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Maneater of Minnesota

Happy heavenly birthday to Ed Asner!

It’s well-documented that Hack’s cover artist Jonny M.’s first celebrity crush was sitcom legend Mary Tyler Moore. But Hack never told Jonny that he knows dozens of dudes who had the same affection for MTM, many of whom who were so despondent over her not returning their feelings (even though all of them only knew her through watching her TV show of Saturday night) that they jumped out a window rather than face life without her. Fortunately, Jonny gave Mary the boot before it came to that and took up a long-lasting fantasy relationship with Linda Ronstadt, but Hack wrote this scathing indictment of Mary Richards’ siren song in memory of those who weren’t so lucky.

Dead Ringer

Everyone who’s been to a movie theater knows that Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest and came in third because they always project it as trivia on the screen to keep the audience from killing each other from boredom before the coming attractions start. Hack had one of his frequent mental breakdowns after being confronted by the tidbit yet again before a showing of Madame Web so for therapy, he wrote a novel around the story replacing Chaplin with Jonny M. and revolving it around a Russian plot to kill him and throw his hideously misshapen genitalia into a blender as a final ingredient to their formula for super atomic rocket fuel.

It made Hack feel much better.

My Elderly Ass

Hack’s cover artist Jonny M. and his pug Boris invited over Hack to watch the charming comedy/drama My Old Ass starring Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza about a young woman who meets up with her older self. Hack got drunk and fell asleep five minutes after the movie started (as always) but he did see enough to hallucinate this story about what teenage Jonny’s reaction would be if he beheld the embodiment of his own disappointing future standing in front of him.

Jonny read the novel and grudgingly admitted that Hack’s vision was accurate, but added that the kid he grew out of was something of a moron himself so he took the little shit’s despondent reaction to him with a grain of salt.

Mountain Joe

Hack, Jonny M., and Bro Joe dined with their girly-girl friend Penelope last night, who was both fascinated and appalled as Joe held court with tales of his outdoorsman adventures. Penny likened Joe to Indiana Jones as he told of the many unprepared tourists he’d encountered on treacherous mountain trails who had plunged to their deaths, while a less-impressed Jonny compared him to the old codger Walter Huston played in Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Hack soaked it all up and cranked out this adventure novel which casts Joe more as the grizzled old goat that Jonny described, although he does save the day when the over-their-heads trio brings the wrong kind of wine to pair with the salmon croquettes in their picnic basket and Mountain Joe comes to their rescue with with a bottle of rosé Cava that he had in his backpack.