Armadillos of the Mind

I was up at Ace Atkins's office the other eve and we were sitting in some rocking chairs on his balcony overlooking the town square when he told me he had watched only the first 10 minutes of THREE ON A COUCH (pictured) before turning it off, which naturally distressed me, but I stayed and drank some whiskey anyway. And Ace did say that I should ask THREE ON A COUCH costar Mary Ann Mobley about Jerry Lewis next time she was in town. And I said, "She comes here?"... "She's FROM here!" Ace replied. Later I got up and acted out one of Adam Muto's "Tall Penguin" comics, perfect for acting out on a balcony. ("Click" here to see why. And "click" here to see another one that I once tweeted at Neko Case and she favorited it or retweeted it or something, who can remember, those were heady times.) Ace and I talked about the Robert B. Parker novel SMALL VICES which Laura Lippman recommended the last time I saw her, and Ace had a copy in his office and he loaned it to me so I've been reading it and in the very first paragraph our narrator Spenser compares a woman to an armadillo and on page 109 another woman looks "like she swallowed an armadillo" and I don't know what to say about that, I guess Robert B. Parker had armadillos on his mind when he was writing that book.