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I’d known that artist Roy Lichtenstein‘s most famous works were done in the style of gigantic comic book panels. Something I didn’t know was that many of those paintings weren’t just in the style of comic panels, but were blown-up copies of specific panels from actual comic books (done, of course, by other artists).

An art teacher named David Barsalou has been tracking down the originals. He has a website, Deconstructing Lichtenstein, which displays dozens of actual comic panels side by side with the corresponding Lichtenstein paintings.

Some are nearly exact. Some depart a bit more, but many of those actually keep the same dialogue or narration. And yet, somehow Lichtenstein’s work has been hailed for decades as “original.”

(via A Distant Soil)

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I really liked the last two Five For Fighting albums, America Town and The Battle for Everything. “Superman” was quite possibly the only song I’ve heard that made me run out and buy an album without checking other songs first. So I was eagerly awaiting “Two Lights.”

Unfortunately, after listening through twice, I only actually like two songs on the album: “California Justice” and “Policeman’s Xmas Party.” Everything else is just too…sappy.

And “The Riddle” is everywhere. Radio, supermarkets, fast food, shopping malls. I can’t escape it. Worse, it’s one of those tunes that worms its way into your mind and runs around in circles.

But here’s the odd thing: Does anyone else think the verse sounds a little bit like “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “The Night Santa Went Crazy?”

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I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon playing The Bard’s Tale (the new one) after a many months-long break. This time I figured out the combat system, so I was able to get past the starting dungeon.

Anyway, after Katie got home, we watched an episode of Teen Titans with dinner. It was structured as a fairy tale, complete with a narrator. The narrator sounded really familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where I’d heard his voice before. The credits listed him has Tony Jay, which didn’t ring a bell, so she looked him up at IMDB.

Turns out he was the narrator on The Bard’s Tale, and I’d been hearing his voice all afternoon.

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Microsoft is really pushing for people to make sure their websites and apps are compatible with IE7. Apparently this is a real concern for a lot of people who relied on certain proprietary features, bugs, and quirks in IE6. I guess they figured they wouldn’t have to worry about future versions. (Hmm… I wonder where they got that idea?)

The fact of the matter is, I’m not worried. I tested my personal sites and the sites I’d built for work months ago, using the IE7 betas, and more recently with RC1. I made a couple of minor changes to some stylesheets, but that was about it.

Why? I’ve been writing standards-based code for years. I validate it from time to time, and I test to make sure it works in the latest versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari as well as IE. So the code was already portable.

Plus, anything new I’ve built since January has been designed with IE7 in mind from the beginning.

Most of the changes were to workarounds for IE6. Either stopping them from running on IE7 (if the bug was fixed), or keeping them running on IE7 (if it was done using a CSS hack).