I stopped moving at 4:45 PM today. Prior to that I don’t think I’d sat still for more than seven seconds – and that’s fine by me. I love Thursdays. The link-of-the-hour drill on buzz.mn plus Lance Lawson makes for an enjoyable day, and the sense of accomplishment, however illusionary, banishes doubleplus ungood thoughts to the margins. Vague sense of winter’s permanence as a nagging analogue to life and the passage of all things into the inky void of an empty universe unbound by gravity, each individual atom eventually spreading out into an infinite void? No time for that! I have to post a link to my office picture on Google Streetview! I am a man with things to do!

At 4:45 I laid down and slept for 17 minutes. Got up, made dinner – various forms of “fish”  - then did the Hewitt show with Dean Barnett while Jasper sat outside. I have no idea why he wouldn’t come in. It can’t be pleasant. He was sitting in the snow. He has no pants.  Eventually he came in, barked once to indicate general displeasure, then settled in to work on a rawhide stick while I played UNO with (G)Nat. My wife was late from work, and since she’d called to say she had to stop off for gas, I was convinced she’d run out of petrol on the highway, and her car was being circled by mocking young men in white jumpsuits and black bowlers, denting the car with their canes and boots. (“Clockwork Orange” is a different story after someone you know gets their cutter crasted by one of those grahzny bratchnys.)

When she got home I went to the studio to cut a Diner; probably an indulgence, given all the things I have to do and should do and haven’t done and will do when I’m done with this, but we have to have Christmas shows. It only took an hour, and it set me up for next week. Trust me – I had no idea where this was going, and based it all on a little cast-off ornament that didn’t make the tree this year. Possibly because it’s creepy as hell. Little Fiftypixie. You can meet it today at the Diner, or see it Monday on the Bleat. Or both.

While the Diner uploaded I scanned and wrote the Stagworld update – the penultimate one, I think. It’s here.

Well, drat. I  had intended to bestow the opening credits of “After the Fox, a 41-year old movie with a peculiar theme. I wrote about it a long time ago. Long, long ago I mentioned “After the Fox,” a Peter Sellers movie I never finished. The credits mesmerized me. It was as if they were trying to invent a new Pink Panther character; the animation had the flavor of a DePatie-Freleng sequence (even though it was done by Maurice Binder, who did the classic Bond title sequences); the music – well, as I said a long time ago, it hailed from a time when the harpsichord was suddenly, inexplicably hip. The song is by Burt Bacharach, and it’s sung by the Hollies, with interjections from Sellers. The lyrics? Who is the Fox? I am the Fox. Who are you? I am me. I still can’t get my brain around the song’s construction, the harmonies, the keys, but it’s such a period piece I can’t take it off my TiVo.

I finally got the opening titles packed into a tiny little bit-slab and uploaded them to Veoh, but it was removed: Copyright violations. Also known as "promotion." I could try with YouTube, but I would have to lie on the page that asks if I have the copyright. I don’t. I think this qualifies as fair use for purposes of commentary, but it’s late at night and I really don’t want to futz around with this. Here's a version on YouTube uploaded by someone else, mangled with scenes from the movie. I give up.

Diner: here, or below, in MP3; it's downloadable. You'll forgive me if I consider this an adequate offering - I've been in Constant Content Production Mode for 14 hours, and I'm not done yet. But am I happy? Why, yes. Idleness is the enemy of satisfaction. Then again, satisfaction is the handmaiden of idleness. Odd how that works.

See you at buzz.mn. And if you don't mind: buy the book. A wonderful holiday gift for young and old.