I’m back in Norfolk visiting my family for Easter weekend. And man, is it ever different than New York. I snapped this photo of a banner hanging from a restaurant that pretty much sums the difference up perfectly:

For those of you that are reading this in text-only form, it reads: “Listen Less to the News, Spend Money and Support America, And We Will All Be OK!”

Wouldn’t it be great if that’s really all it took, just that one sign! Apparently the owner of San Antonio Sam’s (the restaurant where the sign is hanging) had this banner made up special, just to let Norfolk know how to get out of this mess.

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I spent most of the NYC ComicCon lurching in circles with my mouth half-open, hunting for a copy of Detective Comics # 587 and spending way too much money on plastic bullshit that reminds me of my childhood. The experience was spectacular.

I haven’t been to a comic book convention since 1991, in Virginia Beach — the whole enterprise was dusty, pasty and pungent. Not now, baby. Now that comics, computers and sci-fi are billion dollar businesses, nerds are out of the basement and blinking in the klieg lights. Pop culture’s always been a byproduct of marketing campaigns, but we are now in a golden age of hype and shiny bullshit.

Today’s thirtysomethings were the target audience back in the ’70s and ’80s when Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and other pop mythologies did the first Triple Lindy into the collective consciousness. Now we’re just old enough to have kids who get just as pumped about Star Wars as we did, and fetishizing fictional universes is a family affair.

Whenever alien archaeologists unearth whatever temples we leave behind, they’re gonna think that Spiderman was our God and stormtroopers were some kind of high priests. Frankly, I’m thrilled. Digging through comic boxes and buckets of chipped action figures gets me all stoked and unstuck in time and I get the same sense of wow, cool wonder that I got when my dad took me to see Star Wars for the first time.

But this thing was for everybody. Really, it was just like the Mermaid Parade except indoors and marginally less sexualized. The people-watching and the costumes were spectacular and totally worth the admission price.

This is my favorite photo from this weekend’s NYC ComicCon, but there’s a lot more after the jump:

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I saw this in the subway stop by my apartment on Friday night — Poster Boy’s latest, if I’m not mistaken:

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I’m one of those people who tries to keep my Inbox relatively clean.  I fail miserably, but at least I want it to be more uncluttered than it is, and I think that aspiration counts for something.  However, one battle front on which I am an unequivocal victor is that of the Spam folder.  I manually delete that shit before Gmail even has the chance to do it for me.  When empty, the Spam folder displays the text “Hooray, no spam here!” and I think, “You’re goddamn right there isn’t.”

But once in a while, the universe sees fit to bestow upon me a piece of electronic junk mail so wonderful and perfect, so beautifully off-kilter in either its subject line or content, that it gives pause to my ‘delete’ finger.  Case in point, this message that I received yesterday:

Such a simple and perfect non-sequitur.

Or is it?

One day later, I received this little nugget from a different address:

Holy christ!
What seemed at first like total random word generation has suddenly turned into a somewhat linear pseudo-narrative!  Whatever the fuck nekkid Britney did in that video to expose the secret trifecta has apparently caused her untimely demise, and set off a chain of events that will undoubtedly lead to the King of Pop having one of his plastic ears bitten off on pay-per-view. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for the next installment of this saga to get caught in my mail filters.

(NOTE: Yes, I blurred the links. And I deleted the messages after I took the screenshots.  If we click on spam links, even in the name of investigative internet comedy-journalism, then the terrorists have won.  Besides, whatever they linked to could never be as good as the stories y’all are forming right now.)

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Speaking of otherworldly creatures, check out these Golden Age Mexican lobby cards:

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Folks with extra weight on them have always had it rough. Whether they were called “husky,” “stocky,” or today’s “33 percent of the population,” everyone knew the truth behind the euphemism. A little respect, no matter how flimsy and transparent, is better than this old ad:

I love how they kindly tell concerned parents that “everything is priced the same as regular sizes,” because, you know, they’re using SO much extra cloth to make these darling little mini-tents.

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Last week, I posted about the giant mashed-up colorform graffiti on the New York Subway system. The post got picked up by Gawker, Art Fag City, Neatorama and some others, garnering a little attention.

A few days later, I got a comment that said:

i know the guy who does this stuff. i can get you more info and pictures of the originals if you’re interested. these pics don’t do the originals justice. you have pics of them after they’ve been tampered with …

I got a bunch more photos out of him, and he’s right … these are way, way more fun, especially this Iron Man remix:

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You may have noticed this site loading slowly and crashing a lot this afternoon. That’s because at some point today, my post about the nastiest pizza in the world hit the main page of Fark.com. It had already been a busy week, as apparently a LOT of people wanted to have a look at this thing. It’s been linked all over the Web for the last few days, and the traffic has been staggering, at least for me.

Have a look:

It blows my mind, really. I revamped this thing to try and get some traffic, slap some ads on here and maybe get a little cash for my obsessions. But man, overnight? I know this is all going to die down in a few days, but right now, it boggles the mind.

I’ve done so much writing on here, so much original photography, etc. And it just amazes me that these photos (which are admittedly pretty cool and nasty) would have this much appeal. But man, you never know what you’re going to get when you get what you think you want — and you never know where you’re gonna be when the lightning strikes.

So yeah, in a nutshell:

1) Sorry about the slow page
2) but it was for a really good, exciting reason
2) one you look past the fact that it was just about some junk food.

I’m sure things’ll be back to normal next week.

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There’s a new Dove ad out. And, whether you agree wholeheartedly with a campaign meant to cram beauty products down your throat while saying “we’re not cramming beauty products down your throat,” this is inarguably a really, really good ad.

It’s good enough that I’m using it for content this morning, propagating the Dove message for free. Execs and directors at interactive companies worldwide are looking at this thing and saying

See, we should totally do something “viral,” where bloggers get the word out for us, expanding our market share and leveraging Web 2.0 social media space networking CTR impressions Facebook. And, since it’s viral, we don’t have to spend any money on it, right? It can be, like, I dunno, viral. And grow organically.

Not that I’m bitter …

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