…comes from the usually only slightly naughty Octopus Pie webcomic where, while creator Meredith Gran makes a cross-country migration (that will NOT be reflected in her Brooklyn-based comic, at least not at once), she has allowed far-naughtier webcomicker Erika Moen (not usually SFW) to do a guest comic in which she provided a collection of “verb out with your noun outs” as declared by the various Octopus Pie characters.

I like the casual style of “hang out with your wang out”, the proud un-coolness of “nerd out with your bird out” and “geek out with your cheeks out” and the age-appropriate “lie down with your fly down (some of us are too old to rock out for very long)”. But I know there are other possibilities, and I wanted to test my own creativity with a little “out”-ing.

But all I could come up with was “a detective doing a stakeout with his snake out” before I essentially schlepped out with my pep out.

So I attempted some oddly-worded queries on several search engines… Yes, I did Bing out with my thing out, Google out with my kugel out, and Yahoo! out with my Yahoo! out.

And, not only am I really not very good at naughty punnery, now the secret databases where the search engines follow your every move have me labeled as a “punning prevert” (which I was trying to hide from them). Later on, when I was writing a response to a MetaFilter post about “Everything Is Terrible” by linking to a video of the Ray Stevens song “Everything Is Beautiful”, I stumbled upon a video for one of Stevens’ less serious songs, “The Streak”.

Now there was a true pioneer in verbing out with his noun out. Except he didn’t really Rock Out, it was more like he Country/Popped Out.

Anyway, at least Achewood is better than usual. I’m sorry, but when it gets into storylines like the recent time travel poncho thingy, it loses me. But in its most recent strip, when Chris Onstad used all of his powers of weirdness on Facebook, it was a delight to behold. “It’s kind of like if the pictures in your high school yearbook came alive and went bald and said sorry.” Best. Definition. Ever. And the COURTESY NOTICES. If there isn’t a Facebook group called “I Have Died” (and I am never getting deep enough into that swamp to find out), there certainly should be.

And then there is the ongoing saga of fantasy, absurdity and clever wordplay that is simply titled Goats, where new chapters have been fewer and farther between as the webcomicker is busy dealing with the dead-tree/living-color edition of his earlier work, yet it is so worth waiting for every new moment in the Ultraweapons Trade Benevolence Private Weaponyards on Galactron Cortex with the Ultimate Computational Weapon, the Lolcat Memebomb, that can “Rickroll an entire level of existence into submission”. Awesomeness.

One other thing worth noting in the Wonderful Web of Wit and Whimsy: the demotivating minds at Despair.com is doing another caption contest, this time using a picture of two dandelions, one of which has only a single spore left standing.And unlike previous contestings, it’s allowing the unwashed masses to rate the entries… it’s things like these that help reassure me that I AM an above-average writer of the funny, because some of these are deeply, deeply awful. Why did this picture inspire so many to make Bald jokes? (Forget I asked; I know) And some of the typos just make the lines better (“The looser takes it all”). And so many references to wind… most of them rather windbaggy. Some of the contributors forgot to include the humor in the black humor (and internet writing contests are not good places to make your cry for help). And then there are some very good turns of phrase that have only the slightest connection with the picture! (“Standing firm against the currents of change invites the lawnmower of destruction.”) Or none at all… (“When being sized up for the promotion, there was always a chance they were not going to go with tenure, experience, and knowledge. Just a chance.”) I submitted a couple myself, but I cannot remember them. Which means I probably voted against them. But I know they didn’t have anything to do with baldness or the wind!

Still, it does my heart good to see an entry like:
WIT
Wishing for it isn’t going to make up for your abundancy of not funny

And knowing it can’t POSSIBLY be referring to me!

“This is why we can’t have nice things.”

It’s an oft-repeated cliché on the Web, especially at MetaFilter, where many members worry about whether they actually deserve “nice things”. Honestly, I find “nice things” are somewhat overrated (and I’m looking at you, Apple). I have an adequate supply of adequate things that do what I want them to do… adequately. Of course, one of the things that my adequate things do is to help me make things… and if I’m doing a really good job, the things I make are “nice” and nobody better tell ME they’re overrated. Because the difference between “having nice things” and “making nice things” is immense. Think about it.

Also, “nice people” are definitely NOT overrated, but I’m not comfortable with the wording “having nice people”. “Having nice people around,” much better.

First, a note about my last post: the last line about not having slept for 88 hours was a JOKE, but soon after I wrote it, I fell asleep and slept, with minimal interruption, for over 14 hours, waking with memories of bits of three separate dreams, and what I remembered was NOT scenery, NOT architecture. Let’s just say I finally made the team in one, got the robot working in another, and saved a TV series in another. It’s true what they say about bloggers, we really do write for ourselves, and this time it really helped. But you don’t care, and I don’t mind that you don’t.

A recent MetaFilter post (NOT by me) about a site selling “Moderate/Ambivalent/Nuanced” Bumper Stickers reminded me of the existence of Internet Bumper Stickers a site that designs little 250×40 pixel images to ‘stick’ on your site or email. I know they go back to the previous millennium (their “retired stickers” collection refers to Bill Clinton, JarJar and Y2K), and have accumulated nearly 4000 designs. They’re an ‘equal opportunity annoyer’ which means they try to cover all the reasonable opinions and some of the unreasonable ones, while keeping the language PG (but some of the entendres do double).

I just wanted to take this occasion to display some of my favorites (since this blog is not formatted for 250-pixel graphics in the sidebars):
















(if you disagree with this one, they do have another with the opposite opinion)







(my apologies; this one is hard to decipher, MUCH harder if you’re colorblind – hint, hint)






(okay, that one is less a sticker than a tag)

I could go on and on (and maybe someday I will) but they have rules, and to show off as many as I’m showing right now requires me to say “Internet Bumper Sticker® is a registered trademark of InternetBumperStickers.com.”

Their content is sorted into semi-logical categories from Admonitions and Affirmations to Personal Issues and Political Issues, as well as a section containing Latin translations of contemporary stuff:
(Garbage in, garbage out)
(What me worry?)
And a section of Oxymorons that specifically excludes “Jumbo Shrimp” as lacking ‘attitude’.
(although that one is just logical, isn’t it?)

Since the days when I visited the site more often, they have monetized their Bumper Sticker Wisdom by putting some of the most popular and/or original on physical stickers for sale (as well as Refrigerator Magnets and, inevitably, T-Shirts).

One more thing they have is MUCH LARGER images for use as desktop wallpaper. My favorite (which has been on my current computer on multiple occasions (and multiple computers):

And there you are.

I was so thoroughly delighted that my participation in Neatorama’s recent “Mystery Sale” netted me a copy of Adam Koford’s “The Laugh Out Loud Cats Sell Out”

Ooops. Wrong sell-outs.

That’s more like it. I thoroughly enjoy this ingeniously funny series, having evolved from its original concept of mashing-up LOLcat-speak with the comic strip style of 90 years earlier to a multi-layered delight of now-extinct hobo lore and other anachronisms, two well-fleshed-out hobo cat characters and their relationship, skillful visual humor and punmanship, and comical cultural references from all over, but I didn’t start keeping up with it until Koford made it the main focus of his blog partly because, well, Flickr still feels to me too much like somebody’s vacation slide show to enjoy a serious portfolio or archive of works.

Anyway, I was thoroughly enjoying the printed collection, containing many Laugh-Out-Loud-Cats comics I had never seen before, until I stumbled onto one in particular:

It seemed strangely familiar, like something I had seen before… or something I had DONE before.

Yes, “Neil Before Zod”, “My Geekiest Pun Ever”, posted May 9, 2007, and one of the few pieces of ‘PhotoSlop’ I have done that ever got any outside attention, prompting me to place a little watermark sig on the bottom right corner. And Koford uploaded his “Neil Before Zod” to Flickr on October 4, 2007. I definitely have first (or at least earlier) dibs on the pun. Yet, while it was the same pun, we did it as different jokes, me pointing out that Neil Armstrong got to the moon (Apollo 11, July 21, 1969) well before General Zod (“Superman II”, premiered June 19, 1981), while Adam was having fun with alphabetical order, in which General Zod is always the loser. I mean, even Wendell Wittler is before Zod! And I’m used to being at the end of the line; my spelling of Wittler is even after Whittler. At least I’m Alpha before Wolfram. And his choice of Neil Gaiman as the Neil Before Zod was interesting. Nobody would recognize a cartoon representation of Neil Armstrong, but recognizing Gaiman is kind of a Geek thing, and that cartoon is one of many examples of the Laugh Out Loud Cats “Geeking Out”. What other Neil could he have used? Simon? Young? Diamond? Peart? Sedaka? (why are most of the famous Neils in pop music?) Patrick Harris? (We both did our things before Dr. Horrible hit the scene, but that might make an even funnier graphic image)

Anyway, I’m not going to take any action over this maybe seemingly semi-plagiarism except to use the Laugh Out Loud Cats in one or more of my future “Square Root of Minus Garfield” contributions – because Garfield is more often an “Am I Supposed to Laugh at That? Cat”. Or Mr. Koford could draw a “Wendell-bo” in one of his cartoons (no superhero suit please, I usually wear a polo shirt or webcomic-design tshirt and plain slacks). Hint, hint.

BTW, that Who album is kind of cool in its own way, between its reminder that, in other parts of the English-speaking world “Heinz Meanz Beanz” more than Ketchup and containing one of my favorite Who songs “I Can See for Miles O’Brien” (Go ahead Koford, use that pun in a cartoon, I dare ya!)

ADDENDUM: Too late, I did it myself.

The Doors. Craigslist. Only Weird Al could bring them together… or want to.

“I thought it would be anachronistically weird to have me as Jim Morrison screaming about Craigslist,” Yankovic told Spinner. “That just seemed so completely wrong that I thought I had to do it.”

Buy the mp3 here.

If loving Weird Al doing a Jim Morrison impersonation singing about craigslist.org while Ray Manzarek plays the keyboard is wrong, I don’t want to be right. Is this the first time he got someone who was part of what he’s parodying to participate in his parody? I should know this. I saw Weird Al live on his last tour at the concert hall at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where he recorded his first couple hits at the campus radio station… in the men’s room (either the serious radio people threw him out or he was going for certain acoustics – there are conflicting stories).