We live in fear!

Well, I don't live in fear but the Nostrumite sure does. He is in a state of permanent depression over the release of the new Twilight film. "Those people don't know nothin' about vampires," he mutters, kicking a stone down the street. "And if this is supposed to be my big Fourth of July movie, I'm not buying it." When I told him that there was going to be an M. Night Shyamalan picture also opening for the holiday, I thought he was going to bite my head off. "Curse you, Jules O'Shaughnessy," he said as he stormed off.

I'm still trying to figure out why he was wearing a Team Jacob t-shirt.

Oh, yeah, we do have a new episode this week. You can read it or listen to it or watch it in 3D at an IMax near you.

The livin' is easy

We have not abandoned the field, even though Tennessee Williams High School, where the Nostrumite teaches, is off for the summer. In the olden days, when men were men and maidens were forever being hounded by dragons and there was nothing for it but to go off on quests and swear allegiance to the Dark Lord, we used to take the summer off in Nostrum as if it were a real school. This was, of course, because with N1, we were going to school ourselves, and when summer rolled around, the last thing we needed was a virtual school. But as I say, that is then and this was now, and we won't be taking the summer off, although we may be a little less than punctual. Then again, as the Mite likes to say, if you want these things as regular as clockwork, you might consider paying for them rather than expecting them as your due, you selfish #^$(@^! Anyhow, there's the usual audio and visual versions in their usual slots, and feel free to have at them.

I say pooh-pooh to you, sir!

Blogger keeps wanting me to use new templates. To which I respond, pooh-pooh to your new templates. I've just gotten here, metaphorically speaking. It's all still new to me. How much newer do I need to get? The Nostrumite, on the other hand, couldn't care less. He is in a state of permanent depression over the whole vuvuzela business, which he finds faintly obscene and which he wishes he had never heard of, or, for that matter, never heard. I told him this is totally unoriginal on his part, and that every blogger in the world, literally, was writing up vuvuzelas, but did that stop him? Of course not. Nor did it seem to stop Menick, who managed to record the latest episode, which we now present in gaily printed or gaily narrated form, take your pick.

This blog will henceforth be a vuvuzela-free zone.

Are emails the new epistles?

PJ Wexler raises an interesting point in his comment to our last post. The answer is, no, email is not the new epistles. There was email back in the time of St. Paul. In fact, he used email for the first time in his message to the Corinthians, entitled First Email to the Corinthians. He abandoned email shortly thereafter and reverted to paper when many of the Corinthians, unfamiliar with their computers, clicked on the Reply All button. The resulting confusion is seen by some historians as the beginning of the end for Corinth as a hot spot on the Greco-Roman casino resort circuit, although a number of others blame Sarah Palin.

For fanatics only

Way back when, during the years of series one (McKinley was President, if I recall correctly), we would announce each episode on the LD-L, which was the LD listserver where everyone who was anyone communicated with everyone else. Somewhere along the way we put the episodes up on the internet (if I'm remembering correctly; before that I think we just carved them on these gigantic stones and just hoped people would read them when they came back to the cave after the mastodon hunts) and put the announcement there as well. These announcements came to be known as the Epistles of St. Jules to the Forensicians. At least that's what they came to be known as to me and the Nostrumite. Back when Geocities (that's this place where you used to get free web space, which was exactly the amount of money the Mite and I were willing to pay) was going out of business, we pulled off all those epistles. The earliest ones were never captured, but the later ones where still there, plus a bunch of correspondence with our obnoxious adoring fans.

And now, they're back. We have scanned them in, and they're not exactly Vermeers, but they're readable. If you want to know what the Mite and I were up to ten years ago, when we were young and hale, now you will. We've put them onto the main Nostrum page, where The Original Series mainly resides. They're just a little below the fold, so to speak, so scroll down a bit.

Check it out. Or not. I've sort of browsed a little bit, and the worst thing is, we're still using all the same dumb jokes. Sorry about that.

Everything old is old again

I'm not quite sure why we ended up where we did in this week's episode (throw it at your ears / throw it at your eyes). Nostalgia, I guess. Speaking of which, the Nostrumite is in a state of permanent depression over the primary races. He's not quite sure what it means that Meg Whitman could be governor of California. First of all, why would anyone want the job in the first place? Second, why would they pay all that money for it? "I mean, eighty million dollars?" he asked. "For a primary? Hell, she could have bought the whole state on ebay for half that!"

Such a wit, that lad...

If this is Wednesday, it must be Thursday

All right. We're a day late. And, no doubt, a dollar short. Don't blame me. The Nostrumite couldn't take pen in hand (or word processor in fist) because he's in a state of permanent depression over the breakup of Al and Tipper. For him, this is like the breakup of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or Idi Amin and the Ugandans, or Eng and Chang, the Siamese twins. It's a rip in the fabric of the universe. WIth something like this going on, who has time to write or narrate silly episodes of high school soap operas.

It's not easy being the Nostrumite.