See You In The Funny Pages

What's up, blogkateers? What should I call my legions of adoring fans, anyway? Squeegee Nation? Squeegeeheads? The Dirty Half-Dozen? Maybe I should put more thought into this. Or maybe I've given it too much thought as it is. Well, whoever you are, this comic appeared in over over 450 newspapers across the country two weeks ago: Now, local sports anchor Bob Lobel is filing a libel suit against Get Fuzzy creator Darby Conley. The comic never actually says he's drunk, only that it looks that way. And he does look drunk half the time, as anyone in New England whose seen him on TV in the past few years can attest. People reading this in the...

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Scott the Fish

A poem that may or may not rhyme, depending on what region you're from. While I was sailing in my yacht counting all the fish I'd caught to see if they were too small or not and throwing them into the boiling pot I came across a fish named Scott Scott grabbed the fancy lure I bought And twisted it into a double knot And sounding not the least distraught Yelled, "Put me back, you drunken sot! For I'm the mighty fish juggernaught And not as weak as you have thought I'm much tougher than other fish you've fought I may be small and I may be squat but mess with me and you're bound to rot. So heed this lesson you've been taught!!!" So I cut his stupid...

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A Quarter-Century, Plus One

Michele got me a sweet 5 megapixel digital camera for my birthday. I haven't had a chance to really test it out yet, but no more disposable cameras for me. I'll be playing with it all this week, so any pictures I put up in the future will be from the new camera. Maybe I'll even update the Pictures section with a few photos and the long-promised sketches and drawings. You can only look at that coloring book so many times. I've now seen Revenge of the Sith three times, and I'll probably see it at least one more time in the theater. Not because I'm obsessed with it or anything, I just keep seeing it with different people. The first time, it was...

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Star Wars, Nothing But Star Wars

I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't seen the movie, but there's a scene in Revenge of the Sith where Mace Windu's uplifting speech to the Jedi Council is interrupted when he is eaten by a shark. I'm sorry. It's been six years now and I still can't forgive that movie. They made the sharks' brains larger and as a "side effect," they got smarter. That's not a side effect, that's a direct effect! It's like, "Hey this is weird, we made the sharks' bladders bigger and as a side effect, they don't have to pee as much!" What was the point of making their brains bigger, anyway? Morons. I went with Michele to see Episode III last night....

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Hungry, Angry and Some Other Thing

One of the guys at work got this e-mail this morning: A RIDDLE THAT'LL KILL YOUR BRAIN! This is going to make you so MAD! There are three words in the English language that end in "gry". ONE is angry and the other is hungry. EveryONE knows what the third ONE means and what it stands for. EveryONE uses them everyday, and if you listened very carefully, I've given you the third word. What is it? _______gry? He sent it to the rest of us, but I got impatient after a couple of minutes and looked it up. Mr. Schprock was determined to come up with the answer, and spent most of the morning trying to figure it out. He asked for a few hints, but refused...

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Dude, You Owe Us Money

I finally paid off my Dell bill last month. $0.00 owed. That's what the statement said. While that's a great load off my mind, I was a little puzzled that there was still a return envelope in there. I don't owe any more, why is there still an envelope? Do they want a tip? Do they think I'll just keep paying them for old time's sake? Speaking of old times, remember last year I found that creepy hut of death in Bare Cove? They found two bodies in the park last week. They were found bludgeoned to death in an old military bunker. I'm going to go hide under my bed no...

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And Now, A Word You Can't Use in Scrabble

Paraskevidekatriaphobia: A morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th. Also known as friggatriskaidekaphobia. I'm not really sure how some people can be afraid of a day. I mean, it's just a day. If you're going to be afraid of something, make it something genuinely creepy, like clowns or soft sculpture mannequins. Look at those things. They look like shriveled up dead people. Yee...

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I Wish Hulk's Love Could Bring You Back Again

When I think about high school, I usually go into epileptic seisures. But once those subside, I think about all the cool people I used to hang out with that I never see anymore. I was in the Graphic Arts program, and while there was a revolving cast of characters passing through there every semester, by the time senior year came around, the only ones left were myself, Journey frontman Valerie, and Jim Vento. Vento came aboard senior year, so really only me and Valerie and been there from the beginning. Vento was a cool guy. He was like this big, friendly giant. And in those post-Vanilla Ice, pre-Eminem days, it was kind of funny to see a giant, hip-hop loving white boy. Actually, that's still pretty funny, Vento was always laid back, and he's one of only a handful of people I know that actually...

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Word To Your Mother

How many times do you have to do something before it becomes a tradition? For the past few years, my family has gone to Chili's for Mother's Day. We go around three o'clock when it isn't too crowded. We took my grandmother the first time. She ordered fajitias, but it turned out she thought she was ordering hard shelled tacos. Actually, she thinks anything remotely Mexican-sounding comes with a hard-shelled taco. So she was a little disappointed with the warm, soft pita bread sitting in front of her. I don't think she can eat a hard taco anyway. Her front tooth falls out every other week and she keeps paying a dentist to put it back in. That's...

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Potpourri For a Thousand, Alex

So much to say, so little ambition to write it all down. I suppose the best way to do this is the time-honored tradition of bullet points. Hopefully, they won't show up as weird symbols like whenever I try to use an actual apostrophe instead of a foot mark. (also known as the "dumb apostrophe," by people who like to come up with mean names for things.) • By now, everybody and their unibrowed cousin Willard has written a review of The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy. So I won't say much about it other than that I thought is was great and I was able to follow the story despite having never read the books. Actually, I didn't really know anything...

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David Alan Grier Screwed my Aunt!

My mom's brother Mike moved to California in search of fame and fortune. He did end up in one episode of Hill Street Blues and even had a few lines, but that's about it as far as fame goes. His wife Tracey is a model/photographer. That's a pretty good gig, actually. You can never be out of a job because you can always just take pictures of yourself. I think she said that in those ads for Quarker State with Leah Remini, when they cut to a close up of hands holding the bottle, those are her hands. That kind of makes me wonder just how bad do Leah Remini's hands look that they have to replace them with the hands of a woman in her forties? Does she have webbed fingers or something? Anyway, Tracey was a contestant on Hollywood Squares a few years ago. She called to let us know what day it would...

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Whatever Doesn't Kill Me...

It has now been officially one year since I realized my lifelong dream of never living in Quincy would not come to pass. What's worse, I kind of like it here. It's a little unsettling, actually. Before moving to Wollaston beach, I used to hate Quincy, although I'm not really sure why. It might have something to do with how narrow the streets are. People park on both sides of two way streets that are barely three cars wide. It wouldn't be a problem if the streets were one-way, or if people would actually use their freaking driveways. I don't understand that. It's one thing if you don't have anywhere else to park, but I go by houses that have three cars parked on the street and none in the driveway. These people should have Nicole Richie shipped to their home as punishment. Can you imagine...

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