Talking Hamburgers

You know, in OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH, every character has a nickname. There's the Black Whirlwind, the Red-Haired Demon, the Dry-Land Crocodile, the Elegant Tiger, the Blue-Faced Beast, and so on. There's even the Timely Rain! But then toward the end of the second volume, we get the Magic Calculator. Ha ha! He's a guy who is good at math. But is that really funny? I don't know. Right after the Magic Calculator comes the Elfin Flutist. And I was like, are these nicknames becoming progressively less bad-ass? I was reciting such observations to Dr. Theresa in the car yesterday and she was like "Uh-huh." I can't say she seemed that interested! Then I tried it out on Tom Franklin at lunch. "The Magic Calculator!" I said. "Ha ha ha," I continued. Tom laughed politely. It all got me to thinking about an occasion quite a while ago when I was going over the history of humanoid hamburger characters in various media and Hanna yawned. And I said with wry self-knowledge, "Is my catalog of talking hamburgers boring you?" And Hanna said, "No, it's riveting." My wry self-knowledge was suddenly replaced with some other kind of self-knowledge! Maybe I need a personal focus group to try out topics on. You know what? I'm going to email Jimmy about the Magic Calculator.