Waiting for Godot to Leave

Last week my actors and I had a great time in Evansville, Indiana with Bill Baer, creative writing professor at the University of Evansville and founder of The Southwell Institute (Bill is third from left in the photo below.) I told Bill about my latest post re. HBO and The Sopranos and he told me the story of how his brother helped create and develop The Sopranos , but was never paid for it, and eventually sued the producer of the series. This made me tell the story of how I'm pretty sure I helped create The Simpsons , TV's longest running cartoon situation comedy. This is all true and I am not making any of it up. The story begins in the late 1970's, when I began writing and drawing a comic strip about a real-life St. Louis family that I knew as acquaintances. I turned them, in my strip, into a horrifically dysfunctional group of people, giving them bizarre and vulgar adventures in the rich St. Louis suburbs. The family consisted of a father named Homer, whom I made b...

This morning I noticed three unauthorized charges had gone through our home banking account within the last twenty-four hours via our debit card, totaling just under $50. The payments were made to Skype, the internet telephone service. Now I knew I had signed up for Skype, but I signed up for the free service, not the paid service, and I never would have given them our debit card number even if I had agreed to pay them anything. In addition, we’ve never even used Skype. The program languishes on our upstairs computer. But when you visit Skype’s website, they make it impossible for you to cancel your account (especially when you haven’t paid), and they give you no opportunity to contact them directly. The company seems to be based out of Luxembourg, and they provide no phone number for customer service or for billing errors. A quick Google of “Skype billing fraud” turns up over 70,000 sites, and the top of the list is Skype’s own forum, where users have been complaining about what I...

As I've mentioned before , as soon as I got tired of receiving beg emails every other day from Priests for Life and cancelled my email subscription, I began receiving spam emails from some shady outfit called freefrfrank.com. I won't link to their site, as the site tries to run scripts on me when I visit it and locks up Internet Explorer. There are no opportunities to unsubscribe from this spam, and it's coming to an address that only Priests for Life knew. In their latest spam, they carry a statement by Fr. Pavone about his priesthood. Clearly, Fr. Pavone is aware of this website (which, if you do manage to visit it you'll find contains what almost amounts to hate speech against Bishop Zurek). Clearly, Fr. Pavone's organization provided this site with my email address without my permission so that they might illegally spam me. Clearly, Fr. Pavone tacitly endorses these venomous attacks on his bishop. Clearly, when Fr. Pavone publicly supports doing bad so th...