It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S., so here’s an appropriate comic. Savor the holiday, have some gratitude, share your blessings if you’re able to, and Happy Thanksgiving!
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Another Wednesday, another fun gig with Tom Hood and the Tropical Sons, the house band for open mic night at Bayou Bistro in Tarpon Springs. It was a fun pre-Thanksgiving celebration, and a chance to play some good ol’ classic rock with great local musicians at a very friendly bar with tasty seafood.
I’m thankful for the opportunity to rock out!
A scene from an old comic book came into one of my social media feeds, and now I’m feeling nostalgic for comicdom’s most over-the-top decade.
Just look at how incredibly “nineties” the cover of The Incredible Hulk vs. Venom #1 from April 1994 is! Illustrator Jim Craig did a very good impression of Todd McFarlane, who’d left Marvel a couple of years prior to found the even-more-1990s publisher, Image Comics.
The only way it could be more a product of its decade is if it featured someone with a comically large sword (or a comically large number of regular swords) and pouches, pouches, pouches.
The comic starts with the classic team-up plotline of “first we fight because of some misunderstanding, but then we team up to take on a big bad villain.”
This being a comic from that era, writer Peter David managed to fit in an STD joke into the battle:
In case you’re wondering why the Hulk is so quippy, it’s because Bruce Banner managed to merge his personality with Hulk’s, resulting in his becoming a big green scientist with a bad attitude. As for Venom, he’d already made the transition from villain to anti-hero.
Venom and Hulk are both in San Francisco to lend a hand after an earthquake. A local TV station gets a letter from someone going by the name of “Dr. Bad Vibes” — he claims responsibility for the earthquake, and unless his ransom demands are met, he’ll make an even bigger one!
Hulk and Venom barge into the TV station during a live on-air reading of Dr. Bad Vibes’ ransom note and trash-talk him ’80s/’90s wrestler style. This scene also provides us with a view of Hulk’s totally ’90s “rad” haircut:
In case you’re too young to remember, Hulk and Venom’s simultaneous “beat (clap) you up!” line comes from the “Hans and Franz” skits from Saturday Night Live at the time:
In the end, Hulk and Venom find Dr. Bad Vibes, who actually can’t control earthquakes. He’s a delusional guy with a cardboard box labeled “Earthquake Machine.” He sent his threatening letter prior to the quake and by comic-book-coincidence, the earthquake followed, with “hilarity” soon ensuing:
What a decade!
What if Star Wars: Andor was broadcast in 1975 instead of 2022?
Auralnauts — the people who’ve been remixing Star Wars scenes to great effect for years — have answered this question by creating their own title sequence for Andor, and from the downscaled video, cheesy title graphics, 1970s synthpop, and Very Serious Narrator providing a summary of the show, it’s 1970s-a-riffic!
Here’s the video. Enjoy!
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The Three Laws of Money
I remember hearing The Three Laws of Money from OpenCola’s cofounder John Henson when I worked there — 2000 through 2002 — during those high-flying days at the end of the dot-com bubble. He said he heard it from someone else, but I can’t remember whom.
In light of everything that’s happened with cryptocurrency this year, I thought I’d post this and remind everyone of rule three.
Once again, the Three Laws of Money are:
- MORE money is better than LESS money. Obvious, but sometimes we need to be reminded of the obvious. More money means you can buy more goods and services, have more influence, and invest more to increase your money supply.
- Money NOW is better than money LATER. This is a greatly simplified summary of the time value of money: a dollar (or pick your favorite currency) today is worth more than the same dollar in the future.
- REAL money is better than FAKE money. And real vs. fake isn’t an either-or thing, but two ends of a spectrum. The more people that accept a kind of money, the more “real” it is. As the de facto world reserve currency, the U.S. dollar is very real. The Iranian Rial, the cheapest currency in the world at the time of writing, is less “real”. I will leave determining the “reality” of cryptocurrencies as an exercise for the reader.
Twitter user @muravfx posted this:
Elon Musk spent $44 Billion on Twitter. The World’s population is 8 billion. He could have given each person $5 billion and still have money leftover. I feel like a cheque for $5 billion would be life changing for most people. Yet he wasted it all on Twitter.
— creed mura (@muravfx) November 18, 2022
Your “math sense” should be tingling at this nonsense. Here is some literal “back of the napkin” math I did to see how much everyone on Earth would get you evenly split $44 billion among them:
5.5. As is $5.50 — five dollars and fifty cents. Not 5 billion.
Tell your kids this was Parliament/Funkadelic:
…and tell your kids this was Bootsy Collins:
(Actually, it’s me and the band from the Tampa Bay Ukulele Getaway, which happened a couple of weekends ago.)