What Washed up in the Web-Surf Dept.

The Wonderful Wizard of ID- Johnny Hart, the cartoonist behind the long time and popular comic strips B.C. and The Wizard of ID, passed away on Saturday apparently from complications after a stroke. I never met Mr. Hart but he was a member of the National Cartoonist Society and the target of many gags at events about the later religious themes in his work. I always enjoyed the dry and irreverent humor of his strips, which seemed a lot more sarcastic than the straight gags of many of his contemporaries.

Drawings from Beyond the Grave– This bizarre item, which I got from Drawn!, claims that Carbon Copy can take a person’s cremated remains an turn them into approximately 240 lead pencils… complete with their names and birth-death years. If I have that planned for me, maybe I’ll still in some way be contributing to the creation of some form of art/drawing after my death. The only thing is I’ll have to get The Lovely Anna to collect all the pencil stubs when they become too small to sharpen anymore. She’ll end up with an urn on the mantle with a bunch of tiny pencils with no erasers left that say “chmond 1966-20xx”.

IPod to the Rescue? NOT– Reports from last week about how an iPod in a US soldier’s pocket stopped a bullet from killing him were apparently a little exaggerated. The bullet actually went through the iPod like it was butter, and was stopped by his Kevlar armor. That didn’t stop Apple-pimp website AppleInsider.com from suggesting that the MP3 player was responsible for “softening the blow just enough to stop the bullet from completely piercing the Kevlar armor underneath” and even claiming that “many of its parts remained intact despite the fatal blow.” Apple of course will refuse to replace it since bullet piercing isn’t specifically listed in it’s warranty. Expect a commercial about this from Apple soon saying how the Microsoft Zune would have never stopped that bullet, starring Adam Sandler as the bullet.