I always kind of liked word problems, but then I always kind of liked a lot of things about math because I am a huge fucking nerd.  So go fig.

I was never really big on The Sound of Music, though.  Though the close proximity of the phrases “the hills are alive” and “the hills have eyes” suggest a nice horror musical crossover waiting to be made.  I’m thinking Rob Zombie is a shoe-in.

This one goes out to the fellas over at digg.

Please consider this a stinging commentary on something or other, if that increases your enjoyment of it.

If not, please consider this a further attempt by the author to fold the comic strip in on itself conceptually, to probe the very notion of “sequential art”, of narrative, of et cetera and so on.

And if not THAT, maybe try the stinging commentary thing again. Or go read today’s Cat and Girl, which is (and I am wasting words even having to point this out) excellent. 7/11 NEVAR FORGET.

These slurpees don’t run.

I love that joke with all my heart. I’m not being sarcastic. I’m just flat-out wide-eyed goddam retarded for stupid jokes. You know the pirate one, with the ship’s wheel down his pants and orders a beer and the bartender’s all like you know and he goes “drivin’ me nuts”? LOVE IT. LOVE IT TO DEATH.

Truly, I musta told that joke like a hundred times over the years. I don’t even tell it very well, but it doesn’t effin’ matter.

The thing I really like about the whole “have you got Prince Albert in a can” gag is that I have no idea what the hell Prince Albert was, and so it always seemed like, yeah, let the dude out! Jesus christ, who do you think you are, stickin’ some guy in a can?

And these days a Prince Albert is a cock piercing. So take that, confusing old joke that already didn’t make sense in the first place: now you’re filthy, too!

I was just about to say something about how this sort of joke doesn’t really seem to play anymore anyway — it’s almost always a joke about it even being a joke, I guess — but then it occurred to me that Bart Simpson has been pulling this shit for like twenty years now. So I don’t know if that’s a knock against me or against Bart or against people who still credulously answer odd questions over the phone.

But anyway, do any of you out there in readerland know what the hell Prince Albert was/is? Do you have some? Email me if you do. Educate me. I can’t stand this mystery.

No comic today on account of there not being a comic today.  See you Tuesday!

I spent pretty much all four years of my high school education involved in the drama department in some capacity, for basically no reason other than that a lot of the folks who did drama weren’t as big of asshats as people in some of the other departments.

We did Oklahoma one year, and the guy who played Curly the Evil Farmer or whatever, who was a total mensch as I recall, had only one real handicap: he couldn’t sing. Not a bit. Trot out your favorite zings here, viz-a-viz “can’t carry a tune in a bucket” and so on, because they apply. Cats mating. Death throes. It was that bad.

Banjos could make jokes about this guy’s singing.

But he was a good guy, and so it made for a weird dynamic during the show, because he was also less of an ass than pretty much the entire rest of the cast. Go figure.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that, you know, non-musical theater really has a lot going for it.

What happens when you take a bunt cake strip and filter it through a bizarro lens?

POMO BUNT CAKE

Nothing says “pretty much the entire writing staff is on vacation” like a sitcom clip show. Even an ironic clip show is still a goddam clip show; when The Simpsons would do it, you’d sort of smile and laugh along as they skewered the corny, apologist mechanics of the genre, but it was still a damn clip show. It sucked, they knew it sucked, and it sucked in a particularly special way because they were winking at you the whole time.

And man, all this talk about flashbacks really makes you think, dunnit? Why, I remember, back in strip #21 …

So one of the things I do with my time is help moderate Metafilter, which is a lovely site and all that but let’s jump to the interesting bit: when a user signs up for the site with the sole intent of spamming. Mefi has a $5 fee for signups, which seems to work pretty well at discouraging bad-faith accounts, but we still get the occasional assbiter willing to speculate a fiver for potential profit.

Hence this mess: that’s the community-policing thread calling out the user who had just earlier signed up as (and I don’t know whether to call this guileless or simply direct) “What is Mesothelioma?”. Said entrepreneur dropped a few comments in various threads, linking to some forgettable ad-trap. Said comments are now nuked — one of the quiet pleasures of the job — but the thread remains.

As does (in deleted form) a sort of riffy reaction post by a legit user. Such are the antics of a community website. And all this over some ad stumping hijinx that probably don’t end up making much money for much of anybody involved.

All of which stands apart from the fact that Mesothelioma is (a) a terrible affliction, (b) a hilarious word, and (c) really what killed Steve McQueen, apparently. Don’t fuck around with asbestos, kids.

Also, it’s deeply important to me to maintain a solid grip on the phrase “twenty bucks, same as in town”, so, you know, there you go. Word up to James “Kibo” Parry.  Giant H battles 4 evah.