John Swartzwelder

I decided to take a day off yesterday, since I’m not too busy at work these days, and one of the things I did was buy Season 7 of The Simpsons on DVD. I’m a big Simpsons fan, so I already had the first six seasons, and I figured that a day off would be the perfect day to get the next one, and start watching it.

As I listen to the commentaries on the DVDs—which I always do—they often mention one of the most prolific writers on the show; a guy named John Swartzwelder. If you have a favourite episode of The Simpsons, chances are pretty good that Swartzwelder wrote it, or at least helped. And as I was listening to the commentaries again yesterday, they were mentioning him again, and the fact that he always refuses to take part in the commentaries. And then they also mentioned that he’s written a couple of novels. This piqued my interest, so I went and looked for novels by John Swartzwelder on Amazon.com. I looked through the excerpt that Amazon provides for each, and they were both pretty funny. So I think that I’ll pick up one or both, the next time I’m buying books.

The big problem will be trying to remember how to spell “John Swartzwelder” when I’m in the book store. (Actually, the “John” part shouldn’t be too bad. It’s just the “Swartzwelder” part that will get me.)

If you’re interested, the two books are called The Time Machine Did It (a humour/mystery novel), and Double Wonderful (a humour/western novel). Actually, now that I think about it, it might be easier to remember the names of his books then trying to remember how to spell his name...