Good morning. Some miscellaneous things. Instead of annoying you all with eight tweets or Facebook posts or whatever this morning, I’ve decided to just dump everything right here in this post:
1. Allan Lorde’s blog post reminds me that I’ve been a member of the gigposters.com community for almost a decade. His sentiments pretty much mirror mine. I mean, shit, we’re practically twins.
2. Blondie: I’m no fan of the Blondie (I thought it was called Dagwood?) comic strip. I usually look right past it when I peruse the morning paper. But a panel from today’s strip caught my eye. The chair she’s sitting in is excellently drawn. All negative space. Extremely smart cartooning. You go, Person Who Draws Blondie.
3. In other opinionated comic news, Michael Kupperman brought the Beetle Bailey 9/11 comic to my attention via Twitter the other day. It is a magic combination of bile and poor layout and saccharine bullshit. I don’t know why it pisses me off, but it really does. Fictional characters’ floating heads trying to express ‘real’ emotion via stupid cartoon tears, with the artist equating their flat one-dimensional emotion-expressing with real people who suffered real loss? I dunno. There’s something about this that I’m not articulating well. It just grinds me the wrong way.
4. I saw an print ad for the Mass MoCA Fresh Grass Festival in the paper this morning, too, and it was one of those odd moments where I said to myself “Boy, that looks like something I’d do.” Not like someone ripped-off some super-unique style or anything. Just semi-similar to the way I tend to fill up a page with various all-caps weights of the typeface Knockout. Except they were a little sloppier and didn’t tighten up the layout enough for my tastes. For some reason it makes me feel like changing my shit up. Apologies if this was laid out by some local designer.
5. DO YOU LIKE FOOD? If you’re some kinda foodie weirdo who likes blogs about canning, no-knead bread, local vegetables, slow food, and all that Michael Pollan business, then you’ll probably want to keep up with Foodpile. I made the fantastic logo. In non-related food news, you might also be vaguely amused by Whole Foods Parking Lot, which, despite traveling down the well-worn comedy path of white-dudes-doing-a-rap-parody-that-lasts-way-too-long, actually has a decent rhyme for quinoa (via ajosephb).
6. TV Shows: We watched three pilots last night:
Up All Night: Will Arnett acting too normal for my taste. His character and Applegate’s weren’t too well-defined in the pilot, unlike Maya Rudolph’s, who is immediately sketched out for the viewer. The show don’t look half bad. I think they’re repeating it tonight.
Free Agents: After seeing the incredibly tasteless promo graphic for this show, I had low expectations, but it actually seemed all right. The show seems to be equally about the Hank Azaria & Kathryn Hahn characters, even though the marketing campaign made it seem like a “dude show.” In general, not too terrible. And seriously, what is it about Al Madrigal that is so instantly likeable?
New Girl: Somehow I ended up liking the-guy-that-was-a-cop-on-Veronica-Mars more than Zooey Deschanel-wearing-geeky-glasses. Weird. Watched it on the glitch-heavy FOX site.
7. Mother, Juggs and Speed is on FMC tonight. If you’ve never seen it, consider it. I don’t have cable, so I don’t know what FMC is. Fuck My Channel?
8. The two bizarre headlines of the day are: Gordon Ramsay Dwarf Porn Lookalike Eaten By Badgers (via Dave Witt) and Nicolas Cage Awoken By Naked Man With Fudgesicle (via Jeff LaChance). I didn’t even click on the stories to read them, out of fear that they might spoil it for me. Two incredibly worthy entries into the Click-Baiting Hall Of Fame. Kudos, ladies and gentlemen of the Internet press. Kudos.
POST-SCRIPT: You’ve probably noticed I’ve been blogging more. It’s weird. I never particularly cared for the medium, but suddenly I’m finding it to be an invaluable bin to deposit miscellaneous brain junk in. I hope it isn’t perceived as being egotistical (“I HAVE IMPORTANT OPINIONS ABOUT THINGS!“) or anything weird like that. It’s more like a record of flotsam & jetsam that I’ll have at my disposal five years from now when I forget all this shit. Making it public encourages me to write fully-formed sentences and have fully-formed thoughts, which is important for me. Hopefully it entertains you in some way. Anyhow, I’ve wasted a good hour of my morning already, so fuck off have a good day.
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#2 *GASP* And there’s a flat panel screen there too that doesn’t look like a picture.