I don't know how many of you have read any or all of my old webcomic which I have linked on my left sidebar there, Dave & Vyacheslav. My guess is "probably, not very many". This is okay; if I had any great level of emotional investment in it, I would still be doing the strip today, or at the very least updating the main page with something to the effect of "Strip's over! For further entertainment, just go visit my journal" or something. However, though I have little commitment to it at this point, I do have a great deal of commitment to this journal, and so some cross-pollination can happen in the other direction.

Here's a two-part strip which you can read on its own and without any knowledge of the story or the characters. The reason for this is that the script was actually not originally written FOR the comic, but got adapted for it when I realized that the "protagonist", whom in my head I was simply calling "Mr. Pompous" was speaking with kind of the same voice as the Colin character in D&V, and the comic was as such a good place for this material. As to the actual origin of the script, I shall quote myself from the time when I first put the strip up: 

This is the first of two parts of a script I wrote some time ago. It was early in the morning, and I was all sleep-deprived and crazy, and on my way into a Knight & Day restaurant, and just sort of envisioning the ultimate exchange between myself and a waiter. Even as I was being seated, I was at once both biting my tongue and giggling madly. As soon as I was seated, I whipped out my notebook and began to madly scribble down the conversation as I would have had it.

They say that every writer, in some sense and at some point, writes their own perfect world. This is a peek into what mine would look like.

Perhaps a dozen or so of the readers of this blog do or have known Colin Macdonald personally, and a similar number of readers will know him as one of the chief actors in my old comic, Dave & Vyacheslav. For the rest of you, he's one of my oldest and dearest friends. This weekend, I received the following e-mail from Colin and his wife Layla in Italy: 

Linora Carolina Macdonald was born on the 23rd of December at 12:20 in the afternoon, almost two weeks late, lazy girl. Lela had to be induced, but unfortunately it wasn't working as needed so Linora was born by emergency cesarean after two days of labour. She's is happy and healthy, and as you can see by the pictures, she is in fact the cutest baby ever. At birth she weighted a reasonable 3.54 kilos, 52cm long with a 35cm head. She drinks like a sailor and has made numerous Pollocks in her diapers. We're now home a ready to celebrate a late Christmas, even though we already got the best present.

We hope you are all enjoying your holidays.

My own response to this missive: 

Congratulations on slapping nature in the dick and telling it you don't give a shit who it thinks ought and ought not to be born. Nature is such a jerk. It's got no idea what babies are worth having around and what aren't. I think you've demonstrated much better judgment than nature this way, in that this is plainly a fine offspring you've produced. Belated congratulations on getting your DNA to intertwine successfully, incidentally.

This, incidentally, is really bizarre to me. Colin, in my mind, has to some extent never stopped being the clever, snarky, nerdy, creative, abrasive and funny teenager who attached himself to my social circle some eleven years ago, and now he is quite undeniably an adult, in a way that even his years-long proprietorship of Vancouver's #1 Satan-themed cafe and bake shop, La Cucina del Diavolo, didn't concretely make him in my mind. The heavy footfalls of inexorable march of time begin to sound louder and louder in my mind with each passing day...
Anyways, anyone who cares to leave their well-wishes, congratulations and such, leave them here and I shall make certain that Colin is alerted to them.