Pen-Elayne on the Web

Of Little Chromium Switches

I've mentioned before about the incredibly cool people I've been blessed to know throughout my time involved in various fandoms. (Well, at least they're cool to me. But most of my friends are cool to me. Aren't yours?) Among the most amazing have been the "4 or 5 crazy guys" (their term, long story) in The Firesign Theatre. I suppose I can't really say that much more about Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman and Phil Proctor than I said in 10+ years of publishing, under my not-so-secret former name, their fan newsletter Four-Alarm FIRESIGNal (link may not work, perhaps it's been "hacx0red"), but I wanted to make special mention of them here again because last night I checked out, as I try to every Thursday night at 9 PM Eastern time, the Firesign Theatre Chat and lo and behold both David and Phil A were there, which was very neat indeed. It's been awhile since I've been in direct contact with either gentleman, but they greeted me warmly like an old friend and that felt really ooky and special and I promised them that whenever they actually start contributing regularly to the Fireblog I'd blogroll it, as well as Phil Austin's own blog, but both ventures are fairly new and they're so busy with things like their show on XM radio - which may or may not be doing well, depending on which reports you believe, but then Firesign has always been a bit daring and experimental in choosing new formats (remember the CD+G format? yep, Firesign had the first CD+G disc published in the US) - and Weirdly Cool and just, you know, their lives that it shouldn't be surprising if blogging is way down on their list of Things To Do. Nonetheless, David promised some old unpublished George Tirebiter stuff if he can work out the tech aspects of posting to the collective blog. So we can all look forward to looking backward again, or something like that. Forward Into the Past! Wait a minute, didn't they say that on the other side of the record? They'd better check...