Dave Secretary writes funny stories in (with one exception, towards the bottom) ALL CAPS, so they are easy to find when you're scrolling fast, as well as being all the more AWESUM for it.

He also draws poorly, with a bad drawing tool, and produces shite cartoons which he nonetheless protests "are gold", which is half-right. In fact, his deadpan blow-by-blow expositions of the cartoons' subject matter and the putative "joke" told therein are (mostly) gold - the cartoons themselves? See for yourself.

When I was seven years old, I remember approaching the radio with trepidation whenever it was switched on, for when it was on, it might start playing a particular song that made me very sad, and which I hated. The song was Terry Jacks' maudlin, saccharine and thoroughly weepy "Seasons in the Sun", although, to be honest, even though I had divined that the song was about someone dying, I really thought the title referred to seasons that had been spent living, literally, in the Sun, much as one lives in, say, London, or Wagga Wagga. But I digress.

So anyway, I was in Harper's Ferry yesterday and I stopped in at a coffee shop for a thoroughly nasty coffee, an experience which was made truly transcendently awful by the radio's insistence on wailing on and on about how we had had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun ... and of course I was transported back to 1974 and all that entailed. I quietly took my leave soon afterward and surreptitiously dumped the remainder of the dismal coffee in a trash can. Unfortunately, it was not so easy to jettison the lingering sonic memory of Jacks' lachrymose lament, and for the next 24 hours, that song buzzed around my head, occasionally swapping places with one of the other two songs that are stored in the same part of my brain.

Those other two songs, incidentally, are Billy Don't Be A Hero (or should that be an hero?) - understandable, since it was released in the same year - and, perhaps, less explicably, R. Dean Taylor's Indiana Wants Me. A friend of mine refers to this kind of apparently localized recall as the "cloud", and I think it fits. Those three songs, for me, are close together in the cloud.

So anyway, I decided to do a bit of googling and see if I could figure out anything about this cluster of songs, but perhaps unsurprisingly, I found a lot more hits for the Jacks' monstrosity than for the other two combined, and while I was combing through the SitS pages, I found something that made it all worthwhile - gearchange.org, which explains, among other things, exactly why SitS is so particularly gruelling to listen to.

Back in the summer of aught-four, I posted the following in relation to really black stuff:

None more black?

but in these more enlightened days, and since "they" now seem to have invented something even blacker, what can I say but:

Blacker than black

My only concern here is that the word 'ever' is hardly ever justified in these circumstances, and for the most part, we'd all be better off if they used a word that has more chance of being correct in the long term: 'yet'

Yes, as in 'yet black'.


Thank you, and goodnight.

Er, stewardess...?

Is it supposed to do that?