Turns out The M.C. Bat Commander from the Aquabats co-created Yo Gabba Gabba!. Excellent. The show just became the greatest thing ever broadcast since Denver, The Last Dinosaur.

So I ran a marathon, it seems. The Detroit Marathon on October 21, 2007, to be precise. It was transcendental experience; pushing my body to the limits revealed new levels of spirituality in me that – PSYCH. A ha, I am so clever. It was what it was; a long fucking run. I’m glad to have gotten it done, like any other personal goal, but it was rough as shit. First off, I got a ticket on the way there. I woke up late (if I wasn’t driving my sister and her husband down for their relay, who knows when I would have gotten up), which led me to really push it with the speed limit. Naively, I thought “Sunday, 6:00 A.M? Naahh.” I guess the “naahh” didn’t pan out like I hoped it would. So there’s that.

When I got there, it was quite the zoo. Just hordes of people everywhere. Supporters, runners, volunteers, crocodile hunters, pedophiles, pretty much everyone you’d hope to find at a large event. I believe there were approximately 15,000 runners, total. I eventually dropped off my gear, was corralled into my starting area, and started preparing for the run.

The course itself was magnificent. I ran through different parts of Detroit that were actually quite nice, almost surprisingly so. I’m sure if I went a block in any other direction, the area would be been quite ghetto, but still, I liked what I saw. Even more amazing was running across the Ambassador Bridge into Canada, and then back through the Windsor Tunnel. I’ve basically run a mile through the sky, and another under water. I feel like Aqua-man, assuming Aqua-man was running the Detroit Marathon and went through the Ambassador Bridge and Windsor Tunnel.

In terms of the actual running itself, I was doing quite well until the 13th mile. That’s “the pain” started to kick in. I put that in quotes because I’m a have an inflated sense of self-importance, but also because it’s a pain that I have become familiar with throughout the past couple of years. It first kicked in ‘06 when I decided that I would try to run five miles instead of my usual three. It’s been lingering around since then, but has been mostly mild, until three weeks ago, when it started coming back in full force. Basically, it hurts to bend my legs. The outer tendons of me “knee-pit,” for a lack of a more descriptive phrase, hurt to bend. It had gotten better in the last few weeks, so I was hoping that I would make it through all the way without the sharp sensation. When I hit mile 13 though, it started edging into my leg a little bit. Not too seriously though, I just had to walk and stretch a bit more often, but I was still doing pretty well until mile 16, near Bell Isle. That’s when my legs were done with. At that point, I pretty much couldn’t bend my legs and had to stiff leg the rest of the marathon. Try walking/jogging a few yards without bending your legs at all. Then do it for another 10 miles. That was how I finished the run. It was rough as shit. It must have been pretty clear I was hurt too, since people kept on asking me “are you okay?” In addition, all the cheering people that stood on the side streets would always scream when I pass “way to push through!” Initially, I thought they meant in general, “way to push through a marathon,” but after being singled out in Greek Town, I’m pretty sure they all meant “way to push through, Frank Einstein, with your gimpy ass legs, you poor mother fucker.” But about Greek Town, the main cheering guy on the mic saw me and said “Wow, look at this guy. If that was me, I would have quit four hours ago. Let’s give him a round of applause!” It was nice, because a large crowd clapped for me, but at the same time, it made it quite apparent that I was obviously disabled. For the last few miles, I started side shuffling a good portion of the distance, because I could do it about thrice as fast as I could jog/walk. For some perspective, it took me about two hours to run the first 13 miles. It then took me an hour to run the next 4, another hour to run the next 3, and then finally TWO WHOLE hours to run the last six miles. That’s quite a slow down there. If you want to get a good impression of how gimped I was, watch the video via the Detroit Free Press. Start watching for me when the clock says 6:01:50. You should be able to notice when I limp across the finish line:

VIDEO!

I think I look peg-legged. My coworker said I look like a penguin. Perhaps I am a peg-legged penguin. Who knows? One thing’s for sure, my legs were hurting like shit.

And that was that. Something that I am truly appreciative of is the fact that my sisters, cousin and their friends waited for me at the finish line. They ran the relay, meaning five of them covered the distance that I did myself, so they were able to finish much quicker than I did. They didn’t expect me to take quite so long to complete the race, but they were there to cheer me on at the end. In an uncharacteristic moment of sincerity here, I will say that I am quite grateful for that. My girlfriend couldn’t make it unfortunately because of exams, which I understand completely. I don’t begrudge her for that at all, and as a matter of fact, I wouldn’t have been able to make it past the hours after the marathon without her on the phone, so in my second, even more completely uncharacteristic moment of sincerity, I must say that I love her dearly and glad she was there for me when I needed her.

All in all, I’m glad to have accomplished this. I would have liked to have been able to run the entire way, but at least I finished, and am now relatively injury free the next day. My whole goal with this ordeal was to get in better physical shape, which I think I am in. I can’t imagine wanting to pound through 26.2 miles of pavement again anytime soon, but the run was very enjoyable. I can see myself doing ½ marathons or relays quite regularly. And who knows, maybe one day, I’ll be able to make it through a marathon as a man, rather than Chilly Jones, the Peg-legged Penguin Pirate. Arrg!

Tila Tequila is about as attractive as Dane Cook is funny. And no, that’s not a compliment.

I’ve always been a huge fan of sequential art (which is really nothing more than a pretentious way to say comics I guess, but I have to try to legitimize my hobbies somehow). To me, it’s the perfect medium for a creator to express everything they want in a story with absolute control. Books and films will always have their place, but books sometimes leave too much to the reader, when a single panel can succinctly summarize four pages worth of overdrawn verbal descriptions, and films give the actor/director/producer/best boy grip a certain degree of control that alters the true vision of the writer. In comics, you have nothing more than a creator, a pen and their ideas laid bare upon a page.

The problem with sequential art (I feel pretentious for even using the term, so that’s the last time), however, is that it gets very little respect outside of a niche crowd who already enjoy the medium. The cheesy superhero material that drives the market is all that people are cognizant of when it comes to comic books, and that turns off a large number of potential readers. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading about super powered strippers getting dressed up in pervert suits to fight crime as much as the next guy, but it’s a damn shame that so much good story telling is being inaccurately labeled as infantile and being ignored by the general public.

Regardless of comic book medium’s problems in saturating the fiction market, there are good stories out there and I thought I’d share one here. This is a story called Click by Sarah Ryan that I found through The X Axis. It’s not the best story in the world by any means, but it is definitely a great read, and short enough to finish in one quick sitting. I think I like it so much because the whole theme of the story really resonates with me, as it should with pretty much anyone who has ever moved from one stage of life to another.

Rather than conclude this with a cheesy plea for you to take comic books seriously, I will leave you (at the risk of making the entire moral of this post seem illegitimate) with this classy panel from "Loaded Bible: Jesus vs. Vampires" to remind you that not all comics are depressing stories of unrequited friendships:

Aww hell, here’s one more:

To describe the state of intellectual discourse on the internet as “lacking” would be completely inaccurate. It’s not so much lacking, as it is a giant cluster fuck of morons and inbreds vying for the position of stupidest commentator in existence. If you’ve ever spent more than a minute reading comments on youTube, you should have an inkling of what I’m talking about. It’s post after post of messages that are horribly ill conceived, homophobic, racist, and the most egregious of all, written with intensely poor grammar.

Figure 1. Duuhhhrrr (from xkcd).

Since this is clearly the single most important issue of our generation, it is monumentally important that we find a way to halt the growth of this rampant idiocy, lest we too become morons via prolonged exposure. As a member of the internet vanguard (…), I have come up a solution that is as brilliant as it is handsome…INTELLIGENCE CAPTCHAS!

We’ve all been exposed to the ever-irritating CAPTCHA many times in the past, but what if we altered them a little bit to test for online trolling potential as well? It would work on the same principles, but instead of having to type in the letters and numbers, you need to answer a randomly generated question that may prove quite difficult for trollers and flame-baiters alike.

Figure 2. When in Doubt, Charlie Out.

Without a shred of hubris, I promise you that my solution will increase the level of intelligence in web conversations, and as an effect, cure all of the world’s ills in a matter of months. AIDS will cease to exist, global warming will abate, Federer will win at Roland Garros and most importantly, we will usher in a Golden Age of Online Conversations, where we can be vitriolic towards each other with caustic wit and drollness, as opposed to screaming “OMG GAY JEW DYKE.” Hopefully, now that this anonymous, unread blog on the back waters of the internet has presented a solution to this sweeping problem, we can all band together against idiots of the world, and remove ourselves of there kind. I mean they’re…I think. Whatever, fag.