Like most kids his age, Truman is is pretty embarrassed by his parents.

C’mon. You don’t think I could let a movie with a title like Must Love Dogs could slip past my radar without an affectionate tribute to my one and only beagle Truman?

I wish I had a cute new photo of him to post for you guys, but since the move, I think our digital camera is still buried in a box somewhere.

It’s unbelievable how often I get e-mail asking me when I’m going to put Truman into the strip next. Odd because he’s only been in three or four that I can recall off the top of the head and he never has a speaking line. I guess he must make an impression.

Should Truman become a regular character in the comic? The Scooby to Tom’s Shaggy? Or perhaps more accurately, the Snoopy to Tom’s Charlie Brown? Food for thought.

I don’t have a lot to say about Must Love Dogs except that it looks like a perfectly serviceable romantic comedy. Even though I know that it’s aimed squarely at the middle-aged divorced market – and let’s face it, how often is THAT demographic being played to? – I don’t even view it within the context of the treacly genre it clearly aspires to.

Casting Diane Lane as the lead goes a long way in this respect. Her unflinching work in Unfaithful three years ago saw to that. And, of course, by adding John Cusack to ANYTHING, you increase your film’s ranking on the Tom Brazelton Cool-O-Meter(tm).

I’d really like to take Cami to the movie this weekend and I wanted to admit it publicly so you guys don’t think I’m some kind of curmudgeon 100% of the time when it comes to romantic comedies.

Hey, does anyone out there have any experience with PHP? Or more specifically, any kind of scripting similar to that which helps display the comics on the site in the timely manner we’ve all come to appreciate?

I’m looking for a way to insert ALL of the guest strips that have been given to me back into the archive so that people can view them. But at the same time, I need to figure out a way that they system won’t officially “count” them. That is, figure out a way that the script can skip over assigning the guest strip a number like in the upper right hand corner of the comic.

Basically what I want to do is give an exact numerical representation of the number of comics I’ve actually sit down to write and draw rather than include guest strips in the archive and say they were mine.

For example, I always hate it when I read some kind of web comic press release that says “The Adventures of Pixel and Poxel recently celebrated 500 comics!” Not so fast, pal! I noticed you had 47 guest comics in your archive. So shouldn’t you be celebrating your 453rd comic?

Does that make sense? If any of you guys think you might have a solution or would like copies of the files you could maybe toy around with, drop me a line.

I’d like to acknowledge the people who’s hard work has helped me through hard times by giving them the continued exposure that the deserve, but I also want an honest representation of my own investment. Just a little piece of mind.

Thanks.