Duck Comics: "That Missing Candelabra"

Don't miss this one, ya big jerk.

Not shy enough, if anything.

If there's one thing I like, it's when people add complete nonsense to wikipedia pages and it doesn't get corrected because nobody cares enough. I happily happened across this, f'rinstance, from the entry on extremely minor new-wave band Kajagoogoo:

I especially like that "citation needed"--as if some editor thought, well, it's somewhat plausible that Trent Reznor was almost a member of Kajagoogoo, but we need proof. Hopefully, someone will write an article about Reznor that, drawing on the wikipedia page, repeats this claim, and then wikipedia can cite it as evidence, and the circle of life can continue.

Awesome Test Post.

Stupid Test post.

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"The Untold Death of Defeat"

This is a little round-table story thing I did in eighth grade with my friend Zac and some other kid; I don't remember who, but I suspect that he or she may not have been on quite the same wavelength as we were.

Zac: There was once a demon who had a keen talent. Its name was Defeat. It had the power to kill anyone instantly by shouting its name. Truly Defeat was a tough competitor, but believe it or not, Defeat was defeated. This is how it happened.

Me: one day, a brave pair of heroes came down to the underworld where the demon lived. One was a brave warrior, the other a mighty wizard. The warrior attacked the demon. It yelled his name, but the wizard used a spell to reflect the defeat, and the demon was killed. But then, a huge army of demons came and attacked them!

???: The attack lasted days and days. Nothing exciting was happening.

Duck Comics: "Scrooge's Second Childhood"

I am quite sure that this is eight billion times more than anyone else has ever written about this obscure old story.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Psychopath

Here's a little passage from my files. I wrote it when I was ten, in response to god-knows-what assignment. Probably something about a guy receiving a mysterious package, since that detail has nothing to do with anything else. All spelling/grammatical issues are courtesy of my young self, as is the question of how I wrote this without being institutionalized.

Lethal Injection
Once upon a time, there was a handsome college student, who one day, received a package. Inside was a six pack of hypodermic needles. He would have wondered what it was for, but he had more important things to worry about. His wife was acting weird. She was always receiving math papers, doing them, and mailing them out, along with valentines. This got the handsome college student so angry that he went to Little white cat’s highly addictive alcohol and asked for a bottle of the strongest licour he had. At home, he got his wife so drunk, that he could inject arsenic into her vains, killing her. Then dusted off his own fingerprints and put hers on it, so when the police came, they thout she had comitted suicide!

Fun anecdote: the most useful class I ever had in high school was Typing. That shit really stuck and has been a boon to me ever since. But it was kind of easy, really, and I would usually get done with the lessons far ahead of time--at which point I would be bored and start writing random idiotic little stories and other assorted gibberish. Anyway, one day I got called to the counselor's office. The counselor (Mr. Stackhouse, who was a pretty good guy as I recall; give him credit) kept asking me all these questions about how I was doing and how my life was and I really had no idea of what the deal was until he showed me the sheet of paper that I'd done the previous day's typing exercise on (we were using electric typewriters), on which I had written, among other things, "life is meaningless," which is no doubt how I felt as I waited for that damned bell to ring. Fair enough; I probably would have reported such a thing to the counselor too. I suppose the above isn't as obvious a cry for help as this was, but still. It 's certainly something. You wonder what sort of themes Dexter Morgan wrote when he was small.

God didn't build himself that throne. For that, he needed football players.

I thought last night's Denver-Pittsburgh game was awesome. Sure, the god-botherer is an irritating twerp, but I'll take him over the rapist any day.

Now, a lot of people get--justifiably--exasperated by these grandiose displays of religiosity. It is extremely unlikely that any God who's other than a ridiculous cartoon cares about football games, they note. Right enough, even leaving aside the fact that Tebow and others like him are egregiously violating Matthew 6:5. I see no reason to believe that Tebow isn't genuinely devout in some sense, but the fact that he feels the need to make public displays of this devoutness whenever the opportunity arises indicates that this devoutness is inextricably tangled up with extreme egoïsm.

But here's the thing about getting down on one knee or pointing at the sky after a touchdown: why exactly are you doing it? I think that people assume they're saying something like "Dear Jesus, thank you for making sure my wide receiver was open, and thank you for guiding the ball into his hands." And if that's the case, it's obviously risible. But it seems like a more logical assumption would be that it's something like "thank you lord for being with me and helping me to obtain the physical abilities necessary to make that play," which seems theologically unproblematic to me. I'm sure that someone who reads more sports media than I do could look at statements by various players over the years to determine whether the rhetoric tends to support this or not, but the idea that football games are won by literal divine intervention does indeed seem so risible that I think it's only fair to give these guys the benefit of the doubt unless they make it explicit exactly what they mean.

Duck Comics: "The Secret of Atlantis"

A duck-comics giant died yesterday, so we pay tribute by covering one of his stories.