Comic for December 18 2006

Skyclad. Birthday suit. In the buff. Bare. Nude. Starkers. Stripped. In the altogether. Unclothed. Nekkid. Naked.

Naaaaaaked.

Don't mind me, I just like watching myself type. It started with "skyclad" and sort of went south of the border, but skyclad reminds me of Wiccans, which reminds me of the time my wife went to a wascally wiccan wedding (heheheheheh, it's wabbit season...) and was asked, as part of the ceremony, to represent the spirit of the North. Her part of the ceremony involved eating a radish or some such thing (I kid you not, but you can feel free to ask her the next time you see her), which has always left me with a little giggly feeling inside every time I meet an overly dramatic Wiccan who has made a lifelong career of embracing their inner radish, or embracing the North radish or whatever silly thing.

The fact is that, unlike that particularly splendid example of goofyness, most of the wacky wiccans I know aren't really all that wacky. Quite the let-down, really. Ok, my friend the thunder-god "demonologist" who was unfortunately not allowed to marry us is a bit eccentric, but that's not nearly as radishy as all that. It's the dabblers that tend to go over the edge, the Craft-kiddies who watched one too many rentals of...well...The Craft. or Witches of Eastwick. Or maybe that first scene with where you get to see madonna's breasts in Four Rooms.

I'm not certain as to where this is going, but I'd better stop here. Anything that starts off with synonyms of naked, with radishes in the middle, and ending in Madonna's breasts can't be leading in a good direction.

Then again, I've another exam behind me, the Daycare Plagues I caught (two variants in two weeks!) finally broke today, and I get to sleep in tomorrow!

Those of you urbanites who still want to know more about embracing radishes, why not check out this book instead? Those of you hooked on the boobies of Our Lady of Material Girlness... just remember that those boobies turned turned 48 this year, which is only two weeks older than some of Michael Jackson's underlying deep bone structure.

Ok, for sure I'm stopping now. That last sentence had "Michael Jackson" and "deep bone" in the same sentence.

Type at ya later...

Comic for December 15 2006

Blarg. Sick as a dog and I'm writing my first exam in 2 hours. It's worth 100%. Yuck.

I don't understand why people say "sick as a dog". All the dogs I see are annoyingly healthy, energetic, enthusiastic, moronic drool-machines. Right now I'm feeling slow, lazy, whiney, and vaguely pathetic, which in my mind puts me in the "lazy as a cat" category.

Don't get me wrong, I love cats and dogs, but etymologically? Sick as a dog just doesn't do it for me...Maybe one of those overly inbred poodle-type dogs that catches a fever at the drop of a hat (yes, there's another saying that bothers me. No one drops hats as often as the implication there).

Double Blarg. I need coffee, some supercharged generic variant of DayQuil, and food. Pretty much in that order.

Wish me luck... and just the good stuff. You can wish the bad stuff over to your neighbour or some cat or dog you dislike, or maybe one of those hat-droppers you just want to see slip in a puddle of moronic drool.

Comic for December 13 2006

My wife and I were married by a unitarian, so I thought I'd throw in something autobiographical into today's strip. Since we're both spiritual but not religious *and* since we both wanted a wedding, the unitarians more or less sprang to mind.

Ok, technically they were the second choice. Our first choice was an old friend of mine who's a card-carrying priest of Thor (I'm not joking) but once my then-future-to-be father-in-law got wind of that, his reaction was "I will not allow a demonologist to marry my daughter!", and that's a quote.

That alone would have made it worth getting married like that, but my sense of humour was trumped by some hind-brain survival mechanism and we opted for the better part of valour at the time, which was a unitarian priest named Evelyn (or Evil Lynn as I liked to refer to her... not because she was even vaguely mean-spirited in any way, it just gave me the giggles at the time).

The one thing that struck me about getting married by a unitarian was that you got to write the script for the marriage ceremony, vows, and her speech and everything. The only part that was mandatory are the bits of form and circumstance that are required by law, i.e. getting the consent signatures and so on. Aside from that, since it was our dime, it was our show.

This made for a very fun, incredibly romantic, and more than a little geeky ceremony. We didn't do anything retrospectively humiliating like getting married in full Klingon battle gear but our wedding march was the song from the last few minutes of the first Star Wars movie where Luke and friends get their medals.

Yeah, go listen to it again and tell me you don't get it. It's a moving, uplifting, stately marching piece that fits right in with weddings. Better so, in my mind, than the usual Mendelssohn piece. Mendelssohn's march wasn't even a wedding march until royalty got a hold of it in the 1850's.

This makes me wonder what was used for wedding marches before 1847 (the first time it was used as such) but no one's got relatives that old and I'm too lazy to go look it up. Seeing as Mendelssohn's march was part of a score for "A Midsummer's Night's Dream", I imagine that whatever was trendy, upscale and popular as far as music went back then would do.

Scaling this into the future, Mendelssohn's march will no doubt fall out of favour in time and be replaced by some Beyoncé tune or other, knowing the way people are.

And hey, since theatre was responsible for the original piece, maybe showtunes will be the next big thing... I dunno. Getting married to a Star Wars march is one thing but I'm not sure if I could do it again with anything from "Meet Me In St-Louis"...

Comic for December 11, 2006

Exam study week. Four finals, each worth 100% of the grade. I've one already behind me (the take-home) and the rest happen at roughly two-day intervals starting this Friday and ending next Friday. There'll be strips for this week and next, but I'll be off from the 22nd until the new year so unless I can figure out how to pre-post strips there'll be a blank week after next Friday. Short of setting up a real site and stopping this blogger business I'm not sure if there's a way to do it, but I'm open to suggestions and too lazy to look it up myself...

Comic for December 9 2006

So as of today's episode, I've committed myself to purchasing the Playmobil Devil Gnome.

Yes, that's a rather kid-friendly name for a toy, isn't it? Bound to have been popular with the conservative European Catholic crowd, I imagine, which is why it was discontinued half a dozen years ago, making it a bit of a rare piece, even on Ebay (I've only seen one in the last six months, and I missed getting that one at the time, darnit).

On note related in that "Hell and back" kind of way, our little family went to get our passport pictures done up all at once a couple of weeks back. It was all very last minute because of our usual procrastinatory planning skills, and we showed up at the photographer's at quarter-to-closing. The only thing that got us a shot at getting our shots taken was our sweet little girl, smiling in her freshly done up pigtails, burbling happily and fresh out of daycare for the day.

This was the last happy moment for a little while, as you realize there's a genetic marker embedded deep within the human program that says "love the camera when Daddy points it at you" and "freak out if it's not a family member pointing a camea at you". It must be some kind of anti-paparazzi (or maybe an anti-stalker?) gene, because it was a real chore to get a proper passport photo taken of her.

Not that the passport office makes it easy. Your picture has to be neutral expression, eyes open, mouth closed, head facing forward, don't move aaaaand...... (*BOOMF*) okay, you're set for the next five years. It's ridiculous how difficult it is to get a small kid to adopt all of these options at once. Especially when she's crying, wriggling, shaking her head and reaching for Cheerios. (that would be a zero out of five situation).

At this point, it becomes something of a video-game puzzle to get the picture, where giving cheerios stops the crying, but the mouth is opening and closing and the hands a moving back and forth, and removing cheerios sets you back about three loud and tearful variables.

Long story short, we all got our pictures taken, but mommy's got sent back a few days ago because it was "not good". So we had it re-done, and went back to the passport office, where they told us the second one was probably going to be also not good because they were both "off" in terms of contrast.

So now it's likely she'll have to sit dow for a third time (fortunately the other pix were ok) but we'll try a different place entirely and the folks at the 'office said that they can just insert the photo (if it's good) into the passport within 20 minutes with the on-site process they have there.

But it's been a pain in the ass, for the record.

Comic for December 7 2006

Despite the (nearly buried) plot arch of our necromancer trying to bring out the destuction of the kingdom through the extraction and distillation of a rather unhealthy amount of Phineas T. Bagmeat's various bodily fluids, if I keep blogging about malady and plague you folks are going to think I'm coming down with a bad case of hypochondria.

Nevertheless, after struggling to shake off the nasty gastro my sweet daughter infected me since last Friday, I'm really glad to be up and about again and complaining about the world like my usual self (and not nearly as whiningly and pathetically, my wife would like me to add at this point).

Personnally I prefer to think that I had a bit of punk in me but as it was pointed out that I really have nothing to complain about and my soapbox is this nice, solid teak thing with brass fixings and brightly stenciled letters that I keep lovingly sealed in lucite behind red velvet curtains for special occasions.... yeah well my credibility's all shot for the punk angle at this point, even if I do point out that my favorite flavour of beer is "free" and I own a leather jacket with a Crass symbol on it (yes, it's hers too... sigh).

Right, well since today's entry appears to be about lack of credibility, have you noticed that this is something from which a number of people in the strip suffer? It must either be me transposing onto my creations or an unwitting realization that competence isn't particularly funny. Or at least, if you have competence, you need some stark and laughably awful contrast right next to it so that there's something funny after all.

It's a bit like waving the right hand while the left hand does something else.

Do you suppose that's why countries have presidents and prime ministers?

I'll leave you on that thoughtful note today. Enjoy the strip and I'll try to keep my stomach in line for Monday...

The NecRomantics - Episode for 01/12/2006

This has to be the funniest thing I have seen in months. It's an "ex" knife holder (sorry guys, it only seems to come in ex-boyfriend flavours... is that saying something about your fear of committment? I dunno...). It comes in black and silver too, but I think the bright red is at the same time most Xmassy and appropriate. Knives are even included, doesn't that just beat the living daylights out of the tired old standby Voodoo Kit?

I think it's great that society can laugh at this kind of thing, even as it engages in the sublimation of basic post-relationship hostilities with petty vengeance. Gotta love the human species that way... or else we'll buy little plastic effigies of you and stabbity-stab-stab them.

Hey, on the topic of ex's, I've got exactly two entries for our Merry Widow, both of them puns. I just want to say how much I love my friends, because I really do love puns. I refuse to subscribe to the hoary old belief that has been systematically foisted on us for generations now, that puns are the lowest form of humour.

In fact, I want to set the record straight on this since it's one of those things that gets my goat: people using half quotes. It's like using statistics without knowing what they mean, or taking a news item completely out of context and using it to emphasize the inverse of its original intention.

Here's the thing. Everyone, but I mean everyone has heard "The pun is the lowest form of humour" before. I've been punning all my life and I'm just as guilty of quoting it this way. Just now, I looked it up to see which humourless bastard in history had the poor grace to make such an awful review of my favorite mode of comedy.

Boy was I surprised to find it was only half a quote. "The pun is the lowest form of humour... unless you thought of it yourself". There are variations on the theme, but attribution appears to go equally to either Doug Larson or Oscar Levant. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to go and hunt down who has paronomasiac precedence on this one.

I think one of my favorite classic authors said it best:
"The goodness of the true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability." — Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia, 1849

All of this being said, the two entries for our latest female lead are : "Mary" Widow and "Poison Pen"elope.

I'm still open to other suggestions, but if I don't hear from anyone by end of next week, keep an eye out for her new name in a near-future strip.

Back in a couple...