Synchronicity? Or just a weird coincidence? So I'm at my desk, thinking about the stuff I read as a kid. →[More:]

My Dad had a friend who owned a bookstore so we would get good deals on comic books and the old-timey pulp stuff that Mort had in the back rooms.

One of my favorites was Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series, starring John Carter, the Virginia squire who would magically teleport himself to Mars and have fifteen kinds of awesome adventures under the double moons.

Now, I know that those books were godawfully bad. Looking back on it with a grown-up's perspective, I'm sure that Burroughs committed umpteen number of literary misdemeanors and felonies. This was written as pulp fiction, after all. But the goofy, awkward, buck-toothed kid with the coke-bottle glasses who I used to be couldn't get enough of those stories.

So I'm in a reverie, looking at Burroughs' page on Wikipedia. The phone rings. Someone for my boss.

"May I ask who's calling?"

"John Carter."