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Ahoy, ahoy, dear reader! Sorry to be out of touch. The muse hasn’t been too friendly, these past few days.

Which isn’t the same as lounging around in a catatonic funk, even though I could use a little of that. No, I’ve just been kinda busy and unable to find any subject about which I can dash off a few lines.

I mean, sure, there’s this picture of one of the terrorist arrests in London.

My first impression on looking at that was, “Either the Bobbies have some pretty lax dress codes, or people who look like average Londoners are capable of suddenly donning SWAT gear and kicking ass.”

But I haven’t had too much to write about those attacks or the ones that immediately preceded them.

The more astute among you have noticed that I’ve reorganized the blogroll on the left side of this page, breaking it out into utterly arbitrary categories. I’ve added a bunch of sites to the roll, too, so forensic psychiatrists can spend more time trying to assemble an identikit picture of my mind or something.

In that same vein, I took a mental health day yesterday and reinforced the principle that I seem to do more stuff on those days than I do when I’m in the office. Yesterday involved finishing two books (Perfume and The Underminer) and starting another (Madame Bovary), putting up some shelves in my office, taking care of some paperwork for closing out my business, cleaning some floors, doing laundry, finishing another Mad Mix, and being Uncle Gil one last time before my nieces head back home to St. Louis. At least I was off-duty enough to refrain from checking my work e-mail.

I had a good idea (I think) for a longer post, which would make it an essay, I suppose. I’ll have to work on that for a bit this week, and see if it amounts to anything. I’d tell you what it’s about, but that would ruin the surprise.

Last night, I discovered that an acquaintance of mine (friend of a friend) is serving nearly 2 years in the penitentiary at Fort Dix. I’ve been researching both the pen and prison life in general.

Here’s the website of a prisoner named Michael Santos, who’s serving 26 years (he’s supposed to finish his sentence in 2013). He educated himself in prison and writes pretty well (prosaically, actually) about the day-to-day ugliness of prison life. Santos was a prisoner at Fort Dix, and wrote about it pretty extensively.

During my researches, I also discovered that the Bureau of Prisons has a federal inmate locator, and that some of the forums at Prisontalk.com are monstrously depressing.

I’ve also discovered that I will, for the rest of my life, do my utmost NEVER to get sent to prison.

As a guy who allegedly writes for a living, and one who tends to go for humor, I’m finding it awfully difficult to write to a friend-of-a-friend who’s in prison. But he oughtta know that people on the outside are thinking of him. I mean, life on the outside can be pretty lonely.

I read BusinessWeek, the Economist, and some other bizmags and econobloggers a lot (can’t say enough about the New York Post’s John Crudele). Outside of my own industry (as a Pharma observer), I like to see read interpretations of how industries function, how business works, and why money does what it does. I haven’t come to any grand conclusions about this stuff, but I am gratified that elegant design of consumer goods is on the upswing. Virginia Postrel writes about this a lot, and I plan to read her recent book on the subject, The Substance of Style, later this year.

All of that is a preface to saying that BusinessWeek has just launched an Innovation & Design site, covering all those subjects that I adore. So check it out sometime.

Looks like my music-laden alter ego has struck again! It’s a new Mad Mix!

Congrats to Lance Armstrong for winning his 7th Tour De France! This morning, I realized that we’re the same age, which makes me feel pretty bad about my own accomplishments, or lack thereof.

I’ve never been much of a Sheryl Crow fan, so that helps balance us out a little.

The Japanese have figured out how to laser-etch encrypted data onto fingernail clippings. I can only make a viking-joke.

You can’t have a Comic-Con without an awards show! Occasional VM contributor Tom Spurgeon just posted his diary of the Eisner Awards night at last week’s Con.

A lot of the jokes are really industry-specific, so you might not laugh as much as I did.

9:32 — Sean McKeever wins Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition, which is a neat award because it helps to solve the problem it presents in its title.

9:33 — I dream of an entire awards show designed along the same, utilitarian lines as the previous award, like “Artist Most in Need of Something Small to Place on a Desk.”

I’m still fixing up the pix from Saturday and Sunday; they’ll be up soon. You get back to work.

I meant to get a bunch of material posted today, but my town’s electricity is down (and it’s around 90 degrees). I’m crashing over at my dad’s, but I can’t figure out how to get my laptop onto his network. So you’ll have to wait to see how the last day of the Con stacked up. Trust me; there’s a pic that makes it all worth it.

Didn’t hit the Con on Saturday. Instead, the official VM fiancee & I went out with our San Diego-based friends Ian & Jess, went up to Cabrillo National Monument, and had some In-N-Out burgers. We met up with my buddy Tom at the Turf Supper Club for dinner.

I took a bunch of pix from the afternoon, but it was kinda hazy and they didn’t come out great. I’ll try to fix them up in Photoshop and post ’em later. We’ll head over to the Con in a few minutes, to check out the last day’s stragglers, pick up some funnybooks, and say goodbyes to people, before our afternoon flight back to Newark.

Had a fun day at the Con yesterday: spent WAY too much money on books and art, including a great sketch of Penny Century by Xaime Hernandez. This photo from the EA booth says it all:

Anyway, not much time/motivation to write this morning, so I’m just posting links to my pix, with captions:

Zander Cannon will probably not be happy to be captured for posterity thus, but he’s a good guy and a real pussycat, so I’m not afraid of him coming out from Minneapolis to whup my ass.

I laughed like a retard when I saw these guys.

Gary Panter is a heck of a good guy, and a legendary cartoonist. I’ll tellya my story of meeting the guy sometime.

Mario Hernandez is “the third Hernandez Brother” and, by all accounts, the hippest. I never met him before this year, and he was awfully friendly and personable. I felt bad that I didn’t have any comics for him to sign. I probably should have asked him to sign something really incongruous, like an old issue of Captain America that he had nothing to do with. I sure could use some coffee.

Dr. Doom, contemplating that fine pimp cup. I wonder if he equips his robot army with spinners, too.

Eddie Campbell, who never looks happy at these things.

Recreating the Spider-Man/Mary Jane scene from the first movie, except he’s not hanging upside-down.

I don’t have a picture of it, but the official VM fiancee spoke to Pete Bagge during his autograph session and asked him to sign his recent comic strip in Reason magazine, about the absurdity of medical marijuana persecution. Since everyone else was there with copies of Bagge’s old Hate comic, I think he was kinda gratified to see someone show up with a piece of his libertarian cartooning.

So far, out of 85,000 projected attendees & exhibitors, we’ve only met one other person who hasn’t seen the new Star Wars flick. So that’s three of us…