Act now!

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this comic strip before on the blog, but 9 Chickweed Lane has been my favorite strip for the past year. It's done by Brooke McEldowney, a guy who has the keenest sense of interpersonal relationship dynamics I've ever seen in the funny pages. And the guy's an awesome artist, to boot, and has a wonderful blend of very accessible intellectual humor, slapstick, and playing with the very format of newspaper comics. The strip's backbone, so to speak, is the story of three generations of women--girl, mother, and grandmother--and the life issues they face. Apparently the strip has been around for over a decade by this point--I believe I read that the main teenage girl character was twelve when the strip started. She's about 18 or 19 by now, and I really like the idea of continuity and development in a comic strip. In fact, one of the current storylines is a continuation of something that happened briefly about two years ago (I read about three years' worth of backlog because it's such a great strip). It's a nice change from Family Circus or Garfield or Peanuts. Just recently, the comic has been focussing on major life changes for all of the characters, but right now (RIGHT NOW!) would be a really, really good time to jump on the reading-9 Chickweed Lane-bandwagon. One of the kookier characters, Thorax, has just started an advice column in a newspaper, and all the characters in the strip have been writing to him for advice. This is a really good time to start in because you'd be getting a pretty good (if necessarily partial) summation of who all the players are, their relationships to each other, and where all the storylines are right now. I'd give you a hyperlink, but I'm on a Macintosh, and this browser doesn't give me that option. So, go copy the following link and paste it into your browser window: www.comics.com/comics/chickweed/archive/chickweed-20060510.html . I'm starting you a couple of weeks back, so you'll have to navigate up until the current date. I know I'm not giving you a great deal of information to really sell you on this comic and convince you that it's worth it to check out.

But you trust me, right?

A friendly reminder

Don't forget, folks, you can do anything at Zombo.com.

Mysteries of the Universe, Part Seven

I've got a special mystery for you guys this month. Why is it so special? Because it actually has an answer.

I have a friend named Brandon. Brandon and I have known each other since middle school, or about 10 years, roughly. And let me tell you, the first day I met Brandon, I just had to wonder: What in the world would the result be if Brandon and I had a child together. I mean, sure, no two men have ever created a child together--at least not without a woman involved. And though the only remotely plausible instance of male pregnancy you'll probably find on the internet is a hoax, I don't doubt that science might someday make it possible.

But I can't wait years for science to catch up with my desires. I want to be cloned, if only so I can have someone who will laugh at my jokes. I want the garbage-powered car and the hoverboard from Back to the Future II. I want even cooler looking windmills. I want my soylent paisley. And I want to know what it would look like if Brandon and I made a baby. Luckily, my friends at Dave & Buster's couldn't wait on science to quit dragging its feet either. As much as Brandon loves video games, he's never been before, mostly due to his puerile phobia of driving on the interstate. So I took him this past weekend, and lo and behold, there was our godsend: a photo booth that would take our pictures and show us what our child would look like. My prayers had been answered! It probably cost us about four or five bucks to do this--I don't know really, because you get credits on a card rather than tokens--but it was money well-spent. So here, now, I give you...my daughter.


That's me on the bottom. The machine matches your face with its facial structure database, and then splits the difference between you and your pretend mate's structures to come up with a child. I was originally making an even uglier face than the one there, but the machine said it could not find my facial structure. So anyway, there's my baby...and my baby daddy.

By the way, I leave in two days for quite some time, so don't expect to many sentences, sentence fragments, words, or even letters on the blog for a while. Though I might drop a few punctuation marks and symbols now and then.

So, for now, this is Casey Roberson with Mysteries of the Universe, signing off and wishing you all a (!,:;.) %@#&*$