Mike Mignola (creator of Hellboy, for those of you who aren’t into comic books and don’t immediately recognize the name) has created a pilot for a new animated show, a comedic horror series, on the Sci-Fi Channel called The Amazing Screw-On Head. Fans of Mignola’s signature style will not be disappointed; the art is exactly what you’d expect from one of his comic books.

The pilot airs tonight at 10:30, but if you can’t wait that long (I certainly couldn’t), you can see the entire thing on the web right now. What’s it about? Well:

"President Abraham Lincoln’s top spy… a bodyless head known only as Screw-On Head… aided by his multitalented manservant, Mr. Groin, and by his talking canine cohort, Mr. Dog.

When arch-fiend Emperor Zombie steals an artifact that will enable him to threaten all life on Earth, the task of stopping him is assigned to Screw-on Head."

Yes, it’s weird. And silly. Go watch it anyway.

Vacations are always nice, but it’s easily just as nice to be coming back home to one’s own bed and creature comforts. This was a good vacation, but I’m sure happy to be on the return track right now.

More about the Con and other activities later. Right now I have to finish packing for the journey home.

I’ve been on vacation for the last couple of days in San Diego, attending the Comic-Con for the first time in years, and staying with family in the area.

For the last couple of days, I’ve also been struggling to get my laptop online here at the ancestral family estate, which uses Cox as its (cable) broadband service. Since there’s only a single G5 iMac here, there hasn’t been a need to set up a router, or, for that matter, even a WAP.

Quaint.

Even so, I figured it would be a slam-dunk to simply take the Ethernet cable out of the iMac and plug it into my laptop, thusly going online using my own machine. No dice. After a little bit of digging, it turns out that Cox cable actually locks down access by the MAC addresses of the single-line cable modem and the computer connected to it. Want another machine to connect? Cox forces its users to purchase a Cox-installed router and cabling for the usual bullshit reasons like supposedly improved reliability and what-not, but it’s basically to mask a money grab.

Their users are already paying for their bandwidth; the addition of another machine on a home network doesn’t alter the size of the pipe they’re supposed to be providing. There are hacks to get around this, most of which involve cloning MAC addresses, but after a hard day of relaxation I just don’t feel up to compugeekery. Cox must figure the bulk of their users don’t realize what a ripoff it is.

Lame.

The 2006 World Cup headbutt will no doubt be soon forgotten, despite its current infamy.

In the meantime, the forum goons over at Something Awful have been busy bringing the funny to the soccer field.

Yesterday as I was driving home, I was listening to the radio, and was treated to what was surely the most underwhelming advertising claim I’ve heard in a long time.

I don’t remember exactly what the commercial was for—something very macho; it featured a booming male voice and a monster truck rally-style echo effect. Car parts or boat accessories, maybe. Doesn’t matter. The whole point of the spot was to entice customers into the store by bragging about the supposedly astonishing breadth of their inventory. Suddenly, the announcer’s voice dropped a couple octaves as the reverb dial went all the way up to eleven for the delivery of the kickass tagline payload:

"If we don’t have it…. It’s not in stock."

Wow, um, impressive… or not.

If you’re trying to use examples to make a point, you generally want those examples to be impeccable. Suppose a parent is trying to modify a child’s behavior, to get him to clean up his room more often. The rhetorical question “why can’t you be more like your brother?” is probably best left unasked if said brother did in fact keep an orderly room, but is also currently in prison for armed robbery, arson, fraud, and murder.

If you were trying to prod an increasingly authoritarian regime into more representative and emancipated governance, one might mention successful democracies like, say, Sweden, India, Canada, Holland, or relatively recent success stories like Poland or the Czech Republic. Violent, uncertain places like Iraq would probably be pretty far down on the list. I mean, seriously, what fool would hold up contemporary Iraq as a good example of democracy?

Oh, right.