Once more, unto the breach, dear friends...

Tomorrow is the first day of classes of the fall semester. Not only have I been (theoretically) rehired for another semester, but I've been given three separate classes to teach, which will be something like 25 hours of classroom time per week.

Too much work? I reckon so. So I'm going to make this choice consciously, with full awareness of what I'm letting myself in for. They want a full-on teaching schedule, that calls for a full-on teacher. I seem to recall having the best hallucinatory visions when I was jittery with exhaustion and fueled by coffee, Snickers bars and bemusement at the antics of my students anyway.

Goddamn it, saddle up! There's educating to do!

Back to basics: traditional entertainment and bargain hunting

The British Tory party (the rough ideological analog of the US Republican Party) is going to have a conference in the city of Birmingham this month. And as a part of the city's attempts to turn a profit from the visiting Tories, they've distributed a coupon book to the visiting delegates, complete with discounted entry to The Rocket Club, a place people can go to watch ("Sir, do NOT touch the dancers!") nekkid ladies dancing on stage or sometimes on customers' laps.

I don't usually count on the Evening Standard for news, but this time they really came through for me with valuable, timely, hard-hitting journalism.

And just in case you were wondering what else Birmingham has going on, it is the home of the world's first Complaints Choir. Yep, homegrown culture.

Life imitates stoopid funny art, sorta...

Okay, just about enough time has passed so that I can consider the following without wincing:

I got publicly betrothed this summer, and in an unpleasantly accurate twist of fate, the run-up to my event was eerily paralleled in the comic strip Achewood. For example, thoughts about dresses, vows, fears about the future, gift registry, fears about the ceremony, catering, the madness inducing lead-up to the day, and the interaction of the guests on the day itself.

Am I R. B. Kazenzakis? Not by any stretch of the imagination. A friend summed up my childhood, noting "you grew up with the Huxtables." Sure, there were fewer adorable children, no well-meaning neighbors, and much, much more swearing, but he's not far off. However, that didn't stop me from worrying that the caterer was going to fuck everything up at the last minute, that the ringbearer was going to wet his pants, or that I was going to preview the rest of my life through a haze of misunderstood advice from well-meaning strangers and reach a technically correct but functionally wrong conclusion.

Y'know something?

I ate leftover curry and chocolate chip cookies (plural) for breakfast. And for lunch I'm going to drink like three cups of coffee, and then maybe some whisky.

'Cause I'm a grown-up and I can eat whatever the hell I want, whenever the hell I feel like it!

Yeah!

Har de har har

Back to back to back...

Okay, so I ain't been on for a while. That's 'cause I've been getting re-married. Which isn't to say that I was divorced, but that the first time around was done on the quick and on the Q.T. It was almost like we eloped, except for the questionable choice of moving right back to the same island her family was on.

D'oh.

So once I got the visa I could get to work, which was a prerequisite for paying for the reception that seemed to be much in demand amongst people who'd heard that my special lady friend was now rocking a legally recognized husband.

Except she's already got a professional reputation in her field, and thus is in no hurry to start rebuilding it under a different name. And she's not my special lady friend!

Anyway, turns out that planning and executing a wedding reception takes up time. A damn lot of time. Time spent worrying about stuff that I would ordinarily never even be aware of. Like caring who sits next to whom, or whether there's going to be enough space on the dance floor, or whether the omnivores are going to eat too much of the vegetarians' options.

Okay, seriously, there was a whole roast pig to eat there. Like, over 175 pounds of slow-cooked pork. The pig roast was the most commented-on thing on the invitations, and people were lining up to see the pig before they even noticed the bride's dress. But for some reason, people still nearly ate all the fucking vegetarian lasagna before the actual vegetarians got a chance to.

But I digress. I've been busy, doing nuptial-type stuff. But today was my first Sunday off in a while, so it was a perfect chance to do some manly-type stuff. I bought lumber, saws, nails, big-ass brooms, and a bunch of cast-iron weights. Butch, man, butch! GRRRR-RARR!

Oh yeah, The Professor Brothers rock my historical world. (NSFW)

Next time: eh, whatever, man. You know how I live.

Kate Beaton!

There aren't nearly enough comics about history.

Wait, scratch that. There aren't nearly enough good comics about history.

No, hold on. There aren't nearly enough good comics, period.

Fortunately, Kate Beaton is making hella funny comics, many of which involve historical figures. Her linework is clear and evocative, her sense of comedic timing is great, and I really can't choose which of her comics make me laugh the most, because there are so damn many of them that leave me in fucking stitches.

Go to Kate Beaton dot com, now now now!

I never got to say "Thank you."

Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits!


Thank you, George.

Who do you trust?

Okay, so it seems that the infamous '2 Girls 1 Cup' film is at the center of a court case to decide just how far the 1st amendment goes. And the judge responsible for the whole thing is taking some heat for a web site he maintained, which seems to have some smut of his own selection.

I don't know if his collection of naughty pictures represents some sort of conflict of interest. But I do know that I would have much more faith in a judge who knew a little something about the topic in question. I mean, you wouldn't trust a referee who'd never watched a game, you wouldn't trust a baker who only ate Wonder Bread, so why would you prefer a judge who'd never seen a money shot?

What's dorkier than dorky?

Imagine, if you will, the kind of mind that would do the research needed to answer this question:

What was Stanley Kubrick's favorite font?

Oh yes. A fellow got the chance to look through Kubrick's archives, and made some interesting observations about the man and the things he left behind. But between the history of the creation of individual fonts and arguments about whether sci-fi writers would have known what the official house font was at NASA, it seems there remains a great deal of uncertainty as to whether Kubrick's purported favorite font was actually used in his films or not.

Can you dig that? So much effort and knowledge and interest, and it's all focused on something even the most obsessive film fans probably overlook.

Glorious!

[typographica.org]