I saw Jay Mohr's book "Gasping For Airtime" awhile ago at work, and curiously picked it up, thinking "Wow, Jay Mohr was on 'Saturday Night Live'? He must have been on after I stopped watching it, because I don't remember him at all". Surprise: he was on for two years in the early 90s, the same time that I watched it, although only occasionally. I was never a big fan of the show, but I would watch if there was a good musical guest on. Mohr talks about how difficult it was to get his sketches and himself on the show, his crippling panic attacks, and finally his decision not to go back after two painful years of begging for more airtime. It seems like SNL was a great place to work for some people, but not for most. He of course has some great memories of Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, watching Nirvana play on the first show of the 19th season (I have that recorded on a VHS cassette somewhere...).
"Passport to Peril" is a Hard Case crime book by the *original* Robert B. Parker (if you want a laugh, look it up on Amazon and see how many negative reviews it got from people pissed off that it's not the Robert B. Parker who wrote the Spenser books). It was a nifty little spy/espionage novel taking place after WW2. John Stoddard is traveling to Hungary to investigate what happened to his brother, who was last seen parachuting out of a plane in the area. On the train, he meets a beautiful woman named Maria, who is looking for her boss, who was supposed to be on the train. Her boss's name is Marcel Blaye, and Stoddard immediately knows something is wrong, since he's traveling on Blaye's passport that he bought in Geneva, not realizing it's a murdered man's passport. Maria has an envelope that Blaye intrusted to her, an envelope full of names that Russians and Germans and everyone else under the sun seem to be after. It was pretty interesting, I like those Hard Case books. I have a bunch I haven't read yet that I'm looking forward to eventually getting around to reading :)
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