GOOD EVENING.

[melannen]

...and happy new year! Well, the new year was actually Sunday, but I am not good at updating when I plan to, hah. As has become traditional, Commander Valentine (the woman in my icon) has decided to give up smoking as a New Year's resolution, and thus will be sucking on a candy cane instead until she inevitably backslides in about a month. :P (If there's any place where the Christian liturgical calendar would be the official state calendar, it's Commander Valentine's home planet, Stephen Colbert's Alphalon.)

Anyway. While stellar_dust was in Maryland for the holiday weekend, she gave me a SIGNED PAPERBACK COPY of JOHN HODGMAN'S first BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE, THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE. It is inscribed personally to me, and he has drawn the dreaded H in sunrays - the sign for the hoboes to rise up and overthrow the American government - over the "Stephen Colbert Award for the Literary Excellence" badge on the cover.

The paperback edition also has - and I had forgotten, if I ever knew this - the original cover hidden on the inside, the one that contains a DRAGON, a SWORDMAID in a metal bikini, and a flattering portrait of the Author in one of the TRIPLE SUNS. So of course I had to make icons. :D

1		2		3		4
5		6		7		8
9		10		11		12
13

As usual, totally shareable, credit John Hodgman and the original artist if you credit anyone: icons 1-4 and 9-13 are from the awesome painted cover by Benjamin Gibson; 5-8 are from the cover design by Sam Potts.

Icons 1-4: "A very Flattering Portrait of the Author [John Hodgman] appeared within the Main Sun." Icons 1&3 face left, 2&4 face right; icons 3&4 are sligtly zoomed in.
Icon 5: stock photo of John Hodgman in his suit and tie in front of the "As Seen On TV" logo.
Icon 6: Black & white photo of seedy man holding out a ferret: "Let's use my ferret to steal that diamond..."
Icon 7: the H in rays, the Hobo sign for "It is time for hoboes to take over the United States Government", in white chalk on a muted blue background.
Icon 8: A house nested inside another house, the Hobo sign for "This house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside", in white chalk on a muted blue background.
Icons 9-12: "A beautiful, nearly nude sword maid as she falls off a cliff." Icon 9 is close-in on her determined pale face & wild brown hair. 11 & 12 are zoomed-out shots of her clinging to the cliff with flying birds silhouetted against a pink sky behind her. 13 has "JOHN HODG MAN" in decorative lettering behind her as she clings to the cliff.
Icon 13: "A metallic silver dragon flying up to either rescure or eat her." Close-up on the terrible head of the dragon.

ALSO HERE IS MY VERY OWN HOBO SIGN ON the Stephen Colbert Literary Excellence Award medal:

It is not for sharing, it is mine.

(Not that I will be in the least disappointed at anything I get for yuletide, but why did I forget to nominate Hodgmanverse?? --if I get any bookstore gift certificates for holidays I am buying myself "More Information Than You Need" at long last, and then there will probably be quite a few mole-men, furry lobsters, eagles of Hohoq and hoboes appearing in this space.)


PS: John Hodgman is on Quite Interesting this week! I will be posting a link here as soon as it is up on youtube.

Comments

[sara]

Hee, I have a determined pale face and wild brown hair and yet AM NOT a swordmaid!

Clearly, something went wrong somewhere in my upbringing....

[melannen]

Surely you are a swordmaid AT HEART!

She has exactly my hair & almost my figure; if I wasn't well committed to Commander Valentine I would totally have a new default icon. (I am not a swordmaid either.)

[sara]

Actually, I tried to be a swordmaid in college, but I threw my back out badly and missed two days at work, and the explanations were really, really embarrassing, so I gave it up.

I am now a sort of grouchy liberal crackpot bicyclematron, and it suits me much better. That whole "maid" thing hasn't been a go for a long damn time.

[melannen]

The world needs more swordmatrons, I have always thought!

(I have had a total of about one hour of sword instruction in my life. I am fairly sure swordmaidening on my part would end badly.)

[elspethdixon]

I usually don't miss having cable at all, but whenever someone mentions Daily Show or Colbert Report stuff, I'm reminded again of how much awesome I'm missing.

Is it wrong that I would buy a nonfiction book with that dragon/swordsmaid cover without even knowing what it was about or who wrote it?

(also, the fact that there's a hobo sign for "Rise up and overthrow the US Government" makes the Watchmen fan in me ridiculously amused).

[melannen]

I went off cable for a year, and got so used to broadbanding everying (including Jon & Stephen) that now I'm back in a house that has it, I still only watch over the internets.

I am more amused that there's a "this house is bigger on the inside than the outside!" hobo sign, but yes. :D There are also hobo signs for "A woman lives here who is very fond of triangles", "there is an awesome hedge maze in this town" and "this railyard patrolled by trained apes" but they weren't in color on the covers.

The universe of Hodgman's nonfiction is awesome, it's sort of a nonsense alternate-history remix of all the fantastical paranoid Americana that built things like Watchmen and SPN. With added steampunk. And lots of nonsense.

The "Maryland" entry in the almanac: "The Mason-Dixon line was surveyed and drawn in 1763-1767, ostensibly to establish the border separating Maryland and Pennsylvania. While the border did finally put an end to the bloody Penn-Calvert wars, the true aim of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon was to map the powerful, preexisting "ley line", resonating with earth energy that divided the continent and could be monitored by the British government. Mason and Dixon grew tired and cranky, however, and ceased after about 244 miles. Yet they left along their path many "crownstone" markers that still occasionally hum with powerful druidic magic. It is said that if you whisper the right words to the stones, they will tell you the names of every soul who has crossed the line. This will take the rest of your life."

..it's *all* like that.

[elspethdixon]

That sounds like the best fake nonfiction universe ever.