Adam Norwood: Tumblr

Life is a circus, Zippy! It can be a circus of pain or a circus of delight!

As the Bil Keane RIP notices started flooding across the net yesterday, my friend Julien reminded me of the bizarre phenomenon of Zippy the Pinhead making a crossover appearance in Family Circus back in 1994 (go look at it, it’s weird!). It wasn’t a single-panel affair: that out-of-context Family Circus strip was a followup to a week in which Bil Keane literally drew his characters into the surreal world of Zippy as a sort of exchange project. From a speech by Zippy artist Bill Griffith:

Here’s an example of something that kind of blew my mind, and a number of readers. I did a number of comic strips in 1994 in which the idea was that Zippy and Griffy were going to, at least Zippy, enter, literally, the world of The Family Circus, a single panel comic. Into the strip a few days I thought, “What the hell, I’ll call Bill Keene. I’ll get his phone number, and I’ll see if he wants to literally jam this strip with me.” I figured the chances were zero, but why not? I called him up; he was incredibly friendly. He lives in Phoenix, where Zippy is published in the local paper. Loves the strip; reads it every day. Y’know, at the end of the phone call I thought, “He’s my blood brother. We’re like the two surreal comic strip artists.”

Behind the sticky-sweet facade of everyone’s favorite round newspaper comic, it’s good to know there was an artist of subversive humor and warmth for his fellow cartoonists, appreciative of both parody and collaboration.

elizs:

motherjones:

domybooks:

hilarious. thanks mark

This. Is. Hilarious.

(For the benefit of those who didn’t immediately laugh: 4’33”)

HAHAHAHAHAHA. Ah, John Cage humor.

Funny! But also an interesting question: 4’33” is very much about the other sounds in the performance space in the duration — who holds the copyright on the ambient sound of a crowded theater? Does YouTube’s blocking of the audio have any actual effect on the nature of the piece?

See also:

• The confusing Mechanical Copyright Protection Society v. Mike Batt lawsuit over a 1 minute track of recorded silence (or was that a hoax?)
• 4’33” in MIDI format (this piece in digital format raises some other interesting aesthetic and philosophical questions…)

superhappy:

I’m gonna post every Mark Trail until this goose is okay.

Not to steal a joke from The Comics Curmudgeon, but my first thought on seeing today’s Mark Trail was “Oh yeah, Mark’s gonna punch a goose!”

Nyan Cat Progress Bar, replaces the standard Windows progress bars in Explorer. Oh, Internet!

(Via Cal Henderson)

austinkleon:

Vigo sweeps the floor

“On a mountain of skulls, in the castle of pain, I sat on a throne of blood! What was will be! What is will be no more! Now is the season of evil”

austinkleon:

Kate Beaton’s Fargo/Charlie Sheen mashup

I saw Fargo for the first time the other day (I know right) and became totally enthralled by Marge Gunderson. I figure, you know, with all this Sheen nonsense going on these days there is only one person who can really sort it out.

I was really trying to ignore this whole business, but now someone’s gone and mashed up the Charlie Sheen rant with Animal Crossing. Damn.

woodswoodswoods:

When You See It, by Aled Lewis. There’s a whole series, but this one nails it. 

Reblogging because there’s probably nothing wrong with having a second SkiFree post in a single month.

(Source: jez-burrows, via simonreid-deactivated20120102)

Awesome thing that I didn’t realize I had on my bookshelf: the Tom Lehrer sheet music songbook I’ve had since I was a kid was illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle. I must have been unfamiliar with Searle the last time I looked through this book — his scratchy style complements Lehrer’s acerbic wit nicely.

The whole book, “Too Many Songs By Tom Lehrer with not enough drawings by Ronald Searle”, is available for perusal on Scribd, in case you’re the sort that enjoys songs about masochism, the periodic table, bull fighting, nuclear annihilation, and Ivy League snobbery…

(Source: adamnorwood.com)

Via NCBI ROFL, a single-page paper submitted to the 1974 volume of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, “The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of ‘Writer’s Block’”.

This amazing research was verified and extended upon in 2007: “A Multisite Cross-Cultural Replication of Upper’s (1974) Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer’s Block”