I was about to make a post bemoaning the fact that LOLCATS images are more popular than Webcomics, meaning that all the creative writing and drawing all over the web is being trumped by pictures of cats and captions in bad English, but now a couple of the sharpest writers in Webcomicdom have decided not to fight 'em, but to join 'em.
I'm talking about LOLBOTS, the instantaneously popular blog of LOL-pictures featuring robots, assembled by a team that includes one guy who really knows robots, Diesel Sweeties' R. Stephens and another who knows a few robots, Questionable Content's J. Jacques (both of whose work I have praised in my comicsblog) . 
In two days, they have assembled an impressive assortment of memes and macros starring some of the biggest mechanical stars of science fiction and some real-life robots too. Still, in the rush to pull it all together, they have omitted some obvious BOTS woth LOLing.
Where are the Bots from MST3K?
And what, no Bender?
And the robot from Lost in Space (I did a little reverse in this one, having a robot that was usually less than humanly erudite speak like an authority figure)
You DO remember Hymie the Robot in "Get Smart", don't you?
Also in MY robotic memories, the mechanical techs-turned-landscapers named after Donald Duck's nephews in the Eco-Space-Opera "Silent Running".
And this one may be a stretch, but since most real-life robots today work on assembly lines, here's that classic TV moment with a mechanized conveyor belt...
Yeah, I admit it. I LOL Lucy.
Well, here's to you, proud LOLBOTers. And if I get any more ideas, you'll be the 18th to know. (My loyal readership of 17 will be ahead of you)
It has been five days and we have not heard any follow-up on the bird poop attack on President Bush at his recent Rose Garden press conference. I find this personally alarming. Apparently, after spending untold billions on Homeland Security, our Federal Government has not only failed to protect the President, but even afterwards, has been unable to apprehend and bring to justice a small bird! Disgraceful. I'm sure if they had succeeded in capturing or killing this airborne evildoer, they would quickly discover through enhanced interrogation and reported to the American People and anyone else watching Fox News that it had held the #2 position at Al Queda in Iraq. Or something. I certainly hope that the entire White House medical staff, including the Surgeon General, Bill Frist and Dr. Laura, are monitoring the Chief Executive Decider's health very carefully. After all, it could have been a carrier of Bird Flu. Or considering it was an all-white substance, maybe Anthrax. You do realize they never found whoever sent the Anthrax letters in 2001! They also didn't catch the guy on the plane with everything-resistant TB until he had gone to Italy, then Canada, then home. He could have infected our entire supply of Italian Sausage and Canadian Bacon! The least they could do is require anyone going to a government facility, airport or WalMart to empty their birds before entering. And as for the TB, empty their lungs. Sigh. I guess the terrorists really have won. I don't feel so well.
A Main-Stream-Media writer with too much time on his hands decided he wanted to "beat" Google, so he set out to come up with as many phrases as he could that (when searched for as a phrase, i.e. within "" quotes) would get NO search results.
I don't think you can call this Gene Weingarten's totally original idea (hmmm... no prior results). Since the concept of Googlewhacking, finding a combination of two words that return ONE single result, is over five years old (35 in dog years, 50 in web years, 350 in 'on the web no one knows you're a dog' years),
Let's take a look at some of the orphan phrases he discovered, shall we? (And see how far up the search results I can place the ol' WendellBlog)
"Googlenope."
"Queen Elizabeth's buttocks."
"Varsity pinochle."
"If you take off your bra, I'm calling the cops."
"Jesus loves you for your money."
"Plush Osama doll."
"Tiffani Suarez."
"Mohammed Ciccolini."
"Moishe Goebbels." (yeah, no surprise here, you'd do just as well with Woody Goering)
"Please accept these underpants as collateral"
"Thor adjusted his mascara."
"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious-esque."
"The Iraqi Regis Philbin."
"Laura Bush's secret tattoo."
"Hot cheese sundae."
"Cancer, heart disease and zits." (caused by eating too many hot cheese sundaes?)
"Pizza with Condoleezza."
"Dogs playing poker and mah-jongg."
"The dainty Hillary Clinton."
"Man-boob implants."
"Acid klezmer band."
"The yodeling librarian."
"George W. Bush's subtlety."
I omitted several that just showed that he was mostly throwing non-sequiturs against Google's wall and seeing which ones didn't stick, but I was kind of surprised at some that got Zero Hits, like "much to Paris Hilton's embarrassment", "I owe my life to unprotected sex", "My grandchildren are so ugly", and especially "I was helped by the federal government", because, although rare, it has happened. In fact, I have been helped by the federal government (no hits for that phrasing either).
Checking out my own meme-creation skillz, I found that I was the first to ever commit to the Web the phrases "Icon Has Cheezburger", "Repent and Indign" "Hollywood Hall of Comedy" and "37 42 4F 69 86 96 A0 BC 667 789 AD0 B52 1995" (to my great relief), but wasn't nearly as lucky with "Neil before Zod" (however, I am #9 of 597; Google does like me).
But this is indeed a game anyone can play, even if you have work ethic of a Washington Post columnist (sorry, WP, no hits).
"ACLU member in the Bush White House" (shooting fish in a barrel)
"The algorithm invented the internet" (stop and think about that one for a moment)
"braiding hamsters" (which actually did come up in an internet chat conversation I had last night - good thing Google doesn't index those)
In a brief moment of thinking "oh, why not?", I decided to enter the Public Radio Talent Quest. It seemed like a good thing to attempt, even if it is rather a longshot (of over 1300 entrants, 3 will end up making a pilot show). I've acted on "oh, why not?" and played longshots before, succeeded more times than I should have and came closer than I expected most times. So, we'll see. I only learned about the competition a few hours before the deadline, but the initial entry only required a recording under 2 minutes (I had to do a little editing to make mine 1:59).
You are all cordially invited to listen to my entry and give it a rating as high as your conscience will allow. I have no idea what I would do with my own radio show at this point in my life, but I know that it would resemble my blogging, with added "ums" and "ahs", and I would try to drag a number of people I know into it with me. Maybe you. But don't let that discourage you from giving my 2-minute audition a high rating.
So, yes, you could say I've gone Public.
A rather unhappy story of our paranoid times is that of Matt Boyd, who got into a conversation in his office about a gun he wanted to buy. But he did it the day of the Virginia Tech shootings (before he had even heard the news) and one or more coworkers who had heard the news and overheard him freaked out and reported him to management. He was fired. Now, normally, that would be all, but Matt is the co-author of, not a blog, but a bloggy "personal journal" webcomic titled "Three Panel Soul", so, obviously the incident was the subject of a short series of strips. And a couple days after their weblication*, he got a visit from investigators from the State's Attorney's Office regarding what they considered a "borderline terroristic threat" (the investigators' own words... Mr. Boyd tell the whole story here).
You can judge for yourself if anything in this sorry story could be considered a 'threat' (besides what the State's Attorney's Office said to Mr. Boyd). Pretty outrageous, but at least he didn't end up in jail. Then I thought of a strange postcard I received a couple months ago. I had previously considered scanning it and putting it up here, but now it seems much more relevant. Does this look like a terrorist threat to you?
(Cross posted at FunnyPapaerless.com because I can)
* meaning being published on the web; it's a word I made up that I want to become widely used. Please spread it around.
Have you ever awakened from a dream that was not just vivid, but long and dramatic and exciting and so much fun you wanted to go back to sleep and dream more of it? And have you ever thought that your dream was so good, it could be made into a book, a movie or a TV show?
I have, on quite a few occasions, and at those times that I didn't go right back to sleep but rather attempted to write down the contents of the dream, I usually discovered one of four things:
(1) Upon further reflection, it was really dumber than the dumbest stuff that they put in movies or on TV.
(2) It involved things very personal to me that I would find totally humiliating if the world knew about them (Believe it or not, there are things too embarrassing for me to blog about).
(3) It involved things very personal to me that are of no interest to anybody else.
(4) I had awoken in the midst a storyline that, either asleep or awake, I could never find a good ending for.
I have had a few dreams like that lately. But last night, I had a dream that I am absolutely NOT ashamed to share and here it is (with a few post-waking touch-ups):
The place: a little-visited tourist attraction called the Hollywood Hall of Comedy. An attempt at a anamatronic wax museum with poorly-designed robotic re-creations of the Funniest People of All Time and one live one. She is Mabel Gable, a seventy-something former TV star similar to Carol Burnett (in the dream, she was Carol Burnett) who took on the job of tour guide for the Hall of Comedy and lives alone in the building's second floor. No one knows why she picked this life for her later years, but there is a good reason. When she's alone, some of the Comedy Robots become real, living beings and keep her company. Now, these are NOT figments of her imagination, and it isn't ALL the robots, but a few of them are inhabited by the spirits of their original sujects (and some of them will NOT stop complaining about how badly they made their faces). The owner of the place is a technologically illiterate carnival-owner type (oddly, my dream pictured him as Tony Danza), who owns several other tourist traps, and doesn't pay much attention to this one, since it maes a little money and the building's a historical landmark he can't do anything else with. But he does find one way to save money on operation. He cancels the maintenance contract with the people who made the comedy robots and found the cheapest robotics expert he could find. And that person is Annie McGalway (name is a feminization of MacGuyver, get it? Actually, this was my role in the dream; I do rarely change myself to a female in my dreams, but in this one I did). And the reason she took the job is that this nerdish semi-genius twenty-something lady is a frustrated comedian, and one of Mabel Gabel's biggest fans.
Of course, she discovers Mabel's secret. At first, the nerd in her wants to find a logical explanation; but in time, she dedicates herself to secretly upgrading the haunted robots so that the ghosts are happier with their homes. She also builds Mabel a team of robot maidservants to treat her like the star she really is. Things are going along quietly until a local ecological disaster: oil from a nearby oil field (there really are some in the Los Angeles area) has begun oozing in the neighborhood, and suddenly the fountain outside the Hall of Comedy's front door has become a tar pit. Danza the owner isn't going to pay to fix it - he doesn't own the mineral rights. Even the Historical Society that declared the place a monument come to the conclusion that the easiest way to fix things is to tear down the Hall and put in some oil wells. Only Mabel and Annie (and the ghosts in the machines) want to save the Hall, but it would require raising a lot of money. Annie's raring to go, and sets up a Press Conference for Mabel, not knowing the reason she had quit the business twenty years ago - an accident during a publicity event that most everybody thought was minor, but left Mabel with a fear of large crowds - especially crowds of the press. Terrified of meeting the media, Mabel sits in front of the tar-filled fountain in the middle of the night, then starts walking out into the black gunk. It wasn't clear whether she could have died in the tar pit, but her robot maidservants drag her out anyway.
That's when I woke up. Not too difficult to come up with more plot; maybe Annie substituting for Mabel and having a press-related accident of her own; trying to pass off the haunted robots as "specially reprogrammed" to put them to work; a pratfall with Danza in the tar pit would be almost mandatory, and maybe add a couple more Hall of Comedy employees - the place is just too quiet. But is that the (a) wildest (b) stupidest (c) most insane (d) most creative or (e) most commercially marketable dream you ever heard?
