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Wow. I expected a spike in traffic after the Flash appeared on last night’s Smallville, but I wasn’t expecting a three-fold increase!

It’s all on the Flash site — no sign of spillover onto this blog, for instance — but Bart Allen’s 15 minutes of fame have propelled him to the #3 spot (right after the Teen Titans and Raven).

With luck I answered people’s questions about the Flash, Bart Allen, and just who is faster in a race between the Flash and Superman. With more luck, some of them will be intrigued enough to come back. With even more luck, some of them will pick up the comic to see what they’re missing.

Continue reading →

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I’ve been getting a lot of what Katie calls “concrete spam” (i.e. junk mail) from charities over the last few months. Eventually I’ll track down who sold my address. But this was an interesting one because they seem to think I’ve gone back to college:

Professor?

What, did my evil psychic twin get a doctorate over the Internet?

I’ll have to look for this on other mailers and see if anyone else thinks I’m a professor. That may help track down one source.

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Some odd searches through which people have found this site over the last two weeks:

  • “vice presidential debate drinking game” somehow hit Fallacious Arguments, despite the fact that the post never mentions a drinking game.
  • “breakdown girl” hit Donna Troy via Yahoo images search. Somehow it seems appropriate.
  • “folsom street fair 2004 pictures” and similar phrases directed several people to Living in Middle Earth, though I can’t imagine why.
  • “sugar packet” — I think someone was looking for real sugar (image search again).
  • “rhyming poems by katherine foreman” hit (big surprise) Katie’s Rhyming Poems. (What’s it like to be famous?)
  • “space pirate amazon ninja catgirl” sounds ridiculous, wich is exactly why I posted about the game
  • “jesse quick in love” actually hit the speed force and Jesse’s mother, but not Jesse Quick herself.
  • “how to steal flash” brings up the Flash Museum. I have to wonder what they were actually looking for, though.
  • “xxx hermione” and similar (some of them rather explicit) — WTF? These hit Harry Potter Titles I’d Like To See.

Unfortunately there are too many phrases for the stats program I use to show anything that hit less than twice — and that’s where the really odd ones to show up! I’ve skimmed the logs a bit, and some of the choice items include: Continue reading →

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Now that I’ve got the complete Alias comic book in TPB form, I’m selling the individual issues on eBay. In getting that set up, I was reminded of an interesting piece of symmetry between Alias and another Bendis series, Powers.

Both feature ex-heroes who now work as “normal” detectives. Christian Walker is a homicide cop, and Jessica Jones is a private investigator. Early on we learn that Walker’s hero identity was Diamond. When we finally get the details of Jessica’s back story, it turns out she went by the name Jewel.

The similarities pretty much end there, though. Despite the names and circumstances, the characters, stories, and overall feel of the two books are quite different. Alias is “comic book noir,” and Powers is a cop show in a city overrun with super-powers. Alias tends to be far more character-driven. Jessica gets into trouble during investigations, but it’s her and the people she’s looking for who are most affected. Powers works on a bigger scale, looking at superheroes as celebrities, and when things go wrong, they affect everyone.

(I’ve got a dozen or so issues of Powers up for auction as well — for the same reason!)

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This showed up in the spamtraps today:

Subject: Truth of the matter

Dear Sir,

This letter can only define Nigeria Scam, a.k.a. 419. If this mail look like scam to you delete it, we are looking for serious minded person.

As we all know, top officials do loot funds out of the country with non-residence foreigners. When they try and fail, the world hears it as fraud/scam, but when they go through, nobody or a newspaper writes it.

This trade is huge here and people are making lots of money out there in most foreign countries. Though the government are mapping out sophisticated strategies to checkmate unauthorized dealers. From the president to the cleaner in the house, they are all into this trade.

And so on.

This has got to be the most brazen variation I’ve seen — and the first one that admits what it is up front. Of course it goes on to try to convince you that no, this one’s the real thing, we’re only trying to cheat other people, not you, because you wouldn’t fall for that sort of thing, would you?

I’m trying to figure out whether the proper response to this is “WTF” or “O_o” or just “Unbe-flipping-lievable.”

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SpaceShipOne has won the X-Prize! This morning it completed its second trip to the edge of the atmosphere within one week (the prize stipulates it must be within two weeks!)

The Scaled Composites team made history in June with the world’s first privately-funded manned space flight, and last week they made a deal with Virgin to licence the technology for space tourism. The $10 million X-Prize won’t offset the cost of developing SpaceShipOne (estimated at $20 million in the radio story I heard), but it is a prototype, and prototypes always cost more because you’re still experimenting.

The runner-up in the race to the X-Prize, the DaVinci Project, plans to keep going. This is great news as well, because the more different types of craft we have, the less chance one accident will ground the world’s space fleets.

The flights are still suborbital, but the process and technology have been shown to work.