Comic for Wednesday, February 20th, 2008

Posted: 7:55 am, Wednesday, February 20th

Another night, another romp by the homeboy, another e-mail waiting for me by the time I wake up asking for a donation. Those of you not on the Obama e-mail list, it is the single most active e-mail list I've ever seen. I think I hear from his campaign at least once a day. People trying to sell me Peruvian donkey hormones mixed with Viagra aren't as persistent.

Also, though some of you may not believe this, I've been doing a lot of photoreference drawing these strips (Barack doesn't lend himself to my style of drawing very well. The whites of his eyes and teeth are prominent, and I don't do that in the Five Bucks style... It's been tricky.)(Also, I am of limited talent.) Anyway, this site popped up while I was searching - I can't tell if it's sarcastic or not. I don't think it is, because of the amount of activity on the site, but then there's posts like this that can't possibly be serious.

Speaking of people who it amazes me they can use computers, Jere over at Sox/Pinstriped/Territory sorted things by the Random Ridiculous Past Comment By a Yankee Fan tag. Those of you who don't live in the New York metro area may not know that the first comment on that list is totally something Yankee fans say all the time.

Good op-ed on anti-intellectualism in America that ran in the Washington Post yesterday. The two stats that bothered me the most were the 20% of American adults that thought the sun revolved around the earth (fuck!), and the amount of time that presidential candidate sound bytes has decreased by and to. Man.

Good list of impossible old video games. I would add Top Gun, which was astoundingly difficult largely because of the landing sequences. Battletoads is one of the very few Nintendo games I ever spent much time with and didn't beat. The eleventh stage where you're on this insane unicycle-looking thing was just freaking impossible. I did somehow beat Ninja Gaiden once as a kid. I don't know how I did it. (Other quick aside, Wii Music looks awesome.)

By my troth, I am off!

bullfrog

Bullfrog -- Wednesday, February 20 2008, 07:48 am

I was wondering why 2.0 was writing Yvette Clark first thing in the morning - evidently, CK posted this late last night:

http://onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.typepad.com/only_the_blog_knows_brook/2008/02/yvette-clarke-a.html

Yvette freaking carpet-bombed us with mass mailings of the snail variety when she was elected a year and a half ago. She owes me voting for the homeboy just because of all her crap I had to put in recycling.

Thanks CK!

I let her know that if she didn't reconsider *her* vote I might have to reconsider *mine* when she's up for re-election.

I have to admit the idea of Obama in a railroad apartment--by itself--is really funny to me. It reminds of that scene in Alice in Wonderland when Alice drinks the potion and becomes so large she fills up a whole house.

Do you think the New York Times will continue to ignore Obama's lead all the way through the general election. I mean, COME ON.

http://politics.nytimes.com/election-guide/2008/results/delegates/index.html

As opposed to:

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/primaries/results/scorecard/#val=D

http://origin.barackobama.com/resultscenter/

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/democratic_race/index.html

I guess it all revolves around this sentence above the delegate count:

"The Times, unlike other news organizations like The Associated Press, does not include projections that are based on nonbinding votes for candidate preference, such as the Iowa caucuses."

I just think it's oddly misleading, though. You'd think they'd at least have a table of their count with and without the caucus votes...

Oh, man, my fucking head asplode.

"The online gun dealer who sold a weapon to the Virginia Tech shooter said it was an unnerving coincidence that he also sold handgun accessories to the man who killed five students at Northern Illinois University."

Yeah, video games are the problem. Not online gun dealers. Video games.

Not being the least bit interested in real guns, I had no idea there *were* online gun dealers. Who the fuck thought that was an idea, let alone a good idea?! Oh, right. The NRA. Right.

http://thismodernworld.com/4201

CNN firing the dude behind Deus Ex Malcontent has gotten play in a lot of media outlets (probably not CNN, though), and the dude talks about it in length here:

http://www.deusexmalcontent.com/2008/02/say-what-you-will-requiem-for-tv-news.html

The last few paragraphs is a damning indictment of what a fucking joke much of American news reporting is these days. Powerful stuff. (Maybe not actually powerful, but 'good,' except that 'good stuff' is typically my reaction to A-Rod preferring she-male types of strippers, so, you know.)

Read the WaPo op-ed because another friend cited it as well. That NEA study about the decline in reading (only text on dead trees counts as reading material) is just being handed around all of the cultural nay-sayers who are certain American is headed for another dark age. Reading defined in this limited way isn't really the issue, and I spend my life studying and thinking about reading.

Not that I disagree with everything Jordan says, or am not frightened by the 20%, but America has always had an anti-intellectual vein in its culture. Now, mass media (Fox News being one example) has allowed that vein more visibility in recent years than perhaps in Emerson's age (easier to write a blog than get anything published), but I doubt things are much worse than they ever were. :)

Hitchens shredded the US media as well this week on the Slate.

I owned Top Gun, and think I may have gotten 4 - 5 minutes into the game, tops.

Super Tuesday, Part Deux. I'm beginning to think that the primary might be more interesting than when whomever the Democratic winner is goes up against McCain.

Oh, Hawaiians weren't impress with Chelsea.

I got to the final space ship in Top Gun, once, but it was really hard. You could cheat and just fly to the top of the screen in every level, and the enemy MIGs or whatever could never get up to you. Just beat the boss, then, and try to land on the effing carrier, and you'd advance kind of easily. I remember being amazingly disillusioned that I couldn't do a barrel roll.

One of the all-time gifts where I felt bad for asking my parents for it. $50 for that piece of crap game. Ugh.

20% of Americans believing the sun revolves around the earth vs. 45% of Americans believing God created man in his present form, no evolution. Which is scarier?

http://www.gallup.com/poll/21811/American-Beliefs-Evolution-vs-Bibles-Explanation-Human-Origins.aspx

http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

I figure Ma and Pa Bullfrog's 50 buckaroos was about $82 of today's dollars. We were victims. All of us.

Ghosts and Goblins. I couldn't begin to accurately estimate the amount of time spent on that game with no payoff. It was the prelude to a girl I dated named Dorothy, same MO.

Zero

I forget - did that article mention that you actually have to beat the game *twice* to get the ending? That news outraged me so much that I stopped playing it on the Nesticle, where I had reached Satan by using the save-states.

The single biggest waste of money I ever inflicted on my parents was the skateboard my dad bought me. I feel bad about that one, too.

Did anyone see Conan last night? I caught only a minute or two, but he had a bit where celebrities filled in answers to a written survey he sent. The question was "If I could travel back in time, I would...."

Dick Cheney's response: "I would turn in Anne Frank."

That's classic.

Conan's never been the same for me since Andy left, but that's freaking classic.

Those of you scoring at home, I have just received my second e-mail from the homeboy since the polls closed last night.

Enjoyed that Cracked list, particularly their mention of TMNT. They left off the video game version of Total Recall, which had such a strict learning curve that after two hours of playing, I couldn't make it more than halfway past the first level. And that was back when I had some video-game talent.

Dumb Americans = cool in at least one way: we can become Alphas just by reading on a regular basis, while everyone else will be left to serve us in Epsilonian obscurity. All we have to do is subvert democracy somehow.

Sweet.

Worlds - colliding - fuck - head - Harry - Hermione - a million slash writers screamed out and were suddenly silenced.

http://yeeeah.com/blog/2008/02/20/hot-muggle-love/

E.T. for the Atari was also impossible. And crappy.

I thought Hermione was shagging some 27 y.o. rock star. At least I think I saw that on the superficial.

Duh - keep up with the times, tree, they're "just friends":

http://perezhilton.com/2008-02-16-just-friends-3

Tree, there's actually talk of a documentary being made about the infamous ET landfill right now.