I was tempted to title this post X-Men on X-Mas Eve but not doing so is my gift to the world this year. Just in case you still don't get it, new comics will be for sale on Wednesday, December 24th also known as Christmas Eve, so come on by, we'll be open until 8 O'Clock for you last minute shoppers!
One of my favorite customers has passed away. Ed Fowler was as nice a person as I've ever met. He was dealt a rough hand in life with lots of medical problems that he overcame for many years longer than doctors expected. Despite these issues, Ed always had an upbeat attitude and he really loved comic books.
Ed was a big Superman and Batman fan and was always looking for Supergirl comics to give to his nieces and he also really loved Disney comics and movies. He was a very talented artist and while he didn't draw the Donald Duck picture above, he could have very easily. He'd been shopping at Hijinx (Mikes Coliseum) for well over 20 years and I'll miss him a lot. He was also the creator of our colorful "New" signs and the "Hijinx Highlights" signs that I contracted him to create. A nicer guy you'll never meet.
At least they did for the hundreds of customers who stormed the gates of Hijinx for the big Turkey Sandwich Sale! We've never had such a successful sale or such a group of civilized salegoers. There was no pushing or shoving, only mutual basking in the glorious deals on display.
The sale was so successful I think it's time to add it as a permanent fixture in the years to come. For those of you who missed out due to family obligations, you now have a full year's notice to let them down easy and come to the sale next time!
I'm a sucker for a good flowchart, and this one really boils it all down quite nicely. Just remember, to paraphrase Freewheelin' Franklin Freak, it's better to have comics in time of no money than it is to have money in time of no comics.
The election is over and the like it or not, the country has chosen a new course. We can all breathe a sigh of relief and hope that our best days are still to come in this country. God bless America!
The Onion has the complete story. The story also reveals the sickening truth of just what lies under Joe's infamous eyepatch. This is all part of the trend towards darkening the hallowed comics of yesteryear with gritty realism. I blame Frank Miller, but where will the madness end?
I subscribe to the Daily Rhyme blog who had this little doozy today:
Post-Halloween Blues
Last night I supped on candy corn,
on Milk Duds, Mounds and Mars,
On Plain and Peanut M&Ms,
on Twix and Snickers bars.
That Almond candy brought me Joy.
The Junior Mints were minty.
Some Sweets were also nice and Tart,
while some were Good ‘n’ Plenty.
I wolfed down Reese’s (Cups and Pieces),
Valomilk and Clark,
Bit O’ Honey, Butterfinger,
Hershey’s Special Dark,
Powerhouse, Three Musketeers,
plus Heath and Mallo Cup,
Then Milky Way. I think today
I’ll bring it all back up.
Do you like stories about time travel? I love them when they're done right, and Time Belt does it right! The best part is the (almost) total lack of F/X, but the whole thing has a goofy appeal that's tough to put into words. Here's the first episode which is mostly just setup for the rest of the series where our hero will fight Nazis, dinosaurs and killer cyborgs designed on a budget. Check it out!
Good stuff here. Watch Ron Howard, Henry Winkler and the great Andy Griffith reprise their most famous characters in support of their presidential pick. Guess who it is?
I'm excited to announce the latest addition to the Hijinx staff: The Machine: Bride of Pinbot! I've always wanted a pinball machine, and now I own a robot construction themed one. We'll be rolling out a high score contest soon, so get ready to win big prizes for your pinball skills.
I'm very interested in the idea of a pinball machine being an interactive art object. It insists that you give it money and invest your time in learning it's arcane rules and intricacies and rewards you by revealing hidden aspects of itself and awarding you points. It's a very early form of electro-mechanical interactive art, and fun as heck too. Pinball rules. Bring quarters!
How can you not want to kick ass after hearing this? I especially love the announcer naming that week's guest stars and episode title. I wish they still did that.
I just want to thank everyone who voted in the "Best of Silicon Valley" readers polls in the Metro and Wave magazines. Thanks to your votes, Hijinx took first place in both magazines, and one of them even spelled our name right!
Fellow comic book retailer and Hijinx mentor Joe Ferarra will be attempting to set a Guinness Book world record for continuous live performance, all in the name of raising awareness for prostate cancer, of which he is a survivor.
He'll be performing 12 hours of live music with no repeats and no sheet music at the Shadowbrook restaraunt in Capitola starting Sunday September 14th at 10am.
Joe is not only a great guy and a great musician, he's also got a great comic book store I visit every time I'm in Santa Cruz, Atlantis Fantasy World. If you can't make the record-setting gig, make sure to visit him on your next trip to Santa Cruz, and tell him Hijinx sent you!
The amazing Professor Plastik has started releasing this killer series of golden age paper dolls. Please, won't someone download and make some of these for me so I won't have to?
Google just announced they are releasing their own web browsers, bringing some serious performance and UI enhancements to the web browsing table. Not only that, but they hired Scott "Understanding Comics" McCloud to make a cool comic explaining the whole shebang. Pretty technical, but well worth reading.
Read this article all about China's attempts to respect civil rights by executing more prisoners in these mobile lethal injection chambers than with the traditional (and cost effective) bullet in the head technique.
Especially creepy are the implications that the Chinese government is making the switch in order to better preserve the organs of the deceased for trade in the international human organ market. The article also notes that for now mostly rich and well connected criminals get the van, while lesser criminals are mostly still taken out back and shot in the back of the head.
There's nothing like Imperial Fleet Week, when the Emperor decides it's time to put the fear of Sith into the Bay Area. All the big hardware comes out for us to gaze in terror at and remind us not to get too big for our britches!
You know how movie adaptations of movies almost always suck? Well this little mashup of Pac-Man and Cloverfield definitely doesn't. It's funny and just short enough to enjoy. And the special effects are truly breathtaking!
Check out this robot that uses rat neurons to help it avoid obstacles. The rat brains were said to respond predictably to electronic signals from ultrasonic sensors. They need to set that thing loose in a maze for full effect.
Mark Evanier blogged about a cool website that will tell you what the number one song on the day you were born. Having such an insight into your origins is not for the faint of heart. I was born July 25th, 1975 so I was hoping for something by Stevie Wonder or James Brown. I guess it could habe been worse than this:
And no, it doesn't imply anything about what my favorite magazine is. Get your head out of the gutter!
Over at ComicBookShelf.com we've got thousands of great graphic novel reviews from all kinds of different people from all over the world. But there's one reviewer who has far more reviews than any other and I just happen to know that he's a customer at Hijinx.
Not only does jdp have the most reviews (878!), they are all thoughtful and well written, and most importantly of all he has impeccable taste in comics.
Don't believe me? Check them out here and then go check out the thousands of other graphic novel reviews on the site, and sign up to start reviewing your own favorites. I'm going to start featuring more ComicBookShelf.com reviews here soon, so get going and write some of your own today!
Here's a little piece of animation that's almost 100 years old. Windsor McKay was so far ahead of the artistic curve that the world still hasn't caught up. He drew every frame himself, and this was many years before Walt Disney did his thing. Watch and be impressed.
The folks at Gizmodo pull back the curtain of mystery on the Lego factory tour and reveal a wonderous place filled with robotic factory workers and injection-molded goodness as you like it!
Check out this prize-winning animation that uses computer visualization of very low frequency sounds created by magnetic fields to try and see what magnetic fields might look like. Way cool stuff that mixes real science with cutting edge art. You can read a lot more about it and see it at a larger size here. If you have a slow connection, I recommend pausing this and letting it load on your computer so you can watch it without the heartbreak of jerkus interuptis.
Remember when video games were things you had to leave the house to play? Back when I was a kid you needed a pocket full of quarters and a way to get to the arcade to get your fix of bleeps and bloops. Now you can relive the experience again (sans quarters) at California Extreme 2008. Every year all the best classic video gamers descend on the Parkside exhibit hall in downtown San Jose for the biggest classic gaming show around. Not just video games, but all your favorite electro-mechanical games like pinball and all the rest. You'll find me in the pinball section, I hope to see you there!
The Mythbusters need your help to try for the third time to debunk the myth of Archimedes Death Ray, which was supposedly used to light Greek ships on fire by 300 Roman soldiers. They've tried testing it twice already, but both times their tests seemed really flawed.
On one hand, it seems unlikely to be true. On the other hand, Archimedes was a pretty smart dude, and we've all lit fires with magnifying lenses, so who knows? They need a few hundred volunteers to set something on fire in an undisclosed bay area location sometime in September, so click the link above if you're interested.
Actually there are several reasons, including the fact that I spend so much time with the computer already, I don't need another reason to. But more importantly than that, as a programmer, I know that there must be other less than scrupulous programmers (who are waaaay smarter than me) out there figuring out ways to gain an edge in online games.
I once actually overheard a conversation between two college students where one said she was renting her identity to someone to use to play online poker. It's so easy to spoof one's IP address that there just have to be lots of folks who are out there playing 3 or 5 hands at one single table. Even just seeing one other player's cards at the table gives you a huge edge in the right situations.
Now to make matters even worse, some smarty-pants at the University of Alberta have created Polaris, a poker playing program that took down a table full of poker pros and came out on top. Basically, this means that it plays perfect poker and never gets tired or goes "on tilt" like us pesky meat puppets. Yet another good reason to just play poker with humans, and let the robots battle each other into oblivion.
This wall-mounted cocktail mixing machine looks like so much fun it makes me want to take up drinking. I these kind of machines a lot, and the coolest part is that they were all inspired by comics by the legendary cartoonist Rube Goldberg, for whom the National Cartoonists Society named their coveted Reuben award after. He was trained as an engineer at UC Berkeley but quit that to persue his love of drawing comics. Good move!
Join rock poster and scooter artist R Black as he putts down the coast from Oakland to San Diego on his 1979 Vespa promoting the release of his new book: L'Art De R. Black: Futura. He'll be making a stop at Hijinx on Sunday, July 13th starting around noon. Get inside the creative mind at Hijinx Comics!
There's something funny about this graph that's generated using Google's cool charting API. It allows you to generate very cool graphs just by futzing with the url of the image. I discovered this graph when I was messing around with different values for the simple data encoding.
It's pretty nerdly, but I still thought it was funny. Don't get it? Check out the url used to generate the image and prepare to not laugh very much at all, but be glad if you get it.
Due to the holiday, comics will be shipping on Thursday July 10th instead of Wednesday. Don't let the terrorists win. Instead, go celebrate independence by blowing stuff up yourself!
I saw this video on the Flowing Data blog (the best data visualization blog I know of) that tries to put the costs of the Iraq war into terms we can understand. Check it out, but be prepared to get angry.
This is kind of like the old Chuck E Cheese Pizza Time Theatre band, except no puppets and the instruments actually play themselves. Plus, they're called The Trons which is way cool.
Over on the Colour Lover's Blog they did a little breakdown of the color palettes of various DCU characters. This mixes my love of comics with my love of color theory, which I'll freely admit is a fairly nerdish combo.
ok, it's not really a robot, as it's really tele-operated by a surgeon, but the cool thing is that the piece of paper is smaller than the diameter of a penny!
Now you can lug your books, groceries and assorted sundries about town while simultaneously showing your great taste in comics. I've already ordered a sample of this double-sided tote bag and can tell you that it's of the highest quality and well worth the $12.99 price tag. Check it out and all the other Hijinx tchotchkes over at our Cafe Press store. We don't make any money on these products, but we'd love to see you buy some!
update
After much teeth-knashing and number crunching, it's been decided that every time you purchase a graphic novel, and remember to bring your official Hijinx tote, you'll earn an extra 1% on every bookclub purchase every single time you bring your bag! Offer good for life of the owner or life of the bag. It's our way of encouraging you to use less disposable bags and more pork-themed eco-totes!
I generated this photomosaic of the late, great Rory Root. It's made entirely out of graphic novels of every type, which were his passion in life. It's tough to make out the individual books in this small thumbnail image, but you can click through to see it in much higher detail.
There will be a memorial service for Rory on June 21st at 7pm at
Comic Relief in Berkely which is located at 2026 Shattuck Ave, 94704.
This is a great little clip about the single episode crossover between Batman and the Green Hornet. What I wouldn't give to see a real fight between Bruce Lee and Burt Ward.
In my mind, the only real battle is between which show had the best theme song. As great as the Batman theme is, The Hornet horns win hands down. It's like Flight of the Bumblebee with a Jazz hook and super-action that never dissapoints. Don't believe me? Tell me this doesn't thrill you:
This Minutemen picture looks just good enough to get your hopes up that the Watchmen movie won't be a horrific waste of film. So much better to crush your spirit when it turns out to be rotten!
I just found out that a good friend and comic retailing icon Rory Root of the world famous Comic Relief in Berkeley is in a coma after a a ruptured heria put him in the hospital this weekend.
Rory Root has passed away and the world of comic book retailing just got a lot sadder for me. This page will be black for a while in memory of Rory. I never saw him wear any other color but black so I want to copy him one last time.
I can categorically state that without the example set by Rory and his store, Hijinx would not be the store it is today. Ironically I just had a long conversation with Rory last week about setting up group health care here at the store. Luckily, Rory was smart enough and progressive enough to provide affordable health care to his employees and for himself, so I know he was well cared for when he passed.
In his honor, if you're anywhere near Berkeley, stop in Comic Relief and spend some money there. You won't have a problem finding something to buy, as it's the single finest comic bookstore I've ever seen. Easily eclipsing anything else the bay area has to offer in terms of breadth and depth of selection. Rory's passion for the medium of comics and for the trade of bookselling were unmatched by anyone I've ever known and it shows in ever square inch of his store. I was proud to call him my colleague and friend.
Most people know what a great crooner Nat King Cole was, but did you know he could swing like a gate on the piano? Here he takes what is usually a corny old tune and takes it to totally new heights.
This is just a "proof of concept" teaser for what looks to be one of the coolest high concept sci-fi movies in a long time. I just hope that there are brains in jars somewhere in the final film. The production design and special effects look fantastic, and I really can't wait to check out the finished product. Check out more on their website.
Some of you may know that I write Free software for use in the comic book retail industry. I give away my software to help make it better and to ensure that retailers have a choice beyond proprietary software that enforces the heartbreak of "vendor-lock". Granted, I don't make any money selling my software but it's already saved me so much money just by using it, and all of the constructive comments from comic shops across the country that use it have made my little labor of love even better.
Back when I worked in the software industry I could hit up my bosses to pay my way into conferences like Google I/O coming up later this month. It costs $400 to register as a developer for the two day event in San Francisco, and I really want to go. The new version 2.0 of my retailer software uses a bunch of cool tools that Google has released lately and I think the conference could really help me make the new stuff a real quantum leap ahead of my current system.
So, that brings me to shaking the virtual tin cup. If you care at all about helping me help the comics retail industry escape domination by one or two software vendors, please donate whatever you feel is appropriate. The little progress graph is a good example of one of the great tools Google offers to developers like me that will be integrated into Hijinx 2.0. Thanks!
Here's a really old Muppet clip featuring our old pal Kermit and Harry the Hipster, both performed by the late, great Jim Henson. Kermit tries some visual thinking excercises and is given a little lesson in jazz by Harry. I love the part where Kermit says he doesn't like jazz!
Once upon a time not so long ago, this cartoon was considered totally appropriate for viewing by kids on Saturday mornings. Not just appropriate, it was one of the funniest cartoons ever made, and it was assumed that kids knew the difference between cartoons and reality. Somewhere along the line since then it's been decided that this cartoon is too dangerous to show to young children as it trivializes gun violence and sends an bad message.
Thank goodness for the internet and YouTube that we can now see these incredibly funny and beautifully produced cartoons any time we want, we just can't see them on TV with the rest of the focus-group created toy commercials masquerading as cartoons that dominate Saturday mornings today.
Speaking of Johnny Quest, here's the original show opener. No cartoon opening credits have ever been as cool as this. You've got frogmen, mummies, several death rays, machine guns, dinosaurs, walking robot eyes, and of course Race kicking much ass. Plus, the swinging jazz theme music, with a driving action beat but still light enough for a little piccolo solo there at the end when they introduce the cartoon cast. I think the very ending notes get cut off here, but you've got to admit that you got excited just listening to it!
This is one part of a much longer documentary about one of the best adventure cartoons ever made for TV: Johnny Quest. It concentrates on Race Bannon, who is unquestionably the coolest character on the show, and one of the toughest guys in TV history.
However, as cool as Race may have been in a fight, he was far from perfect. Her's another clip from the documentary that goes into some of the more politically incorrect moments of the show, including the famous "racist Bannon" scene where Race dyes himself purple to impersonate a god and proceeds to insult the "heathen monkey" natives. Let's watch:
Just how close are we to actually building Iron Man suits? It's always seemed to me that the technology is pretty much there for at least a Mark I suit, and this article in New Scientist magazine points out that all of the various classes of tech involved are viable, but nobody has put them together yet.
I love barcodes. Besides saving me a ton of time when ringing up your book club purchases, I just like the way they look. I always love it when a book designer incorporates the barcode into the aesthetics of the book jacket. The folks at Design Barcode are nerds like me, and have devoted their existence to spicing up these ubiquitous little buggers.
Every time I hear war mongers talk about who should and shouldn't be allowed to develop nuclear capabilities I can't help but think of this song by the great Tom Lehrer. I honestly don't think any country can be trusted completely with the ability to destroy all life on the planet, but that's just me.
The New York Times covers the the last pinball factory in the US. It includes a glimpse into a dwindling industry that hasn't lost it's sense of fun. It also includes funny quotes from the curator of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas that is a must-see destination for any pinball fan.
Anyone my age or a little older will remember this classic bit of advice from KTVU channel 2's old puppet pals Charlie and Humphrey. There's no video for this, but just the music and voices take me back to a simpler time and place. Thanks to alert customer Dave Watts for bringing this to my attention.
Yes, THAT Steve Ditko. With his first new comic in eight years, Ditko shows that he's not just a recluse, but a reclusive artist. I'll try my best to get some of these for the store soon.
Paro is the world's cutest therapy robot. According to the website, Paro is a "Seal Type Mental Commit Robot", designed to treat patients with Alzheimer's and other emotional illnesses.
Paro learns to act how you'd like it to by seeking out affectionate petting and more disturbingly, by trying to avoid making patients hit it. Apparently it's sensors know the difference between a loving caress and a brutal beating. There are some people out there who can't tell the difference between those!
Here's an upbeat little tune written and performed by a very bad man. Sometimes it can be tough to separate an artist from his art, but you kind of have to in order to appreciate this song. But you have to admit the song is catchy.
Does anybody else think that the idea of free-moving, self-replicating robots is probably not the best idea? This is a prototype that only uses a pen instead of an actual routing head, but this thing has the potential to be a completely autonomous CNC (Computer Numerically Controlled) fabricator. Seems like we're just playing into Ultron's hands with this one.
Nexi is an MDS robot which supposedly stands for Mobile, Dexterous and Social, but I think the title of this post is a little more accurate description. Can you imagine a young child being anything but totally terrified by this machine? If only Jim Henson were still around, he could really help these people!
This is a link to what may be the most impressive robot ever built. It's not only able to carry out complex tasks, it also passes the Turing test. It's so top-secret that I can't even embed the video, you must click here to see it, but trust me, it's worth it!
But if I was, I'd be number the number six. Why? I'm glad you asked.
Six is a perfect number, quite literally. A perfect number is one that is the sum of all of it's own positive divisors. 1 + 2 + 3 = 6, it's actually the very first perfect number. The next perfect number is 28, followed by 496 and 8128.
Six similar coins can be arranged around a central coin of the same radius so that each coin makes contact with the central one (and touches both its neighbors without a gap), but seven cannot be so arranged. This makes 6 the answer to the two-dimensional kissing number problem. The densest sphere packing of the plane is obtained by extending this pattern to the hexagonal lattice in which each circle touches just six others. Bees figured this out a few million years ago, we're just catching on.
According to the bible, god created man on the 6th day, and that was so much work even he needed to rest the whole next day. I think he just hung out and watched football. But take 3 sixes and you've got the mark of the beast (also known as the number of man) according to Revelations so three sixes has become the sign of the devil.
Carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the universe and the basis for all known life has an atomic number of six. Without it, not only would we not have life, but we'd also not have pencils, diamonds, or charcoal barbecue and what good would life be without those?
Perhaps most importantly of all, it was 6 years ago today (April 1st) that I bought Hijinx Comics and started the long trip that's lead me here. In that time I've opened, sold and closed other stores, but I know now that I belong here in Willow Glen and I hope I'm here for a good long while to come.
Thank you all for all of your support and encouragement. It makes it all worthwhile and I could not do it without you!
A botanist from Hawaii has filed a lawsuit to stop the completion of the Large Hadron Collider on the border of France and Switzerland on the basis that turning it on might create a miniature black hole that would engulf the entire earth and spit us out in a parallel dimension.
If this blowhole wasn't a certified kook I might be a little bit worried, but I don't think we have to worry about evil transdimensional doppelgangers. Of course, there's always the possibility that this is the evil universe, which might explain a lot of things come to think about it.
The Music Man is a truly great example of American musical theater at it's finest. It's got travelling con men masquerading as crusading intellectuals, a sexy widowed librarian/piano teacher, more show-stopping numbers than you can shake a stick at and it even has Buddy Hackett! But what puts it over the top is the fact that it's got catchy tunes that also manage to make important social points.
In the clip above, Professor Harold Hill engages in the age-old political maneuvers of fear-mongering and scapegoating. He's using a fear of change to whip the town into a frenzy that distracts them from the fact that the true danger in their midst is actually him. He's there to bleed them dry and with nothing more than a little hand waving and a song and dance, they're ready to sign up.
So the next time you see a politician preaching to you about the dangerous choices you need to be prevented from making, think of this. The idea that billiards is healthy and wholesome but pocket pool corrupts the morals of our youth is a pretty powerful analogue to a lot of other discussions going on in the world around us.
The Marx Brothers were amazing performers on the stage and screen. Groucho is known all over the world for his amazing wit and wordplay and Harpo is much beloved as a musician and as a pantomime performer. What's even more amazing is that Chico was as good at any of those things as either brother, and was an amazing piano player to boot. Check out his piano stylings and impressive comedy chops in this short clip. Amazing!
Usually seeing a cool new robot do something amazing fills me with joy. For some reason this thing scares the heck out of me. Perhaps it's the loping gait, or the headless design that makes it look like some Geiger-esque horror show.
It's crazy to think that just 10 years ago walking robots were considered almost impossible to implement in the real world. Now, thanks to Moore's law and some very determined dorks around the world, it's not a question of if we'll see lifelike autonomous robots in my lifetime, but merely a question of when it will happen. My bet is on soon.
Here's a brief video of the Willow Glen High Robotics team and their entry in this year's First Robotics regional event at San Jose State. Dozens of teams from high schools all around the bay area competed and I was blown away by the creativity and enginuity that I saw on display at the event.
I didn't have as much time as I wanted to spend at the events and I also didn't really do very much of importance on this robot. It was all the hard work of the students and especially the team mentor Rick Guptill. This guy ate slept and breathed robots to help the team meet the ludicrously short 6 week design cycle mandated by the tournament rules.
The age of hobby robotics is truly upon us, much like hobby computing became realistic and affordable in the seventies and changed the world in the eighties. I have no doubts that this century will see the rise of semi-autonomous robotic armies and unmanned submarines that will change the way war is waged.
What, you thought this was all about robot butlers?
Garfield minus Garfield is an experimental comic strip based on the popular strip by Jim Davis. It simply removes the titular character leaving only what appears to be a lonely and confused man living a life of quiet desperation. That kind of thing makes me smile.
Dave Stevens died of leukemia today. All I know is, wherever he is a man is a man and the dames are all lookers. Dave seemed to be born a few decades too late, and he never put out a lot of comics, but those he did do are among my very favorite comics of the eighties. I always hoped he'd return to the adventures of Cliff Secord and his stolen rocket pack, but the work he left behind is so great that I'm glad it was never over-exploited.
From the website:
Often disregarded as part of any continuity, Li'l Bruce Wayne was a long-running series of light-hearted comic books aimed at children, detailing the life of a young, fantastically wealthy Bruce Wayne (known in the series as "The Happiest Kid On Earth") in the years before the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne and his subsequent transformation into Batman
The series was originally created by Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson to fill a gap in DC's publishing schedule after the cancellation of More Fun Comics in 1946, and ran through the majority of the Silver Age despite being regarded by editors and fans alike as being "extremely depressing" [citation needed] and is usually left out of any discussion of the character. It is notable, however, as being the first published comic book work of writer/artist Frank Miller.
The father of role-playing games ran out of hit points and failed a saving throw against death. From his mind millions of imaginary worlds, characters and adventures sprung forth through those who played his games. The entire world is a richer place thanks to his pursuit of his passions, and he will be missed.
RIP Myron Cope, legendary Pittsburgh broadcaster and creator of the Terrible Towel. The Towel came into being in 1975, the same year (and city) I was born in and it was a working class symbol of a working class team. My family moved to San Jose the next year, so I don't remember anything about Pittsburgh, but I've always identified myself with it, and I've always been a Steelers fan. We had a Terrible Towel purchased in Three Rivers Stadium which doesn't even exist anymore. I'm old.
Ballooning always seemed like it would be pretty fun, but the standard rainbow balloon designs are a little bit femme for my tastes. Now this is how you design a balloon. Imagine the terror your presense could inspire if someone's lack of faith disturbs you!
I've recently begun "mentoring" the Willow Glen High School robotics team. I use the quotes because I'm the one who's been learning the most so far. The kids don't get any school credit and they show up on their own time (on weekends!) to participate in the First Robotics League.
When I first heard they had a team I thought maybe the store could sponsor them a little, since I know that robotics gets expensive. It turns out they already had a few sponsors, but if I had time to help they needed hands more than money. So now the list of sponsors for the team reads:
Up and coming comics superstar (and Hijinx regular) Mike Choi is a swell guy. He was kind enough to slip in not only a shoutout to Hijinx, but to also to add a picture of a certain devestatingly handsome bald man into page 20 of the flagship X comic Uncanny X-Men #495! I've greyed out the less interesting parts of the panel so you can concentrate on the good stuff. This is sure to be a highly prized collectible in the future, as it is my first appearance in a Marvel comic. Get yours today!
Just in case you're not depressed enough, Warren Ellis linked to a blog where the blogger in question logs every animal euthanized by a compassionate veterinarian. Sad but somewhat uplifting at the same time as many of the animals were in great pain before they were put down.
Check out this ornate mech-spider that is somehow controlled using only 2 servo motors. I can't really tell, but it looks like one servo is set up for continuous rotation to provide locomotion, and the other somehow switches gears to steer the thing. This is an object of love!
Edward Tufte is an information / interface design guru who really opened my eyes to what interesting possibilities for rich and intuitive display of complex statistical information exist. That made me excited to hear what he has to say about the Iphone.Yes, I know I'm a nerd.
For those of you who wonder what I do with the precious little spare time I have, one of those things I like to do to relax is make useless crap like this. Enjoy!
I blogged about this video a long time ago, but never had the complete commercial until now. In honor of the Smurf's 50th anniversary, please check out their anti-war PSA that's sure to horrify any human being outside of Gargamel.
Here's your chance to make your opinion heard on the new direction of Amazing Spider-Man. In case you didn't know already, it seems Peter Parker struck a deal with Mephisto to erase his marriage from history in exchange for the life of Aunt May. He also managed to gain his secret identity back in the bargain, despite having recently unmasked during the civil war.
Personally, I haven't enjoyed many Spider-Man comics in the last few years, so I'm glad for anything that brings some fun back to what was once my favorite character. I don't think the way it was handled was very elegant, but I guess the upside of such arbitrary revisionism is that they can always just change it back again if they ever get a new Editor In Chief.
This is yet another invention that's so logical I can't believe it wasn't thought of before now. How many times have I frozen my arse off when having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night while camping? Too many times, that's how many! Although now that I think about it, the one feature that seems conspicuously absent on this model is a velcro fly.
Please answer the question in the little box above to determine whether or not you'll see more little boxes with stupid little questions in the near future.
