You must follow, leave this academic factory

A while ago I went to the department's business office down in Hillcrest, and the young woman I spoke to at the front desk gave me a curious look and asked if I had TAed logic several years ago. This was surprising if for no other reason than the fact that hardly anyone actually attended those logic sections, since they were optional and people generally underestimated the difficulty of the course. But also I guess I just never think about how many former students of mine are running around...it must be...jeez, at least 500 or so?
Yeah, so come to think of it, I'm surprised that doesn't happen more often. But it does remind me of another, weirder coincidence: it turns out that both of the PIs in my lab have kids who went to Pomona. If you have ever speculated about the existence of some kind of massive secret creche created for the upbringing of academia's offspring, I am pretty sure it is over by the 10 freeway and Indian Hill.

About a month ago, I succumbed to weakness and went to McDonalds to have a mushroom and swiss hamburger. Now, after doing so, I was all ready to wax poetic about the inexplicable magic of the crappy fast food joint mushroom and swiss burger, describing, in loving detail, the mysterious process that joins substandard meat, cheese, and mushrooms into something wonderful, via an alchemical transformation that transcends human understanding. Then, a few days ago I had another one and discovered that a thick layer of mayonnaise or some other fat derivative, in which the mushrooms were suspended, was masquerading as part of the swiss cheese. Shows what I know about human understanding, I guess.

We'll return, dear, to the sky

Comic-con update continued:
There's not a lot else to say, I guess. I talked with some neat comic people (the nicest and most interesting among those being Miriam Katin and Jim Ottaviani), and saw a bunch of people in costume. Perhaps most striking were the hordes of replicants running around. There must've been like 30 Prises, several Battys and Zhoras, and a couple Rachaels. I have since heard that it was part of a promotional thing for the Blade Runner re-release.

In other comic news, Warren Ellis is going to be taking over Astonishing X-Men, and Koala Wallop has a lot of really good comics (I've linked to Rice Boy and possibly Dresden Codak, but how about Minus? (thanks to Chris and Simon for that)).

Also Kelly has a show underway and lots of other exciting things happening

Again and again and again and again

Sorry I've been away for so long! I've had lots of things to write about, but I was really busy with comic-con, and then I was busy being sick, and in between I was busy catching up on my sleep from both of those things.

The pickles were a modest success. Comic-con was fun. I'll probably say more about it later. For now, I'll tell you about the panels I saw...oddly, I actually only went to a couple this year. One was a whole bunch of people from the Vertigo imprint talking about upcoming titles. Some of them sounded really neat (WHAT), but the panel was basically a really long, cool, press release. The other panel was much more lively and entertaining, and had people from the Babylon 5 Lost Tales thing, which I am ordering a copy of right now.
The Comic Arts Conference was also reasonably enjoyable; I had some interesting conversations with people, and on the whole it was all less intimidating than I feared, and afterwards I got a cheeseburger with ham on it (being of a literal bent, it was important to me to put the "ham" back in "hamburger").

Oh also I guess maybe you would like to see my Edgeworth costume. There are now pictures of me on the Telltale Games blog (I bought a copy of Sam and Max at their booth) and comicbookresources.com (I ran into Pinguino and said Hello), but I think the most flattering one is Marisa's, so that's what I'm linking to. But lots of other people asked to take pictures, and let me tell you, it is a pretty weird feeling to know that you are probably floating around all sorts of strangers' flickrstreams.