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...

"...if you wish to know what a man really is give him power." - Robert G. Ingersoll - 1883 The origin of "retail workers" is well documented. In 1969, a stale potato chip that people in Chicago thought was the spitting image of the Virgin Mary turned out to be a petrified slice of scalloped potato that an Internet expert dated as being from 198,7890,765 A.D. and was actually an excerpt from the Lost Gospel Of Murgatroyd, Chapter 3, paragraph 14. [Citation needed: The writer admits the "A.D." is an autocorrect error and should read "B.C." but says if not editing any work of genius was good enough for Kerouac, it's good enough for the AI bot he claims generated this blog entry. Besides, the increase in historical accuracy would be minimal even if corrected] The excerpt relates that the great Babylonian King Hammaruby MacLaughin The Awesomely Dishy One asked the wise men of his council, "How do we create a class of people who will free us ...

 "And now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by radio, is, all the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine..." - Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf) In 3000,098,5678 B.C., neanderthal man had perfected a culture that would be hailed as the apex of sexist behavior in the 21st Century. Those restless go getters weren't satisfied with mere domination of saber tooth dinosaurs and women. They wanted to take it to the next level by evolving a new role for man that involved less physical labor and enhance their ability to attract optimum non-animal candidates for breeding and making sandwiches. I'm talking about rock and roll, of course, and the earliest known rock concert in the Stone Age (note clever reference) was documented on an ancient Babylonian healing crystal that was accidently included as a prize in a collectable Happy Meal box on sale in the 5th Avenue Salvation Army store in Chicago and dated by an anonymous Internet expert as being from the middle...