There, sitting on the best seller shelf, was a book called South Park, A Sticky Forms Adventure! The Sole Proprietor doesn't get cable, so later, after he'd bought the thing, someone had to explain to him what South Park is (or was), an animated series for television that runs (ran) on HBO. Oh. OK. He's seen the characters. BaddGrrl has some stuffed South Park characters that she sits on her desk for the video cam when she's not at work. They're nice, he understands why she puts them there.

For whatever reason, the Sole Proprietor wanted this book, a book maybe ten inches by ten inches that has ten different scenes printed inside, each of them spread over two pages and each page printed on heavy cardboard stock, more like a game board than a book page really, with a glossy surface to which you can afix and move about the little cut outs of the cartoon characters that come on several printed plastic sheets.

The execution is kind of dumb. There's a little patch of dialogue on each two page spread with a very simple background: what seems to be a school room, a couple of tables in the cafeteria, some sort of weird laboratory and several others. The dialogue is, um, dialogue. The cover has a little warning that "this product is recommended for mature audiances only. It contains adult language and situations." Product? This book is a product? Well, maybe, it's more like a coloring book than anything else. It contains adult language and situations, but what adults? What language? What situations? This is number nineteen on the best seller list?

Of course everyone else in the world has seen this thing and knows what the Sole Proprietor doesn't: the history, the background, the beat, the sound of the voices, all the things that make this funny. It is funny, right? The characters, at least, are pretty nice. Wonderful weird little expressions. They look funny without dialogue. They're funny with. Right?

The Sole Proprietor's idea is to use the characters and arrange them on the backgrounds and do his own dialogue and shoot pictures of the results. You have no idea how a dumb little thing like this can entertain a Sole Proprietor. He gets to play with dialogue, pots of rubber cement, little cartoon characters printed on slick plastic, strobe lights, cameras and film. You are easily amused, are you not Sole Proprietor? Well, yes, he's been blessed with that.

It will have to wait for this weekend, of course, and even then the Sole Proprietor will probably let it slide, lots of good intentions, but not so much follow through. But today he bought this book, number nineteen on the best seller list called South Park. Life is OK. With or without the dialogue.