January 13, 1964 saw the release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” b/w “I Saw Her Standing There” on Capitol Records. Shame the label couldn’t keep up the quality with subsequent jumbled singles (or LPs, for that matter). (The Parlophone original came out on 29th November 1963.)

The weather frightens me. While the early thaw is not unprecedented, its severity is certainly unusual.

I rarely recommend a US situation comedy so enthusiastically, but Committed is hilariously funny. It is the actual American version of Coupling, with writing and acting sharp enough to draw blood.

“Ten fucking years” was my reaction, too. Where does the time go?

It’s fortunate that The Confessions of a Hoaxer is still circulating. By the time Macmillan published it in 1970, Alan Abel had already published five other books—but I’ve never seen them. alibris.com has all but one of the titles available (at top dollar). amazon has some of the books listed, but only Confessions is readily available. The missing volumes are:

The Great American Hoax 1966
C.S. Lewis was among the many taken in by the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA) hoax.

Yours for Decency: the Campaign to Clothe Naked Animals 1967

The Button Book 1967

Crazy Ads 1960 (?)
(This book, according to The Confessions of a Hoaxer, was so heavily pirated that the publisher simply gave in and withdrew their edition.)

This is a Dirty, Rotten, Filthy Book

Dirty, Rotten, Filthy is the missing one. It would seem to parallel Alan and Jeanne Abel’s 1971 film Is There Sex After Death?.

Alan published two books in the 1980s, Don’t Get Mad—Get Even!: A Manual for Retaliation (1983) and How to Thrive on Rejection: A Manual for Survival (1984). Like The Confessions of a Hoaxer, these books are found relatively easily, which I attribute to either higher print runs or more sympathetic library systems.