Dispatches From the Fortress – Day 162

Hi. Sorry to be doing my first Thursday post after 6:30 PM but it's been kinda hectic here today with the phone ringing and Zoom conferences and e-mails that required immediate replies. Also, the Sun seems to think my house is a chicken and is trying to cook it to an internal temperature of 165°. I think the idea is that when you get it to 160°, you let it rest a half-hour and it will get to 165° by carry-over.

I probably don't have to remind you because you're all already in the chat room waiting but at 7 PM tonight (my time), I'll be webcasting not as interviewer but as interviewee. My best friend Sergio Aragonés will be asking me questions and we'll see if he's still my best friend when we're done. I believe Joe Biden's speech tonight and associated festivities are already recorded, whereas the show with me will be live. The video of it will be directly above this message at the appropriate time.

Steve Bannon arrested? Shocking. But did you ever see a man who looked more like he ought to be?


Early in my Internetting Days, I had an e-mail address which I was forced to abandon. This was more than twenty years ago. Some spam-advertising company got the address and I was receiving literally 500 spam e-mails a day — and I should mention that unlike a lot of people who use the word "literally," I actually know what the word "literally" means.

There didn't seem to be any way to filter or block the endless stream of loan offers, genitalia enhancement, cheap Rolex and Gucci products, absolutely-guaranteed diet aids, and proposals from overseas folks who had millions of dollars I could share in if I would let them use my bank account to smuggle those funds into America.

So I got a new e-mail address and was a little smarter about who got it and where I entered it…and it's worked fine. The old one, I allowed to disappear into the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere.

The other day, I got a furious, angry, livid, insulting e-mail from someone I never met, never heard of, never corresponded with…nothing. Total stranger. He was outraged that though he had sent me multiple e-mails asking — no, demanding that I plug his Kickstarter fund-raising drive for a comic book he self-publishes, I had not. His was not a polite, do-me-a-favor request. He seemed to think I had an obligation to help him raise funds for his publication which, to be honest with you, didn't look all that impressive based on the samples he attached.

I wouldn't have plugged it even if I'd received his repeated commands but I didn't get them. And since at the bottom of his angry e-mail to me, he copied the earlier missives, I could see what the problem was. He'd sent them to that e-mail address I haven't used since, literally, the turn of the century.

He finally addressed one to the right address and I guess didn't notice it wasn't the same address as the previous eight which he accused me of "deliberately ignoring." I actually have stopped promoting crowd-funding efforts here since I personally have been stiffed on so many of the ones I've backed. If and when I do start again, guess whose comic I won't be mentioning.