Happy birthday to my personal assistant Abby, who is celebrating her ninth birthday today. That makes her about 50 in prorated human years, which means that, relatively speaking, she’s now older than I am. Abby would like you to know that she is never too old to wear a silly hat and play with a [...]
Archive for February 2010
Hero of the Day: Abby is nine
February 28, 2010Comic Art Friday: Legacies
February 26, 2010I get a kick out of dreaming up new combinations of heroes for my Common Elements commission theme. That little inward chuckle from uncovering a heretofore untapped linkage between two unrelated comics characters? Man, I love that. Sometimes, though, my Common Elements combinations surprise even me, in that I stumble upon a second — or [...]
Idol 2010: Your Top 12 guys, America
February 25, 2010In yesterday’s post, we examined the 12 female competitors comprising the feminine half of this season’s cast of American Idol. Today, it’s time to smell the testosterone. As in our previous list, we’ll give you the performers in order of their initial appearance in this round, as well as noting the song each presented. Twelve [...]
Idol 2010: Your Top 12 girls, America
February 24, 2010It’s that time again, isn’t it? Frankly, I blew off last year’s entire season of American Idol, because I just couldn’t drag myself through the whole sordid ordeal again. Besides, was it going to get any better than Jordin Sparks? Most likely, not. But it’s a new decade, and your Uncle Swan comes back refreshed, [...]
Comic Art Friday: My heroes have always been heroines
February 19, 2010Today’s Comic Art Friday is dedicated to my birthday girls: my wife KJ and my goddaughter Shelby. As regular readers here know, KJ has been battling metastatic breast cancer for the past three years. One thing we’ve learned in these past 36 months: We don’t take birthdays — or any days — for granted. In [...]
Guam to run all night, Guahan to run all day
February 18, 2010This just in from the South Pacific… To mark the beginning of his final year in office, Felix Camacho, the governor of Guam, issued an executive order changing the name of Micronesia’s largest island to Guahan — the original name of the island in the language of its indigenous people, the Chamorros. Guam — begging [...]
While my guitar gently weeps
February 16, 2010This explains the police helicopter overhead the other night. I’d read over the weekend about the murder of local artisan Taku Sakashta, an internationally renowned creator of hand-crafted guitars. Early Monday morning, Rohnert Park police chased down and eventually captured a suspect in the slaying — Joshua “Crash” Begley, a recently released felon with a [...]
Comic Art Friday: Connections
February 12, 2010This is a story about connections. The other night, I was surfing cable TV’s bounty when I stumbled across Man-Thing, the ultra-low-budget cheapie thriller based on Marvel Comics’ swamp monster character, on the channel now ludicrously named Syfy. I knew of this film only by its sullied reputation, which was at least part of the [...]
Comic Art Friday: Going batty
February 5, 2010In an era when sexual sensationalism sells, DC Comics made a major media splash a few years ago by announcing that Batwoman — a character who’d been killed off way back in 1979 — was being revived as a lesbian. The irony of this was that the entire reason that there had ever been a [...]
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