S***r B**l Blend-Off.

If you've never seen the guys at Will It Blend stuff weird shit into their powerful blenders, here it is. They can't say "Super Bowl," so they bleep it out with "The Big Game" and other euphemisms. Funny as always. Link for video-impaired. Don't try this at home.

Also be sure to check out the Sinfest Super Bowl Special, in which Nique pwns. Again.

More Super Bowl stuff from Dave Barry today (who says it's raining in Miami right now). This is an article you're supposed to show to your wife, if your TV does not have an 11-foot diagonal (a large diagonal is important to a man) which requires you to watch the game from your driveway (this is a good thing).

SMALL TVS CAUSE CANCER, STUDY SHOWS

NEW YORK OR BOSTON -- (AP) -- A scientific study, done by scientists, has shown that small television screens cause cancer.

''If your TV set is not the size of, at minimum, a Toyota Camry, you are taking a serious medical risk,'' stated Dr. Harold Gropenfinger, a scientist. "A person who would deliberately expose her family, including children, to a smaller TV is, in my scientific opinion, scum.''

Dr. Gropenfinger won the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for Science for discovering that beer prevents heart disease.

Let me just add at this final juncture that I do not think of Prince when I think of football halftime, and similarly, Cirque du Soleil will perform in the pre-game show, and to this I say, WHAT THE FUCK???

In blackest night.

I blogged about Green Lantern recently and how much I like the hero. Martin Nodell, artist and creator of the original Golden Age GL from the 1940s, passed away yesterday.

While I was not a fan of the "Earth Two" Alan Scott version, without this original idea, there would have been no Silver Age Hal Jordan GL. The comic cover I selected here shows both illustrated by the inimitable Gil Kane.

I met Marty at a comic convention in St. Louis many years ago, and he was a kind and generous man. The night is blacker without him.

Little blue guys win Iraq war.

The Green Lantern theory of geopolitics. GL (Hal Jordan is still my fave) was all about fearlessness and willpower used to overcome any obstacle. Hal's power ring could only do cool stuff because he was a cool guy with the right attitude (and a kickin' girlfriend whose daddy made jet planes).

Suffice it to say that I think all this makes an okay premise for a comic book. But a lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.

I hope this Blackest Night will be ending soon.

Marmaduke, explained.

Haven't you always wondered what was going on in those Marmaduke cartoons? Me neither, but This Guy certainly does.

Marmaduke's fat, elderly neighbor-lady believes her phone to be ringing, but her husband tells her that it is probably one of Marmaduke's mobile phones (Marmaduke, for reasons still at large, owns a very large number of mobile phones).

Examples such as this abound. Some are funnier. Here's my favorite:

Marmaduke planned on eating dinner with his fat, elderly neighbors, but they are having something he doesn't like to eat and he flips a shit.

"Flips a shit." Man, that's awesomely deathless prose right there.

My daily comics.

Here's what I check out every day. In this order too, which is determined by many factors including how often the strip updates. How about you? What are your favorites?

Liberty Meadows
PVPonline
Dilbert
Doonesbury
Fox Trot
Non Sequitur
Rose is Rose
Penny Arcade
Girl Genius
Dork Tower
Sinfest

God speed, Screw On Head.

Run, do not walk to SciFi.com and watch the preview of The Amazing Screw-On Head. Why? Well, there are two reasons. First, you can see it online before all the other kids and be cooler than them. Second, it's by Mike Mignola of Hellboy fame (judge him by his comics and not the movie). I found out that when you smoke somebody, you learn all they know. Here's a sample quote.

It's a turnip, and it looks like it has a small parallel universe inside.

You either like that and you're hieing to the URL above, or you're saying, "WTF?" I don't think there's a middle ground. Like when Eddie Van Halen plays his guitar with a power drill in Poundcake, you either think it's cool or you don't.

Superman is a Tulpa.

Neil Gaiman co-wrote this article for Wired about "The Myth of Superman." It says Alvin Schwartz wrote a book about Superman, and how he transcends being a character in a comic book.

Schwartz writes that Superman is real. He is a tulpa, a Tibetan word for a being brought to life through thought and willpower.

I learned the word tulpa from the CCG On The Edge, from which I learned many unusual things. Tulpa was a hot, broken card that figured in many decks. It produced FAQs like these:

The card says the Tulpa is "a copy of the real Character." Can I play a Tulpa before a non-Tulpa version of the Character is in play?
Can I call a non-Tulpa version of a Unique Character after I have played a Tulpa of the same Character?

Of course, real Tulpas (!) are made from whole cloth and not copies.

It was said that Carlos Castaneda was able to materialize a living squirrel on the palm of Don Juan's hand based on the latter's instruction.

Lame X-Men quiz.

There are 13 questions. Four of them have nothing to do with the X-Men. I got 85% on the quiz, missing only two, and one of them was a non-X question.

The picture with the quiz is pretty cool, even though it's a posed on-set shot.

Macho women with guns.

I mused to my Lovely Wife Cheryl, as I am wont to do, as to why action heroines often have kids to defend. Elektra had that little girl (not in the comics, Elektra was an assassin, pure and simple), Ultraviolet had that catatonic boy, and even Ripley had Jonesy and Newt.

She opined that somebody needs to get in trouble, somebody needs to be saved. If it was another woman, that screws up the story, because our female lead needs to show that women are strong. If it's a man, then it shows women stronger than men, and most of the audience wouldn't buy that. The exception would be Sheena of the comics, who had a sidekick named Bob that always got captured and held hostage in a complete role-reversal. Same thing happened to Wonder Woman's Steve Trevor.

It also seems to be okay when the female action hero's boyfriend gets captured, she releases him, and they both kick butt side by side (see Alias, Underworld).

So I guess we're going to see lots more macho men saving weak women and macho women saving weak children in action movies to come. Who do macho children save, pets?

Death talks about life.

Neil said this on his blog. I love Dee Dee.

Incidentally, the exact and complete Death quote (from Death Talks About Life) is

"Life -- and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison -- is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal."

(Which I put up here for the benefit of anyone googling it, because I notice that there are a few different versions out there.)

Death, from the Endless in Sandman comics, is this cute little goth girl that shows up when it's your time and hangs out for a while, and then you go away with her and be dead. Much nicer than that reaper chap.

He talks to fish.

We can be sure that Peter David's harpoon-handed, nasty-tempered revision of Aquaman will not be the one used by the WB in their Smallville-like television show.

Seriously... Aquaman? Isn't he the butt of all kinds of jokes over the years? The Ant-Man of DC comics? One wag on Fark said that by episode 6 they will have plumbed the depths of evil corporation enemies bent on poisoning the seas, and after that it'll be all over. I'm sure there will be lots of young, pretty people in swimwear.

The Swiss Army knife of answers.

Garry Trudeau has an uncanny ability to predict what next week's hot topic will be, and zeroes in on that for Doonesbury. However, Harriet Miers' sudden withdrawal caught him by surprise. Here you can see next week's strips as they would have been. They're funny stuff, too. A glimpse into a future that never was.

Of windshields and dots and frits.

I guess the first question is, "Why do windshields have a big black border around them?" It's the frit, an area for adhesive that shields it from UV rays. Then there's the big black dots.

Rather than a straight black edge, the dot border blends the solid band into the clear glass, says Steve Coyle at Auto Glass Specialists. Some windshields also use the dots as a third sun visor to block the Sun behind the rearview mirror where most visors don't reach.

I don't think the blending effect works, resulting in distracting, golf-ball sized dots. They look like Ben Day dots and make me think my car is a Lichtenstein painting.

Dial B for Blog.

I don't want to go out on a limb here, but Dial H for HERO had to be the stupidest idea in DC Comics history. It's one of those old comics that's hard to believe somebody's not making it up as a gag. Dial B for BLOG is a well done sendup of the whole silly idea, and seems to be a passable blog on comics as well. I loves me a well crafted parody, I do.

They'll Do It Every Time.

On the very first day I blogged, over two years ago, I wondered about the name of a comic strip that used to be in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch comics section. One of the names I considered for my blog was taken from said strip. Today, on my blog's 402nd-day anniversary, I can report that the name has been found.

Originated in 1929 by Jimmy Hatlo, a sports cartoonist for The Call-Bulletin in San Francisco, the feature was created on the spur of the moment when a syndicated cartoon was lost in the mail. The cartoon soon attracted the attention of readers, who submitted their own examples of human foibles.

This comic sometimes illustrated dumb things people do or say in daily life. Usually, the victim of said dumb thing had an arrow pointing to him with the words "Urge to Kill," sort of like stage direction. The best example I can find, sadly, is this recent comic (it's still produced daily, by another artist). Evidently the demons of poltical correctness have removed "Urge to Kill" from this comic's vocabulary.

The name of the strip became part of the vernacular for a while. Chuck Berry even used it in his song "Ain't That Just Like a Woman."

Find Katie Holmes in this picture.

The caption for this picture is Christian Bale, as Batman, and Katie Holmes, above, in Warner Brothers' "Batman Begins." For a minute there, I couldn't find Katie. Then I noticed the well formed breast crowned by a tiny nipple, and realized that was her. I'm sure she'll be adding this flattering picture to her resume soon. I hope we see more of her in the movie, although I have to admit I like what I've seen so far.

By the way, I learned from this article that the DC logo from the 70s was designed by Milton Glaser, which means that changing it is a SIN AGAINST GOD and they shouldn't have done that.

Office Super Friends Space.

Pretty damned funny. Make sure you watch all the way through the credits.