Quick Reminder...

...about two worthy causes this weekend that I'm sure would appreciate your physical, financial, or moral support.

On Saturday in Tonawanda, New York, a 5K run and after-party will benefit Lindsay's Legacy, with funds going to the Rhabdomyosarcoma Research Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and to Carly's Club, Roswell Park Cancer Institute's pediatric fundraising division.

Sunday in Los Angeles is the National Lung Cancer Partnership's "Free to Breathe" walk-run. My thanks to my friends and readers who already donated to Nurse Sis's fundraising team, "Mom's Heroes." It's much appreciated. 5K and 8K runs will begin at 8:30 a.m., followed by 1.4-mile and 5K walks at 8:35 a.m. Same-day registration opens at 7 a.m. The event happens at Lake Balboa Park in scenic Encino, where Interstate 101 hits 405.

I imagine that there are dozens of similar events happening in communities near you that would love to have your help, support and participation as well. Look for them!

Meet Momo

This great statue of the Michael Ende character Momo arrived yesterday, my award for winning the German Youth Literature Prize for nonfiction, about which I blogged back on October 12 and 17. It really is a beautiful piece of work, depicting Momo standing on a round clock face with a tortoise named Cassiopeia at her feet and a "time lily" in her hands. I admit I haven't read the book--although very popular in Europe, it apparently only had a small U.S. printing 20 years ago--but I think I'll have to seek it out. Again, my genuine appreciation to everyone involved for the honor.

The sculpture is heavy bronze, with "Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis" inscribed on the front of the base and "2007" on the back. It's hard to get a sense of how truly impressive Momo is by herself, so I took a photo of her with ordinary, everyday objects found around my household to provide a sense of scale:

Please forgive me. I needed the picture anyway and couldn't resist.

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LitGraphic at the Norman Rockwell Museum

Lions released from a zoo in war-torn Baghdad; a mother's battle with lung cancer; an American expatriate searching for her identity in Mexico--serious subject matter for any medium, but particularly so for a new wave of critically acclaimed and commercially successful long form comic books. In these illustrated stories, called graphic novels (a mostly grown-up version of the comic book), themes explored include culture, society, and current events, and topics range from heart-wrenching to thought-provoking to risqué....

Norman Rockwell Museum Press Release

Next weekend my wife and I will be taking our first trip to Massachusetts for the opening of the "LitGraphic" exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge. The show opens November 10 and runs until May 26, 2008, and has nine pages of original art from Mom's Cancer among other work by Jessica Abel, R. Crumb, Howard Cruse, Steve Ditko, Will Eisner, Milt Gross, Peter Kuper, Harvey Kurtzman, Frank Miller, Terry Moore, Dave Sim, Art Spiegelman, and many more.

These Rockwell folks are the same ones who flew a camera crew across the country to interview me and sent an 18-wheeler to my house to pick up nine sheets of paper, and they impress me as a first-class organization all the way. I'm also impressed by the many activities the museum is planning in conjunction with the exhibit throughout its run: children's programs, workshops, artists' visits, symposia for educators. They're not just hanging drawings on the walls, they're doing something with them. Cool.

Of course I'm thrilled and honored to have my work in the exhibit. Also puzzled, but I'll try to act like I belong there. When we were exchanging paperwork, the curator mentioned that there's a decent chance this exhibit will travel to other museums after it closes next May. If so, it could be years before I get my pictures back. That's all right. I'll just be jealous if they end up better-traveled than me.

My wife and I are making a little vacation out of the trip, spending a couple of days in Boston afterward. As you might imagine, we're watching the weather pretty closely; hope Hurricane Hugo is long gone and all the electricity's back on by them. We're also getting more invitations from friends in the Northeast than we can possibly accept. I hope there are no hard feelings when we can't see everyone. It's very nice to be asked, thanks.

Pictures and stories will follow I'm sure.
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I Can'nae Change the Laws of Physics, Cap'n!

That's my oven. It's a 20-year-old Whirlpool with the oven underneath, a microwave on top, and controls for both at the upper right. Yesterday, the control panel went dark. Dead. Joined the choir invisible. Same for the microwave. The oven still worked, although if we wanted to do something fancy like set a delayed cooking time--not that we ever have before--we were out of luck. We couldn't live like that ... like animals. Something had to be done.

It is understood that repairing a broken microwave costs more than replacing it. This wasn't just the microwave, though; it was the whole control panel, too, and they're both integrated with the oven. Either we would have to call in a sure-to-be-exorbitantly priced repairperson or replace the whole darn thing, and what are the odds we'd ever find anything that'd fit into our 20-year-old cabinet hole? Neither option was appealing.

This morning I figured I'd take a peek at its guts. Just in case there happened to be a huge, clearly labeled switch inside that had somehow flipped from "Work" to "Don't Work," because if it were more complicated than that I was pretty sure I was out of luck. I turned off the circuit breaker, unscrewed the control panel at upper right...

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"What should I tell the paramedics?" asked my wife.

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"Probably 220 volts," answered I.

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And there, sitting fat and pretty under a tangle of wires with a big blinking neon arrow pointing at it saying "Look Here!" was a 20-amp fuse. Gingerly reaching in (yeah, I know what a capacitor looks like), I pulled the fuse and checked it with my multimeter. Resistance = infinity; that's a hopeful sign (a good fuse would have had a resistance near zero). Called the hardware store half a mile away, went and picked up a new fuse for $3.75, and popped it in. Asking my wife to watch the oven and scream in panic if she saw sparks or flames, I flipped the circuit breaker and.....

It worked.

I think I now understand how a soldier feels dragging a wounded buddy to safety under fire. How a surgeon feels pulling a patient back from death's icy grip. But mostly, I now know what it feels like to be this guy:

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Congrats to Kid Sis; Curses upon Bill Gates

Congratulations!
Hey, there's a writer in the family! My sister Elisabeth ("Kid Sis") wrote a screenplay that just won first prize in the 2007 Screenwriting Expo Screenplay Competition!

She won in the "Thriller" category for a movie script titled "Pistoleras," which I have read and she hopes to put into production soon--just as soon as she splices together another independent film she just finished shooting. The awards are sponsored by Creative Screenwriting magazine and I'm sure will draw the attention of investors and scouts looking for emerging talent. If anybody wants to back a feminist spaghetti Western set in a Mexican bordello, I can hook you up.

Gosh, if I hadn't let her read my comics and taken her to see "Star Wars" 30 years ago, who knows where she'd be today? That's right, I'm taking the credit.

We're proud of you, kid.

The Gates of Hell
Bill Gates and I are going to have a long talk someday. Sometime yesterday morning, he sat in his Redmond lair stroking his long-haired cat and pushed a button that made two months of my e-mails disappear. It took me most of the afternoon to figure out where they'd gone and how to get them back where they belonged. Grrrrrr.

I don't wanna hear from you smug Mac or Linux cultists. I've used Macs in professional settings and found them just as temperamental and prone to bog down or crash in the middle of The Big Job as PCs. My experience has not convinced me of their superiority. I don't have the time or interest to tackle Linux. When my computer is acting up, I can usually figure out the problem and I like being able to tinker under the hood. The downside of that: sometimes you have to tinker under the hood. Still, I'm considering making my next box a Mac just because I don't want to have anything to do with Vista. Everything Microsoft has done in the past decade seems based on the assumption that they know how I want to use my computer better than I do, and Vista looks like the worst yet.

Bill Gates owes me an afternoon.
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