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.