Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 268: The Ed Wood Wednesdays Disclaimer, annotated

This disclaimer belongs in a museum.

When the Dead 2 Rights blog started in 2009, it was a spinoff of a zombie movie podcast and was, therefore, mostly about zombie movies and television shows. (This was the heyday of The Walking Dead.) When that podcast ended in 2013, I could have let the blog come to an end, but I decided to keep it going. In my search for a new focus, I launched the Ed Wood Wednesdays series of articles in July 2013. It was supposed to run for a couple of months but has now been going for nearly 13 years. By September 2013, I'd already accumulated enough articles to justify an index page. To this day, I continue to update and revise that index as necessary.

In 2021, eight full years into the project, I decided to add a "big fat disclaimer" to the index page. That disclaimer remains there today. I've tinkered with the wording over the years, but the current incarnation reads like this:

BIG FAT DISCLAIMER: Ed Wood Wednesdays is not a reference work. It makes no claim of being definitive or scholarly. It was written strictly for my own amusement and is intended only as entertainment. As such, the articles listed below may contain factual errors, spelling and grammar mistakes, and other glaring omissions. Also, many of these articles were written years ago, so they may contain outdated information and dead links. If that bothers you, please do not read them. I fully acknowledge that you, the reader, may know more Ed Wood trivia than I do. While I cannot stop you from sending corrections to me, I encourage you to start a blog of your own instead. Thank you.

I consider this the single most important paragraph in the entire, 13-year history of Ed Wood Wednesdays, but it is also one of the least-read. How do I know this? Because people keep sending me corrections and complaints rather than starting their own blogs. My advice to the nitpickers remains the same after all these years: instead of complaining about what I've written, write something of your own and show me how it's done.

So today, let's go through the disclaimer line by line and see what it all means.

One Song at a Time: Remembering a (failed) series on this blog

They can't all be winners, as this series proved.

When this blog started in 2009, it was a spinoff of a podcast called Mail Order Zombie to which I regularly contributed material. As such, for the first few years, Dead 2 Rights was mostly about zombie movies and zombies in general. In fact, I even wrote the blog in character, using my "living impaired" alias from the show. But MOZ went dark in 2013, and I'd already been experimenting with non-zombie material a little by then. Once the podcast was kaput, I decided to ditch the pseudonym altogether and write about whatever interested me.

And what was that exactly? Well, the Ed Wood Wednesdays series started in 2013 and is still going in 2026. For some people, that's all this blog is. Which is fair: there's a lot of Ed Wood stuff on here. Like it or not, there's been a lot of Happy Days stuff on this blog, too. So I'm not just the Ed Wood guy. I'm the Ed Wood and Happy Days guy. I'm fine with that. 

But there's other stuff on Dead 2 Rights, too. I've tried many different approaches over the years, hoping something will break through. Nothing really has. I regret that I dropped the Comedy Classics articles. It's just that they were a lot of work for very little response. I still owe you guys 22 more of them in addition to the 78 I already did. (Maybe someday.) Comics and cartoons have long been a part of this blog, too, but those are more for me than they are for you.

One of my biggest disappointments was a series called One Song at a Time. The premise was pretty simple. Rather than talk about whole albums or genres of music, I'd concentrate on individual songs that meant something to me. I'd relate a little about the history of the song and add a personal story from my own life related to that song. I really thought this series had a chance of connecting with readers, but it apparently didn't. The series lasted from June 2014 to October 2015, then disappeared without a trace. C'est la vie.

The thing is, I've occasionally thought of reviving One Song at a Time, namely because there are a couple of music-related articles that have done fairly well by the standards of this blog. One is about the 1950s duo Patience & Prudence. Another is about the song "Be My Baby." Those still get views every week. In retrospect, the "Be My Baby" article served as the pilot for One Song at a Time.

Anyway, if you're just here for Ed Wood stuff, none of this may interest you. But if you want to know your humble blogger a little better, check out One Song at a Time.

New and gloriously stupid project: 100 Buddy Hollys

Ten of the proposed 100 Buddy Hollys.

What is life without its pointless projects? As I look back on my own half century of existence, I see that I have always been the most productive when the work I am doing has no practical application in the real world. If it's completely and utterly useless, I'm all in. Often, the work only has "meaning" because it brings me some strange, indefinable enjoyment or satisfaction. I suppose this entire blog (which has been running since October 2009) is my ultimate boondoggle. I have faithfully maintained this madman's journal largely for my own amusement and at the expense of more noble or profitable pursuits. But it's far from my only folly.

Lately, for instance, I have embarked upon what might be my single-dumbest endeavor: a project called 100 Buddy Hollys. The idea is to create 100 different parodies and remixes of the 1994 Weezer song "Buddy Holly" and post these to my YouTube account, mostly as shorts. Why this song? Why now? I don't know and I don't know. But the project is already moving forward at a furious pace. I started on October 19 with a video called "Buddy Holly but Rivers fired the rest of the band and replaced them with The Moog Cookbook." I have since created several dozen sequels, combining "Buddy Holly" with numerous other pop culture properties and rearranging the song in various ways.

The most popular of these videos has garnered about 1,800 views -- not even a blip on the YouTube radar. The least popular currently sits at a miserable 23 views. I have no idea why some of them perform better than others, and I don't really care. All I know is that, at some point, I decided I'd make a hundred of these things and then stop. Will I make it? Will I lose interest or run out of ideas? Stay tuned, true believers.

2024 Comics Fun Advent Calendar, Day 18: Have I posted this before?

I don't hate juice in real life.

I've been blogging for so long now, I have no real recollection of what I have and haven't posted to Dead 2 Rights. It's all a blur. But I was going through my archives recently and found this one that still made me laugh, so I'm posting it now. It's another one based on a tweet by Comics Outta Context. I have a bunch more of these. 

Here's another:

RIP Margaret Thatcher. Unless you didn't like her.

One more:

Okay, now I'm done.

And that'll do it for 2023! See you in 2024! (BONUS: Some comics!)

I'll be joining Larry Burns for some brewskis.

After a pretty busy 2023, this blog is going on a brief hiatus for a couple of weeks. I trust you can live without my super-niche Happy Days and Ed Wood content for the time being. Rest assured, These Days Are Ours and Ed Wood Wednesdays will both return in January. 

Boy, isn't it strange how this blog used to be about all kinds of stuff but is now just about those two topics? Hmmm. For instance, I used to do a lot of comics parodies on this blog, little sendups of comic strips and (less often) comic books. I haven't posted any of that stuff to this blog in three years. I haven't stopped making that kind of content, though. I just tend to post it to my Twitter account and leave it there. But Twitter (or, uh, X) seems to be in its death throes. I guess we'll see.

In the meantime, here are some of my extremely crude, silly comics from the last couple of years that haven't yet been posted to this blog. All created in Microsoft Paint. Enjoy or don't. 

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 158: Ten years of Ed Wood Wednesdays (2013-2023)

Here's how my blog looked ten years ago.

It was never supposed to be like this. Ed Wood Wednesdays, as I have explained many times over the last decade, was planned as a limited series back in 2013. Emphasis on limited. I'd just gotten the DVD box set, Big Box of Wood (2011), and already had a handful of other Wood films in my collection. I thought it'd be fun to put those films into chronological order and review them one at a time, supplementing my commentary with little historical tidbits from Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy (1992), which was pretty much the only Ed Wood book on the market then. I'd start with Crossroads of Laredo (1948) and end with Hot Ice (1978). That was it.

The project came along at a time when this blog was in need of a new direction. Dead 2 Rights started in October 2009 as a spinoff of a zombie movie podcast called Mail Order Zombie, where I was a regular. But that show ended in April 2013, and I was getting a little burned out on the zombie-related content anyway. Less than a year earlier, I'd had a complete emotional meltdown and been hospitalized for suicidal depression, and this blog briefly became a journal of my recovery as I started taking meds and going to therapy. But I got bored with writing about that stuff, too. 

For a while, I busied myself with reviews of public domain comedies, thinking that those lighthearted, often corny movies from the past might help me shake off my melancholy. They didn't, but I'm still proud of that series. Maybe I shouldn't have abandoned it so abruptly. But the Ed Wood stuff eventually became this blog's main focus and crowded out everything else.

Here I am with my mother at Christmas.

But why Ed Wood rather than, say, a more "respectable" director? Well, like many middle-aged people, I was probably trying to recapture some aspect of my lost youth. I first saw Eddie's films at a Halloween movie marathon in October 1992. I was a high schooler at the time, and this would be one of the last positive experiences of my teenage years. Shortly after that, my mother's cancer returned with a vengeance. Her death sent my life into a tailspin, and the next few years were bleak indeed. For me, Ed Wood somehow became an icon of happier times.

I never put myself forward as any kind of expert on Ed Wood, nor did I intend this series as a deep dive into obscure Wood trivia. In fact, that was the very opposite of my intention for this series. My goal was (and, to some degree, still is) to write for a general audience, and I felt these articles should be comprehensible to the average reader, even one who'd never seen any of Wood's movies. The immediate reaction to Ed Wood Wednesdays was largely positive, with each article getting several thousand hits -- small potatoes by internet standards but very good for a niche blog like this. 

Very soon, though, people started to contact me, either by email or through instant messaging. Some were merely curious and wanted to know if I'd be covering certain speculative Wood films or delving into Wood's written work. Some wanted to make corrections or school me on Ed Wood lore. Some wanted to promote Wood-related projects of their own. And some felt I was an interloper, horning in on territory that rightfully belonged to others. Every fandom has its share of gatekeepers, and Woodology is no exception. I have written of a so-called "Hollywood historian" who considers himself a Wood expert and who has been unfailingly hostile towards me for years. I try not to hate anyone, but this guy makes it tough.

There were some upsides to being the author of Ed Wood Wednesdays. Not many, but some. I was interviewed by The New York Times back in 2014. That was kinda neat. My father had no idea how the internet worked, so telling him about my blog was futile, but even he had heard of the Times. A few professional opportunities came my way because of Ed Wood Wednesdays as well. I know that I was asked to contribute to the Girl Gangs, Biker Boys book (2017) because of this series. The book Dad Made Dirty Movies also came about because journalist Jordan Todorov found my lengthy, detailed reviews of the movies Ed Wood made with director Stephen C. Apostolof in the 1970s.

The salad days of Ed Wood Wednesdays did not last long, though, maybe a year and a half. Then things started to turn sour. For one thing, Google's search algorithm changed and stopped sending people to my blog. It was like a faucet had been turned off. I lost 95% of my audience in a very short amount of time, and it has never recovered. A typical Ed Wood Wednesdays article now gets, at most, a few dozen hits. Only the diehards remained, and they wanted obscure Wood trivia that I was not always able to supply. My life, too, remained chaotic. I abruptly quit my corporate job on a whim in August 2015 and made a quixotic attempt at a career as a freelance writer with virtually no idea how that profession works. What was I thinking? I don't know.

This series probably would have ended in 2015 had it not been for Greg Dziawer, one of my most persistent emailers. He'd inundate me with Wood trivia, some of which I could barely understand. At the time, I was trying to make a go of the freelancing thing and didn't really feel like contributing anything substantial to this blog. (I found that, when I wrote for money, I was less willing to write for fun.) So I made the decision to turn the reins of Ed Wood Wednesdays over to Greg. 

I felt a little guilty about that choice. I called myself a writer, after all, but I wasn't even writing my own blog anymore. For the true Wood diehards, though, this was probably when Ed Wood Wednesdays "got good." Greg was much more willing to supply the graduate-school-level trivia that they wanted, and he made no attempt to court a wider audience with his articles. His stuff was for the true believers only. Greenhorns need not apply. He was combing through old magazines and loops and even contacting people connected to Wood in search of material for the blog. (I was never good at that.) More than once, I suggested he start his own blog, but he thought it was better to publish his findings on my blog. So the series continued.

Eventually, as my freelance writing career evaporated, I drifted back to Ed Wood Wednesdays. Between the main series and such supplementary series as Ed Wood Extras and the 2022 Ed-Vent Calendar, plus my individual reviews of Ed's short stories and magazine pieces, I have now written something like 380 articles about Edward Davis Wood, Jr., totaling god knows how many thousands of words. It's possible that I've written more about Eddie than anyone, certainly enough to fill several books. 

What keeps me going? Well, it helps that the last 10 years has been a time of great discovery in the world of Ed Wood. So many of Ed's movies and written works have come to light in the last decade, and more continue to be found. It's truly the best time to be a Wood fan. Plus, as the founder of this blog, I just get stuff sent to me. I especially need to thank Philip R. Fry, Greg Dziawer, and Bob Blackburn for hooking me up with some Wood goodness. That's the ultimate perk of founding this series.

More than that, though, I find some kind of strange solace in the works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. I can't explain it to myself, let alone explain it to you. It's not that Ed is a hero to me, exactly. He was a drunk who beat his wife; that's no role model. But in his films and his writing and, yes, his own life, he created this fascinating alternate universe that I like to explore, even after all these years. It's my own Oz or Narnia or Wonderland or Middle Earth, populated with beings as extraordinary as any you'd find in those fictional places. I got into this series to cover Ed's movies, but it's his prose that actually gives me the most satisfaction these days. There's just a certain cadence to Ed's writing I find comforting, and reading is for me a more immersive experience than watching.

Make no mistake, Ed Wood Wednesdays is a ton of work for me. It generates no money whatsoever -- quite the opposite, really -- and takes up an inordinate amount of time. That's something I have less and less of, especially now that I work a full-time office job again with a commute and also do a weekly podcast that requires hours of writing, researching, and editing.  But I intend to keep this series going as long as I'm physically and mentally able to do it, long after everyone has stopped reading it. Ultimately, the audience for Ed Wood Wednesdays is and always will be myself. I write these things so that I can read them when they're done.

Occasionally over the last ten years, people have asked me if I'll ever write a book about Ed Wood. I tell them that I have. I've just been publishing it online for free, one chapter at a time. And I hope it'll never be finished.

A brief history of this blog's many, many logos

The first two logos this blog ever had.

When this blog started back in October 2009, it was focused almost exclusively on zombie movies and zombie-related humor. Dead 2 Rights was created specifically as a forum for a fictional character I played on a podcast called Mail Order Zombie from 2008 to 2013. I didn't even set up this blog myself. It was done for me by the people who ran that podcast. The original logo, featuring a group of smiling, blue-eyed zombies with perfect teeth, was designed by an artist named Scott Cole. I loved it and kept it for years. 

Mail Order Zombie ceased production in 2013, and I completely dropped the pretense of writing the blog in character. By then, the blog was mostly about my own life and my own interests anyway. Reluctantly, I decided to junk the old, beautifully designed logo in favor of a crude one I made myself. It was just black lettering on a white background. The full name of the blog became Dead 2 Rights: The Personal Blog Of Joe Blevins. I made that switch because the old articles had been credited to the nonexistent character I played on Mail Order Zombie. Those skinny, hand-drawn letters reading "DEAD 2 RIGHTS" are meant to resemble the opening credits of Dr. Strangelove, by the way.

Functional as the black-and-white logo was, it was a little spartan for my taste, so I moved on to a series of more fanciful mastheads. Like the following:

We'll miss ya, Fran.

Aren't those cute? For a while, this blog's mascot was an old-timey character actor named Slim Summerville. I cancelled out his eyes and pasted his picture over the carpet pattern from The Shining. So that was another Kubrick reference. 

By then, I was pretty heavily into the Ed Wood Wednesdays phase of Dead 2 Rights. Since Eddie made a lot of adult movies, I found myself doing Internet searches for porno actresses and pin-up models. Somewhere along the way, I must have discovered the name of Fran Gerard, who didn't appear in any movies but was a memorable Playboy Playmate in 1967. She might have been the first Playmate to wear glasses in her pictorial. I thought she was adorable, so she became the face of Dead 2 Rights for a while. 

The logo was kitschy and sexy and retro -- all the things I wanted the blog to be. You'll see I was enamored of Cooper Black and those damned Dr. Strangelove letters. During this era, the blog also acquired a new subtitle: The Journal Of Important Matters.

Then a weird thing happened, and the blog's appearance had to reflect that change.

The most recent logos. Notice how unsexy they are.

Sometime in late 2014, Google got really uptight about having sexually-related content on Blogger, the platform I use to publish Dead 2 Rights. People with Blogger sites got a bunch of threatening e-mails about what content was and was not appropriate and said that blogs that didn't comply would be restricted from searches and could be blocked altogether for some users. My blog got a voluntary but still embarrassing orange "Content Warning" screen slapped on it, and some readers found that they could no longer access the site at all. 

Google eventually relented (somewhat), but I'd had enough. I censored the holy hell out of Dead 2 Rights and lobbied to get the warning screen taken off. After some rigmarole, I was successful. At that point, it was no longer appropriate to have a Playboy Playmate as the unwitting "face" of the blog, so Fran Gerard was replaced by Thomas Bowdler, the man whose name became synonymous with censorship. The subtitle was changed to A Decent Blog For Decent People in order to emphasize my moral turpitude.

I got sick of looking at Bowlder pretty quickly, and I'd always wanted to experiment with a "log cabin" motif, so the site became Dead 2 Rights: A Folksy, Down-Home Blog. I liked this much better, but I thought it was getting a little corny. Therefore, I ditched the backwoods design altogether and went for a super-plain look with a skinny, nondescript logo, once again (yawn) employing those skinny Dr. Strangelove letters. The problem with this version of the site was that it was so bland it was hideous. I hated looking at it, so I gave Dead 2 Rights its most recent makeover. The current banner is minimalist but colorful and takes its version of the logo directly from Scott Cole's original 2009 design. I thought it paired well with the Soviet propaganda posters I currently use as the site's wallpaper.

And that's a pocket history of Dead 2 Rights. Not that you asked for it.

Sure, I've got Halloween content at my blog! How much do you need?

"They're like the Blue Angels of dance!"

October is here, and you know what that means. Yep, it's time to clean all of those dead woodchucks out of the crawlspace again and maybe mail a couple to old enemies from high school. But it's also the time of year when people's thoughts turn to ghosts, goblins, witches, and werewolves. Actually, if they're heterosexual men, their thoughts probably turn to women in scanty costumes which make them look like Chechnyan prostitutes, but that's another story. Wherever your thoughts may be turning, Halloween is just a couple of weeks away, and instead of actually getting off my lazy ass (or, to be more accurate, spending more time on my lazy ass) and producing new Halloween-appropriate content for this blog, I thought I'd point out that there is already a metric ton of Halloween content at Dead 2 Rights, more than you'd ever get through in a single lifetime. In the spirit of a greener Planet Earth and a brighter tomorrow, then, I'd like to do some recycling.

JOE'S KICK-ASS HALLOWEEN STUFF THAT HE'S ALREADY WRITTEN

This is delightful, right?

• Of course, the conversation begins with Joe's Halloween Dictionary, based on an assignment that I did in the third grade. I don't actually have a lot of souvenirs from that era of my life (the mid-1980s), but I did manage to hold onto this little hand-drawn booklet. And one year, I decided to scan each and every page of it for your amusement. Is it delightful? Judge for yourself. 

• Then there's my, uh, unique interpretation of the definitive movie of the season, John Carpenter's legendary Halloween from 1978. In the article, I posit that there may be more to Donald Pleasance's creepy "Loomis" character than meets the eye. And, hey, if you're into screwy fan theories about classic horror movies, I have more of that. Way more.

• And then there was the time that I yakked on and on about "Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett. It was my blatant attempt at doing a BuzzFeed/Cracked-type listicle. It didn't do a thing, traffic-wise, but it's still a fun read. Theoretically.

• You can't have Halloween without zombies, and this used to be a zombie blog back in the olden, golden, molden days. In fact, I had an entire series of cartoons about one of the overexposed, undead buggers. If you just want to skip to the better Zomby panels, here is a good place to start. Speaking of classic monsters, a few years ago, I investigated why so many of the great ones seem to have such lousy websites.

• More recently, I visited two real-world costume shops and countless web sites in my search for celebrity Halloween masks. What I learned was disillusioning, but I reported my findings here nevertheless. And Google is still giving me lots of disturbing ads for disturbing Halloween masks, so I truly do suffer for my art.

Bonkers bonks you out!

• And what is Halloween without sweet, sweet candy? Pretty lousy, is what. Candy has been a long-time preoccupation of mine on this blog, so I have posts about Bonkers, Summit Bars, Fruit Stripe Gum, Twix, York Peppermint Pattie, and just plain old sugar. In case you're wondering: yes, I am somewhat overweight and have had lots of cavities. Does that information make you happier?

• Some of my favorite little Halloween items at Dead 2 Rights were things tagged onto posts of Zomby cartoons. Like this thing about a ridiculously joyless '70s Halloween safety film from Centron. Or the anti-Halloween rantings of Carol Kornacki.

• It seems almost redundant to point this out, but plenty of articles in the Ed Wood Wednesdays series are Halloween-friendly. Try this one or this one or even this one, which is about how my interest in Edward Davis Wood, Jr. can be traced to a Halloween movie marathon from 1992.

So as you can clearly see, I have hardly been negligent in my coverage of the Eve of All Hallows. There are plenty of articles here which could be described as spooktacular, frightmarish, or even pants-shittingly-scary. Just go searching through the archives. Who knows what will turn up? 'Til we meet again, happy haunting. Whoops, I mean happy hunting. I don't know why I said haunting the first time.

Sometimes, I just need to be openly miserable, okay?

I want you to study this graph very closely. Commit it to memory.

This blog has sucked lately, but I don't apologize for that because it has sucked for a valid, legitimate reason. As anyone who has read Dead 2 Rights or who has known me for any amount of time should be aware by now, I suffer from depression and anxiety. (You should know this because I won't shut up about it.) And we're talking medically-diagnosed, clinical depression and anxiety here. I take antidepressants and attend weekly therapy sessions, and these things help somewhat, but they are not magic by any means. They are not a cure-all. Treatment of mental health issues can be complicated and frustrating. The best, quickest way to illustrate this is to direct you to a recent BuzzFeed article by Anna Borges entitled "13 Graphs Anyone Who's Ever Been Depressed Will Understand." Please read it. It's an excellent summary both of what depression is truly like (read: mostly boring) and of the various misconceptions people have about the condition. Of particular interest is Borges' keen observation that "sometimes, you relapse." That's very true for me.

Since my hospitalization in late 2012, I have made slow, sometimes barely-perceptible progress in my quest to become a happier, healthier person. But I have my share of bad days, too, and sometimes those can turn into bad weeks or even bad months. Lately, I will admit that I have been relapsing somewhat. My high-stress, low-satisfaction job is a constant source of both depression and anxiety, and some recent changes there have had a significant negative effect on me. Part of the fault is my own. As an anxious person, I am liable to take minor, inconsequential issues and magnify them until they are huge, life-threatening crises. And as a depressed person, I am liable to fall into a state of helplessness and lethargy. Combine the two and you've got a real mess on your hands.

One thing which really helps -- and this can be difficult for people to accept or understand -- is to vent my negativity. I do that in therapy, sure, but I also occasionally do that on this blog and in private conversations, too. There are some posts on Dead 2 Rights which are strictly excuses for me to be negative and complain about everything which is going wrong in my life. If those articles don't interest you, by all means skip right over them. There's plenty of other stuff here to read. But if you do choose to read those articles, please try to understand that I just need to be a total downer sometimes. I don't want these articles to worry you or upset you. Believe it or not, these articles help me to feel better. Please just let me be miserable sometimes. It's important to me.

Okay, I'm glad we had this little talk. You may go in peace to love and serve yourself.

Ed Wood Wednesdays is going on hiatus (and other disappointing blog news)

Yup. That about covers it.

"If I could not earn a penny from my writing, I would earn my livelihood at something else and continue to write at night."

-Irving Wallace (via Michael O'Donoghue)

Yesterday, I went into my Blogger "Draft Posts" folder, where all my unfinished articles and stories reside, and deleted everything in it. It was a sad and profound moment. I knew I was never going to finish these posts, so why should they taunt me? Among the casualties: a very high-concept short story about cartoon characters (specifically, cartoon nephews) getting together in Hollywood; a far-reaching and history-minded analysis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one which connects it with such films as Easy Rider, The Big Chill, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and a half-kidding, half-serious editorial about how Jim Henson's Muppet Babies was the beginning of the end of everything. They all bit the dust, along with a number of never-to-be-completed reviews of certain movies, including (yes) some titles from my Mill Creek Comedy Classics box set. (I haven't forgotten about it.) I honestly thought I could live like Irving Wallce suggested: earning my livelihood by day and writing at night. Kafka did it. "The Night Writer," some have called him, though that nickname brings to mind talking cars more than talking cockroaches.

Folks, I've tried, but I just can't be Kafka. Not right now, anyway.

Between working and commuting, I have only about two hours every weekday between when I finally get back home and when I have to be in bed. During that two hours, I have to eat dinner, make my daily phone call to my father and patiently listen to every detail of his event-free day, check my e-mail and social media accounts, and maybe try to watch a little TV or part of a movie. That leaves very, very little time for writing. Today, I'm using part of my two hours to write this little update. Was it worth it? You tell me. I suppose I could write on the weekends, and I try to do so, but those are my only days to catch up on laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping. and (oh, yeah) something called sleep. While it's still warm outside, it would be nice to get some fresh air occasionally, too, if possible.

Ed Wood Wednesdays is going to have to go on an indefinite hiatus for the time being, at least until my mind and body adjust to my new work schedule. All other writing projects I may have had are hereby cancelled. As always, I will probably post some brief, informal articles here from time to time, as I have always done. But I don't see myself writing anything research-heavy or complicated in the foreseeable future. This is a very troubling and disheartening time in my life. It feels like I'm putting a well-loved pet to sleep. The creative/silly side of my personality is dying. Maybe it's already dead. I just know that I'm tired all the time now. Tired of mind. Tired of body. Tired of spirit. As Lili Von Shtupp once succinctly put it, "Goddamnit, I'm exhausted."

On the bright side, I discovered a neat little obscure R&B number from the late 1950s, lurking on a compilation I've owned for years. It's called "King of Fools," and it's credited to a singer named Sam Hawkins, who currently does not even merit a Wikipedia entry. Give it a spin.

Announcement regarding the future of Ed Wood Wednesdays (UPDATED)

Jeffrey Jones as Criswell in Ed Wood (1994).

"We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives."

It was a line Criswell swiped from a 1953 Rock Hudson-Donna Reed flick called Gun Fury. (Rock's version went: "I'm interested only in the future, 'cause that's where we're going to spend the rest of our lives.") Cris recycled this fortune-cookie-ready adage throughout his career: in Plan 9 from Outer Space, on his 1970 album The Legendary Criswell Predicts Your Incredible Future, and even into latter-day personal appearances in his waning days. On the Plan 9 DVD commentary track, Ted Newsom recalls seeing the old faker at one such event and cringing when Criswell nearly forgot the second half of the famous sentence. (To Ted's relief, Cris eventually remembered his own catchphrase.)

Though mocked by the Medved-inspired bad movie crowd, there's a certain forehead-slapping truth to those well-worn words. We really are going to send the rest of our lives in the future. Isn't that exciting? In fact, the dull, ordinary day you just had would probably be extraordinary in a thousand different ways to someone who lived a century ago.

Folks, I'll not beat around the bush. I'm here to discuss the future of this blog in general and of Ed Wood Wednesdays, far and away its most popular feature, in particular. Writing about the films, books, and stories of Edward Davis Wood, Jr. is one of the great passions of my life, but it does not pay the bills. On the contrary, it sucks up money and time that could be (presumably) spent on more profitable endeavors.

In 2014, while my rent, insurance, and transportation costs all went up, my income actually slipped a little. To quote Arthur Miller: "That's an earthquake." (He meant it metaphorically, as do I.) In order to fix this problem, I have applied for -- and gotten -- a promotion at work. This new role will require more of my time, attention, and energy. Therefore, I will be doing much less writing in the foreseeable future. There is no joy in my heart as I write these words. I'm just telling you how it is, as straight as I know how to tell it.

I am not shutting down Dead 2 Rights or even Ed Wood Wednesdays. Writing is my first love, even if I don't have a single reader other than myself, and just like the song says: "Without love, you're only living an imitation... an imitation of life." I don't intend to live an imitation of life. Here is what I propose for now: Ed Wood Wednesdays will drop back to a once-a-month schedule. Let's make it the last Wednesday of each month, huh? This month's article would appear on June 24. And in between, I'll try to post as much non-research-heavy content as I can, whenever I can.

Stick with me, will ya? Maybe I can turn this thing around yet.

Addendum to previous article: 

I wrote that announcement several days ago in a moment of frustration, and I wanted to clarify some points made within it. First off, I don't mean to give the impression that I am in desperate financial straits at all. I'm not. Not even close. In fact, by living extremely frugally and denying myself nearly every luxury, I have managed to save enough money so that I could survive for a year and a half, maybe even two full years, at my current standard of living with no income whatsoever. I pay all my bills on time and have what I'm told is a very decent credit rating. That's the good news.

The problem is that, in recent months, my monthly expenses have been slightly outstripping my monthly income, forcing me to dip into my savings just a little. That frightened me. In order to counteract this, I applied to be a salaried, full-time employee at my current place of business, where I have been an hourly employee for the last decade. I won't even be leaving my current department at work, just moving a few cubicles over and doing a slightly-different-but-mostly-the-same job.

There is no adventure or challenge to this. It's strictly a financial decision made with an eye toward the future. The upside to this is that, ideally, I can worry a little less about money. The downside is that I will have to curtail some creative pursuits in order to focus more fully on a job to which I have no emotional connection whatsoever. That worries me, too. There's no truly "good" news here, just some half-bad, half-neutral news that I wanted to share with my readers. Thanks. - J.B.

Notes on my incredibly glamorous and exciting life (including a trip to Onion HQ)

No, this isn't an outtake from Caligula. It's supposedly a picture of an Onion staff party. (Not pictured: me.)

"May you be happy in the life you have chosen."

-Scrooge's ex-girlfriend, Belle*

*She doesn't really mean it when she says it, but I think it's good advice anyway.

My life is, at least partially by design, uneventful to the point of almost total stasis. I can define myself by the (many) things I dislike: people, crowds, noise, disruption, spending money, following directions, traveling, making small talk, listening, trying to be nice, doing favors for people, and social interactions of all kinds. The extent to which I can successfully and temporarily avoid these terrible maladies is the extent to which my life is tolerable. Of course, this comes at a price. Boredom, alienation, loneliness, and stagnation are the occasional side effects of my chosen lifestyle, but they beat the alternatives: despair, frustration, humiliation, resentment, and an overall disgust with the world and every last person in it. In other words, a relatively solitary, quiet, and dull life is the only kind for me. I couldn't imagine any other way of existing.

Zomby (briefly) Returns: This is what creative desperation looks like

The first new "Zomby" cartoon in nearly two years. So, um, enjoy, I guess.

Zomby, a zombified parody of Tom Wilson's long-running newspaper cartoon series Ziggy, used to be an important recurring feature at Dead 2 Rights. That was before Ed Wood more or less hijacked this blog and (posthumously) made it his own. The premise was exceedingly simple. I'd take that day's Ziggy panel, turn the title character gray in Microsoft Paint, and change the punchline so that it was about a reanimated corpse who feasted on the living rather than a sweet, bumbling loser who couldn't get decent customer service. The joke, I guess, was that even in this supposedly-terrifying form, Zomby was just as much as an ineffectual, put-upon loser as Ziggy was. It was a way of taking some then-trendy monsters who were dominating films, TV, and video games and removing everything that made them cool or threatening. I did dozens, maybe hundreds, of Zomby panels and then just sort of stopped. Apart from a few stray shamblers in Plan 9 from Outer Space and Orgy of the Dead, zombies are no longer the focal point of this blog, despite its George Romero-inspired name. So Zomby disappeared. He hasn't been seen around here since 2013.

But today, I was trying to think of something I could post to Dead 2 Rights and thought, "Hey, why don't I try to do another Zomby cartoon and see if I can still get back into that mindset." So I Googled today's Ziggy panel and found that it was one of the series' most familiar tropes: Ziggy going to a diner and getting predictably lousy treatment. (The uncouth chef tells Ziggy he's too late to get the "breakfast of champions" and will have to settle for the "brunch of also-rans." Get it? Because Ziggy fails at everything and should totally just kill himself. HA!) It reminded me of another reason I abandoned Zomby: monotony. Ziggy only does five or six basic things, over and over. He watches TV, he takes abuse from his pets (a dog, a cat, and a bird), he tries to obtain goods and services without success, etc. I was going to call him out on this, until I realized that Ziggy's life was actually more varied and interesting than mine. I mean, he has a parrot. I don't. He goes fishing (or golfing or mountain climbing) sometimes. I don't. He freely walks around in public without pants. I...  well, that's none of your business.

Anyway, I realized today that the part of my brain that could easily come up with Zomby jokes must have died a couple of years ago. And unlike Zomby himself, I don't think it can be revived.

Ed Wood Extra! The arrival of Lots #3028 and #3043

Here I am with my new Ed Wood poster, bathed in the greenish fluorescent glow of my small kitchen.

This poster caused me so much grief.

Chalk up one more thing Ed Wood and I have in common. Eddie suffered for his art. And I, too, have suffered for Ed Wood's art, though not for the reasons you might be imagining.

While making my way through, let's say, the '70s softcore romps Eddie wrote for Steve Apostolof involved a certain amount of tedium, I cannot say that Wood's work has inspired in me the same kind of theatrical agony it seems to have caused other observers. No, my suffering has been of a different stripe.

Since Ed Wood Wednesdays began back in July 2013, I have essentially been an indentured servant to a man who died nearly 40 years ago. In my quest to catalog the life and career of Edward Davis Wood, Jr., I have frequently forsaken such niceties as fresh air, exercise, and sleep. The sun may shine and the birds may chirp, after all, but this DVD of The Undergraduate isn't going to review itself! Like Mark Borchardt said in American Movie: "I have to adhere to this keyboard."

Conservatively, I'd estimate I've put on 15 to 20 pounds in the time I've been writing Ed Wood Wednesdays. I chalk it up to all those hours I've spent hunched over my laptop computer, keeping my energy up with a steady intake of frozen dinners and prepackaged snacks. Hey, Eddie got a little doughy near the end, too. That's yet another thing we have in common, except his weight gain came from booze while mine came from gummi worms and microwaved pizza.

And sometimes, this project has inconvenienced me in such silly ways that all I can do is laugh. Take today, for instance. You'll remember, a few weeks ago, that there was a massive auction of Ed Wood memorabilia. I chickened out on the big ticket items, including a suitcase and two trunks owned by Eddie himself, but I wanted to get something out of the auction so I bid on a few of the smaller items. I wound up winning two of these: a vintage one-sheet poster for Glen or Glenda? under the alternate title I Led 2 Lives (Lot #3028) and a set of eight Mexican lobby cards for Plan 9 from Outer Space (Lot #3043).

Today, they are in my possession at last, and getting them into my apartment was a Sisyphean ordeal. It should have been easy. FedEx was scheduled to deliver them yesterday, but I knew I'd be at work when they arrived so I arranged to have Patricia, the lovely lady who manages the office of the apartment complex where I live, sign for them in my absence. My apartment, I should say, is literally next door to this office. We share a wall.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men. My landlady happened to be dropping by the office when the FedEx guy arrived, and she prevented Patricia from signing for the package, reasoning that if they performed this simple kindness for me, a loyal rent-payer for 12 years, they'd have to do the same for everyone. My landlady, I can say from experience, is not someone with whom you can bargain... or reason.

One of my nifty new lobby cards.

Meanwhile, of course, my package could not be delivered as instructed. So back to the FedEx pickup center it went. Luckily, this is less than a quarter-mile from my home, since I live in a busy commercial district dominated by strip malls, chain stores, and gas stations. The clerk there was only too happy to turn over my Ed Wood poster and lobby cards to me.

But here is where the story turns into a Buster Keaton comedy. RR Auction sent these items in one large, flat cardboard box, and there was no way of fitting this into my cramped 2002 Chevy Cavalier. I tried every configuration I could imagine. Seats all the way forward. Seats all the way back. Passenger seat tilted as flat as it would go. Windows open. Trunk open. Nothing, and I mean nothing, worked.

Here I was, stranded in the FedEx parking lot just a few minutes away from my apartment. I thought of temporarily ditching the car and just walking the damned thing back home. But, again, this is a busy commercial district, and my story was happening during rush hour traffic. How was I ever going to get across those busy, dangerous streets with this ridiculous cardboard box? If I held it in front of me, I couldn't even see the traffic coming.

In desperation, I dragged the package back into the FedEx place and asked if I could just open it there and take the contents out. The lady behind the desk said this was fine, so I borrowed her scissors and cut into the package. And what tumbled out? More styrofoam packing peanuts than I have ever seen in my life. Dozens and dozens of the goddamned things accumulated at my feet. Mortified, I spent a good (read: bad) 10 to 15 minutes crawling around the floor of the FedEx pickup center in a frantic effort to retrieve every last one of those peanuts. The place looked nicer than my apartment, after all, and I didn't want to muck it up.

Eventually, though, I did manage to extract my purchases and get them into my battered, grungy old car. The Glen or Glenda? poster was swaddled in about eight miles of bubble wrap, so it was still quite a large item even outside of its cardboard cocoon. But at least it was now flexible enough to be (barely) wedged into the nearly-nonexistent back seat of my vehicle. I couldn't see a damned thing out the rear window, but then again, I didn't have far to drive. It wasn't 100% safe, but it was safe enough.

Once I got back home, I had a devil of a time chasing after all the additional styrofoam peanuts that were falling everywhere. I'm kind of a zealot about littering, especially in my own neighborhood, so I didn't want to just leave a trail of those tell-tale peanuts outside the apartment complex where I live. It was a windy day, though, so this was tricky to say the least. I'm sure I lost a few soldiers today.

And now? Well, now the poster and the lobby cards are safely ensconced in my apartment. And you know what else? They're really lovely. I have no idea what I'm going to do with them, but they're lovely nonetheless.

The Glenda poster is larger than I was imagining, the size of a small (admittedly very wide and flat) child, and still a satisfying shade of fire-engine red. Right now, still wrapped in plastic, it's leaning against the wall of my kitchen. I'll probably have it framed soon, but I think the kitchen is a good place for it. Much of Glen or Glenda? takes place in kitchens. Even Lugosi's lab where he creates life is a kind of kitchen. Every morning when I have my bowl of cereal, I can look up at Eddie smooching with Dolores Fuller, forever preserved in their 1953 glory. That's a nice thought.

The lobby cards came in a thick, heavy binder of their own. I might just leave them that way. To be honest, I haven't given much thought to the items themselves. I've barely even looked at 'em. For now, I'm just happy they're home.

POSTSCRIPT: In my Clouseau-esque struggles to get the uncooperative poster and lobby cards into my vehicle on Wednesday, I somehow managed to injure my left leg rather badly. By Thursday, that leg was noticeably bruised and achy, making it difficult to walk. For the last two days, then, I have been limping to and from work. Now that I am at last in repose, attempting to recuperate over the weekend, the medicinal smell of a cheap, over-the-counter topical ointment is stinging my nostrils. So when I say I have suffered for Ed Wood's art, I mean it quite literally.

Expect delays at Dead 2 Rights for a while

This is never a good sign.

I am currently waiting for the delivery of a new, hopefully more reliable power cord for my laptop computer. Until then, it will not be possible for me to write longer, more complex articles for Dead 2 Rights. I have a very particular way of working on this blog, you see, and a key component of my creative method involves writing while sitting up in bed, comfortably propped up on pillows like Marie Antoinette. (At least, that's how I'd imagine Marie Antoinette as a pop culture blogger.) It's the way I write 99.9% of the material on this blog, and it's not possible until I get that cord. I was hoping to get a new "Ed Wood Wednesdays" article out this week, but those pieces take hours and hours to write, and I can't do them if my computer has to remain stationary on a desk or table the whole time. I tried working on the latest "Ed Wood Wednesdays" piece that way yesterday, and I got a stiff neck and sore back like you wouldn't believe. It was physically painful to write like that. Do you see how I suffer for the benefit of my readers? But I'm only willing to suffer up to a point. So this little blurb here is my way of letting you know that "Ed Wood Wednesdays" is on hiatus indefinitely. Look for the next installment in the series once I get my computer up and running again. Until then, hang in there, true believers! I'll try to post some shorter items in the interim, but I'm not promising anything.

SAD UPDATE (1/16/2015): My computer is definitely going into the shop tomorrow and is possibly beyond repair. I have no idea when I'll be able to start blogging again. I will return, however. - J.B.

So this dumb blog is 5 years old today! Whoop-de-freakin'-do!

Remember this summer when we all found out that Hello Kitty is actually not a cat at all?

This blog started on October 30, 2009. That makes today the fifth anniversary of Dead 2 Rights. I thought that I should acknowledge this milestone in some way. That's what this post is: me acknowledging a milestone. Hi, milestone! Do you feel acknowledged? Good. Let's move on with our lives.

Ed Wood Wednesdays temporarily delayed by research for Ed Wood Wednesdays

Perhaps this eye-catching photograph will distract people while I'm away.

A little programming note is in order, people. Normally, I post a new Ed Wood Wednesdays article every two weeks, but that's not going to be possible this week because I'll be out of town. Way out of town, you might say. Ironically, what is preventing me from working on my Ed Wood project is the project itself. Or rather, one aspect of the project is muscling out another aspect of it. Tomorrow, folks, I'm flying to New York City so that I can attend the final two days of the Ed Wood retrospective currently going on in Manhattan. I'd be lying if I said I weren't a little nervous about all of this. Not that I'm afraid of flying. I'm just really, really bad at traveling. I have no knack for it whatsoever. I hate having to make arrangements and show up at certain places at certain times. I simply do not possess the organizational skills necessary for travel. So tomorrow will be a high stress day. Today has been a high stress day, in fact, because I've been dreading tomorrow. I feel like I'm going to take the SATs or something. It's been that kind of day. Anyway, I'm about halfway done on the next Ed Wood column. I'll be posting it in the near future. This one is exciting (I hope) because it's about a mystery movie which I did not plan on covering in this series. To quote an ad campaign from the 1980s which has stuck with me much longer than it should have, BE THERE! In the meantime, please wish me luck on this trip. I'll tell you all about it when I get back home.

P.S. - How do you like the new look of the blog? I spent some time this weekend making it over and have added some extra features to make it easier to find past content. I hope you like it.