I’ve uploaded the four most recent newsletters to the Monty Python Society website. Besides my brief attempt at Barry Manilow parody, this week’s issue features the following quiz:

Monty Python Character or Band Name?

In the spirit of “Dead or Canadian?” and “Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?”, Completely Different is pleased to bring you this little quiz. Can you guess which of the following are band names and which are characters from Monty Python?

Gwen Dibley
Lady Chatterley’s Hamster
Flying Fox of the Yard
Bullwinkel Gandhi
Mystico and Janet
Neville Shunt		 Toad the Wet Sprocket
Uncle Mingo
Ned’s Atomic Dustbin
Johann Gambolputty
Ewan McTeagle
Attila The Stockbroker		 Mr. Pither
Mrs. Grundy
Three Monkeys Named Bob
Ximinez
Timmy Williams
Screaming Iguanas of Love

Without cheating, how well do you know your Python characters or obscure band names? I’ll give you a hint: one of them’s a trick.

As I told my mother on the phone last night, the whole sketch comedy show is starting to feel a little like a job for which I’m not getting paid. A lot of the initial fun has gone out of it, I think in large part because I haven’t seen an episode since the premiere. I think I lost some of my drive after the live show. There was talk about streaming video online, but for that they first need a website. And there was talk of getting us a DVD of our first season, but I’m worried that’s going to fall through (like a lot of the other talk), and I won’t actually have anything to show for this.

At the same time, I’m still trying to convince the Monty Python Society that we should record a new CD. There, the fun of performance and writing really hasn’t gone away. It’s a much smaller group, and we’re much more informal, so I guess that’s only natural. I’m not sure if the Society really needs to record a new CD, but we have a pretty good stockpile of material. I know it’s something that I’d really like to do.

I have always sort of regretted not getting a chance to record that love song I once wrote about diarrhea…

I had a weird dream last night in which I owed some editor about 2,000 words on gardenias or something. Of course, it was due the next day and I hadn’t written anything. I think I’m feeling guilty about having only written 1,000 words on my novel and not a whole lot else on the side.

This is sort of weird. In the past week, a number of odd weblog links have shown up in my referrer logs. Not all, but most, of them actually do seem to link back to my main page. Why they do this, I don’t know. They don’t link back to this weblog. None of these domains appear to be owned by the same people, yet quite a few of them don’t appear to be run by people at all. The names on the weblogs, for instance, almost never match the names of the registrants, the archives are apparently nonexistent, and most are nothing more than regurgitated news clips from other sites. Is it possible they all simply borrowed the same blog template, which, for whatever reason, had a link to my domain in it? If it’s some sort of weird scam to generate browser traffic, they could certainly choose a better link.