Lynn Shawcroft is comedian Mitch Hedberg’s widow, and she curates MitchHedberg.net. In a series of tweets this week, Shawcroft alluded to the possibility that she’ll be releasing Hedberg’s notebooks in the near future, perhaps as part of a book. Of course some excerpts from Hedberg’s notebooks are already available online, such as this fantastic sketch which explains the trouble with mingling before a comedy set.
Possible Release of Mitch Hedberg’s Notebooks
Rest in Hell
Say goodbye to Binky and Sheba, everybody. After 32 years, Matt Groening pulled the plug on his Life In Hell comic last week with this installment. If you’re unfamiliar with the strip, you can play a round of catch-up by scouring this German website’s 70-strip archive.
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Democracy Sausage
“[T]he term was first recorded in 2012, but its use increased significantly during the federal election this year, especially with the popularity of several websites set up to help voters find polling stations with sausage sizzles.” Australia’s word of the year is “democracy sausage,” reports The Canberra Times. Other national choices, according to Mental Floss: postfaktisch, or “post-truth” in Germany, and the 52-letter-long Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung, or “postponement of the repeat runoff of the presidential election” in Austria.
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The Return of the (Poet) King
“Grim was the world and grey last night / The moon and stars were fled.” It looks like even J.R.R. Tolkien might have been a an angsty teen. Two previously unseen poems by the legendary author have been found in a forgotten annual printed by a small primary school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1936. For another Tolkien-related blast from the past, here is W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King, book three of the Lord of the Rings series.
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Travel Estimate
Write what you know? Pssh, how twentieth-century. More like write what you can Google Map.
Playing the Victim
The Empathy Exams, a new collection of essays by Leslie Jamison, gets its title from a piece about medical acting that was published in The Believer. On the Harper’s blog, you can read an interview with Jamison, who calls her collection “a refusal to choose between these approaches — criticism, confession, journalism.” (Michelle Huneven interviewed Jamison for The Millions a couple of years ago.)
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No Rest for Rowling
Flavorwire reports that J.K. Rowling is working on two new novels, one under her own name and one under her crime writing pen name, Robert Galbraith. See also: that time Elizabeth Minkel had extremely strong feelings about Rowling’s internet activity.