Hooray for Captain Spaulding

Tuesday, January 30, 2007


Rethinking Chewbacca and R2D2's actions in Star Wars in light of Episodes I-III (via my brother). Of course, my first reaction was "What about Chewbacca being rescued from slavery by Han Solo?"

On the same page, I find this bit of dialogue which adds support to the hypothesis:
LUKE: What made you come back, Han?
HAN: Oh, the Wookiee here got stubborn about it.
.

I love the idea that they had been playing future-chess for years.

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Wednesday, January 24, 2007



I wasn't going to post about National Gorilla Suit Day because I posted about it before it was cool and didn't want to just look trendy. But I was touched by the sentiment of this banner and my heart grew three sizes. So I asked a boy at the window to buy the biggest gorilla suit at the shop window and have it delivered to the Cratchetts. And I keep National Gorilla Suit Day in my heart not just on January 31st but all of the days of the year.

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Tuesday, January 23, 2007


In celebration of the great Milton Caniff's 100th birthday, website Humorous Maximus (or "Humourous Maximus", as our friends across the pond say) is running old Steve Canyon strips.

In related news, according to Doonesbury, the Bush administration has banned saying how old Steve Canyon is.

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Thursday, January 18, 2007


Speaking of comic strips, I'm really digging Li'l Abner after buying the Kitchen Sink reprints off of eBay. Unlike the Spider-man strip where it took two weeks for a guy to walk across a room, the pace of Abner is lightning-fast. If he's hanging off a cliff with one hand while holding an anvil with the other with a lake full of piranhas and sharks on the cliff drop and twelve gangsters with tommy guns on the clifftop at the end of a strip on day x, the situation gets resolved on day x+1.

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More on Grand Canyon-gate: Michael Shermer from Skeptic Magazine tells the tale (on Huffington Post of all places) of how he was duped by the press release and got PEER to retract the claim when he asked for specifics. He also notes that the Creationist book is sold in the Inspirational section of the bookstore so it's not like the Grand Canyon is calling it science.

Via "Jolly Jim" Treacher who does that thing where he puts different words in a comic strip and correctly notes that Shermer needs to learn how to do HTML quote-blocks (or someone at Huffington should have done it for him).

UPDATE: A more readable version of Shermer's apology.

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Saturday, January 13, 2007


Today's Doonesbury, which is based off of this press release (or an email about the press release with three FW:'s), claims that the Grand Canyon park Service is not allowed to tell the geologic age of the Grand Canyon. A three-minute Internet search finds this National Park Service page which tells the geologic age of the Grand Canyon.

If you look at the press release, you'll see that they have good documentation about the book but are vague as to the "not allowed to tell" claim (Who gave the order? When was it given? Etc.)

UPDATE:The folks who released the press release have disappeared the claim that park rangers aren't allowed to tell the geologic age of the Grand Canyon. Google cache is, for now, here.

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