This is the 123rd and final post for Wriphe.com/blog in 2009. While it seems like spring was just a few short weeks ago, mere days now remain until 2010 (the year we make contact). The older I get, the faster time seems to move. According to the theory of relativistic time dilation, that means that either I'm slowing down in relation to my surroundings, or more likely the world is spinning faster than before. Since I refuse to believe that I'm not a constant, the world must be increasing in velocity. But I guess that's impossible, isn't it?

Damn you, Superman. In addition to making time seem to move faster, now you've also electro-magnetically erased my hard drives (and given Captain Marvel an erection). Thanks a lot, Man of Asshole.

Apple proudly announced on Christmas Eve that North American children could follow Santa's sleigh via NORAD-approved applications on their iPhones and iPods (this in addition to Google Earth, OnStar, Facebook and Twitter updates, and old fashioned text messaging). Of course, this is an extension of www.noradsanta.org, a website created by the multi-national military North American Aerospace Defense Command, which is in a lot of ways just like G.I. Joe. Founded in response to the Cold War, NORAD is mandated to oversee North American airspace. Unlike millions of greedy amateurs, it is really NORAD's chartered mandate to keep an eye out for flying men in red coats who intend to rain down "gifts" on otherwise defenseless America and Canadian children.

We've come a long way since the 19th century when children actively sought to earn the approval of Father Christmas by sacrificing a goat. No wonder kids are so fat these days.

Tis the season for poodles.

My aunt gifted me two rescued standard poodles this week. The black bitch is named July and is quite a playful handful. The light apricot bitch is named Victoria and is skittish and reserved. They came as a pair, previously owned by a woman who became unable to care for them following an injury. Despite the fact that they are both adults (2+ years old), they've kept me very, very busy.

Meanwhile, my father bought a new standard poodle puppy descended from a line including show champions. Though at this point the puppy remains unnamed, I'm sure that it can't help but do well considering that it's dam was named for Joanna Cameron's title character in television's The Secrets of Isis.

I've had this commercial stuck in my head all day.

Call me crazy, but I've decided that Barney is really rapping about raping Fred's daughter, Pebbles. Fred must think so, too, for he sure freaks out over the minor theft of some delicious "cereal."

One would think that an archaic cartoon character rapping about child molestation is probably not the best way to sell sugar to children, but Post Cereals doesn't care. Post blatantly uses drug themes to market Golden Crisp, a cereal with so much sugar it gives Sugar Bear hallucinations, and Honeycomb, a cereal that acts as a nutritious sedative for dangerous feral creatures. It's no wonder that after a childhood of ingesting roofies, reds, and tabs, Post wants me to buy boxes of 100% Bran to cleanse my system.

One of the nine dogs I was dogsitting this past weekend was mauled to death by another one of the nine. The dead dog was a typically enthusiastic beagle named Petey. The survivor was a much larger mixed breen mutt named Buster. The cause of their final encounter remains unknown: the two had long been affable kennelmates, and I didn't come upon the scene until minutes after the fatal event. I was able to get Petey to the animal hospital alive, but surgery was unable to save him from his extensive internal injuries. Petey died several hours later, alone in a cage. Buster was and remains confined to a lonely 5-ft by 10-ft kennel pending evaluation.

I mention this because it sucks to have a limp and wheezing puppy in your arms for Christmas. It does, however, adequately illustrate my general indisposition about the never-ending Christmas season: you know the dog is going to die, and there is nothing that you can do about it but wait it out. This situation is not significantly improved by the possibility that If you're judged "nice," you'll get a new shirt to replace the one ruined by all the blood.

Bah, humbug.

If you didn't know that assists, rebounds, and free throws were basketball statistics, this article from the sports section of my local Newnan Times-Herald (page 7, Dec. 9, 2009) newspaper would be really confusing.

Scratch that. It's really confusing anyway.

I just saw a commercial for Macy's 2009 Cashmere Sale. While I don't care for wearing either goat's hair or sweaters, if Macy's puts their models on sale (even the one playing the "old" lady), I'm buying. Why can't more stores advertise their seasonal specials with unnaturally good-looking women? It seems that there is a shortage of subtle hotness in Christmas advertising these days. Between the uncomfortably overt sexuality of GoDaddy promos and Zales adverts intentionally confusing jewelry with love, it's nice to see that someone remembers that dressing the set with beautiful women is still enough to get consumers to notice the real star: the product. And no, GAP commercials staring prepubescent girls doing their best Punky Brewster impressions don't count.

The Atlanta Falcons played like dogs this Sunday, so it was fitting that Michael Vick returned to town to put them out of their misery.

Michael Vick had predicted that he would receive a standing ovation on his first return home to the Georgia Dome following his eviction due to federal conviction as a canine killer. He pretty much got what he expected. Never have I attended a sporting event that was quite so much a love letter to a single person, an event where a player was indeed bigger than the game, but that was what happened. Very few, it seemed, came for the game. (This was a good thing, as there wasn't one played, at least not by the Falcons.) Everyone was there for number 7. And to his credit as an athlete and entertainer, he gave us what we came to see. Most Falcons fans had justifiably fled by late in the third quarter, leaving only Eagles and Vick fans, whose chants of "Put in Vick" were answered as Vick drove the Eagles down the field for another touchdown. Then everyone went home.

I'd be lying if I said that I didn't take some vengeful enjoyment in watching the prodigal Vick return to Atlanta with the Eagles and pull the wings off the injured Falcons, 34-7. (Atlanta's lone touchdown couldn't have been less relevant, scored as time expired in the game against a third-string Eagles defense.) I figure the Falcons deserved the punishment it after the ingracious way that they treated the Dolphins in the season opener. So I ask, Falcons, how did you like them apples, because I thought they tasted pretty sweet.

The single greatest comic book page ever published:

Seems that Stallone's Rocky was in talks to join Sgt. Slaughter and William "Refrigerator" Perry as a Joe in 1987, but negotiations fell through, leading to the publication of the above totally-awesome page in 1986's G.I. Joe: Order of Battle comic book. Details can be found here and here.

The 2009 W.A.T.C.H. list of dangerous toys is out. This year amid such life-threatening fare as Lots to Love Babies and Curious Baby Curious George Counting - My First Book of Numbers lurks none other than the Wolverine! World Against Toys Causing Harm warns that X-Men Origins Slashin' Action Wolverine presents the "POTENTIAL FOR EYE AND AND OTHER IMPACT INJURIES!" (Their capitalization, not mine. My Caps Lock key works just fine, thank you.) Well, duh. After all, Wolverine is the best there is at what he does, and what he does is not cuddling. He is genetically designed always to be running with scissors, for Pete's Sake, hardly a proper role model for little Jack and Jill. The figure's packaging brags that Wolverine is an “indestructible combat machine," which sounds about right (and, despite W.A.T.C.H.'s criticism that the toy packaging contains no caution label, qualifies as all the warning any eye impact injury-free parent should need). Giving Wolverine to a toddler is equivalent to giving him a plugged in toaster filled with forks. I don't see that on your list, W.A.T.C.H.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'd like to buy that Spy-Gear Viper-Blaster that W.A.T.C.H. discourages. Because a gun that shoots snakes sounds like something Santa will be giving Toys For Tots this year.

Uga Update: PETA wants Georgia to replace live Ugas with a robotic dog. While I'm intrinsically opposed to anything that PETA wants (see "Sea Kittens"), I happen to think that a robot Dawg would be awesome, and would be a great addition to the sidelines as it paced menacingly back and forth, glaring at the opposition with steely laser eyes and baring titanium teeth in a continuous growl. So way to go on finally having a kick ass idea, PETA. Here's to robot mascots!

I'm sure that Uga VII would be pleased to know that we played football in his absence the same as we played it in his presence. That is, terribly.

Kentucky beat Georgia in Athens for the first time since 1977. (My brother wasn't even born at the time.) Georgia turned the ball over 4 times, solidifying our lock on the 119th ranking (out of 120) in the country for turnover margin on the season. Joe Cox threw two interceptions, including the final turnover in the game at 1:44 remaining as the Dawgs began a final drive for the tying points. On the upside, Uga VII thankfully didn't live to see it.

And so ends another home season of Georgia football. Sure it was exciting, but it wasn't very satisfying.

The University of Georgia's football season has been so bad, it killed our mascot: Uga VII died of a heat attack yesterday, November 19, after a mere 23 games as mascot and only 15 months after the death of his predecessor, also from heart failure. Uga VII (born Loran's Best) was only 4 years old at the time of his death and had the shortest reign of all Ugas to date. As a result of his sudden departure, no live mascot will be lounging in his custom-built doghouse for Saturday's prime-time home game against Kentucky.

Though it is too soon to tell, there is an indication that Uga VII may be the last Uga. "There may not be an Uga VIII," said Uga VII's owner, Swann Seiler, in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, What this means is still up for debate, as reporter Alexis Stevens followed typical AJC procedure and did not follow through on this intriguing line of inquiry, but it would not be unprecedented to have a differently named english bulldog mascot in future seasons. Prior to 1956, Georgia had bulldog mascots named Mike, Butch, and Mr. Angel. And lest we not forget more recently the 1986 temporary Uga IV replacement named Otto. Heck, our next mascot need not necessarily be a bulldog at all.

The historical record reports that Georgia's first football mascot was a goat. Columns, the University's internal newsletter, indicates that inaugural football coach Charles Herty nicknamed the team the "Goats" in February 1892. "At that time the goat was a mascot for everyone," UGA Associate Director of Alumni Relations Charles McBride is quoted in the Jan. 20, 1988 edition of the student-run Red and Black newspaper. "They would just decorate an old goat from the University farm and take it to the game." The Athens Banner-Herald newspaper claims the goat was our mascot for some time, at least two years, though the official mascot may have been the goat for as long as 3 or 4 decades. A paucity of recorded information makes ascertaining the time of the shift between official mascots uncertain, much less the name of that original goat.

According to the University's Athletic Department and other sources, the unnamed live goat was replaced by a bull terrier named Trilby in 1894. From Trilby the University would generate the nickname "bulldogs," which took several decades to saturate the popular consciousness as team mascot despite many people claiming credit for the idea. The Feb. 4, 1938, Red and Black contains reminiscences by Herman J. Stegeman and Robert L. McWhorter -- both men who now have buildings on campus named in their honor -- who debate the exact dates but agree that the team was known internally as the Bulldogs prior to 1921. (Historical note: the game that Stegeman recalls against Yale discussed in the linked article above took place in 1923, not 1921.) The Bulldog was not made the official mascot of the University until a ceremony at halftime of the annual game versus Georgia Tech on Nov. 26, 1938.

While I don't expect a return to the Georgia Goat (a nickname possibly already claimed by current quarterback Joe Cox), I wouldn't be surprised to see a lineage change for the bulldogs. Like the University itself, the Ugas have been growing all too fat and indolent in recent years. Whether the Seilers have tired of the spotlight, the weekly journey from Savannah, or the minefield of internal UGA politics, perhaps a return to the likes of Mr. Angel would do us some good.

So long, Uga VII. It was nice knowing you.

Facebook wins again: the 2009 New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year is "unfriend", a term that apparently defined "to remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook." Now in addition to promoting the decay of polite society, Facebook is ruining my language.

"Unfriend" was chosen over such universally accepted words as "netbook," "sexting," "tramp stamp," and "teabagger," which it turns out is now used with a complete lack of irony to describe participants in the Tea Party movement. (Let's just say that "teabagger" means something completely different where I come from.) This proves the voice of Facebook dominates that of the traditional mass media, at least within the offices of the New Oxford American Dictionary. And yes, Google assures me that the publisher of the NOAD, the Oxford University Press, does indeed have a Facebook page. Not that I'd go to Facebook to confirm it. Sure, that may be bad journalism, but I've got my principles.

This is what 92,000 people standing in concern for a single person looks like:

With 1:16 remaining in the game, UGA's Bacarri Rambo suffered a severe concussion that left him motionless on the field. It was the first time I've seen the cart have to carry a motionless player off the field in person, and I must say that the crowd, including the many Auburn fans, was quite supportive.

And despite a dismal first quarter played by the Bulldogs (no first downs, 14 points scored by Auburn), the game itself turned out to be another in a series of fantastic games this season. It is a shame that our record isn't better considering how entertaining the home games have been this season (with the exception of the Tennessee Tech blowout last week). Once more to go as Kentucky visits next week for the final 2009 home game, our UGA-record setting fourth night game this year.

Remember those stories about computer-illiterate people who thing that a cd tray is a coffee holder? I've spent over 7 hours this week helping my aunt pick out a new desktop computer. Her biggest purchasing criteria: that the tower case be large enough to entirely fill its designated cabinet space so as to keep her cats from crawling behind it.

In response to recent allegations of an existing sex tape, Carrie Prejean, the former Miss California who lost her shot at being Miss USA when she spoke out against gay marriage, has now come out against "sexting." I really have to say that I'm losing all respect for this girl. Once upon a time, she was a carefree lass who was willing to film naughty moving pictures to please her long-distance boyfriend. Later she sold her own flesh, accepting breast enhancements from beauty contest producers in order to help her win. But in her new book Still Standing, she says that her body is now a "temple of the Lord" and that she should be respected for her heart, "not for showing skin to look sexy."

Look, lady, I find it hard to respect anyone who willingly submits themselves to the degradations of a fixed beauty pageant and then whines on non-stop press junkets once they lose. But don't compound your problems by discouraging young women from sending naked pictures of themselves to their boyfriends. Think of the harm you're doing to all the poor young men with hot girlfriends that really need to show them off. You're damaging the self-esteem of millions of young Americans. Is that really the Christian thing to do? If all those hot young women stop sharing their bodies with young men, those men will turn to the only available alternative: other men. And we know that's not really what you want, Carrie. So, please, do the right thing and release your sex tape to the public. America is counting on you to save heterosexual marriage.

UGA homecoming weekend results in a huge win for the dogs. Huge win on the scoreboard, anyway, as UGA wins easily 38-0. I'm not sure that a defeat of Tennessee Tech University counts as a huge win in any other way. TTU certainly didn't seem to be trying very hard. Even their mascot didn't seem to care about his job, preferring to mingle with our cheerleaders instead of livening up the limited TTU fans in attendance. (Not that I blame him.) Whatever the case, it sure felt nice to win a game again after the latest Florida debacle, so I offer a hearty thanks to Tennessee Tech.

Stop! Clobberin' Time meets Hammer Time.

During this year's annual beating courtesy of the University of Florida, the Georgia Bulldogs wore black helmets and black pants. To avoid the public humiliation of losing to Florida at the World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party again (only 3 wins since 1989), we've taken to disguising ourselves as Division I-AA Grambling State University. Both the football game (final score UGA 17, UF 41) and the uniforms were unwatchable.

Please, never, ever, do that again Georgia. Ever.

The internet was "born" 40 years ago yesterday with it's first connection between nerds in California colleges. Credited with making the graphic world wide web profitable, banner ads celebrated their 15th anniversary on Tuesday. And of course tomorrow is Halloween. Keeping all of that in mind, I present to you a complete convergence:

Image and caption stolen borrowed from Bobby "Fatboy" Roberts, courtesy his article "5 Reasons It Sucks Being a Joss Whedon Fan" at Cracked.com.

I just saw Transformers 2, and it made me like Michael Bay a little more. As I mentioned years ago, even Michael Bay thought the first movie was bad, but it sold well. Really well. So he did what any sane man would do when presented with an astronomical paycheck (reports estimate a personal income of $75 million for the original film) and a public that just couldn't get enough crappy cinema: he gave us more. Jump cuts of dogs fucking, large scrap heaps punching other large scrap heaps, and mystically-reanimating teenagers should not equal box office gold, but somehow they do. Bay gives us what we ask for, and therefore what we deserve.

It's worth noting that the movie goes so far beyond stupid, it can be used as a litmus test for judging the quality of a man by discovering whether he liked it or not. There are two types of people in this world: people who hated Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and the living dead. People who enjoy this film cherish style over substance, and their idea of style is anything that will make a rational person bleed from at least 2 of the holes in his head. A bit of advice: if you are over the age of 12 and genuinely like Transformers: ROTF(L), not just Megan Fox's tits or the distinctive sound of metal grating against metal, see a doctor before you reproduce. Your children may unwittingly suffer because of your retarded genes.

What the world really needs is a superhero with the power to stop email spam. Think about it: his story would be a taut psychological thriller. His mere existence would interfere with the fabric of space-time, creating a natural firewall for all batch junk email advertisements worldwide. He'd be forced to wander anonymously from town to town as a drifter, a la The Fugitive, as the forces of organized spam, led by his arch-nemesis, the Nigerian Prince, aka "the Phisher of Men," hunted him in order to destroy his unique ability and return to their corrupt spamming ways. Danger at every turn! One-armed men! Meddling!

On a very related note, I've added a captcha to my contact form, as the computers had figured out how to pester me with a growing stream of dick enlargement and Russian bride ads. According to a 2008 study by the University of California, spammers get one positive response from 12.5 million mails. Another 2008 survey by Marshall (now M86 Security, a company that designs email encryptions) estimated that nearly a quarter of web users admit to having purchased something through spam email. It's clearly only a matter of getting the right spam through the right firewalls to the right person. It seems a shame that they keep sending mail to everyone on my street when only 1 neighbor ever buys anything. So let me make it clear, spammers: I am not that person. Just leave me alone. I've got other affairs to meddle in.

CSI: Gotham City.

This process is called infrared luminescence photography and is still in use today. These days scientists rarely need to use any "newly discovered chemical" because of advancements in infrared imaging, still a relatively new and delicate process in the 1930s.

Thank you, Batman, for putting me one step closer to the perfect crime.

On this date in history: Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed surveying their famous line separating the well-mannered South from their ill-bred Northern neighbors in 1767. Just think: if Pennsylvania had built a fence on their southern border, it sure would have saved the United States a lot of trouble over the years.

Metafiction Quiz: If Robin recognizes Jerry Siegel as the creator of the comic book character Superman, and Robin shares adventures with Superman, does this mean:

1. Robin is self-aware that he is also a comic book character?
2. Superman is a real person, the offspring of Jerry Siegel?
3. Jerry Siegel is a comic book character created by someone else?

Yes, comic books can also be textbooks! Though it may not seem so at first, Reed Richards, the so-called "Mr. Fantastic" and self-described genius, is correctly using the word "myself" in the above panel.

According to my Unabridged Second Edition-Deluxe Color Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary (which surprisingly has color on only 16 of 2,305 pages), the word "myself" is defined "a form of the first person singular pronoun, used: (a) as an intensive; as I went myself; (b) as a reflexive; as I hurt myself; (c) as a quasi-noun meaning 'my real, true, or actual self'; I am not myself when I rage like that." While the Quicksilver may use the first example sentence and the Incredible Hulk the third, Mr. Fantastic is clearly interested in hurting himself, so to speak.

In Reed's sentence, "myself" is an intensive pronoun referring to the sentence subject, "person." If Reed had said "I have that qualification myself," there would be less confusion, but super geniuses just don't talk like common people. For the sake of clarification, consider the following sentence diagram (don't look at me like that; sentence diagramming is way more fun than Sudoku):

So there you have it: proof that repeating anything that Mr. Fantastic says is not only melodramatic fun, it's also grammatically correct. It really gives us all something to think about, doesn't it?

NES Legend of Zelda + sex jokes = funny. Don't agree? Go away. You're reading the wrong blog.

If you haven't seen the Legend of Neil, go to Effing Funny and watch it. Now. I'd embed it here, but the Atom Films embed is a little squirrelly, and I'm not nuts about embedding auto-playing video. The only person who should get to yell at my blog readers is me. (And, yes, I did intentionally use the words "squirrelly" and "nuts" in that earlier sentence.)

Three things I learned from the internet:

Lesson 1: Sea-Monkeys® support hate. Harold von Braunhut, the man who in 1957 began marketing brine shrimp -- specifically a patented hybrid involving Artemia salina, used his fortune to support the Aryan Nation. This despite the fact that von Braunhut was born an ethnic Jew. Note: other than Sea-Monkeys, von Braunhut literally holds patents for, among other things, X-Ray Cameras and an aquarium watch. ("A wearer of such a timepiece is then able to contemporaneously tell time and enjoy watching the aquatic pets." Thank you, Google Patents!)

Lesson 2: Eat dolphins and die. Further investigation into the life cycle of the brine shrimp accidentally led me to discover that the Japanese annually hunt dolphins. Many in the East consider dolphin meat to be a delicacy, and the hunting of dolphins continues despite the fact that they frequently contain more than 10 times the legal Japanese allowable tolerance of mercury. Note: Mercury poisoning is blamed for many neurological conditions, one of which may be developing a taste for dolphin meat.

Lesson 3: Mormons control the world's fish supply. Utah is among the world's foremost suppliers of brine shrimp (at one time controlling up to 90% of the market), as the Great Salt Lake is an ideal breeding ground for the little critters. (The brine shrimp is, in fact, the largest animal living in the saline lake.) Commercially, brine shrimp are used as food for birds and farmed aquatic life, biomedical experimentation, and, of course, pets. Brine shrimp fishing on the Great Salt Lake has its own lobby, the Utah Artemia Association, that relies on the tiny organism for life support like a tapeworm. Note: despite their nearly microscopic size, brine shrimp can carry and transmit real tapeworms.

If I can learn all of this, quite by accident, in 5 minutes on the internet, I believe that this clearly demonstrates that it is finally time to stop throwing away money on public education. I never learned anything as interesting or useful in my high school French classes. (What did I learn in French?
Je ne sais pas.)

Sometimes you forget just how many people there are in Sanford Stadium until everyone is staring at the field in shocked silence. Today it was not great to be a Georgia Bulldog.

Bulldogs lose to the 4th ranked LSU Tigers 20-13. It was an exasperating game, as the Dawgs suffered through the worst offensive play calling so far in a season full of terrible play calling. When the clock needed to be killed, we called passes. When yards were needed, we called runs. Pass plays always came from the same singleback or no-back formations, telegraphing our intentions to the defense. And, for reasons I still don't understand, we continually faked an end around, a play that we almost never execute, making the misdirection entirely unnecessary. (We did run a reverse that was so obvious, we should have just handed the ball to the defense to save wear and tear on the players.)

The game went late into the 3rd quarter UGA 0, LSU 6, before the Dawgs had their only two successful offensive drives of the game. LSU scored the go-ahead touchdown with 54 seconds remaining in the game. In response, Georgia quarterback Joe Cox fumbled the first snap from scrimmage, bobbled the second, and threw a game-ending interception on the third. Thank goodness he's a senior.

Before this game, the question was whether Cox or Offensive Coordinator Mike Bobo needed to be sacked. After this game, it would appear that the answer is that they both need to go. It was an embarrassing disgrace for all.

Snap! Parenting fail. Trust Batman and Robin to put the "fun" in "funeral."

Please excuse the lateness of this posting. I usually try to post UGA game day updates on the day of the game. This week's kickoff wasn't until after 7PM, and the game didn't end until much, much later. Saying that this year's Bulldog games have been running long is like saying that the Jurassic Period only lasted a few years. Fortunately, the Dawgs won again, if barely. They are certainly playing some frustratingly exciting ball in Athens this year.

So far this year, watching the Georgia Bulldogs play has been like learning to swim: you spend a lot of time holding your breath. That was especially true Saturday, as the game versus Arizona State University kicked off in an early evening downpour. (Is it irony that we were playing a team that calls a desert home?) The first half was so wet that they refused to let the band on the field at halftime. Yet they did allow the majorettes to simultaneously juggle up to 4 flaming batons. Fortunately, none of the batons were dropped, because contact with the waterlogged ground would certainly have extinguished the flames.

The game was not televised locally, so my brother and father, both huge football fans, could not see it. However a friend of mine who has a satellite television package but minimal interest in football did watch it. After the game he asked me, "why do you watch this crap?" Despite some soul searching, I couldn't give him a very good answer. But so long as the game is close I am entertained by it, even if we turn the ball over frequently, struggle to tackle ball carriers, are punished by some inexplicable officiating, and run some very questionable offensive plays that fail to take advantage of our strengths and expose ourselves to huge losses and stalled drives. (I'm looking at you, soon to be ex-Offensive Coordinator Bobo).

.

I told my family that I couldn't think of anything clever to put on my blog today. "It's because you're not clever," said my brother. "It's because you're getting old," said my mother.

Supportive.

Durin' Friday night's broadcast o' tha annual Boise State versus Fresno State football contest, ESPN took time t' show me not only tha broadcast team's weekly fantasy football starters, but also their correspondin' scores. Those bilge rats at ESPN pirated time from an actual football game t' show me results o' an imaginary football game. If thar be anythin' more borin' than bein' forced t' see pictures o' some stranger's sprogs, it's bein' forced t' see some stranger's fantasy football team's score. In me idea o' a fantasy football game, commentators will shut their grog holes and we'll be able t' watch a real football game in peace. Arrr!

(P.S. Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day.)

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies (based on the comic book story of the same name) will be released to DVD later this month. To promote the video, Warner Home Video is offering "virtual collectors cards" on Facebook to fans who waste their time hunt them down by following the daily updates at the video's official site and Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter pages. I find this promotional strategy strangely fascinating.

First of all, the public's interest in collectible cards collapsed nearly 15 years ago. What were once common collectibles are nowadays recognized as just more garbage to clutter your desk. (I should know; there's a Billy Dee Williams as "D. A. Harvey Dent" card from Tim Burton's 1989 Batman starring at me right now.) Since that time, no one on this planet has given two shits about collectible cards except the poor suckers who were stuck with them before humanity abandoned them in favor of Star Wars Prequel figures. However, the Warner Brothers would have me believe that it would be super exciting to visit multiple sites daily to gather codes which can be entered into their Facebook app to unlock "virtual" cards (from this point forward we're going to call them what they are: jpgs). I'm left wondering what's exciting about a picture stuck in a shockwave document that I can't download?

Prepared for my cynicism, Warner has gone so far as to turn the whole mess into a data mining operation contest. That's right, by registering for the opportunity to see pictures taken directly from the video that they're planning to sell me, I'd also be eligible to win a Playstation 3 or an HDTV on which to watch the Blu-Ray version of the movie. This sweepstakes is open to anyone older than 13 and a registered Facebook user. I shudder to think that this "contest" of trolling corporate sites daily for codes to unlock advertising would appeal to anyone who was older than 13, but I've learned to keep expectations very low when dealing with anyone associated with any social networking site. I'm sure they're looking forward to the next WB contest in which they can call a special 1-800 number and tell the operator where they live and what appliances they have for the opportunity for someone to come take them away from them.

The ultimate question is whether this unique strategy will pay off in increased sales of the direct-to-video movie. I don't see how it could. How could anyone fall for such a pointless promotion? Who would spend so much time traveling between sites to collect cards whose sole purpose is to create a buzz for a marketable product? Who would get so excited about the upcoming release of a movie such as, say, 1995's Judge Dredd that they'd go hours out of their way on multiple visits to hunt down an entire 90 card set of trading cards one $5.99 pack at a time at Oxford Comics located inside Oxford Books in Atlanta, GA? Only a fool, I'm sure.

On a completely unrelated note, I promise that I don't have any Judge Dredd cards. (Anymore.) So stop looking at me like that.

This post is a little late, but I've had a busy weekend. Saturday night I attended the first University of Georgia football home game vs South Carolina. I was excited because I love night games, and the game had a 7PM kickoff. If I had known before hand that the game was going to take over 4 hours to play, I'm sure that would have dampened my enthusiasm somewhat.

Two things slow down a football game: scoring and penalties. And this game had both in spades. Thirty one points were scored in the first quarter alone. There were 24 penalties called in the game, 11 for us and 13 for them, for a total of 206 yards. Six of those penalties resulted directly in first downs. But we won, so I'd be a fool to complain. Besides, the game had just about everything else you could ask for: special teams touchdowns, long runs, long passes, blocked kicks, goal line stands, shouting matches between the coaches, last second drama. It was a good game.

I would not call Sunday's match up between the Miami Dolphins and the Atlanta Falcons a "good game." The Dolphins flat out stunk. Sure, this was the first game of the season for both teams. The Georgia Dome, even when not full to capacity, can be a pretty hostile environment to opposing teams ("loud" is an understatement). But that's no excuse for four (4!) Dolphins turnovers and an anemic... well, everything. Just two years ago I watched an entire season in which the Dolphins won only 1 football game, and even then they couldn't even aspire to this level of ineptitude. I have a name for this level of failure: Pennington.

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that I've railed against Chad Pennington before. (On August 11, 2008, and January 4, 2009, to be exact.) While I have grown to admire his never-say-retire-while-they're-still-throwing-money-at-me attitude, his weak arm and failing body have hurt us in the past just as they cost the Dolphins any chance at winning today.

Watching the team warm ups, I noticed that Pennington's longest warm-up pass was exactly 15 yards. Pennington's longest pass of the day was almost exactly 20 yards in the air. My brother was quick to point out that on that pass, Pennington took three big steps forward before heaving the pass, and the ball still wobbled like a lame duck. The Falcons must also have been paying attention, as they didn't bother to cover any Dolphins deep, knowing that the ball would never go that far. As if that wasn't bad enough, every time Pennington dropped back to pass, the Dolphins receivers themselves generally aborted their routes to ensure that Pennington's passes could still reach them despite the fact that this prevented almost any chance of catching the ball past (or in most cases near) the first down marker. Thanks, Chad.

On the upside, on rookie Pat White's first play in a regular season NFL game, he heaved the ball an impressive 40 yards, overthrowing the fastest Dolphin receiver deep down the field. My brother went berserk, amazed that Pennington could launch the ball so far. He was heartbroken when I explained that Pennington had been replaced for that down with another quarterback. Though come to think of it, he may have just been upset that the coaches immediately put Pennington back in and never let White throw again during the game. In any case, at least it's good to know that there's someone on the team who can throw the ball, even if the coaches are determined to keep him off the field.

I should mention that these football games were the second and third sporting events that I attended this week. I also watched the Gwinnett Braves (AAA affiliate of the MLB Atlanta Braves) lose a playoff game 0-3 on Wednesday night. The Braves would go on to lose the series, and after watching them play in person, I'm not surprised.

The picture below gives a pretty accurate indication of the turnout for the game against the Scranton/Wilkes-Barr (Pennsylvania) Yankees (AAA affiliate of the MLB New York Yankees). There were just enough people in attendance that team mascot Chopper the Groundhog was able to annoy everyone in attendance personally, one at a time.

Why a team named the Braves would have a groundhog for a mascot is explained only once you realize that the main thing that Gwinnett County has of any name recognition is a number of large shopping malls, and they make lousy mascots. General Beauregard Lee, the groundhog at Gwinnett's Yellow River Game Ranch is the state of Georgia's "Official" predictor of spring arrival. We don't care for Pennsylvania's Punxsutawney Phil in these parts, especially if we're going to get beaten by Phil's state baseball clubs.

In Comics Buyers Guide #1347, published September 10, 1999, many of the industry's top names pushed for the abolition of the Comics Code Authority. They argued that the Code was outdated and needlessly restricted the artistic growth of comic book storytelling.

The Comics Code Authority was formed in 1954 to self-censor comic books in order to save the medium from interference by public/political intervention. The Code included General Standards that were to be applied to all comic books of the time in order to assure the public that comics were safe for children. Samples from the original code's General Standards include

A.5: Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates a desire for emulation.

B.5: Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires, and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism and werewolfism are prohibited.

Now, 10 years later, the publishers that submit comics for Code approval have been so dramatically reduced as to make the Code Authority functionally irrelevant. Theoretically, comic books should be at an all-time artistic high. However, for months the entire Marvel Comics universe has been controlled by villains who have blackmailed and murdered their way into power. (Note that the company was just bought by Disney for $4 billion. Crime does pay!) Even DC Comics, one of the only 2 remaining comic publishers who still submits (some) material for Code approval, is now publishing stories in which former heroes rise from the grave and kill their fellow heroes. Batman is dead and his disembodied skull is now being sexually fondled by an undead foe. Ugh.

It appears that rather than opening new artistic horizons for the comic industry, removing the code has simply been a license to publish depravity. Death, gore, and evil abound (and in some cases, such as Marvel Zombies, are sadistically glorified). That's not art, that's pornography. It's exactly the situation that the Code was created to prevent.

Though lacking any teeth for enforcement, the modern Code still dictates, "heroes should be role models and should reflect the prevailing social attitudes." Sadly, I'm not sure anyone is listening anymore.

The Georgia Bulldogs kicked off their 2009 season this weekend in a horrible loss to Oklahoma State University. Just for the record: I'm not panicking yet.

I'm typically optimistic about the Dawgs' upcoming performances, and one loss will not cause me to lose faith. (Especially a loss to a very good OSU team.) We didn't deserve to be ranked preseason number 15 this year anymore than we deserved to be ranked preseason number 1 last year. So, to repeat, no panic yet.

We're young and in a talent gap at receiver and quarterback. Coaching has to step it up, especially on our perpetually abysmal special teams. Everyone's got to keep their head screwed on straight instead of becoming all self-pitying hangdog at a little adversity. The defense needs to stop a pass that matters for a change. And can someone, anyone please fire Mike Bobo? Like, now. Before he can call another play. Grrrr.

But as I said. I'm not panicking. Yet.

If Madden NFL 10 is college calculus, Batman: Arkham Asylum is kindergarten finger painting.

To be fair, I've only played the demo. But to complete the demo, I only needed one button on my controller. Apparently anyone can be Batman, so long as they have an "X" button. This is the sort of behavior that I would expect from a Superman game. (Really, if you could shoot laser beams from your eyes, would it really matter if you had any other powers?) Run, punch. Sneak, punch. Drop from the ceiling, punch. While I'm not really expecting a solve-it-yourself Agatha Christie mystery in a video game, I would've like to have seen the World's Greatest Detective featured in something other than an upgraded River City Ransom.

Maybe I could forgive even this if I thought the game looked good. But a Batman wearing plate armor, Joker wearing makeup, Harley Quinn dressed as a circus slut, and a Jim Gordon who has been moonlighting as a body builder are hardly my idea of good design. (It's better than the designs in last year's hideous Mortal Kombat vs. The DC Universe, but then everyone involved with that game should have been subjected to Johnny Cage's Ball Breaker.) And Batman has pupils. Why, oh why, does arcade Batman have pupils? It's not like he's looking at anything.

Despite all of this, it may still be the best Batman game ever. That's damning with weak praise, indeed.

Madden NFL 10 loudly and proudly proclaims itself as the best NFL game on the market. But look a little closer and you'll realize that it is the only NFL game on the market. And it sucks.

If you haven't been playing Madden since 1989, don't bother picking up the controller unless your idea of a good time is sitting in rush hour traffic while the car next to you plays music you can't stand loud enough for you to hear over the sound of the horn blaring from the car behind you. Everything about the game is designed not for the football enthusiast but for the Madden-ophile, though the game would attempt to berate you into believing that the two terms are synonymous with its derogatory help text and insulting in-game commentary.

By "help text" I really mean "sarcastic text." Because while the instruction booklet includes an entire page devoted to button combinations for establishing a "Defensive Playmaker" without ever defining what exactly that is, its advice on how to complete a forward pass is limited to "Throw the Ball: X, A, B, Y, or LB." Needless to say, this "instruction" is surprisingly inadequate to the task of conveying the exact level of skill needed to get the ball to what would appear to be a wide open receiver but is in fact a masterfully created interception beacon for the CPU's defense.

Byzantine menus require hours of exploration to decipher. Franchise mode alone shows more non-football data about your team than you could glean in an entire week's worth of NFL Network coverage. Taking the time to navigate the dozens of unexplained play-calling options means that you hear only slightly more delay-of-game penalty whistles than in-game Snickers advertisements. (I'm not kidding: they're everywhere: Snickers heavily subsidized a game that still costs more than $60.) At any given time, there is more information on-screen than F-22 fighter pilots have in their 21st-century HUDs, which is kind of appropriate, as this "game" is more flight-simulator than sports recreation.

If you, like me, haven't at this point in life mastered Madden, the game insinuates, you don't know shit about football. Which is demonstrated in the game's only 2 levels of difficulty: Rookie, which is about as much like real football as a rousing game of Duck, Duck, Goose, and What-The-Fuck-Do-You-Think-You're-Doing-Noob? The learning curve is so steep that "imminent-failure cliff" is a better term to describe it.

So I guess if I don't know it by now, I never will. Oh, well. I just wanted to play an intuitive football game with my favorite teams and players. If Madden's too difficult for me, I guess I'll just go play... oh, that's right. Thank you, EA and NFL for your exclusive contracts. Nevermind.

I should note that the game isn't all bad. My favorite part of the game is the list of Hall of Famer players. Not that you can play them. It's just a list. Embedded in a video game. Taking up space. It's not even a complete list. Among those missing from the list of HoF members is none other thanJohn Madden, the man known for introducing the fun and excitement of the NFL to generations fo fans. And that really about sums this whole game up.

Welcome to Batman and Football Month, everybody!

The new Wriphe.com version 3.0 is now online. Some things have been moved, so a little reinvestigation (and re-bookmarking) may be necessary for those of you who don't come in through the front door.

Last night Katie Couric told me that U.S. Government studies reveal that the general public is skeptical of the need for a new flu vaccine. Among the concerns specifically included in her over-simplified info-graphic were the following three points:

1. people believe that the H1N1 virus is a "mild disease overblown by media";
2. the potentially dangerous "new vaccine developed too quickly";
3. and the standby "parent's fear for children's safety"

Putting aside the fact that the media informed me about the public's distrust of the media (curse you, CBS, for making me doubt that I doubt you!), this made me wonder: what does America trust anymore?

Point 1: Clearly it's not the media. They've enjoyed exaggerating the dangers of a flu virus variant that has almost exactly the same death rate as the standard flu. But wait, the media cries! This flu tends to kill the young instead of the elderly, the inverse of a typical flu virus, so be afraid! The media enjoys reporting the difference in ages as "years of lives lost", meaning that this virus kills more potential years than most preceding flu viruses. (I'm not making that up; I read it in Time magazine). That would make this the worst hypothetical danger ever besides perhaps the Death Star or the year 2012. Also, you'd best not take into account perennial potential-stealers such as SIDS, which has killed more babies than this new flu virus has killed humans over the same time span. So maybe this distrust in the media is valid.

Point 2: Clearly it's not the government. Big Brother Obama wants the vaccine deployed yesterday. Earlier this week, the White House "advised" the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to accelerate vaccine availability. HHS is the umbrella agency which provides oversight for the CDC, FDA, and NIH. And of course when the White House says jump, all Cabinet members, including the Secretary of the HHS, has to say how high or risk losing their jobs. So should people have concerns that the political expediency needs of the White House would cause the HHS to rush the production of a potentially dangerous vaccine before the appropriate alphabet agencies have had a chance to verify that it is safe? Yes, they should. (See President Ford's ill-fated 1976 mass inoculation program against swine flu for details.)

Point 3: Clearly it's not reason. Parents are so afraid of the side-effects of a vaccine of weakened virus that they'll run the risk of exposing their children to a strong, baby-killing flu virus instead? Do these same parents wrap their children in suits of padded bubble wrap? Cover their mouths and noses with tape to keep out smog and allergens? Keep them locked in the basement to avoid falling down stairways and being exposed to carcinogenic sunshine? Clearly God sends disease to punish us, so who are we to try and oppose his will? Who wants to live in a world where our entertainment outlets and elected government alike are out to kill us, anyway?

The cure may be worse than the disease, but I doubt that either is worse than the symptoms.

No post of significance today. I've been taking care of business working on a jigsaw puzzle of Elvis and watching preseason football. (I hadn't noticed, but apparently I've been in football withdrawal.) Sorry.

I have a friend -- a real friend, not the Facebook variety -- who has a specific use for Facebook: he's trying to become "friends" with all of his favorite character actor television stars of the 1970s. He's particularly partial to Don Stroud. Most of you would know Stroud from... well, most of you won't know him, but trust me when I say you've seen him in something. ("Facebook friend" is sure to soon be the new shorthand term for "that guy looks vaguely familiar.") My friend has also recently "befriended" Robert Conrad of Baa Baa Black Sheet and Wild Wild West fame (the man loves his alliteration) and Lynda Carter. Sweet, sweet Lynda Carter.

So maybe Facebook isn't all bad but that's as far as I'm willing to bend on that point.

All I've heard lately are cries about the inevitable destruction of America. The popular media is abuzz with stories of people determined to reveal that the planned federal health care reforms are really just an excuse to start a new wave of eugenic cleansing. Somehow, "damn Mexicans are stealing our jobs" became "damn bureaucrats are trying to kill our children," and no one seems to think that's really funny but me.

My father is convinced that the secret cabal manipulating the government of the United States is determined to take away all of his rights. Most recently he was concerned that soon all cars on the interstate highways will be driven by computers, removing the ability of citizens to drive wherever they want. I'll bet we'll glad we cashed in all those clunkers for new cars when we're walking everywhere.

Meanwhile, a friend of mine has been complaining that the federal government will soon take away all of our handguns. This will be a problem, he says, when the oppressed criminal class of America (by which he means citizens who are or have been sentenced to prison, estimated to be 1 in 13 citizens and fast growing) stage their armed uprising against the American justice system. This will prove the old adage: when guns are outlawed, only most people will have guns.

It's not enough anymore to just hate gays and women anymore. If your pet theory doesn't involve government conspiracies or the end of the world, you're practically un-American. I'll bet it's all that fluoride the Jews have been putting in our water. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Old Age is like a zombie. No matter how fast you run, it's still coming slowly but inevitably towards you with a desire to eat your brains until you're dead.

When I was young, the world feared the effects of a nuclear war that could end mankind as we had come to know it in a matter of days, if not hours. These days, kids seem to be more concerned about the effects of using non-renewable resources such as coal and oil. I'm pretty sure that no matter how old I get, I'll never be more concerned about the extinction of endangered species or the melting of ice caps than I am of the possibility of unexpectedly finding myself trapped in a glow-in-the-dark corpse. Hard to believe that within a generation, people have moved from fearing sudden, immediate death to fearing the use of gasoline-powered automobiles. Is that really an improvement?

This trend is clearly visible in modern movies, where nuclear war seems to have lost some of it's impact. Of course, I have complained in the past that in The Day The Earth Stood Still remake the aliens aren't worried about man's use of The Bomb, but of how we treat our own environment. (Why the fuck do aliens travel across the infinite reaches of space to warn us that they will kill us if we don't stop killing ourselves? Ugh.) In the recent movie version of the 1986 Watchman comic book, the solution to imminent nuclear war was nuclear war. (Not a perfect adaptation to Alan Moore's original solution: fake aliens.) And in this past weekend's G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the 1980s Cold War sentiment directed at a child audience has been adapted from an evil anarchist organization threatening world destruction into the "mature" story of a weapons manufacturer who wants to destroy manmade things. (Presumably, natural things will only be damaged if Cobra is really pissed off, not as a byproduct of some stupid explosion. How urbane.)

What's next? Movies extolling the virtues of laying miles of recycled water bottles instead of asphalt in roads so that less energy can be expended on the nation's highways-turned-conveyor belts? Sci-fi flicks where the creature is mutated not by nuclear tests but by "inorganic" corn crops? A remake of Dr. Strangelove where the world is doomed not by overzealous militants but by overaggressive fishing practices? A modern Soylent Green in which the hero proclaims that "Soylent Green is people," and he's happy about it?

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd really rather duck and cover my eyes than watch these. The old ways may not be the best ways, but if you ask me, they certainly make for better cinema.

After a focused site re-tooling and a couple of long nights, Boosterrific.com is now the number 2 return in Google on the key phrase "Booster Gold" (behind Wikipedia, curse them). I consider this to be something of an accomplishment. Maybe not so great as founding a country or curing smallpox, perhaps, but certainly better than having a million Twitter followers or running a multi-million dollar business into the ground. So, congratulations to me.

For reasons I'm not going to go into (use your imagination), I was recently trying to think of a superhero name for a painter. And it occurred to me that painters simply aren't super heroes.

Frustrated painters can become super villains (such as Crazy Quilt and Rainbow Raider), but never super heroes. (Sure, some become comic book illustrators -- Captain America and Green Lantern come to mind -- but that's hardly the same thing. Anyone can tell you that comic book illustrators aren't real artists.) Is this because the act of painting, a cathartic translation of thought, beautiful or otherwise, from ephemera to tangible is innately opposed to the destructive violence generally employed for subduing criminals? Or perhaps because painters have to spend so much time in a studio honing their craft that they don't have the opportunity to master gymnastics and Karate, necessary super hero skills? Maybe it's because painters spend all their time looking at things, unable to rouse themselves from marveling at the beautiful shapes formed by stark blue and red police lights to answer the sound of a bank's alarm siren.

Seems to me that the world is ready for a slew of super powered painters, charging forward with their brushes primed to cover man's inhumanity to man with a new veneer of peace and order. Painters would gain their super powers by accidentally coming into contact with experimental radioactive pigments, unusual combinations of toxic turpentine fumes, or still life compositions of creatively arranged alien meteor fragments. Heroes named Action Painter, Cadmium Kid, Color Crusader, Maul Stick, or the White Brush would band together on teams such as the Complementary Colors, Palette of Order, or (my favorite) The New Masters.

But then again, maybe not. Most of the painters I've met are pretentious dicks who I'd never want to see in tights. So maybe the lack of painter heroes is all for the best. Nevermind.

We're playing with IP address changes today here at Wriphe.com that may will cause some connection problems, at least temporarily. Should be solved soon. Thank you for your patience.

With football season fast approaching, it's time to address a serious question: advertising on jerseys. Is it acceptable to turn players into living billboards, or is it the final sign of the apocalypse for which we've been waiting? As you'd expect, I'm completely against it, though I can certainly understand the argument for it. However, I think the line needs to be drawn somewhere, especially in college, which is ironically where the most advertising currently takes place. (I'm looking at you Nike.)

The NBA and NHL recently announced that they were considering it, and the NFL allows it on practice jerseys. (Translation: it's coming.) This isn't a surprise, as the NBA will sell anything not nailed down in order to generate enough revenue to sign their latest thug-of-the-month. The Reebok wordmark on modern NHL jerseys already eclipses some team names. MLB uniforms already have patches everywhere, and it's only a matter of time before the designs of those patches transmute from "World Series Champion: 2009" to "World's Best Wings: Just $1.99." (I'm looking at you, CITI Field.)

Perhaps we are conditioned to accept advertising on jerseys after years of seeing "Chico's Bail Bonds" on Little League jerseys. But that doesn't mean that the professional leagues, which are already charging us an arm and a leg for the honor of attending their games, should be selling ad space on their players' bodies to supplement their already over-inflated incomes. (I'm looking at you, Yankee Stadium.)

With stadium seats priced higher than a HD television and television contract revenue exceeding the price of government automobile bailouts, why should I be stuck with the eyesore of Miami Dolphins wearing Landshark Lager ads on their helmets? Is there no pride anymore? Wait, nevermind. I'm pretty sure I'm not ready for the answer.

For the first time in 2 years (more or less), I missed a day blogging yesterday. And I don't really have a good excuse.

I woke up and immediately found myself on an unexpected trip to Fry's Electronics to purchase a new television. Fry's , like the cosmos itself, is way too big to wrap your head around. I swear that place is bigger than the Hartsfield airport hangers. People just wander around lost in a sea of unending electronic goodies. Truly, it's the American Dream at it's finest/worst (depending on your point of view).

Finally finding the television we wanted (after consulting an aging roadmap, wandering for hours, and and finally gathering directions some friendly Bedouins), we left Fry's only to end up on an unplanned trip to my father's house. "If you're so close, you could at least drop by and visit your lonely old man," I think is a direct quote. Next thing I know, I'm helping dad with his livestock. Whoopee.

Four hours later, we returned home, only to be summoned to my mother's aid. Like my father, she was lonely. However, she didn't request our company, she demanded it, which was probably wise on her part. Mom came over and had dinner with us, and shortly thereafter fell asleep on my bed, right next to my computer. I certainly couldn't compose a blog entry with my mother sleeping, see? (I might be heartless, but I'm not cruel.)

So I was forced to spend the next several hours playing Half-Life 2 on our new HD TV before passing out on the sofa. I didn't mean to not post anything here, but you can see that events conspired against me. Please forgive me, I'll try harder next time.

My computer's hard drive is failing. It's 7 years old and holds a maximum of 75 GB of information. When I bought it, 75 GB was a lot of space. Now, not so much. I suspect that Hello Kitty toy laptops for little girls are more powerful than my aging PC.

When I put it together, it was pretty good. Not top of the line, but ahead of the curve, and that was good enough for me. However, the world is beginning to pass my computer by. Once the dashing Tron, my computer now more closely resembles the aged Dumont. It sleeps in, wakes up when it's good and ready, and ambles around, scratching it's ass and grumbling until it feels sufficiently aware enough to get down to business. (Computer and I have that bit in common.)

Now my computer is showing the signs of early onset Alzheimer's. It randomly forgets things, unexpectedly ignores me, makes funny noises at the oddest moments, and absentmindedly stops working on a whim. I need to start saving up the money for the inevitable end; I don't care what the President says, socialized health care simply won't help combat old age.

It was 40 years ago today that man first landed on the moon. Now the generation that supported that amazing scientific achievement is more concerned with universal health care than they are with exploring the universe.

I suspect that I will not see a man on the moon in my lifetime. Even though it was essentially accomplished in a decade the first time around, it took a drive that seems to be completely lacking in the post-Cold War era. Say what you will about competition, but it gets things done. (Yes, I'm talking to you, socialists!)

I suppose I'll have to content myself with cheering for machines that are designed to do a man's job, such as the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, each of which continues to do a stellar job of investigating an alien environment over 5 years after their original mission was scheduled to end. Certainly no human would be willing to do that.

Despite the study having been published months ago in Social Science Quarterly, it has just been brought to my attention that my name marks me as someone "more likely to engage in criminal activity" than the average boy. At least if I were a juvenile native to Pennsylvania, where the study was conducted by Shippensburg University faculty.

What this means is that the ratio between the number of juveniles in the state who share my name and the number of those juveniles who are officially considered "delinquents" is abnormally high. The study's conclusion is not that certain names make for inherently bad people, but that families predisposed to certain socioeconomic conditions are more likely to name their children certain names. In other words, I'm not bad, my family is.

Throw in the fact that the maternal half of my family which is partial to the name "Walter" is also fond of "Alec," another of the study's 10 worst names, and you can begin to get a sense of where my family may be headed. My mother's sister recently nicknamed a dog "Luke," yet another of the 10 worst names, but I'm not sure that this really counts because it's a nickname for "Lucifer," which definitely was not on the list.

For the record, the names are Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan (my favorite: I always knew Ivan was trouble),  Kareem, Luke, Malcolm,  Preston, Tyrell and Walter. That's alphabetical order, not most troublesome.

After yet another long day behind a keyboard, coding to solve an apparently insolvable problem for an apparently endless contract that will never, ever pay me back what I've put into it (around the house, we call this project "Tar Baby"), I was at the end of my rope. I had passed through frustrated to embittered, and was now firmly entrenched in seething hatred. As the darkness wrapped my soul in a smothering blanket of searing fury, I contemplated doing something rash, something terrible. I was finally ready to turn to a life of remorseless super-villainy!

The world would fear my name as it trembled under my iron fist! I would crush my opposition and take what rightfully belonged to me! The huddled masses would cower before my very name!

In a rage, I flung myself up from my disconsolate sulking and reached for something tasty to fuel the sour flame roiling deep in my belly. Seizing at some leftover chinese food, I snapped open a fortune cookie, savagely crunching into the stale, cement-textured dough, and forcing myself to choke down the desiccated, partially masticated bolus. Only once I was half-way through the masochistic exercise of eating this "cookie" did I glance at the small worm-like paper that had fallen to the counter. It read:

So the next time you are wondering why someone did something completely insane like climbing the outside of a skyscraper with no safety wires, wrestling naked with a dozen starving pit bulls, initializing a new round of ethnic cleansing, or running for public office, just remember: a fortune cookie probably told them to do it.

Meanwhile, realizing that a unusually Emersonian fortune cookie was actually encouraging me to devote my remaining life to hurting other people as revenge against intransigent css and insolvent destitution, I shelved my plans for world domination.

For now.

What's the best way to beat the heat on a hot summer day? If you said read The Adventures of Kool-Aid Man comic book, you're right!

Archie comics published a half dozen issues of this thing back in the 80s, and boy, is it a product of it's time. I count 2 "rad"s,3 "awesome"s, and13 "wacky"s, the 1980s equivalent of the 1990s "extreme." " Oh Yeah!" is said 12 times, all by Kool-Aid Man, making Kool-Aid Man the comic book equivalent of J.J. Evens or Arnold Drummond.

And this is a typical Archie style comic book: light reading about a bunch of kids and an oversized animate pitcher of sugar water who just want to have fun. Standing in their way is a slit glasses-wearing living flame named Scorch, who like all anthropomorphized flames, just wants to ruin everybody's good time, but not in a way that really causes anyone lasting pain or anguish. (He's an imp, not a terrorist. The only American who cared about terrorists in the 1980s was Chuck Norris, who spent hundreds of hours at the theater keeping america's shores safe in such classics as Lone Wolf McQuade, Delta Force, and my personal favorite, Invasion, U.S.A.) The book is drawn by Dan Decarlo, THE Archie artist.

My only gripe about this book is the manner in which it attempts to promote the (at the time) latest Kool-Aid flavor, Berry Blue. Knowing that there wasn't any real relationship between fruit and their licensed product of water-additive, the manufacturers instead decided to have Kool-Aid Man work a little "blue." Reading "The Wacky And Wild Dance Party" in this issue, it doesn't seem like the marketing department really gave their plan enough thought:

Wait, what did she just say? Is it just me, or doesn't that sound like slang for something that does NOT need to be in an Archie comic book, which is ostensibly , you know, for kids?

Nope, it's not just me. Of course they're out of step, Beth, you've led Kool-Aid Man into the Blue Ball Room! (That's not cool or refreshing, Kool-Aid Man!) With dialogue like "I can't meet the beat," someone else had to be in on this joke as well. If you ask me, I think this story gives a new and terrible meaning to the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid."

Back on March 26, I was willing to give Burger King the benefit of the doubt for using the porn slang term "Burger Shots" to market their new mini-hamburgers. But now loyal reader and good friend of the blog Ken Harrison points out something that's obliterates my good faith presumptions by being a bit too obvious to misunderstand:

While I'm sure that the King is very proud to have a Super Seven Incher (as he should be: the average American male's "sandwich" is more aptly named an Average Five-And-A-Half Incher), I'm not so sure that this is the best way to sell a sandwich. Or anything else. Assuming half of the population wants to put something like that in their mouth, it's a pretty safe bet that the other half will go out of their way to avoid it. So right off the bat, Burger King is cutting its potential advertising audience in half unless they are hanging these promotions up in prisons.

On the plus side, as far as names go, that's waaay better than The King's Weiner.

Seriously, Burger King, you're starting to freak me out. When I think of sex, I don't want to think of flame-broiled meat. I don't think that coitus should have the lingering musty smell of old Whopper. And I don't think I want to put your meat anywhere near my mouth. Keep this up, and I just might have to become a vegetarian so that your stiff french fires and sultry milk shakes won't be molesting me in my dreams. (If only cucumbers didn't look so much like large penises. <shudder>)

Signs that you're getting old: you don't recognize the coins in your pocket. Arriving home from the grocery store, I reached into my pocket and withdrew 32¢: one quarter, one nickel, and two pennies. And I'd never seen any of them before.

I know that they're making quarters for every state in the union, but this one was quite unexpected: it's Puerto Rico. The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is a self-governing US territory. Puerto Rican citizens have dual US/Puerto Rican citizenship, but are not subject to US income taxes. Though its citizens are allowed to vote in US elections, they have no direct voice in the US congress. So why exactly are they on my money? While I think it's cute that Puerto Ricans have finally taken their place beside the Indians Native Americans as currency mascots of protestant Manifest Destiny, I'd personally much rather see a powerful bison or majestic eagle on my coins than an advertisement for a tropical tourist trap that I'm paying to help support.

Speaking of buffaloes, the nickel in my pocket was the most familiar coin. On one side was Thomas Jefferson and on the other was Monticello. That's what was on nickels when I was a kid. Heck, it's what was on nickels when my grandfather was a kid! Only now Mad Tom sits off to the left of the coin, smirking at me. I'm sure he didn't pull that sort of sass with my grandfather, or his generation never would have given up their buffalo nickels. A quick search through the spare change cup on my desk uncovers not one or two but five (!) different nickel designs, none dated prior to 1996. That's 6 different coins in just over a decade! If they weren't all exactly the same size, I know I'd be in trouble at motel vending machines.

The two 2009-minted cents I received showcase Abe Lincoln on both sides, presumably because you can never, ever get enough Lincoln. "Heads" is the Lincoln portrait that's been tarnishing on pennies for a century, and "tails" is what will no doubt become known as the "lazy Lincoln" portrait of young Lincoln shunning his wood-chopping duties to read what I'm sure was the 19th-century equivalent of Us Weekly Magazine. An internet search reveals that there are 4 different cent designs released this year in a tribute to Lincoln's 200th birthday, with more due next year.

Why so many all-new, all-different coins? Both pennies and nickels have in recent years cost more than their face value to make, so why are we making so damned many? Is the US Treasury desperately hoping that people will take these coins out of circulation as "collectibles" so that the world won't ever catch on to just how many they're minting? (Hello? Inflation?) If so, they should go ahead and start making Obama coins. I'm sure that there are still quite a few people out there who would each save a few hundred Obama 3¢ pieces figuring to use them to put their kids through college once they've skyrocketed in value.

Meanwhile, if you're forced to stand behind me at Target, I apologize in advance for the wait. It's probably probably because I'm trying to figure out what combination of round collectible discs will add up to the 69¢ I need to buy penny candy. Now I know why all old people need glasses.

I spent this past weekend at a fine art opening in the Miller Gallery, located in the picturesque Hyde Park region of Cincinnati, Ohio. But before you congratulate me, let me say that it wasn't my opening. I was a tagalong. (The proverbial "third wheel," not the tasty Girl Scout Cookie.) This event was for real artists, not graphic/web designers. So what if I can write scripts in php so elegant that you could cry? You don't code with a paint brush. (If you did, it'd be really hard to see the monitor.)

Painters are a funny lot. On the whole, I don't suspect that we are any different than the rest of the population. Sure, most of us are driven by a desire to flee typical social conventions. And maybe more than our share have a fear of soap and water. But by and large, artists are exactly the same as anyone else: put enough of them in a room, and you'll get the spontaneously occurring artist's version of the pissing contest. With artists, it's always whose theory is best. The problem with this, of course, is that unlike the traditional pissing-contest arbitration method of comparing sexual conquests, which can be qualified and quantified, artists are forced to prove whose figurative brush is biggest by comparing their lifestyles: "I'm more artistically countercultural than you are!"

At a rather posh dinner this weekend one artist bragged that he didn't watch television, as it drained his creativity just as it does the millions of huddled masses who spend hour after hour on the couch. (He said this wearing a shirt that looked as though it had never seen an iron.) Not to be one-upped, another questioned everyone else's integrity by challenging their satisfaction and drive. (The only way to nirvana is through suffering. Not selling enough $2,000 paintings, it would seem, counts as very painful.) A third complained/boasted that long hours in the studio led to excessive loneliness. (Though you wouldn't have any idea that he was friendless based on the number of patron names he was dropping.)

If this sounds stupid, that's because it is. All of these artists are fantastically talented. However, having great technique is like having the most expensive car in your neighborhood: everyone knows, but that's not going to stop you from bragging.

Meanwhile, I spent most of the weekend trying to stay out of their way to intermediate degrees of success. Still, every day is a learning opportunity, and following is a short list of information gathered while I was out of pocket:

• If a Cinicinnatian offers to let you swim in their pool, do it. It's really the path of least resistance.
• Speaking of Cincinnatians, word to the wise: they don't think that WKRP jokes are funny.
• Chicks dig robots and doughnuts with sprinkles.
• Unlike Paul Newman, if you're going to deface a parking meter, wait until after midnight and act like you know what you're doing.
• Bicycle racing is like poetry: it's created only for the enjoyment of the writer/rider and is really, really boring to everyone else.

So a good time was had by all. Unlike most gallery owners, everyone associated with the Miller Gallery is a gem of a human being. (Read: Buy their art.) I'll have to go back one day soon, as I didn't find out until after the trip that Cincinnati's Union Terminal Train Station was the inspiration for the Super Friends' Hall of Justice. Sightseeing fail!

By the way, If you're an art fan, you may wish to check out the work of artists Jessica Hess, Eric Joyner, and Otto Lange. Be sure not to judge them by their web sites, though. After all, while they're fantastic painters and really great people, they're not graphic/web designers.

Since we're already on the uplifting topic of death, it should be noted that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the suicide of George Reeves. Reeve's contested suicide has given rise to the so-called Superman Curse. (Wikipedia has a whole page devoted to it here.)

I find it hard to believe that there is some cosmic conspiracy against those who have worked so hard to bring the stories of Superman to the great unwashed masses. However, even I have to admit that one of Superman's greatest vulnerabilities has always been magic. So if I were you, Hakeem Bennett, I'd think twice before I started calling myself "The Kid Who Saved Superman."

If you were unaware, Hakeem won an essay contest and was earlier this month rewarded with his own appearance in a Superman book. That's right: his reward for writing a story was something else to read. What they should have given him was a signal watch. Curse or no, Superman has a lot of enemies who might not take kindly to having their enemy saved by the intervention of some special-needs kid and his blind teacher.

In honor of the death of Michael Jackson, I present the only "meeting" between the King of Pop and the Man of Steel of which I am aware: the cover of the All-New Collector's Edition: Superman vs. Muhammad Ali.

And while Superman doesn't actually say hi to Jack-o on the inside of this book, he doesn't actually fight Muhammad Ali, either. (Go figure.)

Beginning in July, DC Comics is partnering with USA Today to present Superman comic strips reprinted from the upcoming Wednesday Comics limited-series. There is irony in the fact that DC is using newspapers to promote a comic featuring a character that was originally prepared for but rejected by newspapers. This irony seems to be lost on DC Comics which instead of promoting Superman's triumphant return to newspaper comics pages has been advertising Wednesday Comics as a 16-page "history-making" "newspaper-format" comic available direct to the public for a mere $3.99 per week! Buzzword Alert: "newspaper-format" means a folded, not stapled, comic book. Now compare that exciting offer to a standard modern comic book which has 2 staples, 22 pages, monthly issues, and a cover price of $2.99. No doubt this is test-market of a low production cost, high profit margin venture for DC disguised as a once-in-a-lifetime collectible opportunity. And therein lies a larger irony: that DC Comics may be turning to the tactics of an expiring newspaper industry to try and save an expiring comic book industry. If only the slide-rule and the 8-track cassette could have teamed up somehow, eh?

Tomorrow is Father's Day. It will be the first post-father Father's Day for Clark Kent, whose father died of a heart attack last October. Unless you count the 49 years of comic book stories in which Pa Kent was already dead before his sudden resurrection in 1986. Or the movies, in which Glenn Ford's Pa Kent suffered a heart attack in 1978. Or on television, where John Schneider's Pa Kent heart attack struck in 2006. But why nitpick?

Now who will Superman play catch with? Who will spank Superman when he plays hooky from school, or send him to his room without supper when he breaks the neighbor's fence? Who will give Superman a ride to the library, or lend him a sawbuck for a date with his sweetheart? Nobody, that's who. And that's pretty darn sad.

Let's just hope that the bitter pill of traumatic loss won't linger in Superman's gut, where the heartburn could fester into a burning sensation of hatred, destroying Superman's legendary appetite for Coca-Cola, apple pie, and a heaping helping of everything else boiling together in that great American melting pot.

Uh-oh.

Aw, snap, Superman! I know that Superman took the day off to spend in Metropolis Park as Clark Kent with his lovely co-worker, Lois Lane, but that doesn't mean that you have to be an asshole about the death of the little boy by way of an out-of-control commuter airplane, does it?

Although, maybe I should cut Kal-el some slack here. Think of the odds! If there is a reported 1 in 10 million chance that an American boy were to be hit by falling airplane parts -- reportedly the same odds, coincidentally, of any one person becoming U.S. President -- what are the odds that the boy would be hit by a plane in Metropolis on the one day that Superman is taking a "me" day? (I see you back there thinking, "probably better odds than the chance that the lone infant survivor of a doomed planet would survive untested travel through space to develop amazing powers and become the adored moral hero of his adopted homeworld." We don't need your kind of cynicism here.)

Sorry, Superman. It won't happen again.

What hates cars more than Superman, the Man of Steel? Superman, the Truck of Monster!

Surely, you've seen this before. Action Comics #1 is the godfather of the modern American super hero comic book. Though not the first comic to feature all-new content, characters, or action, it is the first appearance of a super powered hero (Superman, of course). A lot has been written about this issue and it's significance to the American psyche. However, one thing bugs me about most critical analysis: the make of the car.

Most simply reference the object of Superman's wrath a "car" or "sedan." Come now, we can do better than that, can't we? How can we, Americans, with our insatiable lust for the automobile and the goods and evils that accompany it, continue to ignore this perfect marriage between super heroic violence and the American Dream-mobile?

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman sometime in 1933. Although Action Comics #1 was published in 1938, the contents were largely stitched together from panels of unsold newspaper strips. While this means that the automobile pictured inside could be any model sedan marketed prior to 1939, it is most probable that the car depicted was a model year between 1933 and 1938, as artist Shuster likely cribbed the image from a magazine advertisement or photograph in the typical style of the deadline-driven graphic artist. (To paraphrase the immortal words of artist Wally Wood, "never draw what you can copy.")

The car is clearly a mid-1930s four-door touring sedan. They sold spectacularly well, even during the Depression. Every manufacturer made at least one. So which one is it?

First of all, this car is not a Studebaker. Author Chris Knowles and Illustrator Mark Engblom both make such claims in some otherwise insightful online commentary. However, there's one glaring error with those claims: the car doesn't look much like a Studebaker. The 1934-35 Studebaker Land Cruiser (whose body styling was introduced to the public at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair via a spectacular 28-feet tall scale model) doesn't have suicide doors. By 1936, Studebaker's touring sedans had split-windshields, as became the popular choice of most manufacturers within a year.

So if it's not a Studebaker, what can we see about this car that may tell us which one it was specifically? Three things are worth noting: the single-pane windshield with it's curved bottom edges; the angled, horizontally-ribbed grill; and the curve of the detailing above the rear fender.

Like Studebaker, Oldsmobile was using split windshields by 1936. Chevrolet's sedans were very square with straight line detailing. Ford marketed Fordor Model 48 sedans in 1935 and 1936, though again, their body detailing doesn't match the car shown. Not surprisingly, most of the manufacturers making touring sedans (Buick, Ford, Hudson, LaSalle, Packard, Pontiac) fail to meet at least one of the criteria established. Yet the 1937 Chrysler sedans appear to be good matches.

Chrysler produced nearly identical touring sedans with the Chrysler, Dodge, DeSoto, and Plymouth nameplates. These models have minor superficial differences, though their general features are all a great match to Superman's sedan. The car that appears between the pages of Action Comics #1 appears to have different front grills in different panels. It is possible that Shuster used different cars for different panels, depending on which angle he was drawing. Maybe he even had a brochure featuring many of Chryslers sedans. (Chrysler was not shy about the cross promotion.) However, after comparison, the 1937 DeSoto touring sedan is perhaps the best match for the grill depicted on the car in Superman's hands on the cover.

It's worth noting that the DeSoto sedan differs from the 1937 Dodge D5 sedan only slightly in the grill and via the bonnet side-vent panels. Hastily-drawn line-art of the two would be practically indistinguishable. Since Dodge was already advertising "toughness" in 1938 (and had already adopted it's now-familiar ram hood ornament), it's quite possible that the car Superman is destroying is intended to be a Dodge. What better way to demonstrate the power of a Man of Steel than to have him destroy something Ram Tough?

So now you know. In any event, Superman hates Chrysler. And when Superman hates you, you don't stay in business.

What's the best way to get super powers? Visit a distant planet? Douse yourself in a chemical cocktail? Walk into a nuclear reactor? Get bitten by genetically-altered animals? Hone your mind through rigorous study? Join a circus high-wire act? Become a world-class sharpshooter? None of the above. Just spend a lot of time around another super powered individual, and before you know it, you'll be walking on air.

Every guy shares his life with his loves. So it's no wonder that Lois Lane and Lana Lang should enjoy the power of their super boyfriend.

Note that when his friends get a load of Superman sharing with his best ladies, things take a dramatic turn for the dramatic. Inside every best friend, apparently, lurks a jealous super-caveman.

Even Superman has mentors. Presumably, they handle the Superman's powers better than Superman's peers have.

So remember, kids, if you want super powers, you need super friends. Or at the very least, move to the same town as someone who already has super poweres.

I'm sure it's been said before, but it bears repeating that the scientists on Krypton weren't very bright. From a race with "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men," only one scientist realized that the planet was dying from an unstable and radioactive core malfunction. And it's rather ironic that the one scientist who was concerned about the destruction of his home world, Jor-El, had previously invented a device to transfer people to another dimension, the Phantom Zone Projector, and promptly used that amazing device to fill the newly discovered dimension with criminals. (Oops. Even for superior Kryptonian physiology, hindsight is 20-20, I suppose.)

Following the Kryptonian-ruling Science Council's refutation of Jor-El's theory of Krypton's impending destruction (which had been unwisely published in the Krypton Journal of Mad Science) and refusing to escape into a prison of his own design, Jor-El focused his efforts on building rockets to save the population of Krypton. Up to this time, advanced Kryptonian scientists had concentrated on building flying cars, humanoid robots with advanced artificial intelligence, interdimensional travel, inter-planetary nuclear missiles, and interstellar space probes, but no member of their advanced society had endeavored to create a means by which a Kryptonian could escape Krypton. Unless, of course, you count the city of Kandor's interaction with interstellar travelers such as Braniac, Jor-El's relatives who discovered alternate dimensions similar to the Phantom Zone such as the Survival Zone, Argo City's orbital domed habitat, or even the Kryptonians who used rockets to flee Krypton and settle the planet Daxam. Yet the noble Jor-El eschewed the work of other, lesser scientists, and designed his own rocket that was, um, better and, um, different than those that had gone before.

Jor-El theorized that the entire population of Krypton could be relocated to the planet Earth, where Kryptonians would have powers like gods. Like all good scientists, he built his rocket in miniature and ran tests. (World coming to an end? Don't rush out and build a full-sized rocket, Dr. Zarkov. You can't violate your prime directive: the Scientific Method must be maintained or survival means nothing!) In his first test, Jor-El launched the family dog into space. That rocket got lost, but no worries; the experience only proved how right he was to run tests. Jor-El followed this with a more successful trial of a rocket piloted by the family monkey. (An inadvertent side-effect of this trial was that the monkey immediately developed a lust for space travel and would as a result survive the destruction of Krypton. Beware the runaway space monkey!) However, before Jor-El could build a full-sized rocket for himself and his lovely wife Lara, in a moment of panic Lara stuffed their newborn son into the test rocket and launched it into space. Kryptonians didn't have pets or children; they had test subjects.

And so it is fitting that the son of Krypton's most esteemed scientist, Jor-El, and the only survivor of the destruction of the science-obsessed planet of Krypton (not counting those aforementioned Kandorans, Phantom/Survival Zone Kryptonians, Argoans, Daxamites, or lone monkey) has become renowned for solving problems not through scientific investigation and methodical trial, but with his fists. "Truth, Justice, and the American Way" sounds great, but it doesn't mean much if you can't back it up with a good right hook.

Every comics blog has mentioned it. ABC, CBS, CNN, and Fox consider it newsworthy. Highbrow magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly have devoted column space to it. Even The Times of India has reported the story that Archie Andrews is planning a wedding. The Toronto Globe and Mail has told me that where I stand on the Betty vs. Veronica debate describes my political proclivities. And, of course, wedding planning sites such as weddingbells.ca and onewed.com are very excited. Me? Not so much.

This smells to me of a sales gimmick. Not that Archie really needs one. His Double Digest sells well enough in toy stores, drug stores checkout aisles, and direct mailings to sit alongside X-Men comic books sold in more distinguished "direct market" outlets. Archie has, for the 68 years of his existence, played the roll of empty-headed teenager perpetually enrolled at Riverdale High. His biggest problems have always been which flavor malted to buy and how high to cuff his jeans. That's his niche, and it's why reader flock to his stories.

Marriage would mean a whole new paradigm for Archie: supporting a family, fretting about house payments, and struggling with his golf game. Change of this nature is not the sort of thing that the Archie audience (or the American audience, for that matter) typically wants when they tune in for fun and frolicking high school stories. Personally, I can think of only one instance where a a long-running, fitful courtship/love triangle has sorted itself out and maintained audience interest: Superman and Lois Lane.

Superman and Lois Lane were married in 1997 following 60 years of courtship. Superman's problems have always been more mature than Archie's: saving Metropolis from organized crime, preventing volcanic eruptions from obliterating villages, and traveling through time to repair the course of history are not even in the same class as remembering to keep your fly zipped after a bathroom break during the spring formal. Marriage is exactly the sort of real-world danger that confronts a Superman but is avoided by an Archie. If a man who can trim the hedges with heat-vision, listen to how his wife's day went from 20 miles away, and bring an entire milking factory home on his way home from the office still has a hard time keeping his rocky relationship with his wife afloat, what hope does Archie have?

Archie has more in common with Spider-Man than Superman, and Spidey's marriage to Mary Jane Watson was such a dead-end for stories that Marvel spent decades trying to separate the two, eventually resolving the problem by having the Devil annul their marriage. Could Archie end up one day performing satanic rituals to undo the terrible decision he's made? Could be. Stranger things have happened.

[Sorry for the delay on this post. Internet was down. Again. It's a very inasupicious beginning for Superman Month.]

I mentioned the puppy in an earlier post. Like all puppies, Charlie is a little engine of destruction. And that's exactly why they're all so damn cute. If they weren't cute, we'd kill them.

While searching the internet for a serial killer referenced in Jack Webb's The Badge, my searches kept coming up with sites with online dating tips.

Turns out that Stephen Nash, a man convicted for the murder of a man and child (just two of the 11 he claimed to have killed; he withheld details of the other 9 victims in demand for payment which the state of California refused) in and around Los Angeles in 1956, shares his name with Stephen Nash, self-promoting dating coach and author.

My searches were waylaid by the fact that the advice of the modern Mr. Stephen Nash is apparently not nearly as hard to come by as the mythical girlfriend that he is promoting. A quick search indicates that his help can be provided through such sites as datingsecretsformen.com, eseduce.com, how-to-get-a-girlfriend.com, natural-pickup.com, seductiontuition.com, and thecompletetoolbox.com (which should really just drop the word "box" from it's name, as it compares its dating gurus to comic book super heroes, clearly indicating it's target audience: Me).

On thecompletetoolbox.com, Mr. Nash is compared to the X-Men member Iceman (who most X-Men fans will recognize as something of an immature, brat). However, if these people have to be compared to comic book characters, they should be compared not to heroes but to villains. You know, those that seek to dominate the world, but don't really have a very good plan for what they'd do with it once they've gotten it. They're like a super sexed-up Galactus, slathering themselves in industrial-strength hair product and Axe body-wash, "devouring" the Earth, and then dumping it via a text message while cruising galactic nightclubs looking for other planets to seduce.

These sites apparently represent the tip of the iceberg of the secretive alliance of PUAs. PUA stands for "Pick Up Artist," by the way. For some reason the "seduction community," or section of society that actively hunts female flesh in the same way that a Big Game Hunter (BGH) chases rhino horns, adores acronyms. Not that there's anything wrong with that, IMO.

And In case you were wondering, Google finally found that serial killer I was looking for here, in the Aug. 21, 1959, edition of the Eugene Register-Guard, among others in its newspaper archives. Thank you, Google.

P.S.: To be fair, one of those PUAs over on tehcompletetoolbox.com is compared to a villain: the Joker. Ah, to aspire to being a sociopathic mass-murderer. That should wow the ladies. I won't be surprised if that guy's name is found only after thorough holographic searches of archaic html documents in the year 2059.

New puppy in the house, breaking all the rules. I don't think you ever really realize how comfortably complacent you've become with the status quo until a new puppy forces you to reorganize everything in the house to ensure that nothing important gets chewed up or peed on. New puppies are notoriously big fans of dangling participles and all the trouble they can cause.

Found item: this ticket stub is 10 years old this week.

It's from the midnight debut of Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace at the Regal Cinemas Hollywood 24 at I-85 (built on the location of the old I-85 Drive-In). Ah, to be young and have faith in George Lucas again.

Appropriately enough, I re-discovered this ticket stub in my copy of Preacher: Ancient History. It's going back so that I can find it again in 10 more years.

In between networks promos and local cable advertisements during The Penguins of Madagascar (clearly they've run out of good names for cartoons these days) on Nickelodeon, I encountered two the most senseless commercials I've seen in recent months.

The first was an ad for Honey Nut Cheerios featuring their animated mascot, Buzz. The only problem with this commercial was that it didn't make any sense. Honest-to-goodness transcript as follows:

BEE: Buzz, everybody's at the Honey Geyser to make Honey Nut Cheerios!

BUZZ: Yeah, 'cause here comes the honey!

Honey Geyser erupts, but then is drawn back in on itself in a honey vortex.

BUZZ: Where's it going? Come on!

No one follows Buzz into the vortex.

BUZZ: Where am I? And the honey... It's being sucked into that mummy's tomb!

Cue glowing, growing, growling sarcophagus.

BUZZ: I've only got one shot at this!

Buzz points his wooden honey dipper like a magic wand at the sarcophagus. The honey dipper releases electricity which topples nearby obelisks, damming the honey stream, causing the sarcophagus to shrink.

SARCOHPGOUS: Nooooooooo!

BUZZ: Yes!

Buzz leaves as the geyser starts flowing again.

BEE: Buzz, you're safe!

BUZZ: And so's our honey, so everybody can have delicious Honey Nut Cheerios.

VOICEOVER: It's the honey sweet part of a good breakfast. From the hive that's nuts about honey.

Lessons learned: honey comes from honey geysers, is coveted by bee-mummies (who present only a mild inconvenience, and honey dippers are electrical in nature. None of which makes me want to eat cereal.

The very next commercial broadcast was done infomercial style for Touch-N-Brush, "the hands-free toothpaste dispenser that works with just a touch!" The highlight of this ad is the series of images of apparently physically or mentally handicapped people frustrated by messy, hard-to-use, and difficult to understand toothpaste tubes. "You squeeze. You roll. You press. Now your bathroom looks a mess!" Maybe this commercial is speaking to the portion of America I've never visited, but I don't recall seeing any bathrooms where dried toothpaste was on all the countertops, sinks, and walls as depicted by the users in this commercial. If that's how these people squeeze toothpaste tubes, I'm interested in watching them squeeze ketchup, shake hands, or hug their children.

Lessons learned: Squeezing a tube of toothpaste is hard. Can't someone else do it for me?

The Preakness Stakes is tomorrow, and Kentucky Derby champion Mine That Bird is currently the betting favorite to win at 11-2 odds, considerably better than the 50-1 odds that he beat to win the Derby. Don't get me wrong, I'm not endorsing gambling on the ponies. I don't even generally care for horse racing outside of the Triple Crown events. It's a sport for rich people, and I'm more of a... poor person. The closest I've ever come to owning a horse is possessing a copy of Who's Who in the DC Universe featuring the Legion of Super-Pets, which naturally includes Comet the Super-Horse.

(I really love the depictions for breaking the time barrier in Silver Age Superman comics. Time, ladies and gentlemen, is a rainbow.)

However, I don't think Comet should be allowed to race in any horse-race, but not because of his super-speed. No, see, Comet is really a Grecian centaur accidentally transformed into a horse, granted superpowers as a consolation for the mistake, banished to a comet for millennia by his enemies, and freed from said imprisonment by the happenstance passage of a rocket ship that contained a young Supergirl fleeing the destruction of Krypton. It all makes sense if you think about it. Comet isn't a horse, but a man trapped in a horse's body. You wouldn't let a man enter a horse race, would you?

Of course this begs the question that if Comet had a highly developed brain, was sentient, and capable of telepathic communication, why in the world would he join a group called the Legion of Super-Pets in the first place? Just because he let Supergirl ride on his back, he qualified as a pet? (Superman's Pet, Lois Lane probably isn't going to appear on newsracks anytime soon.) What male wouldn't let Supergirl ride on his back?

Fast fact: in "The Secret Identity of Super-Horse," Action Comics #301, Comet was granted the form of a bipedal human -- his fondest wish -- and began a romance with Supergirl. Turnabout is fair play, it would seem. Maybe I've just got a salacious mind, but that sounds like a comic I've got to get my hands on. I suppose a "Super-Pet" must be a little different than a traditional pet. Maybe it's the equivalent of a pet with benefits.

For my book report, I read Zap: The Rise and Fall of Atari.

I read Zap: The Rise and Fall of Atari so that you don't have to. While it didn't contain a lot of information that I hadn't read before, it was amusing to read a contemporary account of the collapse of the video game industry following its unprecedented boom in the early 80s. (The book was published in 1984, "the Year of the Apple," and chronicles the events at Atari through 1983, "the Year of the McNugget.")

Author Scott Cohen largely assumes that the reader is abreast of current events in the entertainment industry of the times, obliquely tying Atari's fall to such events as John Schneider and Tom Wopat walking off the set of the Dukes of Hazzard and IBM dominating the market for personal computers. And he doesn't seem to be much on fact-checking. (The man responsible for Wack-a-Mole and the glorious Rock-afire Explosion, one Aaron Fechter, is irritatingly repeatedly referred to as Aaron Fletcher.)

Despite Cohen's limited pop-style of prose -- he was a magazine editor who has penned such probing investigative reports as Don't You Just Hate That?: 738 Annoying Things and Yakety Yak: The Midnight Confessions and Revelations of Thirty-Five Rock Stars and Legends -- he was able to draw some pretty good conclusions about the future of the video game industry. " Selling computers, it would seem, will not be much different than selling cigarettes."

Most amusingly (and perhaps not too surprisingly), the best parts of the book are not what the author uncovered about the dismal state of affairs in 1983's Atari, but what he got wrong about the future. I'm not talking about simply understating how poorly the game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was received. (Cohen calls it a bomb, but fails to convey the weight of just how much the game's poor popular and critical reception lead directly to Atari's collapse. There's no mention of the estimated 5 million Atari 2600 E.T. cartridges buried in an Alamagordo, New Mexico landfill in the fall of 1983.) Examples include

• "No video game company is going to do as well as IBM, Apple, Commodore, or Radio Shack." Does anyone even remember the Tandy?
• "By, 1986, everyone who can afford and wants a video game will have one, and manufacturers will have to drop their prices further.... Any further growth at Atari and in the video game industry generally, in terms of selling units and bringing in earnings, is going to come from overseas." Cohen was speaking about selling Atari VCSs to overseas markets, and was not predicting the arrival of the Nintendo NES on American shores and the revitalization of the home video game market, even if that had the same affect of keeping the Atari name alive, if barely.
• And my personal favorite: "if there were a neat little terminal and it put people in touch with everything they wanted to be in touch with, people would stop playing video games." Hmm. I guess after posting this to the internet, I won't go and play xBox.

One more amusing note: according to Cohen, "if a movie were made of his life, Nolan [Bushnell, the founder of Atari and father of video games] says he would like Gene Wilder to play him, but he means Robert Redford." Point of fact is that there is indeed a movie planned for a 2011 release on the life and times of Nolan Bushnell (working title: Atari), and it seems that Nolan will not be getting his wish. It is rumored that Bushnell will be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. Fitting, I suppose, since Bushnell, like DiCaprio, was once the king of the world, even if that world was Pong.

Attended the Georgia Renaissance Fair today, where I saw many men in kilts, overweight women wearing fairy wings and elf ears, and shocking anachronisms. My favorite part of the entire experience was the hour plus spent making fun of my friend who had a hot dog for lunch. The joke was supplied by the Renaissance Fair itself, which marketed the foot-long hotdog as "The King's Wiener" and expected people to pay for the experience of putting it into their mouth.

More in the same vein as Sunday's post. While the "I" in the following story is not me, the story was related to me by an impeccable source as a true story.

Driving down the road the other day, I was shocked to encounter the van of a commercial exterminator which had printed on the side the biblical passage Revelations 22:7, "Behold! I come quickly." All I could think at the time was how completely inappropriate that was!

Suffice it to say that I'm sure they could have used a less appropriate biblical passage, such as, say, Deuteronomy 5:17, "Thou shall not kill," or Leviticus 12:3, "And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin will be circumcised." But then, I'm certainly no biblical scholar.

My latest submission to Reader's Digest's "Life in These United States" column:

Yesterday, a friend and I were walking through a local supermarket when he stopped short at a sign proclaiming, "Pick Up Line Forms Here For Senior Prom." Confused about my friend's sudden stupor, I asked him to explain. He simply shook his head and said softly, "I spend too much time on the internet."

(Don't worry if you don't get it. That just means that you probably actually read Reader's Digest.)

I don't know if you've heard yet, but we're all going to die. Swine flu is going to kill us all. So says all the important talking heads on television, radio, and the internet. And they've never led us astray.

Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization, has said that "it is really all of humanity that is under threat of a pandemic." Don't be fooled by the fact that "pandemic" simply means "global distribution of the disease." AIDS is a pandemic, and unless you're Magic Johnson, it's fatal, remember? So straight from the mouth of Dr. WHO, this flu is clearly something to be feared.

Responding to the dire news, 3M has announced that that they're ramping up production of respiratory masks to meet the consumer demand swelling before the onslaught of this modern plague. Never mind that the Center for Disease Control does not recommend the use of respirator masks for preventing the spread of this particular strain of flu as unnecessary. Why listen to the CDC, anyway? They're a government agency, so of course they don't have our best interest at heart. How else are we going to contain our sneezes? They don't expect us to use our hands, do they?

News reports indicate that since the initial outbreak of the disease a month ago, Mexico officially "suspects" that the swine flu has killed 159 Mexicans out of over 3,000 suspected cases. That's a mortality rate greater than 5%, ten times greater than the standard death rate for the .003% of the Mexican population that has had the flu! The argumentative WHO claims that they've only counted 7 deaths in 79 confirmed cases worldwide, nearly doubling Mexico's estimated mortality rate to a staggering 9% of the nearly .000001% of the world population that has contracted the virus! In either case, if left unchecked at it's current rates, this flu could sweep across the face of the globe, killing literally thousands of the 7 billion world population! Oh, the humanity!

So make peace with your gods, people. The end isn't near, it's already here. And it smells like bacon.

G.I.Joe's latest relaunch, G.I.Joe: Resolute, aired on Cartoon Network this weekend, and it suffers from all of the same problems as modern comics, I'm sorry to say. (No surprise: it was written by Warren Ellis, once of the writers most responsible for the modern bloodlust of mainstream comics.)

What's new about this G.I.Joe? Not much. Despite a clear and present danger to the governments of the world by terrorist organization Cobra, only the G.I.Joe team does anything about it. It remains unexplained how Cobra thinks they can take control of the world when none of their soldiers can hit the broad side of a barn with a gun. The Joes stay in "uniform" at all times, even if that means that Beachhead wears his balaclava inside an aircraft carrier. No Joe performs the mission for which s/he is most qualified: (Scarlet, not Ripcord, performs a HALO jumps into enemy territory, and Tunnel Rat, not Payload, goes into space to jury-rig a satellite). And Duke is still a quitter and all-around douche.

What's different? Other than the anime-influced style: death. Exactly 10,362,756 die in the first 5 minutes. (How's that for a specific number, eh? That includes the onscreen death count when Moscow is vaporized by an ultra high-tech Cobra particle cannon.) Eighteen deaths later, we see the supposedly heroic Roadblock laugh maniacally as he guns down 7 Cobra guards from behind. And Duke, shortly after ordering his own subordinates to abandon him to die, decides that the solution to the episode's conflict is the assassination of Cobra Commander. (Take note, Duke; if you kill your principal antagonist, it's harder to sell accessory packs for all the environments that you didn't show in the episode.)

No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of animated death for television designed to sell toys. "The new G.I.Joe, now with more armageddon!"

As reported by the United Kingdom's The Daily Telegraph, during home renovations in a building in Urborough, England, the homeowner discovered the mummified remains of a cat in the walls. (See? Newspapers still have uses.) It is believed by the locals that the cat was placed in the walls sometime in the 17th Century as a ward against witches. Says the homeowner (a funeral director, by the way), "It clearly works as, since we have lived in the village, we have not seen sight or sound of any witches." I'm pretty sure that I could use the same logic to prove that the cat is an effective ward against bigfoot, honest politicians, and God.

I can understand why the ignorant peasants of the Middle Ages would believe in witches ("life sucks, but it's that witch's fault, not mine!"), but I'm not exactly clear on why dead cats would make an effective witch deterrent. Medieval witches had the power to transform themselves into animal form, fly on broomsticks, and prevent milk from being churned into butter. (What, no butter? Diabolical!) So why should a dead cat be a problem?

Other witch preventatives included iron, salt, candles, urine, and lockable broom-closets, all of which make some sense. In fact, I think urine makes a pretty fine deterrent for just about anything other than the rare and dreaded Piss Vampire. But why should a dead cat be any more effective than a dead dog. Or even a live cat, other than the fact that it's really hard to get that live cat to stay in the wall for 400 years.

Maybe we'll never know. So long as that dead cat stays in the wall in Urborough, I guess no witches will be showing up to tell anyone.

I've found another great television show: Superjail! Sure, the show's been airing on Cartoon Network since September, but if you hadn't noticed by now, I'm a little slow to accept new things.

It's super-violent, like cartoons ought to be. (I've long maintained that cartoons should always present something impossible in live action, and this show's got it in spades.) It's about crime-and-punishment, like all the best dramas. (Did you ever see Tom Selleck's jailhouse thriller An Innocent Man? Just thinking about it has me feeling a little logey.) It's filled with sci-fi and fantasy elements, like all the best comic book stories. (The Twins, recurring uni-browed characters of mysterious power and intent, dress as Sandmen from Logan's Run. That's enough to get my attention.)

However, I suspect that the real reasons that I like it are two-fold. A.) it is clearly hand-drawn, a rare commodity, indeed, in these heady days of computer-aided animation. (As much as I enjoy a heavy outline, I grow weary of the stiff and stylized Johnny Bravo style.) And 2.) It's always in motion. In many ways, it reminds me of some tortured cross between Itchy and Scratchy cartoons and Ralph Bakshi's work. If you've seen the bizarre, psychedelic action of Fritz the Cat, you know what I'm talking about. (Truthfully, I have to admit that I never really liked Bakshi's work, probably because he took himself and the world a little too seriously. I suspect that he could have used more pointless sight gags involving defenestrations and fewer topless lady-cats. But what do I know? He's a famous director with his own animation school and I'm just some schlub with a blog readership of 7 and falling.)

All in all, it's my favorite new cartoon since I discovered the The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack (also on Cartoon Network) earlier this year. Maybe I should be watching more Cartoon Network. Their programming of imaginary friends, Dial-H-For Hero rip-offs, and Family Guy re-runs is certainly more realistic than that of either Fox News or ESPN.

If your knowledge of super hero comic books is limited to what you've seen at the movies, then you've never heard of the Grey Gargoyle. And your life is probably the better for it. The Grey Gargoyle is a middling Marvel Comics villain with the "uncanny" ability to turn anything he touches into stone. For an hour. Unless it's magical. (Which would make his foe of choice, Thor, a piss-poor choice for a nemesis. But then, the Grey Gargoyle is a piss-poor villain.)

It's no wonder the guy has an identity crisis. (There's a reason he always uses the word "the" before his name even though no one else would be caught dead impersonating a loser like him.) The Grey Gargoyle is French, so he'd probably refer to himself as "Le Gargouille Grise." However, Gargoyle spends almost all of his time in American comic books fighting American heroes, where you'd expect that he'd be referenced as "The Gray Gargoyle." But for some reason he inexplicably prefers the Queen's English to American. Usually.

Like I said, the guy has an identity crisis. Even the writers and editors at Marvel Comics apparently don't care enough to consistently get his name right. They can't even keep his name straight for an entire issue. Sometimes they don't even try at all. (And why should they? I don't think the schmuck has ever won a fight. In the comic above right, he is defeated when the loose end of a chain accidentally gets wrapped around his foot. Unfortunately for him, the chain was attached to a rocket. What fool would wrap a chain around a rocket in the first place? He did. Fail to plan, plan to fail.)

And when they do get it right, they tend to over-compensate a bit. His name appears on the cover above twice. In all caps. And he's shown holding his own against the entire Avenger's team! If you've never seen him before, you'd be thinking that he must be a bad-ass, right? That is, until you learn that he's French.

While it's one thing to disrespect a villain enough to forget his name, it's another thing entirely to forget his powers. Notice on that cover above left, it looks like Gargoyle is turning someone to stone, yes? That's his power, right? Turns out, no, not when he's using the wrong hand, it isn't. Gargoyle is only able to turn someone to stone with his right hand, not his left. And last time I checked, things made of granite fly about as well as a..., well, as well as a stone.

He wears blue socks with claws, a cape made of stone, and has a pencil mustache. Once you get to know him, you begin to understand why a man made of stone would wear a domino mask to hide his identity. The more you learn about this guy, the more you suspect that Darwin was full of shit: "natural selection" would never let something this retarded live long enough to learn to learn to walk. Ah, but the world of super villains needs janitors, too. Therefore, I present to you... The Gray Grey Gargoyle!

Like most people not expecting a tax refund, I just finished my income tax filing. This year I had to pay taxes. Not because I made a lot of money, mind you. My gross income was well below the national poverty line. Granted, "poverty" in the United States is a pretty relative term when compared to incomes around the world. So while I may not be "poor" in the Slumdog Millionaire sense of the word, I'm not going to be helping the U.S. out of a recession any time in the near future, either.

The national poverty line of the United States is defined as the annual income required for the average American to sustain his own basic needs. In 2008, this has been estimated at about $11,200. (Yet more proof that I am not average.) Comparing this number to the median income of American citizens, about $27,000 according to the World Salaries Group, you can see where I fit in. My income is closer to that of the average citizen of Russia. (Who won the Cold War? Not me.)

Our friendly U.S. Government graciously allows a single citizen who earns a "gross income" of less than $8,950 to bypass filing taxes. (Presumably, this is the threshold where the income tax rate overcomes government subsidy. You can't get blood -- or taxes -- from a stone.) Sadly, I qualify.

"Not so fast," cries my Uncle Sam. Because in 2008 I tried to earn income as a self-employed graphic/website designer, I am required to file taxes so that I can pay the government the "self-employment" tax used to sustain my Social Security and Medicaid benefits. Nuts!

If in 2008 I had worked exclusively for an employer other than myself earning the same amount, my meager income would have been taxed nothing (thanks to the Standard Deduction). The IRS would have refunded whatever my employer had withheld on my behalf, and thanks to the Earned Income Credit established in the 1975 (the year of my birth -- someone must have known I was coming!), the government would have paid me money to help offset my relative poverty. But alas, that is an alternative history. Instead, I made more than $400 for myself on my own terms, and now I'm paying for it. Literally.

Well, I've learned my lesson. Working for myself has cost me money. From now on, I'll only do toadie work for someone else or do no work at all. So employers, if you're interested in hiring a talented fool who will work for peanuts -- and I mean actual peanuts: I'm hungry, and I just gave my last dollars to the government -- I'm your lackey.

In honor of Pope Victor (who first decided that Easter would be celebrated on a Sunday), I interrupt your Day of the Lepus celebration with the following long-form complaint about chicks.

Why does Victoria's Secret mail out catalogues every month? Who buys underwear that often? A quick web search reveals that they mail over 400 million catalogues each year. (A mere 33 million catalogues per month.) The population of the entire United States of America -- men, women, and children combined -- is slightly over 300 million.

I'm a little torn on this issue: I'm not opposed to free porn arriving in my mail box. (That old Sears catalogue and I had some good times.) But I do have concerns about the frequency and volume of these catalogues. I see more Victoria's Secret catalogues than credit card applications and "have you seen me" postcards combined.

I'm not the sort to lament the overgrowth of landfills (I hope everyone drowns in their own filth) or mourn the destruction of a tree (I hate trees, too). But it seems to me that mailing endless piles of catalogues with pictures so heavily airbrushed as to be considered paintings of impossibly-shaped people (we called you ugly in high school because you were, ladies) in order to market push-up bras to women concerned that their chests are too small could probably be a sign of the apocalypse (if one were so inclined to be looking for those sorts of things).

That is all. You may now resume your regularly scheduled pastel-tinted activities.

Continuing my tirade against fast food marketing from last month:

My brother suggested that the Mexican slogan for McDonald's ("Me Enchanta") was used because the translation of the American slogan, "I'm Loving It," is apparently some sort of Mexican slang for having sex. As I recall, not too long ago, McDonald's ran a Big Mac commercial in which several guys said they'd "hit it," which is American slang for having sex. So I wouldn't think that McDonald's would really be all that opposed to saying that Mexicans were having sex with the food.

Clearly, Hardee's has no such compunction. Hardee's has gathered a fair amount of attention recently from advertisements with Padma Lakshmi having oral sex with a hamburger. Lakshmi is the perfect spokesperson: an authority on food (she rates food on television, so she must be an expert!) and a former model (the equivalent of a role model in modern America). Subtle, no. But if people are talking about it, that pretty much means the ad is working.

It all makes me wonder if there is any chance that some portion of America's obesity epidemic is related to an association of food with sex in our sex-obessed society? Horny equals hungry. How long until someone cuts to the chase and uses the slogan, "Got a boner? Grab a burger!"