Everything that I've thought about posting to the blog in the past few days has essentially amounted to little more than me whining about nothing important. (Not football or comic books; those ARE important.)

But I didn't want to do that. I don't want this blog to be nothing but me bitching about the same old things. (My brother has already chastized me for that once. I'm not giving him a second opportunity, that bastard.) So instead of a pointless blog entry about how much I hate something, I present to you, my adoring public, the most enjoyable game I've ever found on the internet: Whizzball.

Sure, it's at Discovery Kids, but that doesn't make it any less amusing. And just because it's been there for years doesn't mean that it's any less enjoyable. It's a good, simple time-waster; the sort of game that consoles used to provide but have abandoned in search of the next over-produced, under-developed, button-mashing, blockbuster movie-length presentation of T&A and boring-ass gameplay. >shakes fist at sky, yelling "Khaaan!"<

And for those of you who like your games a little deeper, I'll give you a bonus: The Battle for Wesnoth. This open-source, turn-based strategy fantasy game. You can't go wrong with that. It's fund to play, and it's a real challenge as well.

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Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's the Sun!

I think that if I were a religious person, I'd probably worship the Sun. Sure, the Sun provides the light energy that makes life possible on Earth, and it has been worshipped by humans for as long as we've been standing upright. Links between the Sun and Christianity (the religion of the "Son") are as well established as the date for Christmas. (Interestingly, the name of the Islamic god, "Allah," may have been derived for a pagan Arabic god of the Moon, the anti-Sun. But that's not today's point.) Despite all of this, the Sun's unique relationship to modern culture goes largely ignored. The Sun gave us superheroes.

The archetype of the modern costumed hero, Superman is powered directly by the Sun. The rays of the Earth's yellow sun charge Superman's amazing Kryptonian physique, allowing him the powers of flight, super sense, and invulnerability. Without the Sun, there's no Man of Steel. That makes the Sun directly responsible for Earth's greatest champion.

The anti-Superman, Batman, is also controlled by the Sun. Unlike Superman, Bruce Wayne has no alien physiology, and must limit his crime-fighting to survivable situations. He chose to adopt a demonic costume and fight in the dark, knowing that his training, combined with mankind's inherent fear of the unknown ("Things That Go Bump in the Dark") will give him an edge against the criminal element. The fictitious construct that is "The Batman" could not function in daylight, and only inspires fear in situations where the Sun is absent. (You can't have a Dark Knight without the dark night.) Again, the abilities and character of one of the archetypical heroes of modern culture, The Batman, is determined directly by the Sun.

As if those two weren't great enough examples of the Sun's influence on American popular culture in general and the superhero in specific, the modern archetype for the superheroic family/team, the Fantastic Four, gained their powers from Cosmic Rays, which by their very nature are generated by the Sun. The Sun's natural radiation must also be responsible for some of the X-Men's bizarre super-human mutations, such as those possessed by Sunspot and Dazzler.

If the Sun has provided all of these powerful and admirable superheroes with their reason for being, I can't think of anything better to devote to worshiping. It certainly makes more sense than Catholicism.

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Damn, that sucked. The Tennessee band played Rocky Top 20 times between kickoff and final clock expiration. Of those 20, only 2 were in the first half. I hate Rocky Top.

Our highly-rated defense gave up 51 points. That's 17 more points than we had given up to our first 5 opponents combined. Ugh.

Note for next year that for 4 consecutive years, the away team has won the UGA vs. Tennessee game.

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The changeover has been made. Please update your bookmarks for the blog to blog.wriphe.com. Old blogs entries are now archived at blog.wriphe.com/archives.

The primary motivating reason for this was to separate the pictures that I put in the blog from the pictures that I put elsewhere on the site. The blog pics grow like a virus, and I didn't orignally account for how many pictures I would be posting. (I think all but one of my posts in September had a picture.) Despite my consistant record keeping, it was getting to be a problem sorting through the art pictures for a particular .jpg of Batman.

Coincidentally, this also restructures the blog so that it will be noticable to search engines. I'm tired of typing '"Adam West" + "Neil Armstrong"' in Google and not finding my entry for April 24, 2006 returned. I'm much too clever to be ignored like that! Look at me! Look! Here! Me!

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There are some changes coming to the layout of this site. Nothing major, really, just a simple relocation of the blog. I need to do some housekeeping to separate out the blog photos from those of the rest of the site, so I'm going to take the opportunity to update a little. You probably won't even notice, all 5 of you who ever read this. The address may change in your address bar, so be ready to update your bookmarks. I promise not to make it harder to find me, because that would discourage at least 2 of you from ever coming back.

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Maybe it's because I'm a dog person, but I've always really loved Ace, the Bat-Hound. I think he's a better sidekick than Robin.

The original Ace was a farmer's German Sheppard that helped Batman solve a 1955 counterfeiting case in the caper appropriately named "Ace, the Bat-Hound!" (Bruce Wayne has a remarkable detective mind, but he lacks for creativity. I mean, he does carry the Bat theme a little far, you've gotta admit: Batmobile, Bat Plane, Bat Cave, Bat Computer, Bat-Hound, Bat Shark Repellent... the list goes on.)

Bruce gave the dog a mask to prevent anyone recognizing him and linking the Batman and the Bat-Hound back to Bruce Wayne and Ace. Trust me, while it may seem that a mask on a dog isn't really going to disguise much of anything, in the world of comic books, that's some very sound reasoning indeed.

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If this were an online sex story, it would have to be coded "MMb, s/m, cosplay."

 

Even though this is probably the stupidest death trap that the Joker has ever conceived, that's clearly not the real story in this image. The real question should be, "why does Robin look so happy about what's about to happen?"

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Whoa, Nellie! Lookout, Dawgs! It's a stampede!

Please note that no Dawgs were hurt during the making of this picture. Colorado brought their 900 pound buffalo mascot, Ralphie IV, to Athens to lead the team onto the field. (Ralphie IV, by the way, was donated to Colorado by Ted Turner.) Earlier this week UGA athletic marketing director John Bateman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "It's David and Goliath. But what's that old saying, 'It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog'?"

Bulldogs, by the way, were originally bred for -- what else? -- fighting bulls. Ralphie IV, however, is not a bull but a female buffalo. That should have been our first clue that we were in trouble.

We played like we didn't understand the game for 3 quarters, only to pull it together in the final 10 minutes of play for the victory. The entire game was a demonstration in coaching: be Dan Hawkins' play selection and execution in the 1st half, be Mark Richt's strategic determination in the 4th quarter. (Just plain be somewhere else for the third quarter.)

Colorado's excellent ball fakes kept our undisciplined defense confused. Meanwhile our offense decided to go pass-happy with our true freshman quarterback, ignoring the 3 talented runners that have won us the last 3 games. (I call this Tommy Tuberville Syndome after Auburn's similar bizarre and losing strategy with Cadillac Williams and Ronnie Brown three years ago.)

I should have taken a picture of the guy who sits next to me. He looked like he was going to have a stroke for the final hour of the game.

In the end, we won. And it was exciting. But I don't exactly want to go through this every week.

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It wouldn't really be Batman and Football month without a reference to that 1990 -- has it really been that long? -- Snickers commercial which combined Batman and football, now would it? Take a look at the video replay here as an .asf file.

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I was at the post office today, and they sold me this:

Awesome. Now that's Bat-Tastic. We truly do live in a glorious age.

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