This flag is not backwards.

You may have seen in the media, or even real life soldiers that wear the American Flag backwards. I have noticed that some big rigs, buses, planes, and others putting on backwards flag decals.

Until it was explained to me, I thought this was wrong. The Flag Code says the Stars should always be to the observer's left. Here is why it is right. Back in the day when armies would rush headlong into each other, the flag would be at the center. Troops on the left flank would see the flag and the stars would be on the left. Those on the right flank would see that the stars were on the right.

That is why the flag patch is backwards on the right shoulder. So that the stars look like the are flying forward into battle.

Ravy 2011 Pg. 22.

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If you can at least guess the decade that reference comes from I'll give you 5 bonus No Points.

Sleep Walk With Me Live: By Mike Birbiglia.

A new Hastings opened up in town. It is only about ten miles away. The other closest one was about twenty. I love Hastings. Great place to go if you want to find something used, mostly. Each store has a random selection of used stuff. So every few months I'll do a Hasting run. All four, now five, in the area. This new one was worth the stop. Had the newest movies that I wanted. The latest books and magazines that I read and never buy. And to my surprise: Sleep Walk With Me Live.

Surprising because lately comedians have been releasing their albums on I Tunes and Amazon. Not really having them put out in any brick and mortar store. The costs are just too high and online is much cheaper.

Fortunately for Mike Birbiglia Comedy Central did put this album out because I bought it. It's always with trepidation I do that. Larry the Cable Guy and Frank Caliendo are funny to no end for the most part. Even they can put out a turd fest. Mike's album Two Drink Mike was one of those. His other album Secret Public Journal Live was really good.

There were two parts that derailed. I'm a Bear, ECT. Several other comedians had already done eaten by a bear joke. Even though no one was eaten It still wasn't all that good. Then there's Mike's Famouse story about jumping out the hotel window in track three, then rabbit trailed for an hour until finally telling it in the final track.

Overall the album was good and was worth the money. I had heard most of these bits on Bob and Tom, but Mike was able to punch them up and make them even funnier. He would pay off setups quickly enough so that the audience hadn't forgotten. Call backs that were timely enough to be funny. Most importantly told a very good and poignant story. With a few laughs thrown in for good measure.

Oh My Goddess 17 and 37.

Let's start with number 37. Because I want to end on a good note. (not intended) Clumsy Goddess Chrono is sent on mission to deliver a song to Belldandy. You guessed it, she screws it up. So everybody finds themselves chasing notes and singing their way through six chapters of near boredom. Oh My Goddess is my favorite manga, but I'm not one of those people that think with a zealotry that my heroes do no wrong.

Let's give credit: When have we seen a clumsy goddess in this series? You can't count Skuld, she just has bad luck because she doesn't realize that mechanical parts are made to work a certain way. You make them work they way they weren't designed to, so of course they blow up. Chrono on the other hand... Amazing how Fujishima can still come up with stuff we haven't seen in a 22 year old series.

After volume 16 which put me to sleep, Vol 17 was a nice change of pace. It continues where 16 left off, but goes into high gear. I was finally able to fill in the gaps that I had from Vol 21. Then we got to a Banpei story. Not again. I never liked Banpei stories. I find them boring, and even sick and twisted in one case. This time was different. It started off stupidly as they always do, then comes Sigel. She saves this rest of this issue. Guess what this series needed, another weird female. For the most part I thought it was good story of personal growth.

Why couldn't Sigel had thought the missile launchers were in her legs or feet?

Ravy 2011 Pg. 21.

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Angry Tonies.

10...9...8...7...6...

Fast Five.

Hiding out in Rio (seems to be a theme this year) our bad guy anti-heroic heroes find themselves in desperate need of cash. Taking what was supposed to be a simple job stealing some cars leads Dominic and Brian into over two hours of nonstop betrayal, shoot-em-ups, surprises, best laid plans laid to waste, the biggest score of their lives, and chased by local cops, DEA, The Rock, and Rio's crime lord.

I was a little confused at what was going on. Part of it was that I had only seen the first Five movie many years ago. So I didn't get the references to the previous movies. The the car stealing on the train also had me very confused. Dominic, Brian, and Mia thought they were stealing the cars from some playboy millionaire, but they were in possession of the DEA, for whatever reason Mia takes off with a car and Brian and Dominic are betrayed by the guys hired to help them because they are being paid by Reyes. The DEA agents are killed by Reyes's goons and The Rock thinks it was Dominic and Brian.

I think I got it.

….

…..

…..

No, I'm still a bit lost.

Any-hoo. This movie did tend to drag on because a lot of concentration was put on coming up with plans of attack just to see them thrown out. From stealing the cars, to collating the money, to winning fast cars that weren't fast enough, to stealing cop cars, just to have The Rock bust in at the last second and then Reyes makes a mistake of attacking The Rock as he was leaving with Reyes's headaches.

If they had just cut the obstacle course bit and went straight to stealing the cop cars, this would probably have been worth watching at full price.

Instead matinee.

Sure was nice to see The Rock in a movie that didn't tank after five fast minutes.

It's all my fault.

I admit it. I'm the one responsible. ME! ME! ME!

Recently Blogger went down. I had something to do with it. I guess it's my tendency to write these posts two and three weeks in advance that screws with Google's servers.

Totally me and no one else. Am I going to learn a lesson from all this? OF COURSE NOT! I'm going to see if I can do it again.

Ravy 2011 Pg. 20.

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My Mom also said to always have a clean pair of underwear. And I do. Usually in the glove box.

IPad in my hands.

Local Best Buy had some IPads on display. Tried it out for the first time. Took me awhile to figure things out. Like Angry Birds wasn't on it. The icon was there but it wouldn't start up. Being a desktop guy I'm used to scrolling down or grabbing the slider on the side of a page and pulling it down to make the page go up. Instead you have to slide you finger up to make a page go up. Zooming was difficult for me. Using my thumb and index finger and twisting my hand to do so was very uncomfortable. Using my index and middle fingers seemed to work best. While doing zooms there's a tendency to click a link. So maybe zoom buttons would be helpful.

Aside from that. I was impressed. I went to nascar.com to test it out. I was thinking of getting this for my dad. Everything came up just fine. I could read and zoom in on stuff okay. Double-tapping became second nature after only a few seconds. (I realize the double meaning of that phrase.) Turning the IPad from portrait to landscape automatically adjusted the contents to fit just right. I found for me keeping it in portrait mode is the easiest to handle.

I find that if all I'm ever going to do is surf the web, watch YouTube, go to Facebook, and play Angry Birds this is a great little device. However I'm not spending $500 for 16 GB. Be nice if there was a SD Card slot. I understand that Apple doesn't want people sticking hacking programs on a card and playing NES roms, but hey, if Nintendo can lock out the DS OS...

Ultimately my dad won't use it. He's not into all the peripheral stuff Nascar does. He just wants to watch the race and some of the interviews and hope that Junior will finally win one.

Sucker Punched.

Having watched this movie, I then read the reviews. They all got it wrong. The first one, well, I don't know what it said. It droned on and on. It was like watching a politician answering a yes or no question. The second review hated Sucker Punch because the girls were wearing lingerie. The third hated Sucker Punch because it was about an insane asylum being run as a brothel. Close, but not quite there. He mentioned at being confused at the action sequences.

That's where things were screwed up. The action scenes while masterfully choreographed and beautifully animated. Some of the best and most realistic animation since Star Trek 11. Also very clever in the use of them to cover up the real action. Quite frankly they dragged this movie down. They were too long and too many. Predictable and therefore boring. So boring that during the train sequence I went to the bathroom and when I came back I felt as if I hadn't missed anything. I pretty much knew that something was going to go wrong, it had to. The others went off without a hitch.

The part that bothered me the most, and I know coming form me this will sound weird, was the constant references to anime, TV, and movies. If you don't watch any of these you will be confused. If you have watched entirely too much anime, TV, and movies, you will spend time trying to pick out the references, and being very confused as to why Sailor Moon, Saber Riders, Evangelion, and Flyboys are duking it out in All Quite on the Western Front. Then The Hobbit versus Lord of the Rings with Black Sheep Squadron. Terminators guarding the train from Undersiege 2 inside the movie Unstoppable.

It was like The Matrix but without anybody saying don't do that. A fanfic really. Or even a web comic that collates a bunch disparate characters and sticks them together in situations that make absolutely no sense. (cough)

It was a case of misplaced priorities. What should have been concentrated on was the asylum/brothel.

The story of a girl framed for the murder of her little sister by her evil step-dad. Dumped off at an insane asylum to cover the crime. The conditions there were so wretched she in her mind conjures up a brothel fantasy to cover the horrors. Then sacrifices herself so that a friend could be free. THAT'S the story that should have have been told. That is what had me interested. Reminding us that at one time mental hospitals were once this bad. We must be on our toes to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

Admittedly Sucker Punch Out still would have bombed. But at least it would have been worth watching in the dollar theater. Wait for it on cable.

Ravy 2011 Pg. 19.

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The major headache with doing comics so far in advance is that if I decide to do one about a current event, nobody will remember the event, especially if it is an obscure one, therefore making the joke even more useless than it already was.

Especially if the number one hit song from a year ago is no longer being played on your local hits station.

Update: That song has been played at least a dozen times now.

Almost a "National Stupid Day" moment.

I wanted a certain set of comics to come up precisely on that oh-so important day in February. To make it easy on myself I started putting the date I wanted the comic posted on in the file name. This helped out tremendously. Especially this week.

You see I originally made these comics right after the second round of Op and Toni in the park. This means they would have been posted during the week of April 15th. That date seemed familiar to me. I looked it up and went "Uh-oh."

What made it worse is that the was there was one that had Trauare making a snide comment about a Megaman clone form the early 90's. I wound up cutting that one entirely. Though I may use it as end of year filler.

Release the photos as JPEGs, please.

Mr. President, I will admit to my hypocrisy on this issue. I will never look at the photos. Not my thing. However a majority of Americans and even a majority of the Muslim world want to see these photos. And from what I'm hearing, in the Muslim faith, such photos do harm to the character of that person. Now Bin Laden was not well like in the Muslim community to begin with. Releasing these photos will do no real harm and will serve to prevent him from becoming a martyr.

If these photos are released, please put them out as JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, or whatever graphic file you seem fit. Please don't use PDF. Remember the even greater stupidity that erupted over the release of the birth certificate? As if the flat birthers weren't bad enough. Now we are getting flat deathers. And I am so sick of Donald Trump death certificate jokes.

Uncle Ralph got his wish.

Years ago my uncle told me that when it comes to the judgment of one's soul, only God can do that. Even for Osama Bin Laden.

And that a sniper should expedite the process

Great News!

With the great news that has happened, I have decided to dig up this old joke.

BIN LADEN IS DEAD!

(For most people that would be enough. However:)

Bin Laden finds himself in a very bright cloud like area. Suddenly he is confronted by George Washington. Who then proceeds to give Bin Laden a boot to the head. Next is Thomas Jefferson, who also gives Bin Laden a boot to the head. Behind him we find: Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, Henry Clay, Ella Fitzgerald, William H. Harrison, Patrick Henry, Sam Houston, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Meriwether Lewis, James Madison, Dolley Madison, John Marshall, Cyrus Hall McCormick, James Monroe, Elizabeth Monroe, Powhatan, Pocahontas, Walter Reed, George C. Scott, Winfield Scott, John Smith, James Jeb Stuart, Thomas Sumter, Zachary Taylor, John Tyler, Julia Tyler, Letitia Tyler, Nat Turner, John Tyler, Booker T. Washington, Woodrow Wilson, Edith Wilson, and many many more.

In the midst of this bedlam, Bin Laden calls out:

“Allah! Allah! What is this?”

“It is your eternal reward for the life you have led.”

“This! OWWW! (Stop that!) OWWWW!”

“Yes. 72 Virginians!”

Ravy 2011 Pg. 18.

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I spent a couple of hours making a new background. Then moronically deleted it and emptied the Recycle Bin. I still have the part that appears in the panel, but not the rest of it. The parts I need to do a camera shift left or right.

I can either spend the time remaking the whole she-bang and having look a bit off kilter from the one before. Or I can just do what I always do: fake it.

Of course that background doesn't appear at all this week, or next, or for several more months. Making this post's jabbering rather silly. Or what I euphemistically call "normal."

(I almost put in that Ricky Martin video. Then a rare fit of sanity hit me.)