I was sitting in McDonald’s over lunch, reading Bill Drummond’s 45. I was on the chapter “From the Shores of Lake Placid,” his recollections on the Liverpool music scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s, particularly as relating to his time as the manager of Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes.

As I was finishing the chapter, getting to the point where Drummond alludes to what would become of the bands as they moved out of their pre-determined 5 year windows of brilliance, “Get the Message” by Electronic began playing over the in-house music.

Like I said, I’m sure that has to mean something. Maybe I already know.

We also managed to catch a few of the Bellagio’s fountain shows, which are still good even with a Lee Greenwood soundtrack.

The Illuminatis Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson - I’ve been meaning to reread this. It’s been 11 years.

In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien - I also read this in 1998, but unlike with the previous book, whoever I loaned it to never returned it. I just found a copy in the $1 bin at Border’s last week.

Both of those books blew my 20-year-old mind, so I’m excited to see how they affect me now.

45 by Bill Drummond - I can’t reread this enough. Great for when you’ll be reading in small doses.

Astro Boy vol 1 & 2 - I’ve been reading Pluto and the Astro Boy movie adaptation, so I thought I’d check out the original source material.

The bugs have been kind of bad ever since Winston killed our garden-patrolling garter snake.

Well I’ve been taking my Poe comic pages to Kinko’s to get scanned so I can color them, as I only have an 8.5″ x 11″ scanner here at the home office, and these are on 14″ x 17″ bristol board. When I took the first batch in a couple weeks ago, I got three pages scanned for somewhere around $2 total. I finished all the inking tonight, so I took the rest of the pages down to the same Kinko’s. First the lady at the counter starts moving really slowly when I tell her what I need (six pages, scanned at 300dpi, saved as PDFs), and I start getting a major “Crap, I don’t want to do this” vibe from her. She starts asking questions in roughly 30 second increments, like “Do you care what the file names are?” and really mundane stuff like that, making no movements whatsoever to take the pages from me to walk over and scan them. Finally, she asks “Is it okay if these aren’t done until noon tomorrow?”

There is nothing going on in the store at this point. No other customers. No big jobs being processed in the work area. Most importantly, absolutely nothing happening at either of the two big copier / scanners. I ask “Are you not able to just do this right now?” She comes clean and confesses that she doesn’t know how. There’s apparently one lady who knows how to do it, and she’s off today. Some guy was coming in at 10, and he might know, but she definitely doesn’t. She recommends I try the Kinko’s 40 blocks down the road.

Needing these things scanned as soon as possible, I go to the other location. The guy stops playing his video game and comes to the counter. Scanning them will be no big deal, he says. He also compliments the artwork, which was nice of him. As he grabs the stack and walks away, he says “You know these will be $6.99 a page, right?” I was like “Hold on, are you serious?” I told him that I wasn’t paying $7 per page to scan. I explained I normally go to a different location, and they charged something like $.50 per page, but the lady working at the counter didn’t know how to do it.

He scoffed at the idea that she didn’t know how to do it. “It’s just putting it in the copier,” he said. And given that I know that, I wasn’t going to pay $42 for him to hit the scan button six times. He seemed really put off (even though he made it quite clear how little work he would be doing for this $42) and just walked back to his video game without saying anything else.

I am so sick of that place. It has gotten to the point where the inconsistency of the product and the service is so bad that it completely negates any convenience that comes from their extra office hours.