I’m not bothering to update you on my groceries this week. There’s still some left, but I’ve lost interest enough that it is too much work to take it out of its various places and put it on my counter to take a picture. You’ll all get over it, I am sure.

But this month, I have brought you a random comic strip I wrote at work one night that would have been forgotten if I’d not bothered to put it online, as well as one of the very first comedical stories I ever wrote for the Internet. That one predates Contains2 by a bit. I think I first did it up as an email to Marq when I was bored one time.

It got me thinking about other stories I’ve made over the years that aren’t as lucky to have made it online. I don’t mean what’s left of the Contains2 stories that I’ve just not got around to bringing here yet, I mean the stuff that is well and truly gone and I don’t even have notes to salvage it. Granted most of these stories I, obviously, can’t remember, but there are a few that I do have faint traces of in my brain and I figure I should note them before I lose even that.

The earliest I recall was, I believe, in grade 2. We were assigned to make little illustrated books with a story in them and I can remember that my story combined Egyptian elements with cat people. Basically, what I am saying is that it was a Thundercats ripoff. Apart from that I can’t remember anything. I do know that my report card that year made an oblique reference to it saying that I didn’t adequately explain things in my stories, that I took for granted that people would know what I was talking about if I knew it. Stupid little me. Similarly I wrote a prose story in grade 5 that borrowed liberally from the plot of King’s Quest V. Plagiarism. It’s the easiest way for kids to write stories.

Also during my elementary years I remember a desire to make a Christmas movie and that I wanted a sort of Advent Calendar motif to open and close scenes. I was apparently deep. It was meant to end with a snowball fight, I think, and I remember getting in trouble when we started throwing snowballs to “practice”. Stupid little me. We also wrote a skit about bullying once and performed it at a school assembly. I’d love to find out someone got that on film, but I doubt it.

Around grade five and six, I guess, was about when I started getting into comics as well and it is no surprise that that is when I started making comics as well. I did a lot of the old fold-a-bunch-of-sheets-in-half-and-you-have-a-book style comics, including one about a superhero called Zappo which I don’t still have, but I do remember enough about the character that someday I hope to give him a home. Perhaps my other biggest comic effort was a couple sheets full of different comic strips with different themes, as if I were trying to create a whole Comics Page in a newspaper. I remember only two of the strips and one of them, I think, I will recreate for this site sometime. The other was a two panel bit with a Native American man sitting crosslegged on the floor/ground. The first panel he said “How” and in the second panel he said “ya doing?”

Sometime in either late elementary or early junior high I wrote just a couple of pages, pure description no story, about a family living in a house that was so empty people kept assuming nobody lived there and putting up for sale signs. I never did finish it, I don’t think, but I remember it impressing the parents and teacher types who read it.

In grade 7, I think, for an art class project I created a comic strip about a superhero called Dog-Thing. I got an excellent grade on that thing, the teacher wasn’t even willing to write my grade on the thing because he didn’t want to ruin it. Naturally I lost it at some point. Stupid little me. For years I assumed I would never see Dog-Thing again, but while the strip is indubitably gone I did eventually find a sketch of the main character. That means I can use him again! I haven’t got around to revealing it yet, but Dog-Thing is a retired founding member of the Team of Superheroes.

Around the junior high years I also created Little Choy. Now I can hardly call these “stories” but innumerable images of Little Choy insulting anyone willing to speak near him have been drawn on school desks and in text books over the years that I will never see again. Luckily every one of them is pretty much exactly the same.

For a grade 11 English class we had to write something and as I recall I did. I wrote something about an office being shot up by criminals or terrorists or something. Nowadays that might raise some alarm bells or something, but this was at least a year before the Columbine thing, so all I got was a comment from the teacher about how I use way more paragraph breaks than necessary and the teacher mused that usually he had to tell people the opposite. I’ve always bucked trends, I guess. I still tend to like smaller paragraphs better. And I guess part of the reason that writing that story didn’t make me look insane was because, as I recall, it was about a guy who encounters one of the criminal terrorists and while they can hear shooting coming from other parts of the building he actually talked the criminal terrorist into stopping.

Grade 12, I don’t even remember for sure which class it was, but this was after the point where I’d stopped actively trying in school, so on some exam I was taking I did what I could and then turned it over and wrote a story about a squirrel detective on the back. As I recall it involved some sort of mystery in a casino tree. I think there was a rabbit bouncer possibly? I really wish I still had this one. It sounds messed up.

Anyway, as I said, that’s just the stories I remember enough to know I don’t remember or have notes about. Who knows how many stories I’ve written that have faded into nothingness? I guess we’ll never know.

Unless Time Travel!

In the past hour my laptop has gone to a blue error screen four times. Suddenly and without warnings. This is pretty much a terrible thing. I do not want to lose another computer. I have already begun backing things up. If I disappear for some days, this will be why. Let us hope it doesn’t come to that, but the computer has not even been staying alive long enough to finish a virus scan. Not ideal.

A Little Later: I successfully did a system restore deal. Let’s hope that helps. Now I’ll try the virus scan thing again. I mean, it scans daily anyway, but it is worth a shot.

A Little More Later: I was just urinating and I could hear the person in the apartment above me also urinating! What are the odds that I, with my non-normal living schedule and whoever that is would just so happen to need to urinate at the same time? Man, coincidence can be astounding sometimes. Who is even awake at four thirty in the morning aside from me?

More More Later: Well, my scan is complete without having found anything yet and it has been over an hour of successful computer running. I should get some sleep, but I will do at least one more update when I wake up. Here’s hoping all is well.

A Lot More Later: Well, the computer remains alive leaving me much relieved and wondering just that was all about.

There’s your Phone Guys. As always, those guys sure are talkin’ on phones.

Also, while sorting papers this week I found a little doodle that I had done at work one night, so I figured I might as well scan it, color it and stick it on a website. So, then I did. And it is this:

“Honestly, you Canadian kids.” In my previous reviews of Canadian Heritage Moment things I have mentioned that I feel the most important aspect of them is their quotability. This one is made up of nothing but awesome quotes. “With glasses, you know, a secret identity”, “That’s it, a bullet. He’s faster, no, he’s faster than a speeding bullet” “Fly no, but he can leap over tall buildings”, “See what your cousin Frank says in Toronto” and so many more! Other countries: If you ever suspect someone of being a Canadian spy, quote this and see how they react.

Anyway, this one is about young Canadian Joe Shuster in Cleveland in 1931. He’s explaining an idea he has had for a comic strip about a powerful superhuman man who, of course, turns out to be Superman himself, father of the modern superhero! I love the way the whole thing is staged. Shuster is rambling excitedly to a woman named Lois who is trying to make sure he doesn’t miss a train, but he just won’t shut up about his idea because he is so happy with it. “This guy is faster than anything, I swear!” he says it like he’s talking about a real dude. It’s just a fun setup. Wikipedia doesn’t tell me who this woman is meant to be, saying that Lois Lane of the comics was based on a woman called Joanne Carter. In all likelihood the Lois of the commercial is a fictional friend of Shuster used to help drive home the point that Superman is being created and, indeed, this exact scene probably never played out in the real world, but as a piece of country morale boosting for Canada, it just works so well.

To top it all off, we end with a bit of the Superman movie theme as we see the original Superman sketch (ostensibly we’re not meant to know who he is talking about when we first see the commercial, but my first seeing it was too long ago for me to judge it with that bit of mystery still intact). This is some solid gold kryptonite over here (only it does not remove superpowers). I’m giving it Five and a Half Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. Quite probably this is one of the best of these commercials.

What could possibly be more important than updating the status of the groceries that I bought last week? Probably plenty. But I’m still going to do it. After one week of those groceries I bought last week, this is what I had left:

Now you know.

Now you all know.