Faster Cars and Smellier Air

A muppet, a wiki, and a B-52 member all intersect at one single web page. Truly the highest and best use of the Internet.

This year, I outfitted my Festivus Pole with an ornaments rig.

If you didn’t watch TV in the Nineties and don’t read the Style Section, Festivus was created by American Philanthropist and Inventor, Frank Costanza, as a less commercialized alternative to more familiar and incompletely-secularized winter holidays.

As a convert from one of those holidays, I had a lot of cool ornaments lying around, but no tree to put them on. Would it be against the rules to put them on the Festivus Pole? According to Costanza:

instead, there’s a pole. It requires no decoration. I find tinsel distracting. [emphasis mine]

So decoration wasn’t required, but it wasn’t forbidden, either - as long as I avoided the “distraction” of tinsel.

The next problem was how to hang ornament hooks on a thin, Aluminum cylinder.

Many Festivus observers favor heavy, solid poles. My own is a light, segmented, telescopic pole from Home Depot. These are typically attached to specially-made clippers, cybernetic claws, etc. Because the top segment collapses into the bottom one, my pole is not uniformly cylindrical, which enabled me to suspend a chicken wire sinusoid from the joint.

This design, inspired by the work of George Hakkio, has three attractive features:

1. the appropriately inexpensive, even shabby aspect of the chicken wire
2. gobs of usable surface area
3. the entire rig can pivot to be viewed at any angle

Here are the results.

Note my great-grandmother Mary Kathryn Moir’s hand-made angels, kitten, sled, boots, clowns and elephant, as well as the traditional California Sea Otter (from Shani’s trip to Sea Otter Shirts in Monterey) at the rig zenith.

The base is a display box the folks at Home Depot let me have. The pole’s bottom fits snuggly into a (hidden) slot.

After covering the top with a sock to protect my ceiling, I extended the pole out and locked it at a length ever so slightly higher than my living room. Then, I wedged it in vertically.

Happy Festivus, everyone!

Photos from San Diego Comic-Con last month.

I’ve started a new science webcomic called Sandals. I will try to post new installments 4 to 5 times a month.

I’ve always wondered about the significance of those little numbers on the caps of drawing pens. Were they tenths of a millimeter of line thickness? Tip diameter? What?

I finally broke down and wrote the company. The awful truth: just like Newman revealed about zip codes on Seinfeld: They’re meaningless!

I readily concede that I’m not entirely objective on this, but Balloonist v1.0 has been released, and it is keen.

Tom the Dancing Bug is my favorite comic in current production.

Check out the typeface on the roundtable studio’s wallpaper of this week’s installment.