Emmet is my neighbor. He’s a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. His owners found him in a gutter in Louisville, Kentucky, a tiny little neglected piglet crying and dying in a pile of wet leaves. They rescued him, nursed him back to health and it looks like he hasn’t missed too many meals since.

Emmet is the physically densest mammal I have ever seen -he feels like he is made out of warm, bristle-covered cannonballs. He loves having the spot between his little piggy shoulder blades scratched.

I only ever see Emmet on misty, overcast mornings – the kind of mornings that really activate New York’s greyness, the ones that give this grey city some serious character and color. It’s like Emmet emerges from the city’s hazy, sleepy dream state. Nobody else is ever around to see him except for me, my girlfriend, and Emmet’s leash-holders.

We always talk about the South, me and Maggie and Emmet’s people. We talk about how great it is, what an amazing, rich and Gothic creepiness the South has and how we are so glad it runs through our blood. And how glad we are that we moved up here, too.

The South is a spectacular place to be from, but not always a good place to be at. Love the culture, hate the crippling willful ignorance, I say.

But enough gabbing. Here’s Emmet:

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I was walking South on Seventh Avenue from Penn Station yesterday when I came across this great, rushed piece of Michael Jackson memorial graffiti:

It’s everything I like about folk art — public, not too fussy, and definitely puts passion over precision.

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It’s true. That is an actual science fact. From science.

If you are of my generation, there is a very good chance that somewhere — be it in a frame, or shoved in a drawer or shoebox or wallet — there exists a school portrait of you with the infamous laser background that you just HAD to have because it was AWESOME, Mom! Come ON!*
So what we’re gonna do here is, were gonna give you a blank laser background which you’re gonna right-click or control-click and save after you follow that link, and then you’re gonna search Google Images for probably longer than you should ’cause you’re probably at work, and you’re going to use Photoshop or whatever your tool of choice may be to mash that bizness up, creating images that have been astronomically improved through the magic of laser backgroundification.

Then you’ll email them to andiamnotlying(at)gmail(dot)com, we’ll post our favorites, and we will have all wasted similar amounts of time that we will never get back, but we’ll have gotten a laugh out of it. Hopefully.

Deal? Okay. Save that background and get to it!

* P.S. — For your viewing enjoyment, a young lady named Lindsey Weber has been collecting 1990s laser portraits and posting them over at We Have Lasers!!!!!!!!!!. Check it.

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I was walking through the Times Square subway station last night, on my way to see Watchmen with Jeff and a few of our fellow thirtysomething nerdboys, when I spotted three identical payphones, side-by-side on a clean tile wall, just begging for something to be tacked on.  So I pulled out a Sharpie and some manila tags that I’ve been carrying for just such an occasion, and designated one phone each for calls to the Past, Present, and Future.

More photos — including a couple with a test subject — after the jump.

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I saw this sign near the intersection of Doyers and Bowery over the weekend – a great bit of Engrish. Someone needs to tell Kool Keith he can get a Digital Perm in Chinatown …

Turns out, a digital perm is a real thing. From Wikipedia:

A digital perm is a perm which uses hot rods with the temperature regulated by a machine, which has a digital display, hence the name. However, the process of the perm is quite analogue. The name “Digital Perm” is also copyrighted by a Japanese company, PAIMORE Co., Ltd.[1] Hair stylists usually call it a “hot perm”, but it is commonly known as a “digital perm”.

So I tried to joke based on ignorance — and my joke was, essentially, “silly Asians.” And it turns out it was me that didn’t know what I was talking about. Not the worst mistake in the world, but when you make this mistake based on a cultural/ethnic assumption, it REALLY makes you look like a dipshit …

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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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More in the ever-entertaining ‘regular-folks-in-superhero-costumes-performing-mundane-tasks’ idiom, this time from photographer Gregg Segal:

There are more on Gregg’s website, and for other posts documenting our love for this milieu, check out our previous encounters with a down-on-his luck Captain America, and various sci-fi characters in domestic settings.

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Continuing our love-fest for extraordinarily costumed people in ordinary settings, we bring you the Land of the Free series from UK-based portrait and documentary photographer Steve Schofield:

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I was wasting my time in middle school trying to be friends with this kid who was mean and ugly but had a lot of cool skater gear and one of those haircuts that’s short all over apart from long hair-tentacles that covered his face. Aaron something. I’m sure he’s happily married now and teaches homeless kids to read in his spare time.

But back then, shit was different.

It was the year that Tim Burton’s “Batman” was coming out and I was believing ALL the hype — still got the t-shirt, too. I gave up on Aaron when he smacked some comics out of my hands in front of some girls and said to the whole hallway “what’s so cool about Batman?”

Nothing sounds dumber than trying to answer a rhetorical question, especially when you’re mad. This photo pretty much sums it up the answer:

Taken from Ashlee’s Flickr page, via The Daily Batman.

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It’s a tough time for Captain America. Advances in military technology have made a jacked-up dude with discus skills all but obsolete on the battlefield, the current U.S. administration is one that ol’ Steve Rogers might not be too stoked to shill for, and his rumored cameo in the Louis Leterrier / Ed Norton Incredible Hulk film was cut. And he was also assassinated last year, which will put anyone out of sorts. So until the upcoming Avengers movie gives Cap something worthwhile to do, we’re just going to assume that he’s sitting around his apartment in his robe and Al Gore post-2004 election beard, swigging the fire water and staring longingly at a picture of the Red Skull in front of the TV.

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