George Carlin: Dead and @$%*ing Gone.

George Carlin was known for many things. Those of us in the Bill -n- Ted's Excellent Adventure generation likely are unaware of his fight with censorship. But like Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce, he was among the pioneers of using profanity in his comedy act. Unlike his other contemporaries, he was philosophical about it, ultimately coming up with his routine, "7 words you can't say on television."

As a form of tribute to the humor and philosophy of George Carlin, we've chosen to memorialize the "...words you can't say..." routine one last time. We'll miss you, George.

Bulwer-Lyttony of puns

So I'm clearly very attracted to terrible puns. I wouldn't call it an "unhealthy" preoccupation because I'm not so sure there is the counterpart "healthy" preoccupation. This contest, in case you've never heard of it, is all about writing the most awful opening sentence to an imaginary novel.

Here's the website.

One of the things I like best about their judging of the contest is their habit of splitting the entries into categories such as "Purple Prose", "Romance", "Westerns", "Sci-Fi", and "Vile Puns", just to name a few. This helps me locate the entries most likely to make me laugh embarrassingly out loud.


In completely different news, you may notice that this strip has a gmail address associated with it that is different from this blogger account's address. Well, you've stumbled across the not-so-secret project I'm working on: a WEBCOMIC! Yes, that's right, I'm making a first attempt into building a webcomic. I'm hoping to have a good amount of strips prepared before actually launching the site. I haven't even bought a domain or hosting yet. These are all things I hope to do soon though and for now you'll just have to speculate as to the rest of the details. As I experiment with things like font-size, art styles, and line quality, I'll post the comics here for your viewing pleasure.

Characters, plotlines, artwork and other information should be coming soon, especially once I have the site up and the blog moved to that site from here. I'll maintain this as a sketch-blog for materials that don't really work well with the comic (at least according to my plan anyway). Check back at least every week for updates!

Pandoramoneum

So it turns out that our friends at Pandora.com are under the capricious and trembling thumb of the RIAA forcing them to gimp the user experience of an "on-demand" radio channel. Maybe it helps them sleep at night knowing that while they can't STOP people from using the internet to listen to the music they actually want (nor should they), they can at least force the inconvenience of unwanted music upon the hapless internet radio listener.

The dumb thing is nobody with an internet connection and half a brain is at all a captive audience. The last thing a media provider should do is make it difficult for people to access the products they want. But in the RIAA's twisted logic, they're not technically giving the music away for free if they can exercise at least some modicum of control over the pipe. Skip those tracks too many times and uh oh, you can no longer click the button.

Listen, RIAA, just because you work with and perhaps pay a salary to Satan, doesn't mean he isn't out to destroy your happiness too.

It just boggles my mind how a decision to produce this crappy user experience came about...