What are you doing here? There's a new GIRL TALK album! FREE!

Friends! Romans! Countrymen!

Once on Twitter, I said that America needed a new Girl Talk album. Well, America now has what it truly needs. The name of the new album is All Day, and it's excellent. And better yet it's free! Go get it!

If you don't know, Girl Talk is a DJ named Greg Gillis who takes snippets of lots of different songs and puts them together in a big bouillabaisse of musical awesomeness. And guess what song kicks in at about the two-and-a-half minute mark? That's right: "Teach Me How to Dougie" by the Cali Swag District, i.e. the song I just wouldn't shut up about this summer.

Christmas came early for Wayne Kotke. The rest of 2010 is downhill.

UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME UPDATE: If you want to know which samples are which, HERE IS A SITE WHICH IDENTIFIES THEM ALL AS THEY PLAY! Lots of fun to be had here. Though I must ask, why are there no Wayne Kotke songs in the mix?

A Brief Update on Why There Have Been No Brief Updates

Hello out there, blog reading public!

You may have noticed that this blog has not been updated since just before Halloween. What's my alibi? Well, it's that I have been doing NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month project. Essentially, in the month of November, you write a 50,000-word novel. I am trying to put every last scrap of creativity into the book I'm currently writing. So far, I am up to 30,000 words so the end is in sight.

My goal is to be the first Living Impaired American to complete NaNoWriMo!

Besides, I did so many posts in the month of October, I figure I was due for a break. If you have been listening to Mail Order Zombie, you know that I have still been doing my regular weekly segment, "A Few Minutes With Wayne Kotke," but I have not been doing the elaborate, prerecorded MP3 bits this month. I've just been calling in and leaving messages on the voicemail line. In a way, this is a return to my roots, because that's how I used to give feedback when I started contacting the show in September, 2008. If you heard my "Bottoms Up" song a few shows back, that was recorded the Saturday before Halloween. I wanted to make that one extra good, because I knew I couldn't do anything like it for the entire next month.

If you're wondering why I'm even writing these words rather than working on my novel, it's because I've already filled my 2000-word-a-day quota, and I felt guilty about not updating the blog in so long.

Once NaNoWriMo is completed, I will go back to doing my regular segments for MOZ and hopefully updating this blog a little more regularly.

Keep on keepin' on,

Wayne Kotke

Z is for Zany (Day 26)

This guy is zany.

I bet that's not what you thought Z was going to stand for. By the end of this book, I was really getting creative with the adjectives -- first "wacky," then "yucky," and now "zany." But hold on a second! What is this creature, this "guy" if you will, supposed to be? It looks like he started out as Frankenstein's Monster, but then somehow mutated into something else midway through. I only drew one neck bolt before deciding, "Screw it! Frankie's already been on the cover and two other pages of this book! Time to try something else!" So I colored his skin gray instead of green, mussed up his hair, and added some bloodstains to his outfit. You know what? I'm gonna call this guy a Living Impaired individual. With a single neck bolt.

And that, dearest readers, takes us to the merciful conclusion of My Halloween Dictionary. I will leave you with the book's back cover -- another charming flourish by the young author, who could've just as easily left it blank. I like how the smudged ink accidentally suggests the motion of the broom-riding witch across the night sky.

The back cover

Y is for Yucky (Day 24)

Monsters are yucky.

Okay, okay... so I misspelled "are." I was obviously in a state of artistic frenzy, judging by the bravura depiction of the horror world's own Rat Pack here. We have Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Mummy, and... uh, The Ghost. Notice the bulbous nose and simpleton expression I've given to both Drac and his ghostly comrade. Frankie appears pretty blissed-out as well. Only the Mummy remains enigmatic, a mystery behind his shapeless blob of bandages. Keep in mind, this was all before The Monster Squad. For all I know, they ripped me off. It can happen! Did you see Big Fat Liar with Frankie Muniz and Paul Giamatti? No? Well, you should. It's actually kind of funny. Better than you'd think.

X is for X-ray (Day 24)

Look at the monster's x-ray.

The letter X affords one very few choices in a project like this. I suppose "x-ray" was about all I could come up with. What else was there? Perhaps "The xylophone is memorably used to evoke the sound of rattling bones in Camille Saint-Saëns' eerie Danse Macabre." But that would have been a little beyond me at that age, so I went with the tried-and-true "x-ray." As this drawing shows, my knowledge of x-ray technology derives almost entirely from cartoons.

W is for Witch (Day 23)

See the wacky witch

An end is in sight, kiddies. And glory of glories, I start this one with "See" instead of "Look at." The witch design here does not seem terribly menacing. I must have been influenced by Broom Hilda or Witch Hazel from the old Warner Brothers cartoons. Serious students of the Halloween Dictionary will note that this depiction of a witch does not match the ones we've seen previously in this project like here or here. Before I leave, I must complement the younger version of myself on having great taste in adjectives.

V is for Vampires (Day 22)

I hate vampires.

Twenty years before Twilight, folks. I was ridiculously ahead of the Twilight backlash. Backlashes, of course, are the lifeblood of the Internet. We're all player haters at heart. I think a lot of the anti-Twilight sentiment is directly attributable to the fact that Stephanie Meyer is pulling in mad cash for her little vampire stories, and we all wish we'd thought of it instead of her. I've never read any of the books or seen any of the movies, so my familiarity with the franchise extends only to the way it has been discussed online. (Well, a little on TV.) I don't really even know if Kristen Stewart really is as hopeless an actress as everyone says. I do know I've seen many publicity photos of her looking hilariously blank -- conveying "nothingness" so perfectly that it almost seems intentional. Who knows? Maybe Kristen Stewart is actually a brilliant con artist having a good laugh at our expense.

U is for Ugly (Day 21)

He is very ugly.

And you are very judgmental and shallow, sir. Aren't we being a bit prejudiced here? Well, he has dental problems clearly. And male-pattern baldness (the Daddy Warbucks/Kojak pattern, that is). Some surgical scars still clearly visible. And only three fingers per hand... with the nails on the wrong side... and in the wrong place. No neck. Little puppet arms. Flourescent skin. Prominent warts. Animal-like ears that stick out too far... and don't line up with each other. But do all these details really add up to ugly? Have you gotten to know this indvidual as a person? Did that even occur to you? Sometimes, the people who are "ugly" on the outside are beautiful on the inside and vice versa. I learned that from a little movie called Shallow Hal. Thank you, Gwyneth Paltrow in a fatsuit, for showing us the way. Again.