Comic for Tuesday, March 28th, 2006

Posted: 7:26 am, Tuesday, March 28th

Not much to say about the strip today. I finally remembered what yesterday's strip was originally about - helper midgets. One of the major influences for Pete, and I only just realized this, was this possibly deranged soccer player that crashed on my dorm room floor for a few weeks sophomore year who had an obsession with hiring a midget to help him in the shower. He had a few other obsessions, also. Last I heard, he was rolling high numbers down in Tampa.

The always rocking Retrocrush podcast (check that - episode 68 was not rocking, in that the host went overboard with his sophomoric humor, but usually, it rocks) interviews the Man for All Seasons himself, Richard Cheese. Highly, highly recommended. You get a lot of samples of his songs throughout.

This bizarre roadside thingy was on Fark yesterday - a huge field of concrete corn in Brady Quinn's own hometown of Dublin, OH. That site's pretty cool - check out the UFO gas station and the bunch of crazy shit in Rochester. By the way, I also found, and this goes back to yesterday's masterpiece statue of Kevin Federline's baby mama (it works that way, right?), but check out this proposed pro-life arch that some folks want to build by Buffalo. It's a modest 700 ft arch. No kidding.

Anyway, the roadside thing reminded me of a site Sarah Vowell shouts-out in Assassination Vacation (I'm almost done with the book, so I'll stop talking about it tomorrow, I promise), findagrave.com. I put it through its paces pretty well yesterday, and I'd say 95% of the people I looked for came back with results. Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac, Teddy Roosevelt, Coach Leahy, Terri Schiavo, William Tecumseh, and Bogey. Check out Bogey's last words. Awesome. By the way, Schiavo came up as a related search for some reaso - oh, no, it was one of the most popular searches, that's why. Yeeeah.

Abe Vigoda is still alive, by the way.

Check out this hole that ate an SUV yesterday further down the R-line in Brooklyn. Damn!

Astor Cellars just moved, and there's free wine stuff going on all week to celebrate.

Forget where I got this from, but check out this wild drunk driving ad (sound optional, really). Also from the video file, somebody at NDNation said that this is what they envision Pete "Jacked and Pumped" Carroll to always be like. I recommend watching it once with the sound off first, and then again with the sound on. I have no idea what country this was intended to run in, but I hope they never deluded themselves into thinking it would fly over here.

2.0 and I passed a line of kids waiting for new kicks a few months back. We had no idea what it was at the time.

My expatriate buddy and I were talking about Nobel speeches the other day, as actually happens not infrequently between us, and I was inspired to look up Papa's. Hemingway didn't make it, so it's actually something of a let-down, as a stand-in delivered a very short address. Oh well. By the way, while googling Nobel Prize to find the site, an eBay result came up. But it was not an actual prize. Too bad.

AOL came up with a list of the City's best, evidently, and I largely disagree with it. My favorite Chinese remains the New Green Bo, and 2.0 brunched as Pastis the other day and reported that it was wildly overrated. Nathan's and Gray's were pretty safe choices for the hot dog category. I don't really see the big deal about Gray's Papaya. Sure, it's cheap, but it's not like an otherworldly dog. It doesn't move me to poetry. It's just cheap and yummy.

Finally, a long New York mag piece on John Damon, in which he succeeds in sounding like, well, an idiot. And A-Rod comes off as almost as much of a dandy as Call of the Green Monster likes to think he is.

bullfrog

wait. are you kidding me about gray's? it's the single reason i moved to new york.

did you have the recession special? did you have the pina colada with it? maybe you are ordering wrong.

so there are 4 people out there who actually got the final four right. 4 out of 3 MILLION. sheesh. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/28/sports/ncaab asketball/28bracket.html?_r=1&8hpib&oref=slogin

Follow up to last comment...this is my favorite part of that NYTimes article:

Mike Breen, a mathematician at the American Mathematical Society in Providence, R.I., said the chances of correctly picking the Final Four in ESPN.com's contest this year were about 1 in 750,000.

Yup, that's advanced math there, NYT...the whole division thing can get tricky...3,000,000/4 = 750,000. Whew. Glad you called the American Mathematical Society in on that one.

Bullfrog - I didn't take you to see the corn when you came through Columbus? It's number one on my list of things to show visitors. It's friggin' awesome. Ctown also has a topiary garden set up like Seurat's "Sunday in the Park..." painting (I don't know the real name.).

Mebbe it's the order, Skitters, but I dunno, I've never been moved by Gray's.

And definitely didn't see either of those things, Tree. We did get perfume for your mom, though.

Nice article on the Bracket of Broken Dreams, too, MNP - I figured anyone who had it right was some hacker that figured out a program to enter a bracket with each possible outcome. Or a psychopath. Or a prophet. You know, one of the three, at any rate.

Tree....are you talking about the corn at the soccer fields out in Dublin? And my favorite "art work" in C-bus (as I call it) is the "Brushstrokes in Flight" sculpture at the airport...it looks like a flying banana.

The corn sculpture is in Dublin, off Frantz Road. I don't remember there being soccer fields right there; it was on the same piece of land as some standard-issue glass office building. There may be soccer fields there now; I probably haven't been by there in two years.

Brushstrokes in Flight is a classic. I remember it being a huge deal for some reason when I moved there in 1988.

Have you seen the topiary garden? It's behind the main brach of the Columbus Public Library. (I don't know how familiar you are with Columbus.)

Went to the topiary garden seven years ago now. I bet it looks much better. But it was really cool to walk around in "A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte." Image here: http://www.scottzagar.com/arthistory/timelines .php?page=event&e_id=1447

so who's meeting me at astor this week? i am often in need of after work beverages :) p.s. i have 3 interviews this week -- keep your fingers crossed!!

Yeah, the corn is right by a bunch of soccer fields. But maybe it's the giant soccer ball I'm thinking of that's actually ON the soccer fields. http://www.route40.net/culture/attractions-oh. shtml I spent 23 years in Columbus, so I'm pretty familiar with it. The topiary gardens you're talking about are behind the Columbus School for the Deaf. http://www.topiarygarden.org/ http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/OHCOLto piary.html

Oh, and for anyone who hasn't been through Port Columbus.... http://www.port-columbus.com/passenger/art/ May I present, flying bananas.

All of this is just further proof Ohio should not get any electoral votes.