Gray and then more rain today, though not as intense as the storm of a few days ago. In fact I didn’t realize it was raining until I opened the back door to let the dog out late in the evening. Such is the isolation from the elements possible when you’re at your keyboard, the shades are closed, and various other electronic noisemakers are on in other parts of the house.

This is a good collection of sketches. I hadn’t seen some of them in many years, especially the Dirty Fork sketch. But I can’t take it seriously as a “Best of” Monty Python list if it leaves out the Spanish Inquisition and Spam.

Today’s main achievement was destroying a vexatious program that somehow or other installed itself recently on the machine I use to make my living — a program that apparently inserts ad hyperlinks on various words on various web sites I visit (including BTST). That by itself wasn’t so bad, but in the last day or two, the thing morphed into a monster, opening pages when I didn’t want them opened and (I figured out later) slowing the machine down intolerably.

Who, exactly, believes this kind of shenanigan is going to lead to higher sales of anything? Or is it simply an automated way of running up clickthrough totals? I don’t care, I’m just glad it’s gone.

Lilly took this picture on Sunday, September 1. “Dog on Deck,” or “My Nose in Your Business.” (To give it a dual title like Bullwinkle episodes.)

Lately we’ve been throwing away, or donating, a fair number of unwanted items.  It’s astonishing how many there are around the house. Things have been turning up that we’d forgotten we had — or at least I’d forgotten. Yesterday the flow of debris included a girl’s purse with a Disney label on it. We might have bought it for Lilly at Disneyland in ’01 or Disneyworld in ’05, but it’s always possible we picked it up elsewhere. More recently it’s been with Ann’s things.

Anyway, I noticed something odd about it. It’s a Tinker Bell purse, and it says Tink America. Tink is holding a small U.S. flag, her dress imitates the Stars and Stripes, and the background pixie dust is red, white and blue. “Isn’t that strange?” I asked Lilly, pretty much rhetorically. “I mean, Tinker Bell usually isn’t associated with America, right? I think she’s a citizen of Never Land.” Or, come to think of it, the realm of fairies, but not the United States.

Then again, what about Never Land? I told Lilly I didn’t think it was claimed by any nation, but considering that Capt. Hook, the Lost Boys, et al. seem to be British, maybe Britain did claim sovereignty at one point. Could be that it was even harder to claim than Pitcairn Is., what with Never Land not quite being in the material world all the time. Still, I bet Capt. Cook visited at least once; he went everywhere.

On the other hand, perhaps American whalers visited too, so lost in the annals of U.S. exploration and commerce is a claim to Never Land. Could be that it was the subject of negotiation in the same treaty that fixed the border between Canada and the United States, as part of one of the lesser-known codicils added later. By this time, Lilly had expressed her usual mild bewilderment at my oddball train of thought.