brykmantra.com

Since I’ve been off work, I haven’t had access to the newspaper every day — I would just pick up the Sunday paper, plus Friday (for the NYT crossword, the movie reviews, and Fry’s ad section) and Saturday (for the crossword) — so that’s almost two months that I haven’t had my daily requirement of comic strips.

I bring this up because I noticed three interesting things in yesterday’s comics:

1. In Zits, the teenager stops his dad from telling an interesting anecdote from his workday — because he always hates to see perfectly good blog material being told to people in real life.

As a blogger, I know the feeling.

2. There’s a fairly new one-panel strip called Brevity. In yesterday’s strip, a bald man in a suit sits with a microphone in front of him, and watches a scorpion approaching him on the table. The caption reads, “Moments later, everyone would think Kruschev was a kook.”

The reason I mention this is that if you get this joke, you’re either middle-aged like me, or you’re well-versed in your Cold War history for such a young sprout.

3. When I saw Get Fuzzy, I noticed something really strange: I could see the characters — and drawing style — from Pearls Before Swine in addition to the regular characters from Get Fuzzy. Plus, Satchel’s behavior was violent and way out of character for him.

Then when I saw the Pearls strip, it was the exact same strip, except without the GF characters.

That’s when I knew that the answer seemed to lie in the week’s earlier strips.

Sure enough, Monday’s strip showed GF artist Conley playing Battlefield and talking on the phone to his editor, who was telling him that: a) Some Pearls strips were accidentally Fedexed to him, and b) That he had missed his submission deadline, and had better submit something really quickly.

That day’s installment ends with Conley looking at the Fedex pack, and saying that he had some ideas …

The rest of the week has been, of course, the same as Pearls for that day, but with Fuzzy characters pasted in.

Pure genius.

And the really amazing thing is that I’ve found other blogs that have mentioned this, and several of the bloggers (and their commenters) have been totally flummoxed as to what was going on. “How can he get away with this?”, one blog asked, and a commenter whined that it was “blatant stealing”.

It was a frigging joke, people! The creator of Pearls Before Swine was obviously in on the whole thing — he would have to be, in order to pull it off.

Some people are a bit slow …

This just in: The preview trailer for Titanic II is now online!

Okay, so the movie — where it turns out that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is still alive, brought out of frozen suspended animation after all these years — doesn’t really exist . This is the latest entry in the movie mashup trend of taking footage from a film and re-editing it to form the trailer of an entirely different movie, like Brokeback to the Future, except in this case, the clips are taken from several films.

Still, it looks pretty convincing as a Hollywood sequel, especially the part where Jack Dawson sits horrified as he watches “Titanic the Musical”.

So check it out.

I almost forgot about this: It was 20 years ago today that I married The One Who Would Become X-Wife.

As miserable as I was for so long, I don’t wish that we had never gotten married, because it was due to X-Wife that we found the house we moved to in 1988, and it was two doors down from that house that, after the separation in 1993, I met the woman to whom I have now been married for almost 10 years now.

In other words, if I hadn’t married X-Wife, I wouldn’t have found Karlyn.

It’s just a shame that the price had to be so high.

At any rate, that was then, and this is now, and everything’s okay now.

There was an important music news item that I wanted to post really soon, which I found over at good ol’ Steve’s Look at This — and since there were several other cool items there, I decided to shelve the post I had been planning and pass on these cool links:

Here’s the big story: The rights to the Beatles music catalog has finally been pried out of Michael Jackson’s evil claws.

Paul McCartney has been royally cheesed off for over 20 years over Jackson’s ownership and abuse of the catalog. It doesn’t look like McCartney will be the one buying the music back, but it’s still good to know that these classic works of art will no longer be owned by Freakazoid #1.

Here’s a blog that makes MP3 collections of entire albums available for download: MP3 for All.

If you find something you like, though, better get ‘em quick: Already the entire Beatles collection has been taken down due to “complaints”.

According to RIAA=defined rules, Bush is a music pirate.

The president mentioned recently that he had songs by the Beatles on his MP3 player, and since the Beatles catalog hasn’t been released for legal download yet, those songs must have been ripped from a CD — and the RIAA has clearly stated that doing that qualifies as piracy.

This is just another sign: Our governments think that the laws they make are only for us Common Rabble to obey — just like earlier this month, when the Homeland Security official felt that he was above the laws against pedophilia.

Fortunately, the local sheriff in his are didn’t agree that this member of the Ruling Class should have immunity.

And finally: A video of the Beatles performing “I Am the Walrus”.

102 frigging degrees today, and it’s only halfway through April. Welcome to Texas.

The Spook sends this: Devil birds in the Falkland Islands, and “Vampire Birds” in the Galapagos Islands.

That’s nature for ya: Out there in their secret hideouts, planning our destruction.

Excellent line on last night’s Desperate Housewives: “She’s not a slut, she’s just … popular, with … indiscriminant men.”

Ha!

Okay, this is bizarre: A new British reality show, Band in a Bubble, will challenge a rock band to write and record a new album in one month …

… while encased in a large glass capsule, in a public place.

That sounds like it has possibilities; too bad we can’t do the same thing with Cabinet meetings.

And for Vickie: Happy Easter Bunny Blowout!

For everybody else, don’t worry if you don’t get it, it’s an old joke between us.

But enough in-jokes, here’s stuff for everybody:

The History of Easter Candy.

For the past 30 years (or more), hundreds of standup comics have thought they were the first people ever to point out the seeming incongruitity of bunnies and colored eggs with the resurrection of Christ.

Seriously: Even otherwise smart comics like the late Bill Hicks have fallen into this trap, and end up looking like lemmings.

Therefore, as a public service to all those beginning comics out there: 1) Making jokes about Easter being represented by colored eggs isn’t clever; it just makes you look stupid and derivative; and 2) There is a reason why eggs have come to represent the religious holiday, and here it is.

So shut up about it already.

Easter on Flickr: >Easter Sunday, Easter Parade, Easter baskets, and, for a change of pace, Easter Island.

Easter Sunday weather in Dallas: A record-breaking 93F, with 99F expected tomorrow.

And this is totally stretching the Easter theme: Easter eggs are cool little secret bits hidden away in video games and DVDs (and elsewhere), if you know where to look — and here’s where to look, a great collection of thousands of these concealed treasures.

This is off-topic even more, but still applies to today: Todn8r, if you’re still reading this, tell your wife Happy Birthday for me. And Happy Easter.

We here on the Internet have been making fun of Snakes on a Plane since early this year (check out some great examples here), so, even though it won’t be released until this summer, it’s time for those of us on the cutting edge of ridicule to move on to something else.

Like what?

Well, like The Legend of Simon Conjurer, which stars Jon Voight (who wisely disguises himself in a fat suit and an over-the-top Sydney Greenstreet). He is surrounded by “a group of dysfunctionals” played by actors whose credits are all limited to roles like “Cop #2″, “Waitress”, and “Blonde in Library” on various TV shows.

If all this doesn’t sound stupendously bad, watch the trailer here, and see if you get the same vibes that I do.

Here’s another warning sign: On the website’s “buzz” page, are several glowing blurbs … by reviewers at organizations WHICH SEEM TO BE FICTIONAL.

Seriously, I can’t find anything on the Internet (outside of the “Conjurer” site itself) on these magazines, or websites, or whatever they are: “Filmaking Today” (or the correct spelling “Filmmaking Today“); “Coopersville Sun Times“, “Octopus FIlmmaker” — the list goes on and on.

Apparently none of these reviews actually exists.

Sony’s fake reviewer scandal of 2001 looks like an amateur effort compared to this mess.

So why I can’t find anywhere on the Internet is anyone else besides me who has noticed that these reviews/reviewers/sources seem to be imaginary. Am I the only person with any skepticism?

These days most bad movies come with blurbs from obscure places like the Boise Weekly Gazette and Radio XZZ Barstow, so I guess everybody assumes that the Conjurer reviews are real but obscure.

Apparently this movie can’t find anybody, anywhere, with anything at all good to say, not even if it means getting their names on nationwide commercials.

And not only does the movie’s IMDB listing not have the names of the director, the writer, or the actor playing the title character, but the film’s site features a clipping drawing attention to that fact, and implying that these three people are one in the same — and hinting ominously that this means that there’s a deep dark secret at the bottom of everything to do with the movie.

Or maybe it just means that he’s ashamed to be affiliated with this piece of crap, so the studio PR machine is trying to get mileage out of that fact by spinning it into a mystery.

This whole thing is just so fishy and contrived and underhanded that it hurts my head.

Just think the agony awaiting people who exchange real money to see it in theatres …

Today it was six weeks since the surgery, but more important than that, an big milestone happened today: I drove.

My wife has been a little overprotective in that regard, as far as I’m concerned. When I first got out of the hospital, she wouldn’t even let me walk into a grocery store, much less carry the groceries.

More relevant, though, was the fact that my heavy dose of pain killers put me in such a fog as to make driving inadvisable.

Now, though, I’ve cut my dosage by half a couple of weeks ago, and I go about 50% farther between pills, so the mental swamp through which I slog on a daily basis has a much lower viscosity, but she still had reservations about letting me behind the wheel.

But since I have to get back to driving before too long anyway, and I’m tired of being helpless to go farther than my walking capacity (about 25 minutes total), and my vehicle inspection is due soon and I hate having to try to get it done on the last weekend, so today I decided to start up the truck and make a circuit around our area of town — without giving my wife prior knowledge of this experiment, of course.

And of course she was peeved that I took any kind of action without her express prior consent; women are like that.

But I assured her that I only ran into one other car — “Oh, very funny,” she said –and that there were practically no pedestrian casualties at all.

Anyway, a big part of the reason I wanted to do a test drive was because I knew how tired she was today — and in pain too, from six weeks of shifting her wait off her broken ankle — so Iwanted to be available to go pick us up some dinner so she wouldn’t have to stop on the way home.

As it turned out, she forgave me for my unsanctioned foray when she realized that it would save her that much more effort, so I headed out a second time to pick up some food from Mi Casa Tex-Mex.

And the important thing is that it set a major precedent, and thought I can now go out during the day when necessary.

Not that I’ll be able to do that much longer: I’ve got my family physician appointment on Monday, and with his blessing, and if my pain subsides some more in the next five days, I might be going to back work next week, if for only half-days.

I called work yesterday, and the receptionist, whom I supervise, said that she really, really wants me to come back — probably because I’m very protective of my turf, and I serve as a buffer of sorts between her and all the craziness.

I’m also wanting to get back soon because we’ll only be in the old building for a couple more weeks, and I don’t want other people moving my stuff.

It’s just a matter principle.

It’s bad enough that somebody’s sitting at my desk because Main Computer Guy has still never gotten him a computer.

You can call me old-fashioned, but I’m just not comfortable with somebody I barely know using my computer.

I feel so violated.

Great episode of Lost tonight; we learned some things. I’ll be vague in case you haven’t watched your TIVO yet:

1. Rose’s husband Bernard is an idiot; worse, he’s a control-freak idiot, who makes elaborate plans and then is shocked when people don’t trample each other to carry out those plans.

2. Locke has given up faith in The Button, and the ritual of pressing it every 108 minutes.

3. Locke isn’t the only survivor who has been cured by the island, and that other person knows that Locke was in a wheelchair before coming to the island. The only other person to know his secret was Boone, and Boone died just minutes after finding out.

4. Someone we haven’t seen in a long time returns at the end of the episode.

5. Bucky Covington was booted off … oops, wait, wrong show …

If you’re a regular reader here, you’re familiar with The Spook, our Lubbock correspondent, my old college buddy and best friend ever since, commenter on this blog since the very beginning, and creator of the metal Brykmantra logo picture at the top of the blog.

(That’s him on the right in the picture shown here, from our more carefree days of ancient times –the beanpole was me — and he’s not that short, we were standing on an incline.)

The reason I bring it up is because … today is his birthday! Be sure to leave your birthday greetings in the comments.

And ladies, keep in mind that the Spookster is currently available! Let me know if you want me to pass on your phone number to him.

But of course, you probably want to see a more recent photo, so here it is:

After all, a guy’s car is a big part of the equation, right? So step right up before it’s too late!