A Comic From The Past

As is standard for a Saturday night, I was rummaging around through old folders and notebooks in the cabinet of my desk when I came across four panels of information that were generated approximately 360-some odd days ago, but remains relentlessly relevant even today. I don't believe I've shared this with the internet - a cursory glance through this site's archives yields nothing - so while it's certainly not my best work, I think the last panel alone is strong enough to warrant its dissemination. Now, a year after it was drawn, it is robbed of the context that would have been essentially meaningless to all but two people aside from myself. This improves matters, I think.

The First two-and-a-half Hours of 2009 - What you need to know

1) it is 2009 - this is important for reasons not worth going into here.
2) it is 8 degrees in the area where I am. Apparently when variables like wind and awfulness are factored in the outside world feels like -22 degrees. This is hard even to begin to understand, especially if you come from a time period or society that lacks the concept of negative numbers.
3) about 16,000 people worldwide have died since it became 2009 in the EST timezone.
4) I was wrong about a number of things in my predictive post regarding 2008. This included what the best movie of the year would be (I said Brothers Bloom which was pushed back until 2009 after first simply being delayed twice - shit, this year's best movie was, of course, Wall•E), the best video game (I guessed the most recent iteration of Smash Brothers when in fact it was Braid), and I was wrong about how I would abandon this blog - instead I just started that other one. What was I right about? I predicted we would elect a new president - check, and I was right about the best album.
5) That's about it

I Forgot to Tell You about Al Pacino vs Robert Deniro Week

And I am infinitely sorry, I can’t believe it slipped my mind for the better part of a month. The trouble was that my scanner wasn’t working properly, and then I set the materials and records aside and buried them under someone else's stuff, and didn’t find them until about twelve minutes ago when I was looking for-

You know what? That's not important.

Important: The Second Annual Al Pacino Vs Robert De Niro tournament.
When: You missed it, it’s over.
What: People vote to show their opinion of who is better.
Why: Because while at work I sit at a desk about 12 feet from 6500 (and counting) DVDs, and not enough of them get checked out on the merits of whether or not they speak to Robert de Niro or Al Pacino being superior to one another.
How did it Turn Out: Robert de Niro won, which was not really a surprise given that his volume of work is, for the most part, more watchable. Pacino won last year, mostly because it wasn’t a real competition that time, and more just a weekend when we watched Dog Day Afternoon and Scent of a Woman and Taxi Driver, and you know how those stack up*. I wish that the library had Midnight Run† so I could have put that on display and declared De Niro the winner five seconds after the tournament began, rather than after a week and a half. Oh well.
The Best Part: it was illustrated.




Anyway: I hope this annual contest is not rendered moot by the upcoming Righteous Kill.


*If you don’t know: Taxi Driver is just ok, Dog Day Afternoon is excellent, Scent of a Woman is very good.

†Midnight Run is the best.