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Tags: alp

Still busy trying to catch up from a (totally great) vacation in Chicago last week, so I had to do a bunch of art-recycling for this comic, and this'll be a short blog post.

The latest gossip going around New York is that (married) Yankee third-baseman Alex Rodriguez is having an affair with (married) entertainer Madonna. There's nothing remotely interesting to me about this "scandal", but it did lead me to compile a list of all the women that teammate Derek Jeter's been linked with, for comparison's sake.

Jessica Alba
Jessica Biel
Jordana Brewster (actress)
Mariah Carey
Lara Dutta (former Miss Universe)
Joy Enriquez (singer)
Vida Guerra (model)
Scarlett Johansson
Minka Kelly (actress)
Adriana Lima
Vanessa Minnillo (MTV VJ)
Gabrielle Union

Holy smokes. Poor A-Rod.

Tags: alp, baseball, new york

On Friday, the Mets and Yankees played the third-ever "subway double-header" in the history of the two teams - the 1st game at Yankee Stadium, and the nightcap at Shea. This is pretty cool by itself, but the fact that we're in the final year of BOTH these stadiums' existences makes it fairly awesome. I would've been tempted to go if both teams didn't suck and I didn't care about having enough money left over to feed my family.

But the rest of this post will be about Monopoly. I was dismayed to find out that the classic "You have won second place in a beauty contest! Collect $10" Community Chest card was replaced, in the Monopoly: Here and Now Edition released in 2007, with "You have won second prize on a reality TV show! Collect $100,000". First of all, that's all kinds of lame. Second, that's 200 of those orange $500 bills! Sucks to be the banker. Ok, so they probably upped the denominations of the bills... or have they incorporated credit cards into the game? Or maybe you fake-PayPal each other. Man, I hate progress. I miss the good ol' days where you could buy entire city blocks for $400... at most.

I was also shocked to find out that that rule that we all knew and loved as kids - where you won whatever money that had accumulated in the center of the board when you landed on the "Free Parking" space - is not, and has never been, an official rule of Monopoly. Officially, when you land on that space, nothing happens. Nothing. So what I'm wondering is, how did we all learn to play that way? It's not like it's some drinking game that spreads by word of mouth and gathers all sorts of weird variations along the way. It's a game that you buy, and pow, there's the rules in the box. Did/do you play with the "Free Parking" jackpot rule? Do you remember who taught it to you?

Lastly, the rudest, most anti-social thing I've ever done in my life was because on Monopoly. I was about 7 years old, and this girl from the neighborhood, who was maybe 8 or 9, used to love to come over and play with me. All I remember is that she had long blonde hair, and was really pushy. She did a lot of annoying things, but the thing that bugged me the most was that she played Monopoly ALL WRONG, starting us out with the wrong amount of money, buying houses at the wrong times... and I think she even IGNORED THE FREE PARKING JACKPOT RULE. So one day, I was having lunch at my kitchen table when I saw her arrive in our backyard on her bike. She saw me sitting there through the sliding glass doors of the house and mouthed the words, "Do you wanna come out and play?" And without a word, I just ignored her and went upstairs. That was the last time I ever saw her.

Seriously I have no idea what I was thinking. Chalk it up to being 7. Hey pushy blonde girl from Forest Hills (shit I don't even remember her name... Bridget?), I'm sorry! Send me a MySpace invite; I'll put you in my Top 8. For a week. And let's play Monopoly your way!

Tags: alp, baseball

Places where I've done at least an hour of work during a work day with my laptop: a coffee shop, libraries, hotel rooms, hotel lobbies, a diner, airports, my health club, the mall, my car, a Honda dealership, and a bar. Am I proud of myself? Yes.

Recently, I also discovered that I can use my cell phone as a broadband modem (if you have a Palm Treo and wanna learn how, drop me a line). Which opens up a world of telecommuting possibilities. So far the park, the beach, and strip clubs have been suggested to me. I'm hoping one day soon to work from outer space.

Because someone's asked already, the full version of the ASCII pic in panel 4 can be found here. Perv!

Tags: alp, porn

Whoa, it wasn't 'til I went to upload this new comic that I realized this is the big two-five-oh. What does that mean? It means that at the current pace, it'll be only 5 more years 'til 500! Remind me when I hit that one and I promise I'll buy you all ice cream.

Actually you know what I'm gonna do? I get emails all the time from folks asking me to write more about NYC, or to have Abe and Preston visit their city, or to use their joke, or to get Abe a girlfriend, or even "I would totally be Abe's girlfriend!" So what I'm gonna do is give you a chance to get involved. HERE'S WHAT TO DO:

UPLOAD (in rough order of priority):
- photos that'd make a good background for a comic*, and/or
- photos of yourself with space next to you for Abe and/or Preston to come "hang out", and/or
- just plain photos of yourself, and/or
- anything at all you think that I, or fans of aLp, would find interesting

TO:
- Flickr group Alien Loves Predator, and/or
- Flickr tag alienlovespredator, and/or
- the aLp Facebook group

In all cases you'll be implicitly giving me permission to use your photo(s) on my site, but of course you'll get full credit where applicable. Thanks!

* - Take a look at some of the backgrounds I use in the comic to get a sense of what makes a good background photo. Ideally it should have space in the upper portion for dialogue balloons, and be high resolution, but I'll take what ya got! Below are two good examples...)



 

Tags: alp, nyc

This is my farewell to Hillary's campaign. I've been in Obama's camp this whole time but I do feel that Hillary got unfairly reamed in the press and on the net. If there were technically still a chance for her to win the race, as there totally was back when everyone started calling for her to stop kidding herself and quit, then why shouldn't she keep going? Because it hurts the party? That's BS. And it's not like any of us can understand this, but I assume that when you run for president, you run for president. You don't just do it for the good of the country; you do it because you want to be president, which isn't a dream that is or should be easy to give up, especially not after you've spent your whole life preparing for it, and millions of dollars of your own dough, as well as that of all the people who contributed from their own pockets because they're inspired by you.

So I finally rented and watched AvP:R. Sure, it was a terrible movie, with cardboard characters and not much excitement, but that's all academic. In every way it was better than the first one. It was fun. Kinda. There were plenty of cool moments, but the big problem was every single one of them was shown in that "red-band" trailer that came out last fall. Every single one. I can't think of anything cool in the movie that we hadn't already seen in that trailer. Can you?

So I'm pretty damn sure that if I hadn't seen the trailer, I would've enjoyed the movie a lot more. And then again, there's the chance that I wouldn't have watched the movie at all if I hadn't seen how cool the trailer was. We'll never know. But it looks like, from their perspective, they did it right, given the stinker of a movie they had to work with. They got my money.

Good thing I just got my stimulus check! W00+! Npw I have to go buy the DVD.

Tags: alp, avp, politics

If you believe that bacon makes everything better, check out Crif Dogs on St. Marks near Ave. A. They take a hot dog, deep fry it, wrap it in bacon, deep fry it again, smother it with cheese, deep fry that, and for good measure they deep fry the actual deep fryer. If your body can take it, give it a try - legend has it that they even serve beer at a hidden bar next door (I didn't know this the last time I went).

Thus endeth the B.O. storyline. Sorry it took me almost A YEAR AND A HALF to finish. It was obviously a GRRRREAT idea to start it just when I needed a break. The restrictions of a continuous plot REALLLY helped me regain my momentum. It's TOOOOO BAD that I'm free to be more spontaneous now.

Oh yeah, POTTY-TRAINED TWINS? CHECK. ELAINE SAYS: IS THAT ALL YOU GOT???

Tags: alp, kids, new york

Another missed update today, sorry. I ALMOST made it in time; the new comic's about 80% done but we're gonna be busy for the long weekend (starting... now) so it'll have to wait 'til next week.

It's been suggested that maybe I should go down to bi-weekly - a relaxed schedule I can keep is better than a more aggressive schedule I can't keep... and there's no doubt I've lost a TON of readers over the past year - but I'm not havin' that just yet. At the very least I gotta wait 'til I'm past this goddamn storyline - it's got ONE MORE installment!!! - and then I can get back to the old, sweeter days of just writing whatever the hell pops into my head. Hopefully that'll get things flowin' again. If it keeps stressing me out, THEN I'll consider making a change.

'Til then, sorry! Join the mailing list, get up in my RSS, or pleasure yourself to my LJ.

In my previous post I broached the subject of torture, allowing for the fact that it'd stir up debate and that I'd be accused of saying things I didn't say. All I really said was that in any past, current or future use of "torture" by our government, our interrogators most certainly don't enjoy the causing of pain (whatever the amount) - it's simply a means to an end, right or wrong. If there were a way to do the same job without it, they'd do it. I don't think the government's biggest distractors even disagree with that. It's just an observation I made.

There's a small debate going on in the previous post's comments section. Join in if you wanna, JUST KEEP IT CIVIL. OR ELSE I'LL WATERBOARD YOUR BALLS.

Tags: alp

I've seen a lot of descriptions and demonstrations of the "enhanced interrogation" technique of Waterboarding, and from what I can tell, you don't so much experience pain as much as you mostly "just" fear for your life for the few seconds you can stand it until you "break". I'll definitely allow for the possibility that there IS actually pain involved, and that you can suffer severe lasting psychological effects, but it seems to me that, at least with the way our government's reportedly practiced it, it's specifically designed to be as effective and efficient as possible while causing the MINIMUM amount of pain. No matter how you feel about it, it's not like the CIA are sadists.

This isn't a defense of waterboarding, but rather an excuse for me to link to the Medieval Torture Museum in San Gimignano, Italy, which was one of the most haunting experiences of my life. THIS was how to inflict intentional pain. Elaine and I visited for our 2nd anniversary (we did other less macabre things in Tuscany too), and we both paid for admission, but Elaine had barely entered the first room when she said, "Uh, I'll wait for you outside". I'm glad she did. This illustrated online tour does a good job describing the nasty devices they used in the Medieval times... it's nothing compared to standing face to face with an Iron Maiden like I had the "pleasure" of doing, but if you have any sort of imagination, that link will freak you the hell out.

How many of you knew that the Iron Maiden was an old torture device and not just a metal band? Ok now how many of you knew that Uday Hussein used to put underperforming Iraqi athletes in one as recently as like 10 years ago?

Tags: alp

I was gonna make a Mitt Romney joke. But then I thought a lot of you wouldn't get it. Then I was gonna make a Schrodinger's cat joke, but then I thought even less of you would get it. Then it turned into a Schrodinger's LOLcat joke, but that was just getting stupid. And that's been done already.

So I went with what you see now; not my best work but it took me like 2 weeks to come up with two words that mean the opposite of each other, both of which you can be at the same time. There's credible and incredible, but they don't make for a good joke. Then there's flammable and inflammable, but as you all know, they actually mean the same thing. Here's a video of Marina from HotForWords.com explaining why.


Obviously her looks are the big reason Marina's so popular, but she does know her shit, as an actual philologist. She's not my type, but hell, put ANYONE in front of a camera telling me about the etymology of words and I'm hooked.

Regarding this old comic, here she is explaining the origin of the phrase "gird your loins" (God, these stillframes are making my site look all smutty).

Tags: alp