Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

I’m just doing a quick PSA here to remind you to visit your local comic book store this Saturday to pick up some free comics.

Free Comic Book Day is an annual nationwide event sponsored by  industry representatives in publishing and distributing comics. If you haven’t been in a comic book specialty shop in a while (or *gasp* NEVER!), this is the day to go.

If you’re thinking to yourself that comics are just for kids and for those socially inept guys who live in their moms’ basements, well, you’re partially right. Comics are for them. But there’s a good chance that you’ll like some of them, too. Aside from the forever-ongoing Marvel and DC comics like Spiderman, X-Men, Batman, and Superman, there are a lot of literary and entertaining gems in the comic world.

The FCBD site has some basic information for those new to comics, but if you’re a “mature reader,” i.e you don’t mind the F-bomb or mature themes like sex and violence, I would recommend that you start out with the following Vertigo-imprint series that are now available in (multi-volume) book form: Fables, The Sandman, and Y: The Last Man. Fables is the only one that still has new issues coming out.

Want to start with something a little more tame but still really good? Try the complete collection of Bone comics. I would personally steer you away from ye olde Archie comics, though new ones are still being released on a regular basis.

If you have the opportunity to start some kids out on comics, or even just reading in general, there are lots of kid-friendly options including Pixar movie spin-offs and The Simpsons. I recently nabbed the first issue of The Muppet Show at Dragon’s Keep in Provo. It’s nothing spectacularly literary, but it’s fun and I’m a sucker for anything Muppet-related (even if I end up panning it).

So get thee to a local (participating) comic book store on Saturday and get thine free comics!

I wasn’t able to watch the new Muppets Christmas special, Letters to Santa, when it aired last week. Thank the Muppety Gods for hulu.com, which has the streaming video available with limited commericals until the end of the year.

Unfortunately, the special wasn’t as good as I’d hoped. It was more painfully contrived than any other Muppet special I’ve seen and in that way it felt a lot more Disney than Muppet. Still, there were a few cool things in the 44-minute special.

[SPOILERS AHEAD] Read more…

I was so excited about being NaBloPoMo’s Blog of the Week that I managed to skip a day of blog posting yesterday. Whoops.

But the house finally has some lights up in electric holiday fashion, and the tree is also up in the living room. Ben wants to add some more lights before we put on the ornaments… but it’s very pretty even without ornaments, as it turns out. Usually we start decorating the tree as soon as it’s up so we rarely leave it partially naked like it is now.

Yesterday we took in our friends’ three girls so that their parents could get some Christmas shopping and wrapping done without them around. We probably fed them too much sugar, but we had a lot of fun playing the Wii and watching one of my favorite Christmas specials that they’d never seen: A Muppet Family Christmas.

The only copy I have is a VHS tape that I bought in college because my taped-from-TV version had worn out… but unfortunately the “flashback” scene of the Muppet Babies singing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” is edited out because of licensing issues. Bummer. And now that Disney owns the Muppets, the chances of seeing them on DVD together with the Fraggles (still owned by Jim Henson Company) and the Sesame Street Muppets (now owned by the Sesame Workshop) are pretty slim.

The girls have grown up watching the Fraggles on tape and, more recently, DVD, so they were really pumped about seeing some new Fraggle material. (Um, unless the fact that it was actually made 21 years ago disqualifies it as new.)

They were extremely disappointed that there wasn’t more Fraggle interaction and that they weren’t discovered by any Muppets except Kermit and Robin. They also thought that the Christmas Carol medley at the end went on a little too long. But they loved the rest of it, and the oldest (who is 13) recognized Jim Henson’s cameo at the end. That made me happy.

What better way to celebrate the independence of our nation than with Muppets? (With illegal fireworks and homebrew, you say? Well, to each his own…)

Here’s a new clip with a Sam the Eagle who, despite sounding weird because he’s not being voiced by Frank Oz, is still a bumbling ball of blue Muppet joy with his Declaration of Independence: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect unton, establish justice, and keep the world safe from weirdos…”

And here’s an oldie but goodie: a 4th of July/Christmas Medly with Hal Linden from The Muppet Show Season 5.

I don’t really have any plans for this weekend, except for trying to pry Ben away from working on the house for long enough to barbeque some large slabs of meat and fresh pineapple. Have you ever tried grilling fresh pineapple slices? Seriously, even if you’re the most serious meat-eater, there is something delicious about sweet, juicy pineapple with grill marks on it and the heady flavor of charcoal. It probably wouldn’t taste the same on a gas grill, but I’ve not tried that so I don’t know.

Now if I could build myself a Sam the Eagle muppet, he might not have the same opinion about grilled pineapple. He might be inclined to say that it’s un-American (in what would definitely NOT sound like Frank Oz’s Sam the Eagle voice) because it doesn’t sound like traditional American fare.

But pineapples are from Hawaii, right? Which became the 50th state in 1959. So pineapples are, therefore, QUITE American.

In conclusion: Grilled Fresh Pineapple = Magically Delicious, and possibly Patriotic.

Have you ever poked around on Craigslist? You can buy, sell, or solicit anything. So it’s not surprising that my college friend Steev found a want ad for a Chinese Baseball Announcer. Or that he responded.

What surprised me is how long it took the interviewer to hang up on Steev during their (videotaped*) phone interview.

This is the same guy who used to torture telemarketers when they called by speaking gibberish (or saying "poopie") to them for as long as he has free time. The nature of their job made it h difficult for them to hang up on him, and he got the biggest kick out of that. Maybe he’s stopped by now?

Nowadays, if you’re in the Chicago area, you should go to see his live Saturday night game show called "Don’t Spit the Water" or one of his other Blewt! productions.  Puppets by Noah Ginex, whom I revere as an even greater fan of The Muppets.

*Is is still okay to say videotaped if the thing was recorded on a DVD or hard drive camcorder? What else can I call it? 

The Muppet Newsflash: Fraggle Rock Season Three on DVD!

I like the simple look of that blog. I need to reformat my blog at some point. Also, I need to fix the forum. Still. I know, I suck. I remind myself that every time I think about the lameness of having anything out-of-date on my site. Hopefully next month, when a “real” web person goes full-time at my place of employment, I’ll be motivated to look at some code and fix up the site a bit. Right now I can’t do anything at work, and coming home the last thing I want to do is go to my computer. I must be sick, right?

My first priority is to fix the hellish, spam-infested forum.

smp and Stardust are awesome people, for what it’s worth.