18.5: Extra Content
information from letters from friends, more comics, and a singing muppet
Dearest Readers - I hope this finds you well. I hope you’ve got a vaccine and are feeling safer. I have an appointment coming up this week.
I wanted to follow up on some things from earlier weeks: Some friends sent resources and information that I should have shared earlier.
re: Dick the Bruiser
One friend, someone I know from childhood/Sarnia who also listened to WRIF sent me some information about Dick the Bruiser, the morning DJ Brad imitated on WIMP.
“TIL that dick the bruiser on WRIF was not the actual wrestler, but a DJ doing an impression.
Total loss of innocence. I’m pretty sure all the song parodies were done by the DJ, but then in a weird turn the actual wrestler starred in the tv commercials. I guess everyone knew it. I still hum the boys in the summer parody song every .
I didn’t start listening til after disco, otherwise I’m sure i would’ve ordered a DREAD card.
The real wrestler was in the tv commercials.
re: Dungeons and Dragons/Moral Panic
After the Burnin’ For You episode, somebody else sent me a Podcast - Cautionary Tales - about the Dungeons & Dragons moral panic in the early 80s, which I hadn’t really known about except for the movie Mazes and Monsters. It’s a great story - makes me want to look for a history of moral panics. That’d be a fun book.
re: Cassettes and Mortality and Billy Joel
Another friend sent me a follow up to the WIMP episode - which coincided pretty closely with the death of the inventor of the cassette tape. Here is that link, and thanks for it. The same person, and my brother, sent me Alec Baldwin’s (Here’s the Thing podcast) interview with Billy Joel as well, which you can find here. Caveat: if you’ve heard any other recent interviews, Joel’s stories are pretty much scripted and memorized at this point, so there’s nothing new here. The best part is hearing the attention hound (Baldwin) wrecking Joel’s timing. Funny if you listen for it.
I was hesitant to send in-between newsletters, but in future I’ll share these pieces of additional information immediately - I really like what they add. Thanks.
Mot80s Mix Tape
I’ve started a Spotify playlist to accompany this project: Mot80s Mix Tape will be a mash made of the better music discussed in here. This won’t be a “Big 80s Hits” list - we’re striving for ecletricity here. I miss making mix tapes.
Don’t forget to buy music.
Other works
How About a Nice Big Cup of Climate Grief? is the 10th issue of my mini. It received a nice review from the mini-comics review site Optical Sloth, which you can check out here. If you send me a note naming the album cover being paid homage here, I will send you a copy for free. (Nobody will get this - but if a surprising lot of people do, let’s agree that I’ll give away up to 5, and y’all pay your own shipping.)
Square Head! is the comic I did before that. It’s the longest story I’ve done - about a weird exchange trip I went on to Quebec in 1982.
And there are 9 others out there. You can pick them up cheap here, if you’re so inclined. Most of them can be read for free over at misterjep.com as well.
To wrap this up:
here’s a song. It’s a cover of Lambchop’s I Will Drive Slowly; the video was one of the things I did to manage in early COVID times.
Thanks for reading. If you like it, please share it.
jep