This Weekend: A Very Special Episode of Ace of Spades HQ

Ace of Spades, Teenager in Turmoil, learns his best friend is addicted to speed. He must decide to keep the secret, or tell his friend's parents. Special Guest Appearances by Tony Danza, Meredith Baxter-Birney, and former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders.

My own blogging will be light this weekend -- I have a major pain-in-my-ass commitment, though I'll try to get on the damn hotel computer and do some posting -- but I'm proud to announce the site's first guest host.

Is "proud" the right word, really? I don't think so. Overstates it by at least 80%. Let's just say I'm required to announce the site's first guest host.

I had actually hoped to get someone you might have sorta-mighta heard of to guest-blog this weekend, but the best I could come up with was Hoke Malokey.

Hoke is a smart analyst and damn funny too. He's funny in that dry, erudite witty manner -- you know, pussy-shit. College-boy crap. While I was out there bustin'-ass on a tuna boat in the Berring Straits, Hoke was standing around at a fancy-pants university club in his pansy tweeds and spats making cutting remarks about the pate.

But seriously: he's good. He knows politics inside and out; I've learned a lot from him.

He's also technically incompetent, so if he does anything stupid, like turn the entire site upside down or set the default font to "Sanskrit Sans Serif," try to alert him to that.

Be nice to him, but not too nice to him. I don't want to see anything even close to "You're much better than Ace; why don't you start your own blog?" I'm not going to get on Paula Zahn with that kind of crap being posted on my site.

If you need to contact him, either about a tip or about how badly he's screwed up the coding for the site, drop him a line at hokemalokey-AT-yahoo.com (replace the "-AT-" with @).

Anyway, assuming Hoke doesn't completely nuke the Munuvia software, I'll see you sporadically over the weekend, and then again Sunday night.

Playing the Expectations Game: Incidentally, Hoke Malokey is coming off the bench cold. This is all very last-minute, and he hasn't had time to prepare or anything like that. So, while I imagine he'll have interesting stuff to say, it will be all off-the-cuff and posted on borrowed time.