Comic for Thursday, April 10th, 2008

Posted: 7:00 am, Thursday, April 10th

There's been no threats of shivving today, so this may reduce the perceived brilliance of my wife in some circles, but I can't say I'm upset about it. I wish I had known we'd be seeing Leatherheads on Sunday and I had come up with this strip in time to run it on Monday, when it was vaguely timely and the box office disappoinment of the flick hadn't been readily apparent yet, but, as I've said, I haven't been as up on the writing of the strip lately because I've not been on the subway very much. For some reason, writing the strip is super-easy on the subway for me, but the unemployment thing means that I've not been patronizing the MTA much (blame me for the next round of fare hikes, I guess).

I *did* do the straphanging thing yesterday, however. From time to time (very much time to time - this was the second time, and I think the first was like a year and a half ago), I participate in these dopey focus groups. They pay OK - yesterday's was $75 cash for an hour and a half - and sometimes you get free samples of shit (brandy, the first time I went). Last night's was this ridiculously contrived lotto game on cell phones. Not only was the girl sitting next to me some sort of moran, and not only was the marketing guy some douche who thought we were all idiots because we hated the product, but the product itself was just astoundingly lame. OK, so it's a lotto game (which I have problems with as it is, but I refrained from getting into that - I think a few other people also held back the additional-tax-on-the-oor bit so that they weren't labeled as crazies) that involved you going to a bodega, filling out a bubble sheet with your cell number, giving it to the clerk, he feeds it to a machine, the lotto commission texts you with a download of the lotto mechanism, and then you assign the lotto ringtone to you Fave Five or just make it your default rings, and then the next ten or twenty-five times people (or the Fave Five) call you, you have a 1/8 chance of winning from $2 to $100,000 or something, which you then have to take back to the bodega to redeem. They're trying to expand the scratch-off market with this, evidently, but I don't think making it eighty times as complicated as a scratch-off is the way, and I don't think the best way to utilize cellular technology is to necessitate two trips to the bodega. Also, evidently half the reason my focus group didn't play the lottery was that it was inconvenient to fill out bubble forms. Yikes, seriously? All I could think of was the Seinfeld where Elaine bitches about Snapple tasting terrible because she was through shaking things before opening, and Jerry shaking it twice and saying, "Oh, yeah. This is killing me."

Wow, that was a really long and boring story. I will reward you with links to downloading the entirety of Wilco's recent residency at the Riviera in Chitown. I have a lot of Wilco concerts - way more than I actually need - and I think the February 16th show may be the best setlist I've ever heard them play. I am jealous that Tree went, and think any future shivving should be directed his way.

Also, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer now runs a sports communications firm? God, is this entire administration just former jock-os running the country into the ground? (The answer, of course: "If only." We've also got evil greedheads.) Anyway, like any true Bushie, Fleischer completely misses the point and simplifies the recent Olympic torch protests down to, "Maybe the torch bearers should run faster." Maybe we should've built the twin towers stronger! Asshole.

OK, does anyone else's PC, like, once a month or so want to install some update that necessitates a restart, but instead of having "install on reboot," just insist on rebooting, and it gives you a five minute ticker that you have to click on to postpone? So if you step away from your computer for a bit, it just restarts, anyway, not saving your work? Who is the fucking ad wizard that came up with that one? Is there a way to disable that? What a ridiculous feature. I would guess it's a stupid Dell feature, but my old office machine did it, too, and that wasn't a Dell.

And, finally, today is my father's - get this - 75th birthday. The 'rents are both coming to Brooklyn tomorrow for a trip to see the red panda, so I won't be seeing him exactly on the momentous ocassion, but, damn. In a related event that may not seem related at first, I've been listening to this 1Up podcast called Retronauts lately, where a couple of their writers/editors get together and talk about old video games. It is immensely entertaining and relentlessly dorky. Anyway, they were talking about Super Mario Bros. 3 the other day, and it reminded me of one of the coolest things my dad ever did for me. Let's jump into the wayback machine to a distant land, before grunge, called 1990. I was in sixth grade, and had gotten an NES for Christmas the previous year (well, in 1988, this was the spring of 1990). Super Mario 3 was hitting soon, and all of us were kind of losing our shit over it. I saved up my Christmas money and everything for the presumed $65 cost of the cartridge (funny, that's more than I've paid for a video game in... eighteen years?), but the main problem was going to be finding a copy. There's a lot more production that goes into cartridges, and popular NES games could prove impossible to find (like Zelda II)(think like the Wii now, except you'd have an ugly multishade gray box and nothing to do on it but shoot that damned duck). Toys R Us was expecting something like 25 copies of the game in their first shipment, and that particular store serviced more than 25 people, so, yeah. Problematic. Also compounding the problem was that there was no set-in-stone release date back in the day. God, this is a long story. I'll try to speed things up. OK, so the day of the rumored appearance of SMB3 at Toys R Us, which also was inconveniently located to just about everyone, my dad just happened into the freaking Woolworth down the street from where he worked in Albany. Amazingly, they had gotten SMB3 on the day of its release, and were asking only $55 for it. From having heard me talk about it all the time, Dad knew this was something I was interested in, and so he just bought it for me on a random, like, March day. Not for a holiday or anything, and not asking me to pay him back. This was not the sort of thing that happened at my house very often (ever?). I was the first kid in Mr. McLaughlin's sixth grade class to have SMB3, and we got it for like ten bucks less than anyone else. It was over a week before my best friend finally got it, which is always fun. It was a completely out-of-the-blue gift, of something that meant a lot to me at the time (we'll save the discussion of what that says about me for later), and one of the coolest things Dad's ever done for me. So here's to my dad, an all-around original in his bow ties and old-school Siena Indians sweatshirt, who calls me and asks me to explain baseball rules to him (something out of the Mets game the other day that I just could not understand), whose critique of every R-rated film ever is "I just don't understand why they think the language is necessary" and yet who railed against "that arrogant son of a bitch" Shitwit yesterday, who had a friend with arms like a gorilla who got stabbed to death up in Montreal, and who is just a great guy. Happy birthday, Pop. (Not that he reads this.)

bullfrog

Bullfrog -- Thursday, April 10 2008, 08:26 am

I have been alerted that the noble Irish take to the ice against some minor school that no one's ever heard of but rightly hates anyway, tonight at nine.

http://und.cstv.com/

Go Irish! Beat Wolverines!

happy birthday to your pops!

Headline from the Onion that made me laugh this morning: "Gun Pried from Charlton Heston's Cold, Dead Hands."

Happy birthday to your dad!

Oh, man, that's awesome. Thanks, CK.

That auto-restart sucks. If you aren't scared of futzing around with the registry:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000294.html

Yikes, I haven't gone in there since gimping my 386 trying to get some Origin games running back in '93. This thing's not long for this world, anyway - soon as I re-enter the workforce, scrapping this Dell is priority numero one.

The UND v UM hockey game also on ESPN U, if you get that sort of thing. And the great thing about this: they'll probably be a fight in there, even if it means both teams lose a couple of players.

Do Red Pandas eat bamboo? Just curious.

I'm pretty much convinced that Clooney just wants to show that he can act and direct in all kinds of situations. Drama, action, comedy, whatever.

Bullfrog, i just heard another one of those funny ads from out of town while listening to the Tampa Bay Rays game feed on mlb.com today... the "Bring Johnny Gomes to School" contest.

You know what sport I can't follow on radio?

Hockey.

The Irish just scored, and I had utterly no clue what the fuck happened.

It has occurred to me that I am listening to this game simply to hear the reaction after a goal; trying to follow the action is completely unpossible for me.

FUCK YES IRISH.

FUCK YES.