It’s fireworks season. My  neighbors have laid in a big stock, apparently; they’re shooting them off by the hundreds tonight, much to Jasper’s distress. Oh, how he hates fireworks. The boomers he can deal with; it’s the high trebly screechy ones that just penetrate his soul, somehow. In dog terms it’s like hearing hell’s own harpies call your name. So he’s at my feet, breathing softly through his nose. Every year we go through this; I try to console him, but he looks at me with vague distress: if you’re not worried, what else don’t you know?

Hot today.  Marrow-boiling hot. DC hot. Swampy hot: welcome to the soup. Fine with me, I guess, but when I go to the office I have to put on office clothes, which means long pants and a shirt with a collar. At least it was productive office time; had a meeting with the creative folks up in promotions, discussing the ad campaign for buzz.mn. Really, this is just the Dream Come True. Think about it. Those of you who’ve been visiting this site for years know I love advertising. I think I know something about advertising, in the same sense that people who’ve watched a lot of football think they could coach a team. Well, I get to lay out my ideas for an ad campaign, and people are obliged to pretend to take me seriously for the moment. Cool. This all feels like Fantasy Job Camp, sometimes.

The Creative People were smart & kind & cool, and when the ads are up, I’ll post copies. A print ad campaign for a blog: haven’t seen any of those, and perhaps for good reason – blogs belong to another dimension. A print campaign for blogs is like, well, radio spots for a Marcel Marceau appearance. But we have to build Brand Awareness, and get the name of the site out far and wide, so having at one’s disposal a distribution platform that hits half a million eyeballs on a Sunday isn’t exactly something you disregard.

After the meeting I dashed home to be ready for Gnat’s arrival from camp. (Her friend’s dad drove out to Camp End Of the Earth to get them.) She showed up beaming, sun-kissed, bug-bitten, dirt-encrusted and tangle-haired. Sweetest sight I’d seen all week. And Pikachu made it back, too. We were worried he’d get lost, but no. Although: she had the top bunk and he did fall out of bed one night.

"What did you do?"  I asked.

Well I went down the ladder to get him, and it was really loud. And I couldn’t find him and it was so dark you couldn’t see the stars.

I love that: so dark you couldn’t see the stars. She found him in the morning, and all was well. Camp seems to have been a grand experience for all: maximum pancakes and minimum horseflies. She was delighted to be home, and couldn’t stop talking about the bunkhouse and the friends and the one girl who had Pokemon shoes but didn’t really know anything about Pokemon at all because I asked her and she was like I don’t know and we had smores and sang songs and there was a store, where you could buy things, and all the girls got this calculator because it’s so cool LOOK! It’s MAGIC!

"You want magic?" I typed in 22 divided by 7.

Whoa that’s a long number.

"And it never ends. It goes on forever. If you laid all the numbers out in a line the numbers would go beyond the end of space. That’s why the universe is expanding: to give us more room for the numbers of pi."

Really?

Well, more or less. The universe is expanding, pi is infinite, it all works out.

So that’s what I did:  blogged all day, took some meetings, had exactly one contiguous block of down-time, which I used to cut a Diner. (Fans of the long 2007 Diner-is-sold plot arc will note a new wrinkle.) Now I have to begin work on more stuff, so I’ll leave you with this:

Another list of the best 100 movies, via house. He gets my appreciation for the maverick choices, like #88:  It’s “After Hours,” which he calls the tensest comedy ever made and perhaps Scorsese’s most underrated film. Oh, yes. I wanted Griffin Dunne to play the hero of my first novel in the film adaptation – and yes, we did sell the rights. For $2500. Nothing came of it, of course, but it would have made a fine movie. In fact it would still make a fine movie. Ahem? Hollywood? I’m represented by the Lazear Agency; pick up the frickin’ phone and make it happen, already.  The list also includes “Back to the Future,” which shows a refreshingly lack of cineaste snobitude, as well as “Sunrise” and “Die Hard.” The list doesn’t have the momentum such lists usually have, but he gets “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the grim dark heart the decades have smothered with Xmas frosting. Then again, he puts “Purple Rose of Cairo” at #10, ahead of “Singing in the Rain.” But you know: he could be right.

This is the show that spawned Dramatic Chipmunk, incidentally.

Here are some interesting pieces of money a fellow has put up on the web – oh, hold on, that’s my site. Well, enjoy, and you know the drill: see you at buzz.mn, already under way. See you there!