Bob Sassone

What's wrong with this picture?

Forget the lameness of the entire strip, take a look at that first panel. What the hell? It's like one of those puzzles where they show you a scene and you have to find out what's wrong with it. Some things are just odd, while others are completely baffling and scary (the doll! the DOLL!). What can you find?

[via The Comics Curmudgeon]

The Internet, Circa 1967

I think I might have mentioned this before, but now here's the video embedded for your pleasure. It shows a plan for a primitive form of the net that really isn't too far from what happened, though thankfully our homes don't have to look like Mission Control to get online. Bonus feature: Wink Martindale!

[via Marty Beckerman]

It's Love Boat ... Only On A Fast Train

In one of those weird web coincidences, I was going to post this clip and then discovered that Ken Levine posted it recently too. I also just watched the preview of the new FOX show Human Target and it features a train that looks a lot like this, but I'm sure this train isn't in service anymore. People of a certain age might remember this show. What a cast! Steve Lawrence! Don Meredith! Char Fontaine! (?) It looks like The Love Boat, only on a train, and I'm sure that's exactly how it was pitched to the networks. The theme song is CHiPs mixed with Charlie's Angels.

I remember being really excited about this show for some reason, but I guess that happens when you're 13 years old. Donald Westlake was one of the creators.

Coffee Overachiever

Note to shoppers at a certain convenience store in northeastern Massachusetts: I tried to save you.

The warm weather has arrived, which means I have gone from hot tea mode to cold summer drink mode. I'm not a big coffee drinker (I like it but it doesn't like my stomach), but I find myself drinking a lot of a bottles of a certain brand of coffee-flavored drink. I think I keep my local stores in business during the warmer months by drinking so much of it during the day as I write, often walking to the convenience store down the street and walking home with 4 or 5 bottles in my hand. Last Sunday I stopped at another store before I went to the supermarket and got a bunch of large bottles. I was going to buy a small bottle too but noticed (again) that the expiration date was in early April. I took the large bottles up to the counter to pay for them and figured I'd let the clerk know about the old coffee drink bottles.

"I noticed that the small bottles of this drink are all out of date, about a month or so."

"Yes, I remember you telling me before."

"Oh. (Pause) I just wanted to let you know before anyone gets sick or whatever." (Laugh)

"The vendor has to take them out. I'll let him know about it."

"Does he work on Sundays?"

"No, but I'll let him know about it."

At this point, I wanted to ask her what would happen if they got a recall notice for a drink or some food. Would they then wait until the vendor came in and took them off the shelves? "Yes, I know there are people dying from eating contaminated potato chips, but I can't take them off the shelves because I'm not an official potato chip distributor!" Still not sure why it's so hard to take 7 or 8 bottles of a coffee drink and just put them in the back room. I'm sure there's a very detailed, logical explanation for it all and this person just didn't want to get into the nitty gritty retail details. (Of course, I'm kidding - there's absolutely no explanation that would make any sense.)

I'm going there tomorrow morning. Can't wait to see what the status is. Maybe I'll Twitter it.

In other food news, General Mills is in trouble for the claims on boxes of Cheerios that the cereal can help reduce your cholesterol. Now, I've never once bought Cheerios because it might reduce my cholesterol (though I guess that's a great side benefit), so I'm not sure why this is causing such a stir. If doctors were suddenly skipping the Lipitor and instead writing prescriptions for Cheerios I would be concerned, but I would hope that consumers don't look at it as medicine. Having said that, I was at the store the other day and saw these two boxes of Cheerios side by side on the shelf (sorry for the lame picture quality):

 

I was never very good at math in school, but can both of those claims be accurate?

Anyway, did TV Talk the other night. Podcast is here. It's been a very busy, hectic week with a new work schedule and a leaky ceiling to deal with, so I've earned the junk food I'm going to eat tonight. Have a great weekend.

75 + 25 = 95

I posted this over at TV Squad and thought I'd post it here too. From 1993:

Water, Water, Everywhere

So...yesterday my apartment almost burned to the ground. And how are you doing?

It's a weird thing to be nudged out of a sound sleep by the sound of dripping water. Your immediate thoughts are "wait, this is not an area of my home where water should be heard dripping" and "am I urinating?" At first I wasn't sure I was even hearing what I was hearing, and then I sat right up, remembering that we've had various liquids dripping from the apartment of the neighbors upstairs before. Once their sink overflowed, once it was their toilet, one time it was a weird chemical like bleach that came through the ceiling, another time it was milk from a glass the son had spilled. One time - and I swear this is true - it was vanilla, leaking from the ceiling on to my washing machine. This could be a horror movie: The House That Dripped Everything. I could sell tickets to kids on Halloween. This time it was good 'ole water. but I know the layout of their place and there are no pipes or sinks or anything of that nature there, it's the middle of their living room. Where could the water possibly be coming from?

And then I thought: fish tank.

I threw on my shoes and ran upstairs and...of course, they weren't home. So I ran back downstairs and called my landlord, who also was not home. So I had to leave one of those, "hey, it's Bob, just wanted to let you know that there's a leak in the apartment and no one is home upstairs. Call me. Thanks!" messages that I'm sure every landlord loves to hear from their tenants. I went back upstairs to see if the neighbor had returned while I was on the phone, but he hadn't. I was tempted to do a Mannix and kick in the door but decided to leave a note instead.

Now I had to get buckets, it was leaking that badly. The landlord calls me back and I tell him the situation and he rushes over. We get inside the apartment upstairs and my guess my right, it was the fish tank (I guessed that even though I didn't even know they owned a fish tank). But it wasn't leaking or broken, they had just put the cover back on wrong after feeding the fish or something and the water was pouring onto the cover instead of into the back of the tank. It was also pouring nicely onto a power strip and several wires that were draped around the base of the tank on the floor. So basically we were probably 27 minutes away from a fire that would have engulfed the entire building. But it all turned out well. All that's left now is a slight odor of old wet wood. I'm assuming that's the smell and it's not actually old burning wood. In certain situations, fire and water smell the same.

I'll be on TV Talk tonight, probably talking about the Lost finale. And if I can somehow turn the conversation to leaky ceilings I'll talk about that too.

The Onion on Star Trek

Funny.

[via Wil Wheaton]