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Collin's so manly that toilet seats lift themselves up when he walks into public bathrooms.

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Do you find Nikola Tesla inherently funny? Understand the last days of Sir James Cook? Then do I have a nerdy set of comics for you!

Hark! A Vagrant! 20 History Comics

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If this can be true, can we not be close to the coveted monkey butler?

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So the trailer for Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is finally out. Take a peek.



Here's the thing: I like Aerosmith, and I liked playing the downloadable 'Dream On' in Guitar Hero 3. Will I buy the game? I don't know yet. I bought 'Rocks the 80's' and then felt like I had been slapped in the face by paying a ridiculous amount for nothing more than a pretty expansion pack. I can't tell if this will be the same sort of thing. My other beef is, I'm not buying another Guitar Hero game until they fix the 'you play more notes than are actually in the song' thing. I can appreciate that Expert should be difficult, but there is no reason why, in a guitar simulating rock game, I should play more notes than the actual band does in order to perform their song. That's stupid. Quit bumping up the difficulty to appeal to the uber. We like your game already.

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Science (maybe pseudo-science) is awesome.

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So, I'm totally jazzed to the legal max. I got an e-mail today from one of my favorite professors asking if I'd be interested in serving as the Supplemental Instructor for her Quantitative Research Methods class in Fall '08. Quantitative Research Methods is basically one of the hardest courses you have to take in the Psych department, so being offered the position means two awesome things:

1. I'm smart/capable enough to handle helping teach other people the class and

2. It'll look amazing on an application for graduate school.

Throw in the fact that there's also some payment to go along with this (geniuses don't work free, right?) and I'm going to be totally set for this fall.

Let's see, a single class in the fall. Check. Job as SI. Check. This next semester's going to be wicked sweet.

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Words cannot express my unending man-crush on Dr. Gregory House.

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David Duchovny in drag.

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I love Guitar Hero. This, I do not love.



It's like a video game tumor.

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I have no idea when or in what situation this picture was taken. I found it, by itself, on my C:/ drive.

Filename: Picture031

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I love webcomics. Even bad ones.

Some people collect decorative plates. Some people love albums on vinyl. I love reading, and drawing, and by extension comics and their ugly half-sister who nobody wants to take to the prom but everybody will make out with after a couple of beers in them, webcomics.

Now, the vast majority of webcomics out there are total tripe. They come in all shapes, sizes and quality (mostly poor), but occasionally you find a little gold nugget in an ugly turd pile. 'Raymondo Person' is one of them.

(Click That!)

This is the world of 'Raymondo Person'. It's silly, sarcastic, profane, vulgar, ultraviolent and actually pretty funny. The art style is fun because it's purely minimalist, and yet at the same time it can occasionally bust out some genuinely good looking frames.

So give it a read-through. The site went defunct a while ago, so you can knock out all the comics in an hours sitting. So do.

Raymondo Person Archives

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Well documented fact: Mondays suck. It's a cliché, but the reason things are cliché is because they get used a lot because they feel true. So it's a fact -- Mondays definitely suck.

I have a few methods to survive the beginning of the week, however. One of them is listening to music really, really loud on my iPod. The other is to dance around in my underwear first thing in the morning to get my groove on.

The current track of choice has been '(Return I Will To Old) Brazil', featured in millions of small South American cafés and also a Terry Gilliam movie. I managed to find a YouTube of it, including not only a good version of the song, but also a pretty cool video to go with it. So return with me to old Brazil.

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So, today I had breakfast in Heaven.

Not actual Heaven, mind you, because I don't think any self-respecting celestial paradise would feature faux-Egyptian decor inside its luminous gates (except Ancient Egyptian Heaven... sup Isis!)

Because of how good a boy I am (answer: very good), I was given a gift certificate to The Cheesecake Factory by my superiors at the preschool. OK, it had less to do with being a good boy and more to do with being a good teacher (which I am), but regardless, I ended up with a plastic gift card and a new restaurant to try out.

Having never been to The Cheesecake Factory before, I had no idea what to expect. Reviews from family and friends ranged from decent ('The cheesecake's great, the food's so-so') to glowing ('Delicious'). A Google image search revealed some tasty looking food and some ridiculously over-the-top architecture for a restaurant chain.


The Cheesecake Factory's website was equally unhelpful. Apparently, the good people at CheeseFAKE Factory (zing!) were so desperate for my business that they'd lie to me and say that they offer over 200 different meals. This was obviously a filthy lie, but I still had that gift card, so I figured I'd give it a go.

So I went in for a late brunch/early lunch and was led to my table by what I'm pretty sure was a college graduate. All his sentences were unnecessarily complicated, much like my own, and made me immediately hate him for fear that he might be smarter than me. The waiter then brought me the menu, assisted by two elephants, four sherpas and a traveling minstrel. To say that the menu was unnecessarily large is an understatement; I'm pretty sure my Boy Scout Handbook was smaller than the menu they brought me (and it taught me how to fight alligators). They apparently weren't lying about the 200 different meals thing; it took me fifteen minutes just to decide if I wanted breakfast or lunch.

The ultimate decision was Pasta Carbonara which, for the non-Italians or heavy-set food lover (I'm guilty!) people among us, is essentially pasta noodles in a light Alfredo sauce with sweet peas, bacon and a little egg in it. It was fantastic; words cannot do justice to a pasta that men will write ballads about hundreds of years from now. I could only eat about half of the portion, so I took the rest home to eat later; all signs point to that it'll be just as yummy reheated as the first time.

The meal was fantastic, and afterwards I was automatically offered cheesecake. Who would have thought that a restaurant with a name like Cheesecake Factory would try and push dessert on you? Anyway, the end result was taking home an entire cheesecake, which is delicious, but will surely cripple me come swim suit season.

The kicker was, the cheesecake was more expensive than the meal, drinks and tip combined. That's some expensive pastry. It's a good thing it's a ten on the Delicious Scale or I'd be really upset but, the way I figure it, you've gotta treat yourself now and again.

So I had breakfast in Heaven, or at least the kitschy upscale restaurant version. The food was fantastic, as was the dessert; the only problem was, the bill was ridiculous.

So make someone else take you to dinner. Or be an Olympic-class runner who doesn't mind not being welcomed back into the restaurant.

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So the unthinkable happened today. In what I can only assume was a concussive blast so powerful that it knocked us all back to 1995 (or as the result of a birthday party, one or the other), the majority of my family ended up at a rollerskating rink.

In case it's been a while, let me remind you what roller rinks are.

This is the carpet of your local roller rink. You can tell that it's a roller rink in two ways: first, the carpet design is so horrifying it would have to be at a place geared entirely for children. Second, you spend so much time face down on the floor of a roller rink after you fall off your skates that you should recognize this carpet by instinct. But there are other parts to your local rink too.

This is your second clue it's a roller rink. I tried to take a stable picture of some kids skating, but just as I did, a lurpy 13 year old ran head-first into me and made the picture blurry. You can see his orange Sublime tee to the left of the picture. This is another way we know that we're at the rink; awkward teenagers and young children skating furiously to songs that time forgot.

Of course, I was able to get at least a couple decent pictures of the rink without being plowed down in a hormone-fueled frenzy:


This is what the rink looks like when you're not being plowed down. As you can tell, it's obviously a health hazard standing too close because, even when there's not a lot of people, I still managed to catch a picture of a kid who ran into me even though I was standing alone, off to the side, ten feet from the rink. Good times.

The most fascinating part of the whole outing, though, was the discovery of a monstrous in-door playground dominated by those inflatable play areas. Interestingly, despite it being among the most potentially dangerous and large areas in the entire complex, the entire area was ruled over by... a single sixteen year old.

This bothered me more than anything else. While you can see parents in the background of the picture, they all left shortly thereafter to go get a coffee, leaving the lives of their children in the hands of that guy (who, incidentally, didn't think it was suspicious that I asked if I could come in, without any kid, and take pictures... go that guy!).

For the next series of pictures, I've simplified your viewing experience by marking, with an X, all the places I saw a child face-plant it during the ten minutes I spent in the play area:

Now, this play area filled me with two very contrary emotions...

As a preschool teacher, I was absolutely mortified at the lack of responsible adults and safety precautions.

As a world-class jerk, though, I was amused at all the stupid looking kids getting injured in various (hilarious) ways.

The above image is my favorite. As you can see from the top of the plastic Goliath, the manufacturers deemed this safe, fun attraction Mt. Everest. This is fairly accurate. It features an inflatable climbing wall which is apparently impossible to climb as every child who made it half-way up immediately fell down. It also features slides that do more 'throw you down the ride' than 'slide you down the ride'.

Anyway, the whole thing smelled like prepubescent wet socks. Horrifying.

I guess where I'm going with this is, there were a lot of people there. The entrance was free (!) and the cotton candy was cheap. If you enjoy watching children get injured, please, give patronage to your local rollerskating rink.

Oh, and if anyone thinks the idea of an age 21+ private roller rink full of awesome music and strobe lights is as awesome an idea as I do, please, send me an e-mail. We have work to do.

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