The Chalkboard Manifesto Blog

I like this suggestion Brad made:

I say that you scratch the whole TV endeavor, and instead begin working on a satirical novel. Every Wednesday you could post snippets of humor! We know you’ve got it in you!

I will ponder some variant of this. In the meantime: Happy New Year!

I swear, whoever wrote this was tripping balls:

The young ice giant has a big problem: he wants to buy fish sticks, but he cannot remember how many and he has nine shopping lists in his basket. So he goes from igloo to igloo and shakes each. In each he listens to the delicious fish sticks bouncing off the igloo walls. When he thinks that the igloo in his hand has the same number of fish sticks as one of his shopping lists, he takes it home. When he gets home, there are no fish sticks in the igloo. Instead, wild and laughing Eskimo children tumble out of the igloo. Excitedly they shout, “Shake us again!” “That was great fun!” “This is super”, thinks the young ice giant. “Now, I have found some new friends to play with!” And, he promptly forgets all about his shopping lists.

5 points for the first person to figure out where this quote is from.

My fantasy football season is over, and I went from the #1 seed to a fourth place finish. We used Yahoo, and I really hated it. Does anyone have experience with ESPN or other sites for fantasy football?

I’m thinking about doing a Chalkboard Manifesto fantasy football league next year. (Sorry, I don’t watch any other sports.) Maybe 10-12 people, if I can get that many. I’ll ask again when football season rolls around. But if you’re interested, comment and reserve a spot now.

Since this is a new blog, I’m still experimenting with the format. I decided I’m going to drop writing about politics. I love talking about and writing about politics, but I’m not really qualified to write about it beyond chatting with close friends (at this point in my life, at least). Moreover, this blog probably isn’t the best place to post my political commentary. When you look through The Chalkboard Manifesto archives, I haven’t done too many political comics.

I’m thinking about replacing Wednesdays with writing about my favorite and least favorite commercials. Yeah, I watch way too much TV. I suppose Fridays will continue to be devoted to random stuff. We’ll see, I’m still experimenting.

Anyway, I’m loving everything about this Nike “Chalk” commercial:

The music is “Candyman” by Cornershop. I had to find the song after hearing the commercial.

When I had to transfer flights in Chicago, I was so worried that I might get snowed in. It was -5 and snowing. I pondered the worst case scenario, which was having to stay overnight. It actually wouldn’t have been too bad because I could stay in a hotel and watch all the good football games. Anyway, I did manage to make it out of Chicago, but my bag didn’t. They lost it. Needless to say, it was a rough day. I didn’t manage to update the comic for Monday. There is a comic scheduled for Wednesday (already drawn and uploaded), and I am on track for the rest of December.

I am tired of these unannounced breaks from updating. Here’s what’s going to happen for next year. I’m giving myself 10 days of vacation. So that’s three weeks worth of comics, plus an extra day. There will be times when I’m traveling, or overwhelmed because of schoolwork. I’ll need a day off from updating. I will notify all you readers ahead of time when I’m taking vacation days. And I will no longer feel guilty for not updating with this new vacation policy.

Enjoy your holidays, everyone. I’m changing the background for the comic web site to Christmas colors.

I’m flying across the country today. There is a greater than 0 chance that I may get snowed in somewhere along the way. This only concerns you because I may miss Monday’s comic.

Sorry, I am getting my ass kicked by finals. The Chalkboard Manifesto (the comic and the blog) is officially on hiatus until Monday, December 22.

I spent a lot of time thinking about shit last Friday. Specifically, on that graph, I messed around with several different variants of “oh shit!” on the y-axis. I considered “oh shit” and “oh shit oh shit” and “oh shit oh shit!” among others. In the end, I decided that 1) simpler was better and 2) exclamation points can be hilarious. I hope I made the right decision.

This Monday’s comic is just a general rule I have had for many years. The kinds of people who wear bow ties are just not right in the head. Mostly, I had Tucker Carlson in mind when I created this rule. Can you think of other prominent bow tie wearers?

It’s finals season here at my university, so I can’t guarantee the proper updating of this blog. There should be no problem with updating the comic on time.

By the way, one person commented on the MySpace/facebook issue. I actually don’t like either of them. One is full of spam (as noted by the commenter), and the other is full of creepiness. I don’t hardly use MySpace anymore, but I do use facebook. I’ll make it a goal to set some new privacy settings and then add a link so people can friend me on facebook. Don’t look for it anytime soon because of the aforementioned finals.

RANDOM THOUGHT: It would’ve been awesome to see someone dressed up as Jack Nicholson’s version of the Joker for last Halloween.

I got off track after Thanksgiving with comic updating, missing both last Monday and Wednesday. This Friday, though, I have an update. I don’t anticipate anymore missed updates throughout the rest of December. It is finals season at my university, but I’ll make sure I’m on top of things.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I’m taking the rest of the week off from blogging. Comic should update as normal, except for the vote incentives.