Legends of Philadelphia Comedy: Fastball Pitcher Bob Gutierrez.

Constantin Brancusi, Cock, 1924. Apparently cocks have undergone a lot of revisions since then. Ha ha ha ha. Via Cave to Canvas.

via I Don't Know What to Title This

The elusive Cheener Dog, seen here in the wild. via Carabaas

The circle of life, via scrotumcoat

Hepburn speaks! via Generic Eric

What's the deal with bananas? I mean, c'mon! Via Haw-lin.

I drew Orson Welles twice. The first one looks more like him, and the second one looks more like an angry owl.

Talkadelphia interviewed me on their podcast. Wasn't that nice of them?

via Carlovely

via Boing Boing

"True words are not beautiful. Beautiful words are not true."

—Lao-tzu

Wow, Ernest Hemingway can even make dress pant shorts look manly! Did you know Hemingway liked to write standing up? He did. You can see his standing desk to the right there.

GPOY. Photo by Jonathan Pushnik

not a crook

Is Obama a Muslim?

"The more times a false claim is repeated, the more likely people are to be exposed to it. The fewer people exposed to a false claim, the less likely it is to spread. It is also important not to repeat false claims because people are more likely to judge familiar claims as true. As false claims are repeated, they become more familiar and thus may come to seem more true to people."

--Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, discussing why the sheer existence of polls that ask, "Do you think Obama is a Muslim?" increase the chances of people saying "yes."

I only talk to people in the hopes that they'll make an offhand reference to one of my many accomplishments.

Me: Hey, how's that cupcake?

Friend: It's pretty sweet.

Me: How sweet is it?

Friend: Almost as sweet as that 360 you just did on your skateboard.

Me: [mission accomplished] Well, see you later.

"I like pigs.
Dogs look up to us.
Cats look down on us.
Pigs treat us as equals."
--Sir Winston Churchill

The Ministry of Secret Jokes

Tonight, 3/14, 8pm, upstairs at Fergie's Pub, 1214 Sansom St.

Performing Standup:

Noah Goldstein

The Lucas Brothers

Tom Cassidy

Joey Dougherty

James Hesky

Special Powerpoint Presentation: the Internet Exploration Society.

Special Event: Heckle!

Three brave comics will be heckled by the audience and must fight back using only their wits and a wooden plank with a nail in it. Chip Chantry, Darryl Charles, and Pat Barker will compete.

Omniana Battle!

This is going to be an incredible battle: Joe Mayo will be defending his title against Pat Barker. As you know, Mayo is undefeated and has won five battles in a row. Pat Barker, you may not know, fought in the Ministry of Secret Jokes's very first Omniana battle where he defeated Kent Haines. Pat has distinguished himself as a giant killer, taking on heavyweights such as Steve Gerben and Chip Chantry. How will he fare against Mayo, who beat Chip only last month? Folks, you don't want to miss this fight!

Six Writing Tips from John Steinbeck

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

via Brain Pickings, again. Sorry, I know I just posted a Brain Pickings link one post ago, but I couldn't help myself, they were both so good. I will stop now.

Henry Miller's 11 Commandments of Writing

via Brain Pickings

Alain de Botton: Success

One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, et cetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

--Alain de Botton, via the New Shelton Wet Dry

The New Shelton Wet Dry is a blargh that posts really interesting excerpts about psychology, biology, science—stuff about people and human nature. Almost everything on the site is fascinating, stunning, and revealing.

via Unique You Nork

Creepy bird skeleton. Toni Garrn by Greg Kadel, via colordonor/visual mixtape.

Good Cop, Dadaist Cop, via xkcd

Another Moleskine portrait. This one is supposed to be Bing Crosby, although it doesn't look much like him. I think I made his eyes a little too large and not sleepy enough. Bing always looks like he just woke up. I also made his forehead too small. WHATEVER! Deal with it.

The Art of the Self-Portrait: Young Gary Larson, elementary school photo. Scanned from the Prehistory of the Far Side.

"Sometimes you're just all by yourself. There's no one to laugh with, there's nothing to laugh at, you really have nothing else to do, you're just hanging out all by yourself enjoying some solitude perhaps. So that's a good time for a solitary laugh."

Gentle on my Mind: Dean Martin

via kenikila

Peter Mendelsund on cover design

Peter Mendelsund [associate art director at Knopf] wrote a great, concise essay about book cover design that concerns itself mainly with the formal approaches to solving a cover: Do you illustrate a character? a feeling? an idea? a location? Etc. Mendelsund frames the whole dialogue by showing examples of different covers for the novel Lolita.

When setting out to design a book jacket for a work of fiction, whether we are aware of it or not, we designers are picking our subject matter from a limited set of bins. Though the choices we can make as designers are unlimited, the categories that define most of the choices we make when we pluck these ideas from their native fictions, are, on the face of it, quite easy to list. 

To wit, some broad categories for fiction jacketing subject matter:  

1. “Character”Put a person on the cover. Frequently a winning design tactic, though also tricky— as we designers don’t want to rob readers of their satisfying acts of imagination. One should always show a portion of a character rather than the whole magilla. Body parts: hands, feet, hair, ears, etc are, and should be, more common than full frontal facial disclosure. Much of our work is spent hiding, occluding, interrupting faces.)

Read the rest of the essay at his site, Jacket Mechanical

Steampunk AT-AT, via Are 2

Van Gogh, Girl in the Woods, 1882.

Holy shit, look at this book cover. So beautiful! via Book Cover Lover.

Do you want to see the most beautiful thing I ever filmed?

Scientists studying the psychological and physical effects of various emotions face a unique problem when conducting experiments: How can they elicit particular emotions in their research subjects?

From an article in Smithsonian:

Scientists testing emotions in research subjects have resorted to a variety of techniques, including playing emotional music, exposing volunteers to hydrogen sulfide (“fart spray”) to generate disgust or asking subjects to read a series of depressing statements like “I have too many bad things in my life” or “I want to go to sleep and never wake up.” They’ve rewarded test subjects with money or cookies to study happiness or made them perform tedious and frustrating tasks to study anger.

“In the old days, we used to be able to induce fear by giving people electric shocks,” Levenson says. 

Ethical concerns now put more constraints on how scientists can elicit negative emotions. Sadness is especially difficult. How do you induce a feeling of loss or failure in the laboratory without resorting to deception or making a test subject feel miserable? 

“You can’t tell them something horrible has happened to their family, or tell them they have some terrible disease,” says William Frey II, a University of Minnesota neuroscientist who has studied the composition of tears. 

But as Gross says, “films have this really unusual status.” People willingly pay money to see tearjerkers—and walk out of the theater with no apparent ill effect. As a result, “there’s an ethical exemption” to making someone emotional with a film, Gross says.

Read the rest of the article by Richard Chin at Smithsonian.

J. Lo's Oscar Dress: Who gives a shit or Nobody gives a shit? Via Gawker.

More portraits. I'm enjoying my little Moleskine sketchbook. This portrait is John Steinbeck. Don't know what John Steinbeck looks like? Well take my word for it, he looks exactly like this. Please don't bother checking google image search, you'll just be wasting your time. Yeah, in real life his left eye kind of floats up in a weird way like it's doing in my drawing.

I don't understand it, but I like it. Via uronelle