Friends, Romans, bloggers….

First, my apologies for such a rocky week, freezing out posts, bed-hopping between sites, making opaque promises and seeming pretty much like a drunkard in charge of microbrewery. As you may gather, I’m not a technical person.

Instead, I’m negotiating with a smart mob to play techie for me, turning this site into a full on DA playground, with plenty of new features and frivolities. And that will take TIME – maybe two weeks. So be cool, and all will be revealed.

In the meantime, ye olde cassowary blog is up and flapping again, with a new Birdbrain in the slot, and Brainstorm results due to arrive later tonight. Further, as if nothing every happened, a new Storm will emerge on Tuesday.

Finally, when this davidastle domain is fully designed and dusted off: shazam. I’ll invite you to make the leap of faith from blog to site, and the hijinks can continue, with a few bonus hijinks to boot.

Sounds like a plan? Hope so, and hope you can bear with the imbroglio. The web is called the web for a reason.

You came. You saw chaos. You wondered, huh?

Fear not, fair surfer, this is a hard-hat zone for the next week or so, as Cassowary is getting her feathers preened into a new beast: davidastle.com.

Same bells, a few different whistles, and a free set of steak knives to the tenth caller.

Played gotcha with ABC.net again, finding this headline on the weekend:

Tiger, camels stolen in bugled car theft

Posted 24 minutes ago

A “delightful” Bengal tiger, named Jonas, and two camels named, Todd and Sean, have gone missing in eastern Canada after thieves drove off with the truck and trailer they were travelling in….

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Of course, the missing N was restored a little later, but the omission has inspired this week’s mission. Not headlines this time – but titles, and two of them.

Here’s the challenge. Choose two related titles (same author, same actor, same band, a shared genre and/or theme) and play a game of Drop and Carry. That is, dump one letter from the first title – with no mixing – and slip the escapee into the second title – again, no mixing, but you can adjust the spacing.

Do it well, and you’ll create two fresh works, with a single-sentence summary attached to each to enrich the gag. Here’s a taste:

King Lea – tragedy of a billionaire pastoralist

Tritus Andronicus – a cliché-ridden Greek melodrama, with coffee

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Mil – Sean Penn yawn-fest about the American advent of metrics

My Stick River – outlawed bootleg release about golden showers

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Pace Oddity – ballad of the Shane Warne zooter

Sashes to Ashes – tragic end to Miss Universe pageant

You get the bugled bungles by now? Steal from Title A and give to Title B and see what humorous havoc your can weak. Sorry, you can wreak. (Deadline late Friday, with five awards in the offing: the best three pairs, plus the Best Drop, and the Best Carry. So drop your tools, and carry on.)