• I may be one of seven people in the world who thinks this is cool, but the soundtrack to the classic PC adventure game Grim Fandango is available for free download.
• Via BoingBoing, here’s a terrific rant directed at a pseudo-scientific chart on the back of a Cheerios cereal box.
• I gave up on the effectiveness of online petitions circa 2003, but I’m signing this one — partly because Russ Feingold is a personal hero, and partly because I’m passionate about the cause.

Recently, Fox News (who else?) claimed that Barack Obama attended a radical Islamic school, or madrassa, as a child. The charge was rapidly debunked. According to this, the meme originated from that bastion of accurate, fact-based rationality, an email chain-letter.

Still, it’s dangerous to assume that a smear is harmless just because CNN disproved it. A lot of people believed the total myth that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet, for example — and still do. Entertaining memes have a way of taking hold in the public conciousness, even ones based on lies. This TPM reader makes the case that the meme now circulating is that Obama is a Muslim.

I only have a handful of readers on this blog, but at least I might be able to stem the tide of the Obama/Muslim meme among my friends and family. Barack Obama is a Christian. In fact, he probably speechifies about Jesus a little too much, in my opinion. Read more here, if you like.

Normally I don’t think this would be blogworthy, but all the smears aimed at Clinton, Gore, and Kerry still bother me. It would be nice if the good guys controlled the memes early in the election cycle, for a change.

This is SATIRE. It’s hard to tell, because it’s really, really GOOD satire.

I sort of want this on MP3…

I didn’t get to do or see as much as I would have liked, thanks to miscommunications, my own underestimation of the travel time involved (Dekalb is at least an hour from Chicago, as it turns out), and other human factors. But on the bright side, I met a lot of Karen’s friends, enjoyed heroic doses of alcohol, and eventually did get into the city.

Chicago was… cold. And snowy. Ironically enough, so was Tucson while I was away.

I also heard “Super Bowl Shuffle.” Twice. With accompanying video. And if there was an available surface that could say “Go Bears,” it said “Go Bears.” In all the impassioned WOOOO-ing of north-side Bears fans after the game, I hadn’t the heart to tell them they’ll be crushed by the vastly superior AFC. (On the other hand, I said the same thing about the Tigers and Cardinals, didn’t I?)

My crazy month continues with a weekend in the cold and snow of Chicago to visit Karen and her friends and see the city for the first time. The plans include a big pajama party, for which I have purchased bunny slippers. Yes.

The hotel I’ll be at supposedly has wireless internet, so I should be able to check in now and then.

Because I’m too busy and/or lazy to write full posts these days:

• More books on TV: Sci-Fi Channel is developing one of the better novels I’ve read, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, as a six-hour mini-series, with Stephenson himself writing the screenplay and George Clooney producing. Meanwhile, HBO optioned George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice novels with the intention of filming one season per book. I’m not a fan of the series, but I know a great many people who would soil themselves with glee should this come to pass.
• Second Life: Utopia of the Future!
• Reason #1,834 that I refuse to get my news from TV.
• Of course, I’ll still get my political comedy from TV — ie, Stewart and Colbert, who tend to be more accurate than ABC News anyway. Tuesday night’s shows were kind of brilliant: one segment likened our Iraq policy to a Road Runner cartoon; the very next segment pushed all kinds of nerd buttons for me (“Takei out… motherf**ker”); and finally, Colbert lays the smackdown on Dinesh “Liberals Caused 9/11″ D’Souza.
• Finally, if you think you’re having a bad week, at least you weren’t tragically killed while taking part in something called “Hold Your Wee for a Wii.” Bryan Lambert has more.

Last weekend I went to Lake Havasu. Next weekend is a trip to Chicago. The week after that, Kristie comes to town for a visit.

Hard to believe, but this is my only weekend in the month of January that hasn’t been spoken for, and I have to use it to finish up a ton of work on Narbonic, vol. 4. I’ve been so busy and distracted that I’ve fallen way behind schedule.

Thankfully, it’s the good kind of busy and distracted.

So my weekend will be spent in front of the laptop with NFL playoff games in the background and tomorrow night’s 24 premiere as dessert.

Meanwhile, following up my previous post, not only did Bush announce his troop increase in Iraq, but he also used his speech to threaten war with Iran and Syria — then had soldiers storm an Iranian consulate in Iraq. No matter how low I set my expectations, Bush always manages to be even worse than I thought.

Tomorrow night, Bush takes to the airwaves to announce he’s escalating the war in Iraq and sending more troops we don’t have to do a job they can’t do. I’ve been following the genesis of Operation More of the Same over the last month or so since it originated from my psychotic Senator John McCain, who never met a war he didn’t like, and former Democrat Joe Lieberman, who won re-election by appealing to Connecticut Republicans and asking everyone else to ignore his Iraq position.

It amazes me how the media continues to brand McCain and Lieberman as sensible centrists when their plan has the support of roughly 11% of America. They’re both warmongering nutters.

Meanwhile, Bush is choosing escalation because he has no other choice left. He is psychologically unable to reduce troop levels or completely withdraw from Iraq; doing so would mean admitting he was wrong (and his father was right). Staying the course is no longer politically feasible. Logically, the only remaining option is more troops.

If the people who started this war are too cowardly to admit they were wrong, then it’s up to the new Democratic Congress to stop this by withholding funding. It’s the same way Vietnam ended — Congress refused to fund any military activity except the withdrawl of troops. No President ended Vietnam. Congress still controls the purse strings.

And to its credit, Democratic leadership has been making such noises the last couple of weeks.

We’ll see. After relative quiet since Election Day, politics is getting interesting again.

• As of Jan 1, Shaenon has been re-running the entirety of Narbonic with commentary. (See the current strip or start at the beginning.) Now she also has a weekly podcast with Joey Manley. Today’s first installment is here and you can subscribe here.
• It’s about time somebody hired Bruce Campbell to sell me things.
• I added him to the blog list on the right a couple of months ago, but I don’t think I mentioned it here: The Show with Ze Frank is well worth your time. He makes me want to vlog.
• Speaking of items I forgot to blog, SNL did another viral music video over the holidays. Allow me to be the final blog to link to “Dick in a Box”.

If you haven’t seen it yet, GO. It’s like the science fiction Saving Private Ryan.

Okay, that description may only appeal to my brother the war-movie aficionado. But seriously, it’s the best SF film since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Most of the action sequences are filmed in subtle but amazing single takes. Yeah, it’s depressing as hell, but I spent the last half hour with my jaw halfway to the floor.