From the Jill Schwartz Memorial Library here in the wilds of Connecticut.

This is obscure season four in American tragedy.

I'm your host, your friend, your ear lover, and literary mansplainer-in-chief, Michael

Ian Black, supine, as always, on the Jack Jack Memorial Reading Throne, and here we go.

Spring. It is nearly spring. You can just about feel it here in the East Coast. The temperatures

are rising. There are crocuses shooting out of the ground.

No leaves yet on the trees, but that is coming. And, you know, you get that, there's a little bit

of anxiousness you get, I get, when spring is about to pop, the sense that the world is about to be

reborn.

And if ever there was a world, in need of rebirth, it is this world.

Sadly, for me, as the, as spring approaches and all the events that will surely unfold with it, I will not be able to comment on it

on the television as, Have I Got News for You, is now in hiatus until the fall.

We just taped our last episode on Friday.

And what a fantastic way to end this series of 10 episodes. We had two great guests,

a guy named Nish Kumar, British comedian, and Kara Swisher, who I believe I have only referred to

incorrectly as Kara Swisher up until this past episode, but it is Kara.

And she was on, Nish was on, and it's just a funny, fun episode.

So I will miss that over the next few months, but on the, you know, on the upside,

I'm going to Italy in a few weeks, going to spend a month in Italy with Martha. The kids will join us there for a week or so. We're going to go. We're going to camp out near Lake Como. And when I say camp out, I don't mean in a tent. I mean in an apartment near Lake Como, not in Lake Como. I mean, not in the town of Lake Como because that costs too much money.

And what, you know, what am I a millionaire? I'm on basic cable television. I can't afford all that.

So we're at a town nearby. Should be lovely. Looking forward to that. Looking forward to seeing the

kids out there in Italy and doing various sightseeing adventures,

...