August: the Month of Control Nathan Rabin 4.0

We are currently five months into 2020: The Year YOU Control Nathan Rabin. So far we’ve had theme months devoted to John Candy, Danny DeVito, Mismatched Buddy Cop Movies and Phil Hartman and we are currently in the middle of a month devoted to movies about television. 

It’s been fun, and an interesting challenge and I obviously have enormous fondness for all of the subjects I’ve written about, even when the films are positively abysmal, as they have often been. You may not believe this, but over the course of his lifetime, the great John Candy made SEVERAL terrible movies. 

At the same time, I’ve boxed myself into a bit of a corner, scheduling-wise. I have so many features going concurrently that take up substantial space on my monthly calendar, month in and month out, that it does not afford me the freedom to try new or different things.

The schedule for the website is pretty set in stone at this point. I publish Big Whoop blog posts four times a week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Every other week the main Wednesday feature is a write-up of a Tales From the Crypt episode and four days of each month are devoted to The Travolta/Cage Project, the written component of the Travolta/Cage podcast. 

I’ve devoted the main slot for five days of the month to the monthly theme and the rest of the month is devoted to Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 to the site, which is why I try to write them at a very steady clip. 

I’m currently on my 107th entry in the column, so I obviously have not been ignoring it but I feel like I’ve been falling behind on it. I’m lucky to have a couple of monthly features within the larger column on the movies of David Bowie and Tawny Kitaen as well as the series Batman Beyond but it’s hard to make a dent in the column’s sizable backlog when pretty much every day of my month is already claimed by Tales From the Crypt, the Travolta/Cage Project and theme months. 

That’s why I have chosen to pump the brakes on the themes in August and devote the entire month to Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 in hopes of making my way through much, if not most, of the backlog. August is going to be a  big month for me in that I have to purchase, sign and ship out more than 450 copies of the extended version of the Weird Accordion to Al book that were pre-ordered through Kickstarter and later Backerkit. 

That will be a whole lot of work and a whole lot of heavy lifting and a whole lot of trips to the post office and checking off lists but it will also be extraordinary rewarding. There’s something deeply satisfying about realizing a project of that size and scope and reaching a point where a massive undertaking that has loomed intimidatingly in the future for years is officially a thing of the past, something you have completed. 

It will be one hell of a challenge but I’m hoping that by the end of August I will be finished with two projects whose workloads are so vast that it’s sometimes felt like I’d never complete either. 

I still plan to do all the theme months. It’s just going to take one month longer now. I suspect nobody will particularly care, or even notice, but if the site is particularly Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 heavy next month, which it will be, it’s because I’m taking care of business and finally getting around to writing up all the Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entries in my queue. 

It’ll be fun, and we’ll get back to our normally scheduled nonsense in September. That’s the Nathan Rabin promise! 

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And, this is VERY exciting, but you can also pre-order the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL with dozens more illustrations and a new cover as well as over a hundred pages of new material covering every facet of Al’s career, including The Complete Al, UHF, The Weird Al Show, the fifth season of Comedy Bang! Bang! and the 2018 Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour for just $23.00, signed copy . tax + USA domestic shipping included here release date: July 27th, 2020