Mr. Edward Gorey, that is, who died in a rather ordinary fashion, following a heart attack, at the age of seventy-five. He died on April 15, 2000, a date fraught with menace as the first tax day of the two-thousands. Except, this year April 15 fell on a Saturday, and tax day was actually April 17. Is there any significance to this? Probably not.

The Comic Book Babe (CBB) stared at me from the cover of a well-known comic-related publication. She was elaborately computer-colored, her outfit a nice shade of purple. But something about her anatomy seemed fundamentally wrong. The longer I stared at it, the more wrong it looked -- and furthermore, looked wrong in a way that has become all too common over the last ten years. She looked as if her creator had gone straight from adolescent male comic fan doodling fantasy women on his pee-chee, to professional artist, with no stop at a life drawing class in between.