When I tire of my son's Lincoln Logs, Thomas trains, and the other 7 milion items I step on, trip over, sit on, duck from, get run over by, and last but not least, get hit in the head with. I'm glad Hi Fructose is out there, so I know there's toys for me too. These are toys that more often will just sit on a shelf with many collectors, but I'm sure I would let them go toe to toe with the Thomas trains, and the whole fleet of trucks that cause traffic jams in my front hall, just to see if artists and designers can make toys that withstand the punishment that only Tonka and Bruder can dish out.

I've enjoyed the first issue of Hi Fructose. It's a nicely designed/produced magazine, that could suck a reader into a world they didn't know existed and may not have cared. It's definitely something for the Juxtapoz crowd. I can't justify subscribing, but I have a strange fascination for well-crafted magazines, so I'm sure I'll pick this up again.

Particularly of interest is the photography of Brian McCarty. If you're spoiled daughter wanted to hire a photographer for Barbie and Ken's wedding, he probably wouldn't be the one to hire, he'd be busy taking the candids of Skipper shagging a bus boy next to the dumpster, or capturing a drunken Care Bear puking in the parking lot. McCarty has a knack for capturing the real life of toys. He has a gift for reading between the lines on the packaging copy, and goes beyond what the Saturday morning commercials let on.

Oh and he's got Master Shake cavorting with some bikini clad babes.

...then catch it. And maybe do it again. Lovely pics. Lovely technique. I'd like to get a new digital camera soon anyway, so if things don't go so well, oh well.

There's no way President Bush could have expected anything except Jeff Gannon size softballs to hit out of the park, but my guess is Matt Lauer saw an advance of that new George Clooney movie, Good Night and Good Luck, and fired up by Edward R. Murrow, he came out of it like I did as a kid after watching the Rocky movies. Lauer set his sights on the president, made light of the "photo-op", and went on to ask questions about Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and why the government doesn't want to ever forgive the Katrina debt.

Bush handled the interview better than I would have imagined. (Translation: 85% less stuttering and stammering, Andy Dick would be disappointed.) His handlers must have prepared him already for some other audience. But still his sometimes incredulous expression simply said, "WTF?"

Lauer must want Dan Rather's job or something. I always thought Matt Lauer just came across as completely dull and uninteresting, but he had his argument with Tom Cruise a few months back and has now showed the president another vertebrae in the news media backbone.

The president's comment, "Last night, Laura and had dinner with Mayor Nagin and a group of distinguished New Orleans citizens from all walks of life." intrigued me. Was Robert Davis one of those distinguished citizens?

All in all a fun time was had by all...but President Bush.

That should now bring you here, if I know what the hell I'm doing, that is.

...and I like it. (I was searching for the cover to Fell #1 at the time.

Ellis has got another good title on his hands. Damn if that chain-smoking, cane-swinging bastard doesn't have a knack for caustic characters with memorable one-liners. If comic books were movies, Warren Ellis would have a few lines, right up there with anything from "Fuck me gently with a chainsaw" to "One time in band camp...". "If you're gonna shoot porno, don't clog the drains" appears in the second panel. For a change the supporting characters are more caustic (because an adjective for that escapes me right now) than the hero (anti-hero...no, scratch that, actually maybe not, it's one of those things people write but never actually say, like "gal-pal"). Ben Templesmith makes with the bleak yet rich panels, and is apparently happy there's no vampires.

Warren Ellis is reaching out to the poeple with this one. These single issues contain an entire story each for $1.99. So I can get the baby formula, and afford a comic book this week, instead of just buying the book and shoving a binky in the kid's mouth. (That's not even funny, is it? I'm such a dad.)

Plus if you like the prose, there's some more of it sans pictures to extend the reading life, and it kind of acts as the DVD bonus material concept applied to a comic book. Ellis still hasn't added me to his myspace, but why should I care, since I still don't know why I have a myspace account, I'm finding plenty of music elsewhere on the net these days.

Rarely are my posts timely, but I just read this on Yahoo, and it was posted there about 14 minutes ago. Robert Davis says he hasn't had a drink in 25 years. I saw the original video on Crooks & Liars. Although I'm sure most everybody has seen it on the news by now.

When's Kanye's next TV appearance?

Both lose.

The Left Coaster is doing a bang-up job compiling the data. Although even with all this information, I'm still not sure how she'll vote. Although it looks pretty clear that she's quite loyal to the Bush family. And that only means more fun in the Middle East, and less privacy for Americans. Attytood's post on the subject hints at that, as well as use of the military as a police force. I believe the term for that is martial law. It's been done before in places none of us would want to live.

Or SE7EN Smurfs. Milk and cookies makes me happy. Although I've never seen SE7EN, I still enjoyed the spoof featuring the Smurfs by Robot Chicken. The Smurfs have also been used to lampoon a specific Internet phenomenon.

I think you can join me in saying, "WTF?" I went to BigBoys for The Rawker, and I got this mess. Are the kids playing too much GTA as one commenter suggested? Or have they been influenced by the events at Abu Ghraib. Yikes. I'm not even sure why I'm posting this. I've been too influenced by today's climate of "Shock and Awe". Or was "Shock and Awe" so 2003.

You can't kill The Rawker.

Topical and edgy. Comedy Central does better reporting than your local news. You know, that show that they advertise at every sitcom commercial break with those permasmile newsreaders shuffling papers engaged in faux conversation that has much less to do with current events, and more likely regarding moisturizers, since that's what news people do. (By, "that show", I meant the "local news", but you knew that, right?.)

Jon Stewart may actually have exceeded Eric Cartman as the biggest celebrity at Comedy Central. Who would have thought The Daily Show would end up doing the most journalism on television.

Blah blah blah. Funny stuff at the Emmys. A Kilborn says what? What's a Kilborn anyway, does that have something to do with post-delivery abortions?

enRAGEd - A collection of Rage Against the Machine mash-ups and remixes.

I couldn't find this with Google today, then I realized I had the link in an e-mail from the folks at what was formerly boomselection.info. That site is now defunct (or at least orphaned), but has been replaced with boomparty.net. Think less mp3s, more party promotion. Good luck, folks. Now where am I gonna go for my fill of M.I.A. mixes and mashes.

Well, I might have narrowly escaped. I did just breakaway to post.

Boggler Classic. Thanks, Tubbs, I found it at your site, which I found at Negro Please.

When he's Tom DeLay.

Indicted for criminal conspiracy in campaign financing, he's stepping down from his position as Speaker of the House.

I had to re-read the article before I realized it wasn't about the SEC investigation of Bill Frist. He sold his family's shares of HCA, which his family founded, one month before an announcement of weak earnings. So it very well may be insider trading. I wonder if Dr. Frist would get more assistance from the executive branch, if he fell in line with the party on stem cell research.

Anything on Roberts?

Bungie, the makers of Halo and Halo 2, I think you XBox gamers may have heard of those, is selling this shirt to raise funds for hurricane relief, proceeds are going to the Red Cross.

A Paul Pope solo exhibit will be at the Diesel Denim Gallery, 68 Greene Street, (Btwn Spring and Broome), New York, NY 10012, (212) 966-5593, through October 30. I got into the city recently but couldn't make it to the gallery before they closed, but I've got a little over a month to try again.

And read Heavy Liquid if you haven't already. Great stuff. I'm not kidding, and if you've read it already read it again, or stare at the pictures for awhile.

Lots of nice artwork at his web site to check out.

And if you go to amazon.com to search for Paul Pope books, use the titles, or else you'll have pages of books by/about Pope John Paul II.

It's nice when there's evidence that someone read your blog. I mean, besides your wife or the guy who sits next to you at work, who should be minding his own damn business. It's not his company, what the hell does he care what I'm doing on their time.

Indigo Clothing featured my recent charity t-shirt post. Hooray for me. Does anyone really want to read this self-gloating post? (Is there really any other kind of gloating?) Probably not, but how often do we get to express glee? (Actually fairly often, life's pretty good these days.)

Anyhow I found a subscriber as well. That's even more surprising. So thanks to those of you, and to those that read, I'll try to refrain from this type of post in the future.

I really just wanted to say that Threadless seems to be done with the Katrina shirts, you can request a reprint, but I don't know how soon that will happen, so in the meantime you may want to buy one of the others.

If you haven't read Brian Wood before, read Channel Zero.

Then check out Demo (the Becky Cloonan art is gorgeous) the new stuff like DMZ looks interesting too. I also enjoyed Couriers and Cous Cous Express.

My second in a series of lazy posts not formatted because the text was pulled directly from my e-mail. Was this necessary? Maybe not, but people like to make clicky-clicky, without messy pasting of URLs in the northern region of browser windows.

...but its a start.

I've spotted 3 different online stores with special T-Shirts created for benefitting victims of Hurricane Katrina. Let's hope the same people don't need additional help after Hurricane Rita hits land.

I wonder if/when Pat O'Brien's re-opens in New Orleans, will they still serve Hurricanes?

Without further adieu, I present the shirts:

1.) Threadless - Regrowth: Katrina. Request a reprint if you want one. Threadless will contribute $20 to the Red Cross, for each $10 t-shirt.

2.) RopeADope - Renew Orleans. All Profits will go directly to the Preservation Hall Hurricane Relief Fund. Cost: $20 or $30 depending on which style.

3.) Mule Design (The Feed Store) - Please Help New Orleans. All profits from this shirt will be donated to the Red Cross. $25.

Who doesn't? My copy of We Love Katamari should arrive any day now, then I can go back to getting my fill of rolling over things with my stickyball. Me and Jake have prepared by taking his mom's Yoga balls and rolling them all over the house. Perhaps we could develop a live action Katamari Damacy, like those folks that play Pac-Man through the streets of Manhattan.

Desolation Jones is a English private detective with L.A. privileges and nothing else (the opposite of Butch by the end of Pulp Fiction). He's got to find this colonel his Hitler porn. Yes, Hitler porn. Oh...because it's missing, duh.

Related links:

Warren Ellis interview

Desolation Jones review

Desolation Jones: author's commentary

Other recommended Warren Ellis titles:

Transmetropolitan, Orbiter, Global Frequency (apparently there's a trailer for a tv show out there, but I believe the plug was already pulled on the project.)

Haven't read Fell yet, but it's at home waiting, as is Desolation Jones #3, which won't be waiting much longer.

This item was originally published on Sept. 7, 2005, but I felt like making real links oout of it, so it's got a new date, as if you care.

Moongirl looks promising. Can't wait to see more. That doesn't look right. Can't wait to see more! But that looks to eager. Suffice to say, this post is here so I remember to return in a month or two. Further inspection shows that Phil Knight (yeah him) is behind this venture. So they probably don't need me attracting attention, they should have some funds lying around. I wonder if they use sweatshop labor in the animation studio.

I revisited this site that I linked to a while back, mainly because I found a piece of scrap paper where I scribbled down a few facts for submission. I must admit that the site seemed a lot less funny than it once did. Perhaps the additional traffic watered down the quality of submissions. Not to say mine are the best, in fact I thought some were much funnier when I first wrote them then I do today. I'll list them here for the crickets to read.

Vin Diesel speaks fluid dolphin.

Vin Diesel likes that Kelly Clarkson song and is not ashamed to admit it.

Vin Diesel shot 50 Cent all nine times.

Vin Diesel is the reason Stephen Hawking is in that damn wheelchair. Why he talks that way is anybody's guess.

Vin Diesel thinks the president should take yet another vacation.

Vin Diesel fantasizes about sitting in a cubicle making PowerPoint slides all day.

There's never been a Hurricane Vin, and you know who is pretty fucking pissed about it.

Vin Diesel thanks you for your patronage.

Vin Diesel thinks your wasting your time.

What Vin Diesel really wants to do is direct.

After posting the Cheney incident, I thought to myself, "What happened next?". Now I know.Thanks, Dr. Marble. More. And another.

I wonder if he had to get a hall pass. Crooks and Liars is my favorite-est blog ever for right now. And that's a long time in ADD-riddled America, and I'm not talking about the kids.

This clip of Dick Cheney is a lot of fun. Please don't tell me he doesn't deserve it. Perhaps Patrick Leahy was the man off-camera. And a nice job by the CNN reporter asking, "Are you getting a lot of that Mr. Vice President?"