Comic for Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

Posted:12:20 am, Wednesday, July 19th

Sweet map of where every tree in New York City is over at Gothamist. My neighborhood gets a shoutout for being treeful, which is always nice.

Stacked linked to a dude I'm assuming he's familiar with from his days at Time who runs a blog called Back to Iraq. He's on the ground in Lebanon these days, keeping us abreast of the nastiness going on over there. He also links to this Time cover that's almost exactly 24 years old, and is thoroughly depressing.

Those damned Diebold machines are up to it again.

There was a housing protest against Ratner's plan to develop the Atlantic Yards and bring in the New Jersey Nets the other day, and the Voice was there to take pictures. I haven't really been keeping up on this because I think it's sadly inevitable, but I've noticed a lot of reports saying that all of Ft. Greene is going to be cast in the shadows of this development, which means that it's going to be radically huge and a massive eyesore. Hopefully Steve Buscemi can make them see the light - 2.0 and I were kicking around the idea of that neighborhood at the end of our lease next June. We don't need Mr. Burns fulfilling mankind's age-old quest of destroying the sun.

The UK Guardian ran a list of the 50 most important albums yesterday (what are with all the ridiculous lists recently, by the way? Rolling Stone has run a ton of them recently - best second album, worst song on a good album, most purple cover art) which is actually pretty solid through about 20, and then impossible to really keep track of. I thought it was interesting, at any rate.

In case everyone missed it, Shitwit is finally going to dust off his veto, since there's no end of signing statements that can counteract this one. What a fucking douchebag.

Some days the MySpace feature writes itself. The real point of the MySpace nightmare is to show off some terrible .html decisions their layout utility allows, not to find stupid people and laugh. Although I do love laughing at stupid people. Anyway, I ran a search for New Kids on the Block because I figured it would turn up something hilarious, and it really didn’t. Just this utterly inexplicable and shitty to navigate page. By the way, Wal-Mart is running a cleaned-up version of MySpace. Check out the end of that article - $150 a month clothing budget for some kid? I don't know the last time I spent $150 a month on my clothes for any lengthy span of time.

bullfrog

Awesome! The Cardinals are mentioned!

I've just wasted several minutes thinking about where this guy could have come from. Since they're cardinals and royals fans, my first instinct would be Missouri, but then I think he would have said Big 12, not Big 10.

So, that leaves Iowa and Illinois as two very likely candidates... If he'd lived in Illinois, he'd have picked the Cubs, not the Royals. Or it could have been Indiana, I suppose, but a Royals fan in Indiana sounds a little farfetched...

I'll go with Iowa!

I'd go with Iowa or southern Illinois, sure. May I say that you definitely spent more time thinking about this guy than I did?

Since people keep coming here by Googling it, attention, everyone looking for something about Christie Brinkley's divorce! Go here:

http://tabloidwhore.blogspot.com/2006/07/peter-cooks-teenage-lover-speaks.html

Has anybody read the Dante Club? Someone left it in the bookcase in the lunchroom at my office and I grabbed it becasue I love Dante. But the quote on the cover is from Dan Brown. I am instantly very wary.

I started the Dante Club over a year ago and haven't been able to get more than a couple of chapters into it. It's still on my bookshelf, though, so I haven't given up hope yet.

Boring? Crappy? What's the verdict?

Hey, when you decide to start a five bucks spinoff starring Lissa's hookup dude, you'll thank me for figuring out this guy's background for you...

I haven't gotten very far into that book, either. Maybe 30 pages or so. My vote goes to boring!

I'm reading the Italian Secretary that someone left in the same bookshelf and finding it immensely boring. It's a new Sherlock Holmes story written by Caleb Carr, author of the Alienist which is hands-down awesome, so I'm pretty surprised by this. I'm assuming they were left by the same person, since everything else in the bookshelf is either some Right Wing crap about Bill Clinton or a bodice-ripper romance. So, evidently someone in my office has a taste for excruciatingly wordy and boring murder mysteries.

Boring, as I recall.

so that girl with the $150 clothing budget?

she goes to my school.

i'm really quite disgusted.

Read Dante Club and liked it better than Da Vinci Code and Rule of Four - same idea, though. Probably even more enjoyable if you have knowledge of 18th century Am Lit.

As you should be, whoever this is. I'm assuming her clothing budget is parent-provided and not earned by working at the Hyatt.

I wonder if that girl has a MySpace page..?

Oh, crap, I just noticed she's 14. It would be privacy protected if she does.

God, $150 a month on clothes at 14? I am going to assume I'd really dislike this person.

its not, i don't know if this link works, though.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=59803149

there you go.

Ha! The basic design is not as nightmarish as I would've thought, but those quizzes and what-not are pretty repulsive. Nice work, stranger.

Sox with the second 1-0 win in a row. Is this what it's like to be a National League team?

Just be glad your Red Sox got to relax with the Royals for the last four days.

As a native Missouri, I can tell you assuredly that many St. Louisians (probably a majority) did go to the University of Illinois and their somewhat contraversial Indian mascot (Fighting Illini). Illinois is in the top ten in terms of student population. So, I pegged him as a native St. Louisian. Althrough he looks a lot like me, althrough I'd never would be able to land a girl like Lissa. (I've never bothered to start dating.) And I'm from the northwest part of the state.

I wonder, does the Dante Club involve various tiers of membership starting and Hell and reaching all the way up to the ninth level of Heaven? (Or maybe just starting from Purgatory?)

We're getting dangerously close to me posting every single damn thing I find about collitch football on the site. This all-name team list is great, though. Penn State has a guy whose first name is Knowledge, evidently, and Michigan State has a guy named "Sackrider."

http://therealests.blogspot.com/2006/07/college-football-all-name-team.html

15's from the Loo (her handle's a tribute to Edmonds, or "Jedmonds" as she calls him), and she went to Mizzou in the Big XII, so she may take issue with that - I was using Big 10 as a conference, not school size.

I find it funny, having gone to school in northern Indiana, I consider the Midwest to primarily be Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Everything further out are Plains States, even Iowa, for no real reason. I consider the Midwest Big 10 country and the Big XII to mostly be located in Texas.

We'll see how far I get in the Dante Club. From the back of the book, it sounds like Seven (or Se7en, whatever) except with the tortures of the Inferno instead of the deadly sins (which were the penances in Purgatorio).

Id hazard to say Calvin, Jordy, Deven and Mohamad arent interested in stimulating conversation. Well, they are interested in stimulating something, just not conversation