Comic for Friday, July 28th, 2006

Posted: 8:28 pm, Thursday, July 28th

So, I'm about a hundred and twenty pages into the Dante Club right now, and it's not all that bad. It's kind of like the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay in that I can't believe it became a best-seller, and not at all like Kavalier and Clay in that it's not nearly as good. It's basically The Alienist except not nearly as good, much more slowly paced, and set in Boston instead of New York. But it does deal a lot in Dante, which is a lot of fun for me. The Dante courses I took in collitch were among my favorite, and this is kind of a nice stroll down memory lane while being edumacational to a point at the same time. In the beginning of the book, a lot of focus is given to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow working on the first American translation of Dante in the 1860s, and how much Harvard wants to stop him from doing this. Evidently, Dante was extremely controversial at the time, partly because he was Catholic and partly because of the sensitivities of the day frowning upon the Inferno's tortures. I find this hilarious because over the course of my studying him, I became fairly convinced that Dante, in a relatively slender poem, packed more history, religion, philosophy, linguistic dexterity and social commentary into his work than virtually anything else I've ever read and can even conceive of. I have a set of the Divine Comedy at home with each canticle in a separate book, and then a companion book for each of them that is just notes - without exception, the books of notes are twice as thick, and I believe Purgatorio's notes may be three times at thick. The idea that this work was somehow not worthy of study in American academia depresses me almost as much as any random three pages of A People's History of the United States. I was kind of psyched to be able to recognize the sin/punishments represented in two murders discovered so far, too (although it took some character exposition for me to figure out why the first guy was an Undecided). So, all in all, through 120: The Dante Club is a post-Da Vinci Code Alienist. If you really dig Dante, read it, if not, read the Alienist instead. It's better.

Is anything *not* on Wikipedia?

The boys at Blue-Gray Sky did their annual quiz this past week, full of impossible (without Google) trivia and the like. Check it out if you want - I got six, although the one about the Gipper was a T/F lucky guess. I can't believe Frank Leahy recruited Jack Kerouac to play for the Irish. On, like, eight levels, can I not believe that. And here's some Michigan's dude's take on ND in the season upcoming. All in all, it's not terrible - it's got the basic flaws that you'd expect a preview not written by someone who follows the program obsessively would have and commits the cardinal sin of saying that Ty was an underrated recruiter (try telling that the all the rising sophomores and juniors on the o-line - BOTH of them), and then has the unmistakeable smell of denial and jealousy that Michigan write-ups usually do (the d-line only got one sack on ol' Chad there, but they batted, what, four of his passes down at the line, and, yes, Charlie's fat, we all know that - Voyd has man-boobs). This is why I don't do opponent lookaheads for the Irish - they'd all be crazy biased and not based on fact in the slightest. In fact, maybe I will do opponent lookaheads this season and have them be exactly that. That way, I can predict wins every week without jinxing the team, because I'll pick scores of eight billion to three week-in and week-out, and there's no way that can happen. Except against Purdue. Anyway, the moral of this paragraph: Michigan sucks.

Evidently Eric Foreman is playing Venom in Spider-Man 3. I think that's actually a pretty good job of casting - Eddie Brock in the comic books was an impossibly muscled guy with a chip on his shoulder because of some impossibly convoluted storyline, and the villain on the whole was kind of ridiculous. Topher Grace is kind of a physical match for Tobey MacGuire, and his nervous ticks are a natural for a Peter Parker-like character. Hopefully Raimi is intending on making Venom more of a through the mirror, darkly sort of thing than the comic books ever managed.

Ondy loaned 2.0 and myself his box set of the Friday the 13th movies a few weeks back and we've made our way through the first four so far. I love slasher flicks - the only legitimate reason Tree has for refusing my film recommendations - and have been enjoying these greatly. Especially the fourth one, which I had never seen before. It's got a young Crispin Glover and a very young Corey Feldman in it, which is fun for the whole family. It's also the first one where Jason tromps around in the hockey mask for the entire movie. For more of a recap, Matt from X-E, take it away. (Matt also gives Part 2 some love, which is my second-favorite in the series so far.)

Beauty of a nightmare today - what's with those white fields with asinine self-inflating quotes that no doubt mask feelings of vast inadequacy? I've seen a few of those on MySpace.

Oh, here's a little something I Photoshopped waiting for someone to get something back to me at the office the other day. My buddy Sanjeev gave me a copy of the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album a while back, and I'm liking it a lot more than I thought I would. Especially the last track - it's got the shimmering guitar of a track from an 80s movie with some delirious lyrics at the beginning that are a lot darker than they seem because of the way the guy sings. So, proving that I'm evidently still sixteen at heart and writing song lyrics on the covers of my text books, I present to you this thing:

I have no idea why I did it, either.

bullfrog

Classic picture, we are safe from big foot. Is really wearing a t-shirt of a dude blowing his own head off or am I missing a reference to something that everyone from Notre Dame does that I missed at RPI.

Regardless, I have worn similar T-shirts to family events on accident. My senior year in college I arrived for a family reunion wearing my jaunty "Trust No Bitch" t-shirt. The old man was not pleased and nor was I when I realized the only other two t-shirts I had packed for the weekend said "Bros Before Hos" and the vaguely less offensive "Taxes are Stealing."

Being uncouth in college was fun.

Wood, the t-shirt isn't an ND thing, but a Threadless thing (www.threadless.com), though I can't find a pic of it on their website. But, yes, it is a picture of a man blowing off his head.

That makes more sense.

its taken me two years of being trapped in albany, with lack of a tv, and massive insomnia to finally look at your website. sorry. i'm one year and one test short of having a professional opinion but i'm worried about you. the baseline weirdness always a little troublesome, but to see in consolidation on print. yikes. as usual overlookable because it is clever and funny.