Friday Cinco de Mayo Post

John, Lauren Kohne, Claire and I are working on a comic-as-exquisite-corpse project. Just because we can and because we want to. The question is, should we do rounds of strips or pages? For now, I am thinking about doing 6 turns. If we were to do pages, we would end up with 24; if not, 6 (4 strips per pages, unless we collate them all on one HTML page). Of course, the project being an exquisite corpse, we could go on for longer.

Today is Cinco de Mayo, the day we celebrate our glorious defeat at the hands of bankrupt Mexico. The origin of the cheese-eating-surrender-monkey joke started here. One hundred forty six years from now, the Chinese will make jokes about the Americans surrendering to the Vietnamese and the Iraqi, the way Americans do it with the French. By then, the Chinese will joke about how they had to bail the hamburger-eating-surrender-dogs out of Iraq. One hundred forty years ago, we made the same jokes about the Belgians.

We still do.

I will drink Dos Equis and tequila instead of Guinness and whiskey tonight in celebration of Cinco de Mayo. You can find me either at the Proletariat or Poison Girl. People I want to drink with: John, Eric, Jessica, Johannes, Chall, Ekrem, Jon, Craig, Scott, Chris, T.A., Lorraine, Tomo, Ryoko and Tony. People I will probably drink with: Claire, Jessica, Shouly, Evan, Todd, Andrew, Natalie ...

In other news, my esteemed colleague Michael Parker reports that Ron Silliman has been elected Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. I am really not sure what the job entails. I am not even sure about what Ted Kooser is supposed to do. I know Robert Pinsky appeared in an episode of the Simpsons. Perhaps we will see Ron in an episode of Spongebob ...

In other news, Jessica apparently knows author-turned-enfant-maudit of the publishing world Kaavya Viswanathan. Which brings us back to this great quote by Stephen Colbert:

you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

I need a drink.