If all went well, the site should now be fully upgraded to MoveableType 4.0. I still have to personalize it, put up links to my books, and so forth, but it should be readable. And most importantly, comments should once again be working.

Just to be sure, though, go ahead and add a comment to this entry. If you try to add one and it doesn’t show up immediately, drop me an e-mail and let me know.

I’m in the process of upgrading to the latest version of Movabletype (my blogging software.) Once it’s completed, it should fix the problem that was stopping people from posting comments.

But the upgrade process isn’t completed yet, so please bear with me if even bigger problems pop up in the meantime (like the fact that my front page is now a big, white wasteland.). I should have it fixed soon.

A couple of people have informed me that they are having trouble adding comments to Yankee Fog posts. I’m looking into it, and hope to have it fixed soon. In the meantime, my apologies.

I just got in from some errands to find about 2000 spams waiting on my server.

There were so many, they crashed my e-mail program.

The crash corrupted my inbox.

The corruption of my inbox meant that when I thought I was deleting a bunch of spam messages, I accidentally deleted an unknown number of non-spam messages.

So if you e-mailed me anything in the past 24 hours, you may want to re-send it.

If you keep up with Yankee Fog via Bloglines, or any other RSS reader, you may have noticed some weirdness yesterday.

First, you may have gotten a flood of old articles, marked as new. No idea why that happened.

Second, you may not have seen the “What if FDR Had Been Like George W Bush?” short that I included in the post. If you missed it, you can see it here.

Apologies for the lull in posting. I’ve got a script due at the end of the month, and it’s keeping me very busy.

I had a dream the other night that Dan Brown had kidnapped me and was forcing me to write his next novel.
I have no idea what that means, but perhaps Mr. Brown was on my mind because I’m about to head off to Cannes, where the film version of The Da Vinci Code premiered last week. I’m not sure what my internet connectivity will be like on the French Riviera, so if I don’t post for a week or so, there’s no need to worry.
If, however, two weeks go by and I still haven’t posted, you better have the police break into Dan Brown’s basement.

I don’t get many tipoffs from readers, mainly because I don’t have that many readers. (I am excluding the vast throngs who seem to find me via google, read my Snakes on a Plane trailer, and then wander off, never to return, leaving me feeling used and lonely.)
In any case, when I post something a link that somebody else e-mailed me, I have generally described my benefactors as “alert readers.” Alert they certainly are, but I always feel a slight pang of guilt when I use the phrase, since I so closely associate it with Dave Barry.
Henceforth, when readers are kind enough to send me a tipoff, I will use a different adjective for them each time, steadily working my way through the alphabet until I reach Z. Then I’ll start over again.

I’m afraid I’ve been very lax about posting lately. This is partly because I have been busy with a few projects, and partly because I recently contracted the bubonic plague, which has evidently been sweeping across London, and soon the city will belong to the rats. (Admittedly, my doctor told me that I (and everybody else she had seen that week) had an ordinary flu, but that only proves that she is secretly in league with the rats.)
Fortunately, I am now feeling vastly better, and will try to start posting again.
The major disappointment of being ill, by the way, was that–contrary to everything I had learned from a lifetime of reading nineteenth-century novels– no matter how long you lie in your sickbed on the top floor of a Victorian home, no elderly widowed aunts, virtuous young maidens, or charmingly malapropic country parson’s wives will stop by to nurse you to health, nor will your illness lead to a series of startling revelations that result in your inheriting of a sizable country estate. I feel horribly deceived by the entire Penguin Classics line, and I am considering a class-action lawsuit.

I’ve just had a friendly chat with a BAFTA official who said that–while members certainly have the right to make up their own mind about the issue–the Academy is very careful to preserve the anonymity of the voting process from their end, and they’d prefer that voters protect it from our end, as well.
This is certainly fair enough, and out of respect for that preference, I’ve removed the entries where I discuss the specifics of my voting. Henceforth, when I talk about the BAFTAs or any other award, I’ll be talking about the results in general, rather than my own votes. (And of course, it bears repeating that anything I say is my own opinion, and not the view of BAFTA, the WGA, or any other organization of which I’m a member. Except the Illuminati–I can definitely speak for them.)