You're listening to a podcast from Blogging Heads TV.

Hello, this is Bob, and this is the right show, as usual.

What's not usual is that normally on Friday, I would be saying,

Hi, Mickey, instead of this is Bob.

Mickey, as you can see, is not here.

He is sick.

He doesn't have COVID, tested negative.

He has what he described to me in an email as a digestive bug.

I gather he ate something that didn't agree with him, which would give it something in common

with me.

I think that will be the last joke about Mickey's illness.

Anyway, he's not here.

What I'm going to do is actually spend a little time talking on my own,

saying some of the things I might have said if he were here,

maybe even trying to anticipate what he would say in reply.

I'm not under the illusion that this is a satisfactory replacement for the normal Bob Mickey dynamic.

I fully expect most people to have already clicked stop.

But there may be a few of you who have set aside the time on your Friday night to listen to this podcast.

And now you're like, what am I going to do?

You know, it's not as if there are like a million other podcasts in the world.

It's not like that.

So your loss, it's either listen to our podcasts or confront the fact that you live in a vast and cold universe and

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