blog: things you should check out

Gift ideas created by my friends!

Assuming you’ve already got copies of all my books — both my comic strip collections and my parody Victorian novels — and perhaps even a Wondermark T-shirt or two…well, you probably think I’ve got nothing more for you this holiday season! You, my close personal friend, are dead wrong.

First, I have a hearty “thank you!” from my warm, rent-paid-up household to yours. This is my job, thanks to kind folks like you. Hooray!

Second, I know for a fact that you don’t want to go to the mall, you don’t want to fight for parking…but neither do you want to just browse Amazon like a sluggard and hope you stumble across the perfect gift for all the weirdos on your shopping list. That’s where I can do you a favor, with the following fine list of Gift Recommendations that are Wonderfully Creative and Unique and also Help My Colleagues Not Starve. After all, you’re the one about whom everyone’s always saying, “Where do you find all these bizarre and wonderful gifts?” Don’t worry…your secret’s safe with me!

For the book lover who’s already got a framed print of this strip, the “Unshelved” book bag is hard to resist. Also check out their T-shirts — my wife’s got several and they always get appreciative bibliophile double-takes (or maybe that’s just my wife).

Poop sign. Great stocking stuffer? Probably won’t fit. Great everything-else stuffer? ‘Nuff said.

Jon Rosenberg’s “Goats” is soon to be a 3-book graphic novel series from Del Rey, and he’s offering some limited-edition, signed & numbered archival prints of artwork created for the first volume, Infinite Typewriters. Really lovely!

Indigo Kelleigh’s designed his own 8-bit tarot cards in a colorful, retro-Nintendo style. These cards are also printed in limited edition.

Next week: book reviews!

Check out: Radiolab

I love podcasts. I listen to them on trips, while working, in my sleep and at all times while gallavanting. It’s tricky, though — I like my podcasts to update regularly, of course, but I’ve had to unsubscribe to more than one for having too much content. I find it’s easy to get outnumbered by a backlog of un-listened-to episodes, feeling overwhelmed and buried and hemmed into a corner frantically trying to absorb it all, every waking minute, afraid of missing out. I have come to terms with the fact that sometimes I cannot fit everything in, and so, sadly, The Two-Hours-Of-New-Stuff-Every-Goldurn-Day Show just has no place in my life.

Once a week for an hour or less seems to be a pretty good schedule for a podcast, as far as my own listening schedule goes. So I really like Radiolab, a WNYC public radio program about science, perception, and the underlying mysteries of everything. But instead of pointing you to the show and saying “There, go;” I’d like to share two particularly great episodes with you.

The first is their War of the Worlds episode, in which they tackle the 1938 Orson Welles hoax broadcast and explore why people believed it was real — and continued to believe it was real each time it was re-broadcast. Fascinating stuff, especially for folks like me who’ve never heard the original (despite the 4GB of old Mercury Theatre archives on my iPod. Like I said, it’s hard to get around to it all).

Another is a short, off-season episode called Tell Me a Story. It’s a recording of co-host Robert Krulwich delivering this year’s commencement address at Cal Tech, in which he exhorts the graduating nerds to evangelize the world with the wonder and beauty of science and exploration. (He does a much better job delivering it than I do explaining it.) Only 27 minutes long, and you can listen online or download the MP3. Do yourself the favor.

Season 5 of Radiolab starts next week. You can subscribe to the podcast at WNYC.org.

Check out: Bellen! homage strip

Brian “Box” Brown has decided to have a little Halloween fun with the characters in his comic strip Bellen! — over the past week or so, he’s “dressed them up” in the art style of a number of other comic strips. Today, they go to Wondermark-land! Check out Bellen! dressed up like Wondermark here. (For the uninitiated, this is what Bellen! normally looks like.)

Check out: Jim Henson’s Fantastic World

Yesterday I visited the Jim Henson’s Fantastic World exhibit at the Smithsonian’s International Gallery in Washington, D.C. If you, like me, were raised on Sesame Street and still have counting songs rattling around in your head, or like my wife were basically born with Muppet fur, you should definitely check this out — it’s only in D.C. through this weekend, but it’s traveling the U.S. for the next few years, so watch for it in your town.