On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

FEBRUARY 2024 COMPILATION ISSUE Note: All material by Al Handa unless otherwise noted. Contents copyright 2024 by Al Handa. All rights reserved. IN THIS ISSUE: The Quitturz Preview: Parts 1-3 A.I. And Art: Part 4 - Some Thoughts About Scraping Boogie Underground Preparedness Primer: Part 1 How To Find The Perfect Headphones: Parts 2-3 The Quitturz Preview: Parts 1-3 The eBook version of "The Quitturz" will be published in December and it won't be a straight compilation of the current Vella episodes. The most obvious change is the title. The Vella serial is called "The Quitters," which is a good title, but music groups and other organizations already use it. I figured it was best to change the spelling, and the new title better reflects the 70s Punk sensibility. There are two significant changes: the chapters have been resequenced, and a parallel story has been inserted. The Quitters is my best-selling Vella book and works well as serial fiction. Most of that ge...

- Al HANDA deltasnake@yahoo.com And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. - Herman Melville (Moby Dick) SOME THOUGHTS ON VAN LIFE AND NOMAD LIFE VIDEOS: One of the topics on Tik Tok and other social media is "Van Life" and other nomad-type trips, and the contents range from helpful tips and observations to complete disconnects from reality that could only happen if the person was well financed or on a lark to become a social influencer. Many of these brief glimpses are about that kind of life when everything is going right or the kinds of obstacles that come up really are more like vacation hassles (that can seem more serious to a homeless person whose short on cash). I won't do a formal essay; I'll just riff ...

"You call yourselves poets, write little short lines, I'm a poet, but I write lines paragraphs and pages and many pages long." - Jack Kerouac WOMEN AND CATS: PART 3 - QUEEN CLEOPAWTRA OF EGYPT Ancient Egyptian Civilization wasn't always a souvenir industry for museums and collectors. Some experts claim they were an advanced race who even played online video games with extraterrestrial beings, but the truth is more profound and thrilling. It is now known that the first Egyptian Pharaoh was a calico cat named Cleopawtra because of the groundbreaking work by Professor Ivy of Shitzu U, who discovered that the "Great Balls Of Fire that consumed The Library Of Alexandria," which purportedly destroyed much of the ancient knowledge of the time only affected ten percent of the library books and documents. The Furry Professor dug up like a bone the scintillating fact that 90% of the so-called lost documents were not in the Library at the time of the fire; 40% of the ...