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Store sign: Yarn Yarn (Yarn Yarn Yarn)
On Friday, Katie wanted to look for some craft supplies at a store we’d seen before, called—believe it or not—Yarn Yarn. We’d first noticed it a couple of years ago, and took a picture of the sign for blog purposes.

The store was closed, but on our way back to the car, we spotted the Puzzle Blimp flying around. So here we had two old blog posts coming together.

Except there was one problem. It turns out that when we took pictures of Yarn Yarn and the nearby Holy Computer, we never got around to posting them online. So here, delayed by two and a half years, are those photos, plus a couple of new shots.

The Puzzle Blimp Returns
The Puzzle Blimp Returns! (As noted last time, it’s Ameriquest’s Soaring Dreams Airship [archive.org].)

Store sign: Holy Computer
Hmm, is this what Robin says when Batman analyzes evidence using the Cray he has in the Batcave?

Store sign: The Enlarger
Maybe it’s just the fact that I see so much spam, but the first thing this name makes me think of isn’t photography.

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Salon has a great piece on how there is no left-wing war on Christmas. This “OMG the blue staters want to ban Christmas” tripe was idiotic last year, and it’s back with a vengeance this year.

Honestly, all this fuss over things like “Happy Holidays,” an expression designed to avoid offending people? Remember, in most cases a store clerk has no way of knowing your religion ahead of time. If you happen to be buying a wreath, a stand-up Santa, a pair of decorated red-and-green stockings and a nativity set, then it’s probably a fair guess that you’re celebrating Christmas, but if you’re buying an Xbox, how are they supposed to know?

(I’m also rather partial to the descriptions of the ACLU defending Christians’ religious freedoms! That ought to make some people question their assumptions.)

Get a grip, people! Christmas is not in any danger, and hysterical whining and knee-jerk boycotts aren’t going to accomplish anything except making you look like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorist.

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I’ve been slowly working my way through the Comic Cavalcade Archives. I’m determined to read the whole thing, but I have to take it in small doses. Partly the target audience is much younger than me, partly the storytelling (and art) I’m used to is much different, and of course partly it’s a very different time. It was the middle of World War II, and half the stories involved fighting Nazi spies or, in some cases, wreaking havoc in Germany itself. (The Ghost Patrol should have been able to take Hitler out on their own, but they seemed more interested in sabotage and practical jokes.) The original setup for Wonder Woman was that she left Paradise Island to help America defeat the Axis!

The Golden-Age Flash hunt continues. I’m now up to three issues of All-Flash with an issue of Flash Comics on its way. So far I’ve discovered that the Turtle didn’t have a costume the first time he appeared. He was just a guy in a green suit who used slowness against a guy who was used to moving fast. Next up: the original Thorn. I’ve bid on a lot of eBay auctions, expecting to win only a fraction of them. Everywhere else I look online, people are selling collector-grade books at much higher prices. I just want to read the original stories, write down who appears, and scan the occasional panel that I’m going to clean up anyway.

Amazon has finally put a discount on the Golden Age Flash Archives vol.2, so I’ve pre-ordered it.

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I found a flood of crude phishing attempts in our postmaster account this morning.

How crude?

The hook was, “Simply reply to this email with your online login and password.”

No forms, no imitation websites, no swiped logos, no links of any sort at all. One of them even had multiple recipients visible on the To: line. It’s like a throwback to the early days of spam-n-scam.

The headers were full of things like %RNDDIGIT27, suggesting a broken spam generator, and of course there’s the fact that they actually targeted the postmaster account.

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Here’s the WTF?!?!?!!!! moment of the day. Actual spam received over the weekend:

Sell Your Organs Online!

Reply to this message if your interested in selling your organs!

Seriously, what the hell?

Forget the fact that selling organs is illegal in the US. And I’m sure mailing them across state lines would be a felony. And you sure as heck can’t list them on eBay. Or Amazon—can you imagine? “15 new and used livers available.” “Customers who purchased kidneys also bought…”