This weekend I’ll be in Bethesda, MD for the annual Small Press Expo! I gotta say, I love SPX. It’s run by volunteers, features work by a truly amazing lineup of independent and creative artists and entrepreneurs, and last year I missed my flight home and got to spend a long, delightful day looking up weird old newspaper articles in the Library of Congress.

I’ll be in the TopatoCo Nation along the right-hand wall, joined by luminaries and friends such as Ryan North, Kate Beaton, Scott C, Anthony Clark, and many more people whose work you should also already be familiar with. Hope to see you there!

If you’re not going to be at SPX because you’re stuck in dumb ol’ Los Angeles under an extradition treaty, on Saturday the 11th check out the ShadowMachine Art Show in Hollywood! ShadowMachine is the animation company that produces the TV show Robot Chicken, among others, and this art show is all Robot Chicken artists and animators showing off their own personal work. My wife Nikki, a Robot Chicken puppet fabricator, will have several pieces in the show, including sculptures she’s made of characters from the comics Goats, Hark! A Vagrant, Diesel Sweeties and xkcd.

The pony figurine at the art show may well be the last one in the world still available for sale (they were a limited-edition run that sold out very quickly, earlier this year) so come check out the show!

If I were in Austin this weekend, I’d check out the live premiere of The Intergalactic Nemesis, which might be described as a mashup of theater, radio drama, silent film and animation. This video will give you an idea:

The stage version of The Intergalactic Nemesis projects the comic book artwork panel-by-panel while three actors perform the voices, one foley artist creates the sound effects, and one keyboardist plays the score, all live.

This looks like a really neat thing to sit in a theater and enjoy! I’m a big fan of taking the trouble to seek out unique experiences like this. I saw something similar once here in L.A.: a touring, contemporary silent film called Brand Upon the Brain!, which had been shot as a pastiche of 1920s silent films and which was shown in the theater with a live orchestra, sound-effects crew, and narrator (in my show, Daniel Handler). It was a terminally weird movie — about sucking people’s brains out, and so on; sort of bizarre-for-the-sake-of-bizarre which is a very hard thing to make enjoyable for a paying audience — but the spectacle and the craft of the music and the sound-effects and the whole bit was enthralling in itself. I didn’t even like the movie and I didn’t regret seeing it.

So I definitely recommend checking out The Intergalactic Nemesis if you’re in Austin this weekend! The show comes highly recommended by some of my Austinite friends who’ve seen these folks perform before. Performances are this Friday and Saturday, Sept. 3 & 4, at the Long Center. Tickets are here!

If you can’t make it to the live show, the full-length radio drama is also available as free downloadable MP3s!

I really enjoyed this video from the White House Poetry Jam, which — until I saw this video — I had no idea was even a thing.

And while we’re on the subject of raps, here’s a piece from College Humor, who (in my opinion) do some of the funniest, most well-produced original comedy videos anywhere.

Tickets have just gone on sale for the second annual New England Webcomics Weekend comics festival in Easthampton, Massachusetts! Organized by my friend and colleague Meredith Gran and her army of trusty flying monkeys, NEWW is a one-of-a-kind gathering of people who make online comics and other people who would like to hang out with those first people. And vice versa! This year it’s being held November 6-7, taking advantage of the lovely New England autumn.

Tickets are limited and are expected to sell out before the show, so if you’re in the New England area (or within teleportation distance) and a fan of webcomics, this is a great event — it’s social, friendly, a great space for conversation without the high stress of a massive convention, and Kris Straub and I will be doing a live Tweet Me Harder comedy show. What could be better?

Earlier this year, it was a bit weird mentioning my trips to ROFLCon and San Diego, because tickets for those events were long sold out by the time I brought them up. I’m attempting to rectify that this time!

Oh yeah and here is the amazing old factory building where NEWW is held — there is a stained brick room deep in its bowels called the Quarantine Area. What could be better, I maintain?

Have I got some fun new things for you:

Engineering: it’s like math, BUT LOUDER. Based on “Accomplishment Measured in Decibels.” I got a lot of emails about this one, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it, but then I really enjoyed playing around with the design so now here it is!

Are you a member of the secret order of the International Fraternal Corps of Bears in Ill-Fitting Hats? If you are, perfect! Here is a shirt for you. And, well, you don’t have to be a member of a professional sports team to wear the jersey, you know what I mean?

Unlike most of my other shirts, which are printed on the American Apparel brand, the guys’ shirts here are Gildan — they’re a bit thicker and more roomy than AA. I made that choice because some folks have asked me for a workout shirt, and this provides an option!

I also made a new bumper sticker! It’s not really based on anything except real life. In fact, I am personally very interested in flying cars, and can discuss the question of “where’s the flying cars???” in a fair amount of detail. Interested parties can check out my two favorite contemporary answers to the question: the Terrafugia Transition, basically an airplane that’s also street legal (marketed quite cleverly to pilots and the existing aeronautical community, who are used to both the challenges and the price tag of general aviation) and the Parajet SkyCar, a dune buggy that operates on a parasailing principle which quite handily avoids all the tricky questions of fixed-wing aerodynamics. In other words, one’s a plane that drives, and the other’s a car that flies. Two interesting principles, and I hope we soon live in a world with room for both!

The sticker is available as a 3-pack, or in a combo pack along with 1 each of my other two bumper stickers:

Here is where you click for these things and many more!

As reported in the New Hampshire Sentinel, June 20, 1855:

The Albany Argus has espoused the beard movement. This is its argument: – “We have come to the conclusion that the practice of shaving is alike ridiculous and absurd, and that it violates one of the laws of nature. Now, our beard was not given us for no purpose – that is evident. It was created for some wise purpose, and that was to keep the face and throat warm, and thus be conducive to health. Let us look at a few facts. It has been calculated that if one shaves three times a week, it grows twenty times as fast as if he did not shave. Allowing two inches as the annual growth of the beard, it will be seen that a man cuts off forty inches, or more than a yard of hair a year, and the nutriment which supports this, and is thus wasted, might have gone to nourish other parts of the body, and render him a healthy and handsome man! Again, allowing twenty minutes to each shaving operation, three times a week, amounts to one hour a week, – fifty-two hours a year. Supposing a man to shave forty years, we find he has consumed about three months in the simple act of shaving ; and calculating the expense of each operation at the small sum of six cents, we find it has cost him three hundred and sixty dollars. In view of these facts, we cannot but regard the practice of shaving as a decidedly barbarous one, and which ought to be discountenanced by the progressive civilization of the age.”

For more on the Beard Movement of the 1850s, see my interview with the world’s foremost beard expert.

p.s. do you think “shaving / barbarous” was pun-intended because I DO

Over the weekend, Keith, Dave and I made our way to Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica for 826LA‘s Spelling Bee for Cheaters! Thanks to your generous donations, we were able to raise over $1,700 for the tutoring center, and we learned that the entire event raised over $70,000 — 20K over their goal. Thrilling!

The judges of the bee were folks from the Broadway show The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and they styled the event to seem just like a traditional Scripps-Howard spelling bee that you might see obsessive kids win on PBS — with the exception that jokes were built into the format of the show. They advised each contestant to ask for a word’s definition and for it to be used in a sentence, and while the definition would be correct, the sentence would take the form of a joke. Here’s video of some of the celebrity contestants, if you’d like to see how it worked! They gave some of the celebrities deliberately easy words to advance them into the later rounds; the words for the regular contestants were quite difficult.

As I watched the other contestants compete, it was clear that this whole enterprise would be a gamble. I knew about one out of every eight words — oubliette, capybara, centavo and cystitis were some where I recall thinking “Dang, I wish I’d gotten that one” — but the rest of them were totally foreign to me. Luckily, our team had used the $1,700 we raised to buy cheats, including what basically amounted to a free pass to Round 2: a “Make Up Your Own Word” cheat.

Right before I was to go up, fellow contestant Jimmy Kimmel made a big show of tearing up his cheat coupons, proving that he was going it alone. When my turn came, I made a big show of gathering up his torn pieces and attempting to cash them in. It was no use! I was given a word so difficult that I didn’t even register it. I believe the definition indicated that it was an archaic term for a Siamese opium-den manservant, or something like that — I honestly could barely hear it (what with the echoey speakers) and knew at once that I would have to cash in the big cheat. I invented the word “blofax,” explaining that it was “a little-known spelling-bee rule wherein trophies are awarded to contestants based on handsomeness.” Fingers crossed! Thanks to the cheat, that word, as far as this bee was concerned anyway, was now canon.

Round Two went quicker, as most everyone had used a similar cheat in Round One and were now coming up empty. “Glee” star Dianna Agron (pictured above, in what is probably my first national-newswire editorial photo) was given the very difficult word “cow” in Round Two, but I was given a word in Yiddish that I had never heard before and probably had never met anyone who had ever heard it before. I am from California, you see.

I took a bold guess and ventured F-A-T-U-T-Z-E-D. It turned out to be FATOOTST. Ridiculous!

So, I was out. I sat back down in the audience with my teammates — I had been our team’s speller, and now that was it — and watched the rest of the bee. Ms. Agron performed respectably enough with the softballs that they threw her, and so lasted until a final face-off with a legitimate contestant who ended up taking home the grand prize (a giant dictionary signed by the celebrity participants). We had fun, got some cool McSweeney’s books to take home, and Dave & I even met a kind reader named Craig who recognized us in the audience. Hello, Craig!

Addendum: In preparing this post, I did an online search for photos of the event, and found that apparently people love this Dianna Agron. A million entertainment and gossip blogs reported on the spelling bee, and made much hay of Ms. Agron’s second-place win as an excuses to post picture after nearly-identical picture of her. This account in particular struck me as a bit funny:

Taking a break from work duties for a good cause, Dianna Agron partook in the “A Spelling Bee For Cheaters” benefit in Santa Monica, California on Saturday (August 14).

The “Glee” gal looked to be having a marvelous time as she greeted the kids at Lincoln Middle School while raising cash for the 826LA tutoring center.

Joining Dianna at the annual event were “The Office” actor John Krasinski, talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, director Spike Jonze and writer Dave Eggers.

As for the fundraising, all money went to support 826LA’s free writing and tutoring programs for Los Angeles students.

In truth, there weren’t really any kids at the event, nor was John Krasinski there (he’d planned to be, but didn’t show up). Someone wrote an article from a press release!

Thanks again for your kind support of the cause, and if you’re interested in getting involved with 826′s tutoring programs, there are chapters in San Francisco, NYC, Chicago, LA, Boston, Michigan and Seattle. Update: And DC! I’m planning on volunteering this fall myself! I am also planning on building a snowmobile from old tin cans and motorcycle parts. Sometimes life involves a lot of varied, fundamentally incompatible plans. That is how progress is made.

I received a lovely email recently from Joanne, a reference librarian in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Joanne had a problem: her library had to get rid of some old books, and she had to find homes for them! Well, as you might imagine, this is hardly a problem for me, as I told her to send them on over.

And send them she did! Look at this delightful packing job. These books arrived in amazing condition and I eagerly flipped through them hunting for jewels.

Comic #648, the latest as of this writing, was created entirely from images taken from the book on the right, 1896′s Kate Carnegie by Ian MacLaren. Here’s a closer view at some of the original images.

Thank you very much, Joanne! And thank you to Toni, who just sent me a CD full of scans from 1882′s Collier’s Cyclopedia of Social and Commercial Information. Thank you to the kind chap whom I met at Comic-Con and who gave me an illustration of a man’s leg being amputated — that is just waiting to find a home in Wondermark somewhere. Thank you to Douglas who alerted me to a particularly great eBay find; thank you to Conch in Portland who brought me a whole stack of books at last year’s Wordstock (from whence came this); and to David in Colorado who sent me a massive box of 1880s Scientific American that I’ve been mining for years.

Guys I get the best mail

Just a quick reminder that tomorrow (or TODAY, depending on when you’re reading this), the 13th, is the last day to sponsor our fundraising team in 826LA’s Spelling Bee for Cheaters. So far we’ve raised over $1000, which is amazing! You are the best.

But, as of this writing, I am lagging way behind both my teammates, Keith and Dave. I blame part of this on a weird link in the previous message that didn’t seem to load the page right, but now I’ve fixed that and there is no excuse. DO IT FOR THE KIDS

Thank you so much for your support! I’ll be sure to give a full report on the event next week.

I have done a guest comic for Dinosaur Comics today! Ryan North is getting married (to his fiancée) this weekend and he asked for some fill-in help for the occasion. Everyone else leaped on the wedding and honeymoon fill-in positions but I just made a comic. I am already married, you see!

If you’re not familiar with Dinosaur Comics or its established canon, check out this episode in which characters are handily introduced all round, this episode about the phenomenon of island dwarfism and certainly also this follow-up! Not only will reading these fine and hilarious works give you a firm working knowledge of Dinosaur Comics but they also conveniently are exactly what you need to understand the specific references in my guest comic.

Congratulations Ryan and Jenn! I wish you both at least five years of happiness. I have learned the secret to a successful marriage, and I will tell it to you right here because we are friends and I want you to be happy until such time comes that I can somehow profit from your sadness. If that day never comes, then I want you to be happy forever!

Are you ready? Lean close, here is the secret!

lots of snuggles

p.s. here is another Guest Dino Comic I made a while ago, referencing this Canonical Dino Comic!