5/9/05 9:27 PM: "All things truly wicked start from innocence." -- Ernest Hemingway

IDOL HANDS: The man in the photo here is named John Layman. He's a comic book writer and letterer, a man with some considerable experience in the field.

I'm going to carve out his pancreas with a spork, and feed him his own spleen, while I tattoo a series of names on his back -- the girl I should have dated in high school, my ex-wife's father (who I liked a great deal), the name I planned to change mine to all through my childhood (a fit of Eurpoean assimilationism) and the characters of the first comic book I ever drew with my own hands (it's really bad). When it happens, it'll be clear it was me (and, now, impossible to copycat, as only I know all those answers).

I had some reasons before, but they've all been eclipsed by Laymerican Idol, a contest for blogs that I somehow was entered into. I suspected something was wacky when, on the second week's judging (in his April archive) that he wasn't gonna talk about the content of my work here. I smelled a rat -- in the contest, not in Layman's clothes (for a change).

Then I poked around at the actual competition ... and despite some of 'em having some slight visual advantages (in Layman's eyes anyway) and some occassionally interesting turns of phrase, with weekly comics reviews (yes, I know, I missed last week, I'm doubling up this week) and the sheer girth of my work, I'm the Ruben Studdard -- you can't believe I'm still chugging along with my grin and wacky look, but on sheer talent, I can't be beaten.

Then, in the third week's results, Layman said, "in his The Operative Net, whose blog portion has not been updated since THE FOURTEENTH, he admits to being stuck on the 'beach party dance' level of Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. How is that even possible? Therefore, Hannibal is the first and only Laymamerican Idol contestant to get a homework assignment: Get through that level, lame-ass, or suffer ELAYMANATION!!!" (emphasis his, not mine)

At the time, there were two updates from the 18th, Kurt Loder and The Reason. Layman, in a potentially drunken and/or cat-groping stupor, didn't notice them (despite a lot of hard work on images). Then, on the actual entry he did bother to read, he didn't read about how I did clear that level on San Andreas (which I haven't played in more than a month, now I think about it) and have gone on to do much more.

The winner, I suspect, has already been chosen. Given that there's no real word on what the prize is (I should have checked that ... argh), I suppose I'll have to take the nominal free publicity and call it a day. Well, that was my Zen attitude, until in his "Emergency Laymamerican Idol Crisis" (noted in his May archive -- the weakness of a "blog engine" is being a prisoner to its linking strategies, whereas I can do whatever I want in my own code) he made a very limp attempt to link me to some kind of fixation on Sally Field of all people, mocking me with a wit honed on the lackluster jokes of Thundercats: Dogs of War and his sad fixation on small, furry animals.

So either I'm already the winner, and it's all an elaborate scam (wildly unlikely -- the Black guy never gets a pass like that, regardless of how handsome or charming he is) or one of those poozers -- probably that saucy Mary Brickthrower -- is already sweet for daddy, and I'm as much a token as I was for USC's Admissions Department. I'd cook up a denial-of-service attack on all of 'em, but it just doesn't seem worth the time. I'll just keep doing horrible things to cats throughout the blog, knowing how it will hurt Layman spiritually.

ROGER LODGE: On Saturday night I had a bad experience. I don't want to talk about it. On Sunday I thought I had a good experience, but it turned out to be not-so-good. My experience leads me to not wanna talk about that either.

It's my blog, and I'll be vague if I want to.

MOISTURIZED: On a somewhat related note, I bought a $10 jar of shea butter today.

News flash about me -- I don't give the foreplay of a f*** about skin care. My skin's a little ashy when I step out of the shower, so what? That's the preface.

I walked over to the mall from my newspaper's offices, where I'd picked up my check. The Police Credit Union machine in the mall is hooked up with my credit union, so I was gonna go deposit said check. I had a pen in my pocket, and I had to write some last minute endorsement info on the check. Sadly, my pen decided at that moment to conk out. As I was shaking the pen angrily, I heard a sister's voice say, "Would you like to try some lotion for men?" I looked up and a fairly attractive young woman (with, what I have to admit, was a less than attractive hairdo, looking like she kind of just fell out of bed) was sitting, looking kind of bored and deflated.

"Sister, do you have a pen I could use for a second?" I asked.

She looked at me, obviously not a potential customer but just some jackass who was walking by, and said, "Sure," handing me a smooth ball point. I filled out my information on the check, handed her back the pen, and thanked her. I walked over and made my checking deposit, also grabbing a twenty. As I looked over my receipt, she sat, slumped over and looking at her hands.

So I walked over and said, "So tell me about hand lotion for men."

She looked up at me and smiled. "Is this because I lent you the pen?"

I nodded. "I believe in being polite. So what do we have here?"

She started talking, but I didn't really retain much of it. Not so much because I was dazzled by her -- she was cute, but not even as pretty as me, although she probably cleans up well -- but because I don't really connect well with, well, information about skin care. I just don't care. Anyway, she tells me that she uses this one kind of whatever white glop that was there, but that she recommends for me this other jug of white glop, and that her mother uses it.

"So you're calling me old?" I quipped.

She laughed, and her smile was like a warm down comforter. "No," she responded playfully, possibly smelling a sale and possibly just happy for something to do, as the Sears end of the mall is considerably lower traffic than the Wal-Mart end (and don't get me started on how disturbing I find Wal-Mart while frequenting there as a shopper). "How's your skin? Do you like lotion or shea butter?"

I stared at her with all the dumbness and incomprehension I've seen from a Bush press conference, and said, "I would have no idea. You see, I'm a man."

This tickled her a lot, and she reached for my hand. "See?" she asked, although recognizing that I didn't. "Your hands aren't ashy, but they're dry." She started to massage this white glop in question into my hand. "Can you feel the difference?"

I shrugged. "Like I said, I'm a man. Not one of those pretty, curly-haired, Westchester kinds of guys, either."

She was going with the jokes, and I saw it as a possible opening. I didn't really have any interest in hitting on her, or in her in specific, but there was a nice, smiling woman massaging white glop into my hand. Plus, as noted before, I like to keep my jump shot in working order (because you never know), so I gave her what I call a "choice" question: I asked, "so which one of these does your boyfriend use?" The answer to this will either show that there is an opening, that she's trying to duck me, or that there's somebody waiting for her (which, of course, informs further plays on my part).

"He doesn't use this kind of stuff," she said, turning her head down and to the left. Clearly a story there, possibly a weakness in their bond, but I just didn't have the interest to push through. I said, "So it's okay for him to be ashy, with you cuddled up, but you don't want me to be?" She chuckled, talking about him seemingly an issue, and said, "I don't want anybody to be ashy."

Just for fun, I lobbed up another alley oop: "So you've got this boyfriend ... but are you happy?" She seemed to smile bitterly. "Most of the time," she said quietly. I didn't really wanna hear her sob story, so I decided it was time to put this one out of my misery. I took the thing of shea butter, feeling like a guy who eats at Hooters just so pretty women will be nice to him for a while, and wandered off, not offering her a card or pressing the point.

The idea that I'm so detached from female contact that this got ten bucks out of me bothers me a bit.

AT LAST, WE WILL HAVE OUR REVENGE: I'm so afraid. I've been seeing the commercials, for not just the movie but the game ... god help me, there's a possibility that Revenge of the Sith might actually be ... good. I want to believe so badly. But every time I believe in something, it goes badly. I'll admit, I went to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and was so pleasantly surprised, but I didn't really expect much (and what's up with Roeper and Ebert completely missing the bus on that?). But so much of my life has been wrapped up in the mythos of Star Wars, and I've already given up on the prequels. But when I saw Anakin using force lightning in the video game (and since the reviews are good, I might get that just for a chance to slice through the corruption of the Old Republic) ... I felt good about it. That never works out for me. Mmm.

MISSING: Two Sundays ago, Venus and Serena Williams had a book signing at Eso Won Books, which is literally less than a hundred yards from the back door of my apartment building. There was a line of people around the building. It happened at 1PM. For reasons that are largely unimportant, I was shlepping my way west on the 105 freeway at the time, trying to make it home in time to drop off some stuff and still get to the paper's offices by 3 to check the mail.

I'm not a regular visitor to Eso Won's website (which I don't even know the URL to link to), and the press release for this was faxed to my newspaper at 5:51PM on the Friday before the event. Which means that either the publicity flack for Eso Won is completely incompetent, or they didn't want the word spread very far.

Either possibility bothers me. I mean, you have two globally-recognized sports icons (one of whom, despite my adoration of Gabrielle Union, is actually the most physically magnificent woman I've ever seen ... and the photo to the left should prove that beyond all reasonable doubt) and you try to cram them into this one crappy little storefront, with no media coverage of note (admittedly, somehow my paper's photographer found out about it, but did he tell me? Nooooo ...). That kind of small thinking and limited scope is what exhausts me about people, and it's part of why I'm so reluctant to work with anybody. Because, you know, other people are bad.

One day, if there's ever a collected edition of my bon mots, the first three will probably be "all things are temporary," "all love is conditional" and "other people are bad." I keep coming back to one, or a combination of those, as the years go by.

So aside from the fact that people suck, I missed a chance to be this close to Serena freaking Williams, without even having to leave my own neighborhood. Ain't that a kick in the pants?

BINGE AND PURGE: Sometimes I wish I could blog like a normal person, just do one fire-and-forget note at a time, scattered over time. But no, I gotta save it all up. No idea why.

DIVINE INTERVENTION: So I was recently asked about religion, and why in particular I'm not the southern Baptist I was raised to be. So now's as good a time as any to do The Jesus Talk (patent pending).

I'll start with what I said at the time, and go to subsidiary reasons in a bit. My personal spiritual path is based on what was done in ancient Egypt (shorthand -- I'm not gonna be sitting on the pew beside somebody in anybody's church). I found it as a part of my rites of passage while I was in college, and with its combination of organized personal ritual and literal changes in my life led me to find it as the right way for me. My spiritual path acknowledges the divinity in all things -- be it myself, a sandwich, a bumblebee or a Glock -- and therefore acknowledges the truth in all things. There were traditions before and traditions after the one I practice, and they all are as valid a connection to the divine as the other, if they're working for the person in question. I don't actively go out and say anything negative about anybody else's spiritual path, because I have a real "live and let die" attitude.

As someone who grew up both in the south and in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, I have a personal enmity towards it becauseof specific experiences in my life and specific experiences towards people of Afrakan descent in the colonial era. Christianity, the Bible and the church were used as both tools of enslavement (ask Malidoma Patrice Some) or opiation (the "negro spiritual" was borne from a need to release stresses and hope for a better life, knowing nothing good could come in this one). In my eye, every hallelujah raised to an Europeanized vision of Yeshua ben Josef signifies another whip crack on a dark back, every head nodded in prayer to a cross marks another tear down the face of a Black woman being used as her master's private property. Do I think that should stop people from being Christians? Sure. Do I talk about it? Almost never. People's spiritual choices are their own business, and I have seen Christianity have a positive effect on some people's lives. It's really none of my business.

I try to respect other people's choices as I would have my own choices respected, and sum up by using the widsom of Bumpy Johnson, as played by Lawrence Fishburne in Hoodlum -- "I don't go into the Lord's house, and he doesn't come into mine."

HOLY CRAP: So Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has been chosen as the leader of the Catholic faith, and dubbed Benedict Sixteen (I try not to use Roman numerals ... I get the feeling my namesake wouldn't like that). Numerous people have made the joke about Ratzinger's name being close to that of John Ratzenberger, the guy who played Norm on Cheers. I won't do it, but I'll admit the first two times I heard it, I did laugh pretty hard.

So as I discussed before, I was in talks with the Catholic Church to take on the Papacy. We were leaning towards naming me Pope Hannibal the First. We ultimately hit two snags that threw the deal out of whack, and forever severed my chances of getting me a pointy pope hat. First, I wanted to eliminate all further usages of Roman numerals. My namesake, Hannibal Barca, spent a lot of time trying to destroy the Roman Empire, and I was gonna take that as the first shot at dismantling their stranglehold on global consciousness. Some conservative hard-liners amongst the conclave of cardinals recognized my ulterior motives therein and kiboshed my ascendancy.

The second issue was of a more ... mindane nature. I'd been reading Robert Kirkman's Battle Pope (from before he was the rated PG darling of comics as he is today) and I could definitely see myself sneaking beautiful women in, covered in nun's habits, and schnackering them while still wearing my pope hat. So I wanted a dedicated door in one side of the Vatican where I could sneak in broads, and then it hit me that creating such a thing in every Catholic church would fix the whole kid-buggering problem the American dioceses were having. Nothing slows down unwanted behavior like a steady stream of sex. Again, the hardliners were against me (there was a Latin cardinal in the running who, on the last point alone, was willing to step aside in favor of me).

So they went with this withered old Kraut, knowing that he'll shuffle off the mortal coil within ten years, and started trying to build up a mediagenic young prelate from amongst their ranks to replace him. The only reason they wanted me was because I was in favor of arming the Jesuits and giving them Army Ranger-style training to forcibly increase conversions. I was on the ballot based on my promise to double the church's membership in five years. If I could have kept my mouth shut, no one would have known that I'd have been parachuting Jesuit shock troops into places like Utah and Arkansas. Again, some of the cardinals didn't see that as a dealbreaker. Oh well.

CHUCK WOOLERY: The woman in the photo to the right is Jessica, often known as "Jessica Rabbit' for her vampish ways and red hair. The smiling gent is Mister Craig Sherman, a good guy all around and one of the better connections I've made singing karaoke.

If you had any idea how much work I did to make this photo possible, for these two wacky kids to have a shot, well, trust me, it'd curl your toes. I'll admit my motives were vastly ulterior -- Craig is a designer and all around digital jack-of-all-trades, so having him in my debt is infinitely useful; as for Jessica, as a Taurus (a sign that normally goes for me like Star Jones going after a slab of ribs) she was too enamored of my writing, my style, my taste in music and my knowledge of Frank Herbert's Dune books to let run the streets unsupervised. I finally found what it was like to kill two birds with one stone, and I gotta tell you -- it's pretty swank. I'd recommend it for not just reasons of stone economy, but for sheer chuckles once the day is done.

Anyhoo, so Jess and the Sherm Stick here are doing pretty well, I've defused any potential problems I might have had (you'd be really surprised how hard it is for a guy who isn't attracted to white women, when they're so not hearing that), and while he might read this, I know she's far too much of a Luddite to do so, and I haven't really insulted anybody anyway. I like matchmaking, even though I kind of think it's like playing a video game (with as much of a beneficial outcome). On the other hand, I still play video games too, so whadda ya gonna do, you know?

THAT'S OUR SHOW: I'm not in the best of moods right now, and I'm surly. Consider yourself warned. I found out where Tim Goodman buys his Cranky Pants (tm), and I got me three pair. Ask me personally, and I'll tell you more, but this is all I have to say right now. I'm gonna close on that, like Dubya's lame exit from last week's press conference (thank you BitTorrent and The Daily Show for hooking me up on that).