not INTO HIM.

BUT IT WILL STILL BE FUN to go and celebrate the release of his new book of essays and stories, including one, called “BORED TO DEATH,” which is being made into an HBO TV show in which I make a small appearance pretending to punch and be punched by Jason Schwartzman.

It’s happening TOMORROW, a Thursday, July 16, at 7PM at Book Court.

THE GREAT “ONE RING ZERO” will also be there, not being hit by knives.

BUT ALAS: I WILL NOT BE THERE. I am still in the Internetless Hills, keeping things SLOW here and BORING on twitter.

IF YOU WANT MORE EXCITING BOREDOM THAN THIS, you can join in on the comments.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE

That is all.