He just had to go and mention Star Trek in a comment. Around here, that can be like tossing a baby penguin at hungry sea lions. I take no responsibility for this.

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And for those who haven’t been paying attention for the past forty years — yes, the song is about drugs. But not Vicodin. I think.

EDIT: I take it back. There’s a lot of Vicodin in this vid. Trust me. I’m an expert.

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I like to think that everyone has a box of spare ideas. Small ideas, ideas too fleeting and silly to be used for anything mighty. I have a box of ideas for children’s books I will never write: this morning’s was a picturebook about a Transylvanian beagle, called Vlad, A Dog. At 6 am I had images of a tiny puppy with fangs and a black satin cape–but no idea of plot. It’s just a high-concept one-liner.

I’ve been hanging out with writers almost as long as I’ve been writing (I know, that’s ass-backward) and I know these slivers of ideas are not uncommon. So what do you do with them? Put them in a box. See if one of them ripens into something more substantial than a one-liner. Write Vicodin-fueled haiku. Some writers can turn these bits of inspiration into flash fiction or knit them together into something larger. But even the thriftiest writer has stuff in her trashbin that will never see the light of day.

What’s in your trashbin?

Katie Cowden was four years old when she confronted me in the Monkey House and said, “Steve! We could go outside and make…MUDPIES!”

Now she’s all grown up and doing…stuff.

I’m betting mudpies are involved.

just sent me this picture.

The title is “Rory Builds a Birdhouse”.

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I thought we’d put the birdhouse incident behind us.

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Scooter Haiku

‘Scuse me while I kiss
the road. It love me too long.
Vicodin, new friend.

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Well, if Rory can post an x-ray….

I just had my teeth cleaned and, as you can see, they’re nice and white (which is black on an x-ray.) Since my teeth checked out okay, I though I’d check on how we’re doing.

The first post at Eat Our Brains was posted (over at blogger) on October 23rd, 2006, though we didn’t have our full complement of seven writers until I announced that I’d blackmailed talked Caroline Spector into joining us on November 10th. Now, four months later, this will be post number 196 and there are over 1400 comments. We’ve gone from over a ranking of over a million on technoratti to just over 100,000 (113 links from 36 blogs, whatever that means.)

During this time people we’ve talked about some who’ve died and how they’d touched us: Mike Ford, Jack Williamson, Molly Ivins, Dave Ritchie, James Brown.

We’ve had someone almost die–well, it was a damn good thing he was wearing his gear and, as I said before, some people will do anything to come up with blog material.

We’ve seen great political change at home and we’ve seen things get worse in Iraq. We’ve seen Buzzards, and Music, and Writing, and Television, and Video Games, and Holloween Costumes, and our very own argument about gun control. We’ve seen the food and we’ve seen videos and comments from famous people, and we’ve been comment spammed over 1600 times.

There are now over thirty-six catgories as our posts ranged farther and farther afield. They include Sarcasm Girl, Bob Y., Rachael Is Awesome, Barb, Young Girl, Noble Girl, The Dude, Tasha the Wonder Dog, and Twilight Ninja, who are all, sort of, innocent bystanders, scooped up by the juggernaut that is Eat Our Brains.

And we’re okay. We’re starting to get the hang of this thing and so I just want to say, thanks.

Thanks to my fellow contributors for their words and their relations. Thanks to all our commentors who’ve added real gems to every post we’ve created. Thanks to Askimet for taking care of those damn comment spams.  And thanks to Rory for not killing his damn fool self.

Just Thanks.