In honor of the Heroes DVD release, here’s a truck that’s almost, but not quite labeled for Primatech Paper:
Interestingly, it’s been a month for timing pop culture releases with relevant astronomical events. First Stardust, all about catching a falling star, arrived in theaters the same weekend as the Perseids meteor shower. Today, the Heroes Season 1 DVD arrives on the same day as a total eclipse (albeit a lunar one, rather than solar).
This weekend I added a couple of webcomics to my daily reads. I’d been pointed to individual strips at Shortpacked! and xkcd, and in the latter case, I kept meaning to add it to my list and forgot. Shortpacked is all about pop culture, action figures and comics. In tone, it reminds me of Sluggy Freelance in its prime. xkcd describes itself as a comic about “romance, sarcasm, math and language.” The art is usually stick figures, but the humor is perfect.
I got through the entire Shortpacked! archive and about 1/3 of xkcd.
So now they join my other daily/thrice-weekly reads: Something Positive, Girl Genius, Real Life and Punch an’ Pie.
This touring bus has an advertisement for the company’s website, but the placement of the handle for the cargo doors is… unfortunate, as it obscures the top of the “o” in “.com”—changing it into an entirely different word.
And weren’t those who dedicated themselves to the service of Vesta called Vestal virgins? I’m just sayin’…
(Once again, I’m afraid to see what search terms are going to bring people here…)
Bumper sticker spotted on a Corner Bakery delivery van:
It reminds me of the warnings you see on cardboard coffee cups that say things like, “The beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot.” Though my favorite is still one from the late, lamented* Diedrich Coffee that said, “Of course it’s hot!”
*OK, they’re not completely gone—there are still two stores left in Orange County since Starbucks bought them out and either closed or converted the rest. *grumble*
The following two “Weird Al” Yankovic songs popped up sequentially on the iPod the other day:
Sometimes random shuffle makes you wonder whether the software knows more about the songs than what’s in the ID3 tag.
I’ve held off on posting funny spam subject lines lately, but I just had to comment on this pair. First up:
Mazrim Taim was one of those, raising an army and ravaging Saldaea before he was taken.
It’s a quote from Lord of Chaos, the 6th book in Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, The Wheel of Time. The next one is a bit less obvious:
If Lan was attempting jokes, however feeble and wrongheaded, he was changing.
I wasn’t sure about this one, since there must be other stories with characters named Lan, but Google Book Search found it in book 5, The Fires of Heaven.
I’ve seen lots of spam that used filler from The Wizard of Oz and other novels old enough to be in the public domain. Project Gutenberg and the like have been transcribing them, making free plain-text ebooks for years, making it easy to snag a couple of lines of actual English text.
In theory this should be harder to identify as filler than randomly-generated text. Continue reading
Today DC Comics released The Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, a collection of classic Flash stories ranging from 1947–1994. Back in February, when they announced the contents, I did a point-by-point comparison of the stories to be included and the stories that appeared in the 1991 book, The Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told.
When I picked it up, I noticed that the paper was lower quality. The 1991 book was printed on thicker, almost glossy paper. It wasn’t archive level, as it’s noticeably yellowed over 16 years. The new book is certainly above newsprint, but the paper is thinner and matte. Of course, it’s still better paper—and better printing—than the stories originally got!
It looks like Johanna Draper-Carlson (Comics Worth Reading) was right when she suggested that the new Greatest Stories books are aimed at another audience: not the fan who wants a collection of classic stories, but a casual reader who might be interested in a sampler.
Alas, no Bart Allen cameo. The final 2 pages of Flash v2 #91, which were really a teaser for “Reckless Youth” and not part of “Out of Time,” were left out. But speaking of that story, Mark Waid’s introduction to the book contains a statement that, given recent events, takes on an unintended poignancy:
That they chose “Out of Time”—one written by me—is, I insist, simply a lucky byproduct of their real intent: to showcase the artwork of Mike Wieringo, a most deserving comics superstar whose interpretation of Wally as the Flash set a standard unsurpassed to this day.
