Earlier this morning, I obtained a Continental OnePass account for Carolyn. She’s six months old, and she has a frequent flyer number. Even if our schedules remain absolutely static from now until the end of 2004, Carolyn will have earned close to 10,000 miles toward Silver Elite membership before she reaches her first birthday.
I can’t decide if this frightens or amuses me.
Whether you love or hate it, “Garfield” is incredibly popular. However you feel, though, you’re likely to really enjoy the Random Garfield Comic Strip Generator. You can go surrealist, or try to get a coherent story out of the script—the latter actually tends to be a lot funnier. I’ll point you to my favorite result so far, but by all means create your own (and let us know what they are in the comments).
A brief sampling of vignettes from this week’s trip to Iowa City:
While walking around downtown Iowa City with some folks from the conference, we passed a Mexican restaurant called “Gringo’s”. A block away, we passed an ice cream parlor called “Whitey’s”.
Do I even have to tell you that I’m not making this up?
Tuesday night we had dinner at an Italian place, and when the hostess asked me if I’d like some freshly grated cheese on my entreé, I said I would. “Just tell me when,” she said as she started.
There was a short pause as she grated away. “More?” she inquired.
“You bet,” I replied. “Did you ever see the TV commercial with the huge pile of—”
“Oh, yes,” she said with authority, still grating. “At my last job, that’s all anybody ever said to me.”
“I think that’s enough,” I told her. “And thanks for so thoroughly shooting down my lame, unoriginal attempt at a stupid joke.”
Iowa City, and for that matter the Cedar Rapids airport, are dotted with “Herkeys”, which are four-foot statues of the local sports mascot that have been ‘enhanced’ by various artists. The statue outside the Museum of Natural History, for example, was covered in fur and titled “Bigfoot Herkey”, while the one in the airport sports a business suit, travel bag, and cell phone. What I found interesting is that none of the Herkeys I saw had been structurally modified, either by addition or subtraction, but were simply decorated in some fashion. I wonder if that was a participation constraint, or if perhaps the mascot is so revered that nobody even considered performing artistic surgery.
Just past the Museum of Natural History I glanced up at the roof of a building to see the American flag at half-mast. I actually had to think about it for a second before I made the connection, but I thought I’d check. “That’s to honor Reagan, I assume,” I said to Mark Hale, the conference organizer. “How long are flags going to be lowered for him?”
“I heard thirty days,” he said. “Although I think ten of those might be in memory of the Democratic Party.”
While I was in Buffalo to conduct training at the university there, I discovered that I’d failed to pack any books or movies to while away the evenings. Since I didn’t really want to pay $9.95 (or, you know, $12.95) for an in-room movie, I decided to head out to a Barnes & Noble and see what I could acquire.
After finding some classic (and massively discounted) Robert Silverberg and a Jack McDevitt novel I’d always meant to read, I headed back into the music-and-movies section to see what they had in the way of interesting DVDs. Not much, as it turned out. But while I was back there, within the space of about 45 seconds I had two different people ask me if I worked there. The older lady who asked, upon hearing my negative, said, “Oh, I’m sorry. You look like someone who would work in a bookstore.”
“I take that as a compliment, ma’am,” I said, and, smiling, headed toward the front of the store to purchase my books.
If you’re in the mood for some goofy humor, I’ve updated my CNN and general-media humor pages. The entries on both go least to most recent, just so you know.
I will say one thing about random-dictionary spam: it can be amusing and educational. I got one today titled “proteolytic giggling.” Once I’d looked up “proteolytic” and had it lead me on to “proteolysis,” I was giggling pretty severely myself. Which is good, because it helped cool off an energetically simmering political rant.
I spotted a link to PacManhattan over at SimpleBits, and was immediately stunned. I mean, sure, it’s like an episode of “When Geeks Go Crazy,” what with the use of cellular and WiFi communications to update player positions, and the Web-based arcade view of a live game in progress, but think about it. These people are running around entire blocks of New York City just to play a live-action version of a 1980’s video game. They’re actually getting exercise. They won’t just be toning their wrists; this is a total-body workout. That’s so not geeky.
Can’t you just hear the guy playing PacMan trying to cross the street? “Hey! I’m wakka wakka wakkin’ here!”
One of the great privileges of writing More Eric Meyer on CSS was having two wonderful technical reviewers: Porter Glendinning and Dave Shea. Even better was the chance to have Dave create a CSS Zen Garden design, give it to me as a graphic comp, and creating the CSS needed to make it work. I describe that process in detail in Project 10 of the book, but as a preview, the design is now available as—and here I take a deep breath to avoid giggling like a celebrity-struck schoolgirl—the one hundredth official Zen Garden design. The photographs used in the design were all taken by me at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, but the design itself is all Dave, baby. Interestingly, I never told Dave where I’d taken the pictures, so the faint thematic echoes of 15 Petals and the Garden’s web site are coincidental.
I will say here and now that design #99, Wiggles the Wonderworm, is an utterly fantastic and delightful concept. If I could, I’d switch his design with mine, so he could have the #100 slot. Wiggles rocks my world.
As you can tell, the syndicate hasn’t yet silenced me. In fact, I got a message from an operative deep inside their organization who says that his boss has met both Mallett and Watterson. Obviously his boss is a part of the conspiracy. I’ve let him know that he needs to be extra careful. Trust no one! I mean, look at today’s strip. How much more C&H does it get? Until next time, courage.
Oh, God, now they’re going to come for me; this may be the last communication I ever send. But it will have been worth it, if only to find the real truth, whatever that turns out to be.
Damn Ferrett, anyway. He’s the one who blew my cover.
This is my story. I just hope it can serve as a guide, and a warning, to those who may follow me.
Some of you may be too young to remember the name Bill Watterson, but he’s the man who created Calvin & Hobbes. Bill is one of the Cleveland area’s most famous residents, but he’s also one of its most elusive. As an article published in the Cleveland Scene details, he not only withdrew from the comic pages in 1995, but also from public life shortly thereafter. He resides in or around Chagrin Falls, which coincidentally was the subject of a song by The Tragically Hip, and not so coincidentally is the small town through which a giant Calvin is rampaging on the back cover of the first Calvin & Hobbes collection. The striped-awning shop in his hand is the Popcorn Shop, a great little small-town store that sits right next to the falls themselves.
It is something of a coincidence that it was next to the actual falls, on a platform right next to (and somewhat below) the Popcorn Shop, where I officially proposed to Kat on her 29th birthday. That has little to do with the story, but I thought I’d share it anyway.
Back to my tale—I just hope I can finish before it’s too late.
A while back, our local paper started carrying a comic called Frazz by Jef Mallett. Immediately, I was struck by how much the illustration style looked like Bill Watterson’s. The main character (Frazz) looks an awful lot like a Calvin in his early twenties. He works as the janitor in an elementary school, and is closer to the students than most of the staff, as you’d expect from an older Calvin. Frazz is a musician in his off hours, and there have been whole strips devoted to Frazz singing some lyrically complex song, just like the lengthy poems found in Calvin strips and treasuries. He’s also an avid biker, as is his girlfriend, Miss Plainwell, who is a very Susie Derkins type of girl. Frazz likes to play practical jokes on people, often jokes that involve a truly surreal sense of humor. One of the students with whom Frazz spends a lot of time is Caulfield. Catcher in the Rye reference? Yes. It isn’t the only one. The pacing, style of humor—it all has a very Wattersonian feel to it.
At some point, it was revealed that “Frazz” is a derivative of the character’s last name, when he was addressed as “Mr. Frazier.” That’s when I started to get really suspicious. So far as I’m aware, Calvin’s last name was never given in the strip. So it was entirely possible that we were reading about the exploits of one Calvin Frazier. When a later strip revealed his first name to be Edwin, I wondered if it was just to throw us off the track. Or, perhaps, his real name is Calvin Edwin Frazier, and for some reason he’d started going by the middle name. (Could he be in hiding from fans?)
Then came The Sign. The moment when I couldn’t rationalize away my suspicions any more.
In a Sunday strip, Frazz is talking with one of the girls at the school. She mentions that she plans to be famous one day, and when Frazz points out that she doesn’t even like to be called on in class, she says she wants to be famous, not well-known; that she wants to be well-known for her work but not be a public figure. “Like J.D. Salinger or Bill Watterson,” says Frazz. “Never heard of them,” she responds, for the punchline.
At that, I threw down the paper, turned to Kat, and said, “All right, now he’s just toying with us.”
There is one major objection that gets raised: there is Frazz merchandise available through the uComics site. “Ah HA!” you cry, “that can’t be Watterson. He was famously antithetical to merchandising of any kind whatsover.” That’s true, and look where it got him: as the Scene article points out, the most common sightings of Calvin these days are those completely unauthorized stickers of him urinating on logos, usually Ford but sometimes others; race car drivers come in for this treatment a lot, too. (And take a look at the illustrations in that article. One is the naughty sticker, two are Watterson drawings, and two are credited to “Jef Mallett.”)
My theory is that this time around, Watterson is trying limited merchandising as an experiment. No stuffed Frazz dolls, of course, but some mouse pads and coffee mugs on which you can emblazon your favorite strip. Would a syndicate go along with this? Oh, God yes. If I were running a comic syndicate and Bill Watterson came to me with a proposal to pull a Richard Bachman, I’d not only fall to the ground and kiss his feet, I’d hire an actor to play the pseudonymic persona full time and have all the mailed strips routed through that actor’s place of residence, just to erase as many tracks as possible.
It’s possible that I’m reading patterns into the noise, I admit. I certainly may be projecting my longing for a return to the early days of Calvin & Hobbes (which I liked much better than the last couple of years) onto the situation, hoping for the return of a personal hero, even if in disguise. This whole Mallett/Watterson thing may well be my own personal Lot 49. If there really is a Jef Mallett, it’s my hope that he’d be flattered by my theory, not insulted.
But if you never hear from me again, it’s because I’ve said too much and the syndicate had me silenced, stuffed into a trio of tiny boxes and buried in the back pages of a newspaper.
