I drew this thing for my lady friend Allie for her birthday (which was today). Supposedly she likes it, but we’ll see how long it is before it’s being used to prop up an uneven couch or something of the like. It’s kind of hard to see, but all those little, uh, creatures, are pretty cute. It may also be interest to none that after about nine months of updates this is the 100th post on this blog. If I was a woman and impregnated on the day I started writing here, the baby would be due any time. I’d probably name it (the baby) Sprinkles, regardless of it’s gender.

In writing this blog I’ve made a lot of suggestions of things to read, watch and sometimes listen to. I’ve said things were good, great, and sometimes even fantastic. I’ve told you I thought some things were worth your time, or that you might enjoy them if you have a passing second. I’m about to make a little more than just a suggestion.

Some of you may remember back in 2000 John McCain was making a run at the White House. David Foster Wallace, one of my favorite writers (and certainly the one I envy the most for the pure amount of skill he has oozing out of every orifice of his person), was commissioned by Rolling Stone to write a piece on the man during the primary campaigning. Wallace turned in a massive document (massive, at least, in comparison to most magazine articles) which was butchered down and a small piece published in said magazine. Later on the full essay was released in Consider the Lobster going by the name Up, Simba. Now a few of you diligent readers may remember me mentioning way back how much I enjoyed the abridged audiobook version of Lobster, although that version did not contain Up, Simba.

Anyway, this essay is beyond good and should be read by anyone with even a passive interest in American politics, and especially by anyone without even a passive interest in American politics. Not only is it bruisingly clever and funny (like everything Wallace writes), and not only does it give you a great behind-the-scenes look at the way a campaign is run, it also paints a brilliant picture of the pitfalls of American politics and the current generation in general. The essay doesn’t have any answers, but it asks some fascinating questions.

In a whirlwind of marketing sleaziness the essay has been republished in its own volume called McCain’s Promise, an obvious ploy to profit from the current election. I don’t understand why you would buy that, though, when Consider the Lobster is like a dollar more and has oodles of great, additional, content. There is money to be made off the ignorant, I ’spose.

I’m not suggesting you read this essay. I’m not saying you might like it or that if you get the chance you should check it out. It’s more than an urge, even. I’m practically demanding that you read this essay. If you know me personally I’ll let you borrow the book. If I don’t know you or live near you, quit being a cheap bastard and buy a used copy of Consider the Lobster for a measly five bucks already.

Afterthought: In case you’re worried about the essay being too pro or too anti McCain, don’t. It’s written neutrally. Some of it seems pro, some of it seems anti, but it’s all honest. And like I said, it’s about a lot more than McCain.

While at said zoo this one skunk looking thing called a "Vernay’s Ratel" kept running back and forth in its cage, almost like it was showing off or working out or something. We watched it for quite some time for some reason, I guess it was somewhat hypnotic. I took a video. Watching it is a kind of torture.

I think a few of you noticed, but my page was kind of goofy for about a day there. I guess I screwed something up pretty good. Thanks, Derrick, for coming along and fixing things like you always do. Anyways, here are some pictures from the convention for your viewing pleasure, or disgust, pick one. I’ve got a few of the city, some from the San Diego Zoo, a couple from Tim and Eric’s Awesomecon, and one of what my hair looks like in the morning. You can look through them here or virtually thumb through them over on my Flickr page. You get some more information on that page, and you can comment on individual pictures if you like, but there is an extra click involved. So I understand if you don’t want anything to do with that.

SUNDAY

The last day of the con. I made the last of my purchases today (rest assured the amount of comics bought over the weekend was far more than excessive), then headed to the world premiere of Sockbaby 4 with Doug TenNapel, Jon and Dan Heder, and Doug Jones (Pan’s Labyrinth). It was goofy and silly – certainly the best of the Sockbabies so far. After that the convention was basically over, so we took the bus to the beach. It was too chilly to swim, but we figured we should at least go to the beach, since we’re in California and all. From that experience my feelings of how crappy the Houston area beaches are were reaffirmed. Tomorrow we head back home, it was a fun trip while it lasted. Keep your eye out for my “Who I Met” post, along with a photo post and follow ups about if the comics I bought were any good or not. Sound exciting? No? Yeah, I understand.

MONDAY

I’m sitting in the airport terminal waiting for my flight. Good trip, all things considered. The fun stuff will be posted later.

FRIDAY

The exhibitor hall got some more attention from me today, at least until the Craig McCracken (Powerpuff Girls, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends) panel. Tom Kenny (Mr. Show) was there as a voice actor, so that was cool, and McCracken was awesome, but way to much time was wasted with the three girl Powerpuff Girl voice actors, who just made cute voices while little kids sqwaked in glee. The good outweighed the bad, but it was not the high point of the week. Luckily the Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics, Zot) panel wasn’t too long after that, and that was fantastic. McCloud is a great speaker, plus he’s funny. His presentation was more than enjoyable and the Q&A session was interesting. I talked to some more peoples today, but again, I’ll talk about that later. They’ll be a whole separate post for “people I saw.” Promise.

We had dinner in Little Italy, a magical part of San Diego where the trick is everything is pasta and it all costs about twice as much as it should. It was good though, at least better than the sandwiches I’ve been eating back in the hotel. There are plans for tomorrow. Let’s see how they go.

SATURDAY

Went to the Bryan Hitch (artist of The Authority, The Ultimates and others) panel today, which turned out to be surprisingly entertaining. He went on and on about how great working with Warren Ellis is, which is cool because he seems to be made out to be a big jerk most of the time. The Fables/Bill Willingham panel was awesome too, it made me wish I had read more of Fables so I’d have some up to date questions to ask. Like every day I met and talked to lots of cool people, but the highlight was probably the Doug TenNapel (Earthworm Jim, The Neverhood, Iron West) get together on the seawall tonight. We talked about everything from comics to movies to religion to jerks in the industry. Nice guy, I’m looking forward to the Sock Baby 4 premiere tomorrow. More to come!

So here’s a day by day break down of what I did in San Diego for the first two days. The goal was for me to post these daily from my hotel room but internet is ten bucks a night, so yeah. Forget that. You’ll just have to live with bulk posts. More later!

WEDNESDAY

I woke up early today. Five am early. Plus the time change added an extra two hours to the day, so it was a long one. A long one that can best be described with one word; walking. We checked into the hotel after landing and decided to go get some food then head to the zoo. We walked to a foodery then to the closest bus stop before we realized that only a few of us had exact change, so the bus was, unfortunately, not an option. We decided to walk, thinking it wasn’t that far. Turns out it was pretty far. Or at least, it felt like it was pretty far. San Diego isn’t the most hilly city in the country or anything, but it’s not short on the inclines, especially compared to the completely flat Houston area landscape I’m used to. The Zoo was awesome and lots of fun, and also very huge. We saw a good part of it but after a while our feet and our legs were begging us to leave so we did. Wednesday is preview night, so after getting back to the hotel we head downstairs to the convention center to at least pick up our entrance badges. I knew the line would be long but wow. It wrapped all the way around the gigantic convention center, weaving back and forth on the convention center lawn, then down some street. Just walking to the end of the line had to be half a mile or so. The line, however, was briskly moving so we essentially walked to the end of the line then walked with the line to get our badges. The shocking momentum of the line was explained to me when I walked into the room where badges were being given out – there were a lot of people giving out badges. Rows and rows and rows of people on computers yelling for the next in line.

Anyways, preview night was open for just a few hours, so I walked the exhibitor hall, which is staggeringly huge. Every time I’m in there I’m lost. It’s by far the biggest single room I’ve ever stepped foot in. Each exhibitor pays a price for a space in the hall, some have smaller tables, some very large booths. It’s anyone from independent artists to Warner Brothers, DC Comics, and the Sci-Fi channel. Booths are flashy and big and often have people dressed up around them to attract viewers. There are thousands of these booths. The number is in the fifty-three hundreds, to get a little more specific. I met some artists and writers, some really nice, some obviously annoyed with the fact that they’re surrounded by nerds. I’ll go into the specifics of who I met a little later.

THURSDAY

First thing in the morning I traversed the exhibitor hall again, bought some comics and things, and met some more people and got them to write their names in a book and draw me little pictures. Again, I’ll go into more of that later. Before noon we went to Will Wright’s panel for Spore, which was absolutely fantastic. He’s a smart, funny, entertaining speaker and I don’t think there’s a person who was in that room (there were tons of people in that room) who isn’t going to buy that game now. I had watched panels online with him before and enjoyed them quite a bit, so I was thrilled that I was able to see one live. There was then some food eating and more exhibitor hall traversing. More people met, more pictures and names written in my book, &c, &c.

We went to dinner at some place in the Gas Lamp Quarter and it got me thinking. Going around San Diego, It’s crazy to see how much of an event this thing is for the whole city. There’s signs everywhere, people are talking about it on the radio, locals are bitching in the grocery store about how they always hate Comic-Con time because down town gets so crazy, people are dressed up goofy parading around in the streets, rickshaws are carrying around nerds to here and there… it’s really quite something. I’ve been to a few, pretty large conventions in Houston, but nothing like this. The outside world is oblivious to what happens in the convention centers of my Texas hometown, but Comic-Con is so big it can’t help but spill over to the general populous with its influence, good or bad.

After dinner we headed back to the convention for a late night “Kung Fu Extravaganza.” Some Kung Fu doctor/expert guy was there showing clips from old goofy ass kung fu movies he deemed were awesome. They were pretty entertaining, and for some reason the creators of Kung Fu Panda were there (who were actually pretty cool, but I’m still going to skip out on that one thank you very much), although after an hour and a half of that coupled with two days of walking around I decided to call it a night.

My presence on the internet has been pretty minimal lately. There are a few reasons why, the main one being school. I took a mini semester (essentially a semester’s worth of work crammed into a five week class) of history that took up a lot of time. My days consisted of waking up early for class and having just having enough time before work to eat something. After eight hours at the book store and getting home at about 11 pm I would try and will myself into reading a massive chunk of my history textbook for the quiz the next morning before I eventually just fall asleep. On my days off I’d feel guilty if I wasn’t working on something for school. Even with this schedule my summer has been one of the more active summers I’ve lived through, maybe sometime I’ll talk more about that, although I doubt that would be terribly interesting for most.

Which brings up what I’m about to be doing in a few days, which is flying out to San Diego for Comic-Con. It looks like I’m going to have a pretty full four days while I’m up there, and you’ll be hearing about them for sure, most likely straight from the convention. There are a ridiculous number of special guests this year, hopefully I’ll see a few good ones.

Here’s a cool Kid Koala video to hold you over!

I watched this documentary the other day called King Corn. I went into it, honestly, thinking that (for some reason) it was about ethanol. I must have read the description for the wrong movie or something, because this was most definitely not about ethanol.

The whole Idea of King Corn is these two guys decide to raise an acre of corn and try to follow it through the system to see where it all ends up. The first part of the movie is basically them raising the corn, and interesting information is kind of sparse during this part. There is some to be found though, namely when the movie discusses how the corn is genetically modified to be immune to certain types of pesticides so the whole field can be sprayed with poison and the corn still live, and how those modifications make the corn inedible without first processing the hell out if it.

The movie really takes off when they start exploring where the corn goes after it’s raised - much of it going towards making high fructose corn syrup, a processed, cheap sweetner that is both disgustingly unhealthy and also in almost everything we eat. The movie finishes up by sticking its finger into politics and talking about why corn is produced like this in America. The stance of the film in this respect stays pretty neutral, and is even borderline apologetic. I guess they figured trying to talk you into thinking that the role the government has been playing in corn production for the last thirty years is a bad one would be a waste of time, since the whole movie does a pretty good job of showing you it’s a bad idea.

All in all it was a pretty interesting movie. It started a bit slow, and at points seemed like it beat around the bush a little too much, but I’d still definitely recommend it, at least until I find a better book or movie on the subject that delves a bit deeper into the issues. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

A video remix of the Radiohead song played by old electronic equipment. Xiu Xiu on the n-philes forums brought it to my attention.