Comic for Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Posted: 7:20 am, Tuesday, December 18th

Not a lot of time to type this morning, crowd, as I was attempting to get something resembling Christmas shopping done last night, and also tried in vain to find a Container Store (this year's hot Christmas gift: containers!), and make some pie crust to chill overnight for a pie I need to make for an office potluck for tomorrow. If I were thinking, I would list my apple pie recipe right now, but I don't have it on-hand and don't want to get it wrong. Maybe for tomorrow. I apparently make good pies.

Poor Jen. The fourth panel, by the way, is not just me being lazy, but a riff on the empty German existentialism that the Curmudgeon mocks Archie about in this installment here.

Did something *just* happen to my freaking internet? God damn this new router. What the hell.

The year's most awesome t-shirts in mugshots, from the Smoking Gun. I would tell you what my favorite was, but I don't seem to be able to connect to the internet. Which is going to make posting this difficult.

And before I leave to go wrestle with my Goddamn stupid router, a nice story about Brady Quinn, featured on Deadspin, of all places. Derek Anderson's surgence (can't really be a *resurgence*) is driving me nuts.

bullfrog

Bullfrog -- Tuesday, December 18 2007, 07:39 am

And as soon as I burn a CD with today's strip - because I obviously forgot my stupid flash drive - the interweb comes back. Well, I assume me bitching about the internet connection is probably just as interesting as whatever nonsense I'd post, so no great loss.

A call for help. I am submitting a list today for a project about things that just blow peoples minds be they good or bad. Ive wandered around the business school but business majors all have the same basic brain process. Any ideas? Thanks all.

More info - just things in general, or products, or ideas? Most of the Fox network's primetime lineup blows my mind (the bad way). T2 or Jurassic Park, when it came out, blew everyone's minds. Pac-Man, going back some. I just listened to a RadioLab podcast about the Wright Brothers and how incredible and not-at-all inevitable their success at Kitty Hawk was. The pyramids, the Moai on Easter Island. Any number of incredible athletic feats. I'd imagine the near-destruction of the British navy at the Falklands gave people a lot to think about. Oh, that Ukrainian election a few years ago where the guy got poisoned. I mean, geez, the other guy thought he'd get away with that?

Jeremiah's apple pie blows my mind :)

Awesome Doonesbury today.

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20071218

The other podcast I listened to on the way in was about the GOP race in Iowa. I know that this shit shouldn't upset me anymore, and maybe they're cherry-picking their data, but everyone interviewed voting for Huckabee went on about how his faith is the same as theirs. "And that's what's really most important." Fucking hell, my head nearly 'sploded. Oh, the one woman said that the most important thing to her was his stance on the family as the primary unit of society. (Actually, she was a Romney voter.) Dear God! You're voting for someone because they think families are important?! There's not a person alive who doesn't think families are important! Your family's not going to do you much fucking good when we're all under Goddamn water because the ice caps are melting, though! RRRRGH. As I said, I shouldn't let it get to me, but, fuck, we've got a lot of ground to cover raising the average IQ of this country to that of a seventh grader.

Thats actually a pretty good list. Products, films songs... Skys the limit. I already had T2 as an innovative achievement but thats because my hero worship of Schwarzenegger is second to none.

Stairway to Heaven, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. ET, Jaws, Star Wars - Star Wars definitely. Moon landing, I imagine the Munich games although I wasn't alive yet and didn't see the Spielberg flick. OJ, the Rodney King riots. The Sox comeback against the Goat Fuckers. I wouldn't actually say iPods because that was kind of a slow build-up before they became ubiquitous. Maybe the Walkman, though. Oh, that Apple ad in '84.

(This is more fun than thinking about the Iowa caucus.)

Oh! A great one - the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring actually caused a *riot* in 1910.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rite_of_Spring#Composition_and_critical_reception

HD-tv blows most people's minds when they see it for the first time. you can see the tee fly in golf, it's nuts. and "Planet Earth" is pretty darn amazing.

The fact that W got elected. twice.

The amount of money Goldman Sachs manages to make quarter after quarter while the rest of the world loses money.

It's too bad I don't have a search function on this site, we could track down every time I've said "my head asplode" and see what I'm talking about.

Of course, most of that is mundane stuff that just pisses me off.

This is probably a little too business-y, but I bet revenue and expenditure numbers around the Football program would be pretty gawdy. That would probably also require some comparison numbers, too. Oh yeah, and some research on what those numbers actually are.

Fortune's decision to include Radiohead's pay-what-you-want plan on it's 101 Dumbest Business Moments list blew my mind.

Well, when you look at it from the corporate greedhead angle, it is kind of dumb, I guess.

God, I can't believe I haven't gotten around to getting that album yet. Tonight!

But even if you're just going by the greed angle, it's apparently already grossed more than their last album, and it will certainly drive more people to their tour.

Also, Iowa republicans are religious conservatives. It's countered by New Hampshire's fiscal conservatives. The Economist said that he probably won't place in the top three in NH and that will hurt any Iowa momentum.

Just posting my immediate reaction to the strip: Oh no! Oh no oh no oh no oh no. Dammit.

Things that blew my mind: The cliffhangers at the end of the His Dark Materials books; the fourth-act turn in ATONEMENT (the book); the success of Harry Potter (people lined up around the block for a book); the thirteenth chapter of THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN by John Fowles; Damien Hirst's sharks (and his chutzpah in general); the Abu Ghraib revelations (the U.S. government really is that evil); back in the 1940s, the Holocaust revelations and the Nuremberg trials (people really could be that systematically evil); Paris Hilton, famous for nothing; the book and TV special IF I DID IT, written by and starring O.J. Simpson -- and also, I suppose, News Corp.'s decision to reject it, showing they have *some* taste (though on the other hand, booksellers were rejecting it pretty strongly at that point too). And then the fact that the book still came out and became a bestseller.

Oh, I totally forgot amongst the interweb problems - CK, we were in line next to an actress you have described of being possessed of momentum-killing delivery at Crate & Barrel last night. I would describe her as quite pleasant, with fine features but overall a kind of plain appearance.

HT to 2.0 for telling me about CK's opinion, since I must've missed that edition of her blog.

HT to Grafe, for proving that I actually don't know very much about the interweb:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.fivebuckstofriday.com+asplode

wow -- you say that a lot...

The Wire.

Yowzers. Thanks guys for the ideas, I'll do my best to incorporate. I turned some of the other MBAs onto the site. They all just made fun of me for bringing my problems to "the people"

We roll deep, man.

Tree, there's no way to really tell because it's one of the countless background details I draw into every strip here and then immediately cover with character art, but Jen's in front of a Wire ad on the subway yesterday.

You also can't tell because I screwed up the backwards link again, because of my panicking to fix the interweb in the morning.

http://www.fivebuckstofriday.com/2007/archive071217.html

Oh, Netflix. It didn't necessarily blow people's minds, but it sure did sink video rental stores.

Kudos, Bullfrog.

Is anyone else in the middle of Season 4 right now? It is mind-blowingly awesome.

Which is why you mentioned it.

We finally returned It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which got lost in a wedding book for about a month and a half, and Hot Fuzz, which we never actually finished watching, so we're back on the Netflix swing after about three months of having those two movies.

The fact that the education system in the United States is so incredibly broken, expected to fix problems (social, medical, cultural, linguistic, mental, physical) that it was never designed to handle, chronically underfunded, and yet teachers and students still show up everyday. This blows my mind everytime I think about it, which is troublesome only because it's what I'm studying, so my mind gets blown far more often than it should.

Other things: knitting, mathmaticians who think in 4 (5 or 6 or infinite) dimensions, space, empathy, racism, and how much change someone who was born in the early 1900s has seen in their lifetime.

There are six dimensions? Honestly?

Confession Tuesday: I have a man crush on Christopher Hitchens.

scuba diving blows my mind every time i do it -- the underwater life, how the body handles the pressure, how quickly pressure increases underwater... the whole thing is pretty crazy.

Tree blows my mind on a semi-regular basis.

here's another thing - blackwater shot the NYTimes dog? that's pretty mind blowing... http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL1819755220071218?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22&sp=true

The FedEx Kinko guys call flash drives "jump disks." And they keep forgetting to give me back my flash drive whenever I ask them to print out a resume that I conveniently would have on my flash drive. If it wasn't for the fact that UPS people absolutely suck, I wouldn't continue to go to Kinkos.

Netflix: What a commercial Napster should have been.

Goldman Sachs made money buy betting against the mortage loans. And they were right. Investments are so much more like gambling than anyone wishes to admit.

Mara: Jen's evil long-lost twin sister? Either way, I'm anticipating a rather interesting cat-fight or Adam will get his groove back.

That's why I keep all my money buried in a bag in the backyard. The house always wins.

Does Damien Hirst's shark blow your mind in a good way CK? I have a bit of a love hate thing with the Hirst (it concerns me that he doesn't mention where he got his animals). I suppose it's the reality of sharks generally that blows my mind.

The first time I stood inside a Richard Serra it blew my mind. Same goes for Janet Cardiff's "40 Part Motet" which is owned but not currently on, erm, "view" at the MoMA.

Vermeer.

Nirvana blew my mind. Actually, they continue to blow my mind.

New York City. It's size, complexity, elegance, power, and resilience. Awesome.

Brooklyn. It's working class, salty, bustling, ramshackle beauty. My first real home as far as I am concerned.

Falling in love. Yeah, yeah, I know--yuck--but really, What else is there?

Yeah, obviously that was me.

The thought of the sharks is more interesting than the "artwork" itself to me -- I actually find the tanks themselves really creepy (and I've never even seen them in person). But it's such a strange *new* thought it qualifies as mind-blowing.

And yeah, 40-part motet. I went to see that solely on your recommendation, 2.0, and it was one of the most beautiful, life-affirming artworks I've ever seen. MOMA should make it their annual Christmas display, like the Nativity at the Met.

I have to say the shark is more interesting when you're in its presence (at least for me). I should mention the shark is actually called "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." Let me dork out for just one moment and say that the volume of the tank, the suspension of the shark in what seemed to be a moment in time, and the physical presence of such a fierce looking animal, nailed the title (which itself is a bit vague, but I think that's Hirst's idea). The shark--to me--seems to exist between the concept of life and death. Seeing it in a book you just don't get the opportunity to stand in front of it. Like Cardiff and Serra, your physical presence is a requirement. To a lesser degree Vermeer (and any painting, really) require presence as well...but you don't loose nearly as much in a quality reproduction.

I am so glad you loved the Cardiff. I think life-affirming is exactly it. Next time I hear that it's up I will post it on the site for those interested. Telling you about it ruins the surprise.