Top Ten Favorite Comic Strips from The Roanoke Times: A Bronze Medal for Doonesbury

Why do we have images of: 1) a brown rat; 2) colorful fire hydrants (the one with Oscar the Grouch is our favorite; and 3) a Clemson Tigers football helmet. Well, read below and you shall find out.

Our comic strip of the week for the comic strips in "The Roanoke Times," a newspaper based in Roanoke, Va., which covers much of southwest Virginia is "Pearls Before Swine." In one of the best overall comic strips in recent weeks, artist Stephan Pastis used 20 panels to show one of the strip's title characters, a mouse, having problems with a computer. We didn't realize until after reading the strip that the mouse was having problems with a mouse (as in a computer tool).

Here is our top ten:

1) Pearls Before Swine (yes the brown rat is in reference to this strip)

2) Get Fuzzy (this week's strip features a dog and a fire hydrant with little dialogue)

3) Doonesbury (great strip on a singles e-harmony style group for married people?!)

4) Speed Bump (the reason for the football helmet is because Dave Coverly's strip focused on a football huddle; our first choice was a Northwestern U football helmet)

5) Zits

6) Blondie

7) Agnes

8) Dilbert

9) Funky Winkerbean

10) Garfield


http://stephanpastis.wordpress.com/

College Volleyball Notebook: A Good Week for Bulldogs and Tigers

The Clemson Tigers went up to College Park, Md., to face their former/current ACC rival The University of Maryland  (we are not sure when college sports gerrymandering goes into effect) and the Tigers came away with a 3-1 victory thanks in large part to Mo Simmons (pictured bottom) a senior from Buford, Ga, who had 22 kills and 12 digs for the road team.

In the nation's capital (insert government shutdown joke here), George Washington University hosted Townson. And, in this case, it was the visiting rival team from Maryland that came over with a win in Washington, DC. For the home team Colonials, Kelsey Newman, a junior from Charlotte, NC, posted a match-high 18 kills. The final score was: Towson 3 GWU 1.

And, in the Ivy League, Kendall Plan (pictured top), the two-time Ivy League Player of the Year, delivered eight kills an 10 digs along with 23 assists for a home sweep of Brown.

Here are 15 scores from weekend action:

Western Carolina 3 Davidson 1

Wisconsin 3 Indiana 1

Winthrop 3 Charleston Southern 0

*Clemson 3 Maryland 1

Colorado State 3 New Mexico 2

Montana 3 Eastern Washington 1

*Towson 3 GWU 1

Pitt 3 Georgia Tech 0

USC 3 Utah 0

Georgia Southern 3 UNC-Greensboro 2

Brigham Young 3 Pacific 0

*Yale 3 Brown 0

Florida 3 Mississippi St. 0

Michigan State 3 Penn State 2

http://www.yalebulldogs.com/sports/w-volley/index

http://www.clemsontigers.com/SportSelect.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=28500&SPID=103711&SPSID=657821

http://www.gwsports.com/sports/w-volley/

http://www.nocturnalguy38.blogspot.com

Top 10 Things 2 Do in the Next Week (or so..........)

On occasion when something we want to post becomes too complicated, we resort to our proverbial old bag of tricks, which might also work for David Copperfield (for those of you in Tajikistan, he is an American magician).

And, one of our traditional entries, even dating back to our earliest entries way back in the stone ages of 2005, was a Top 10 Things To Do List; this effectively postpones our hopes to make fun of conservative newspaper columnist Cal Thomas.

So, here is our latest installment, we imagine at the BBC, they are never this desperate:

1) Taxes (the reason for the image of the vintages Mr. Professor children's calculators from the 1970s; I don't live in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, but if I did, I'd check in with Ronald A. Weiss)

2) Watch a tape of the University of North Carolina-Clemson baseball game that we recorded on Monday from ESPN-U (this is the reason for the image of a tiger; the Clemson mascot is a tiger with no name, but finding a suitable image of that tiger proved to be difficult and time-consuming as is this explanation)

3) Go to West Virginia

4) Eat a gyro

5) Get new library card

6) Read the Torah (It should be pointed out that I am not Jewish, but I did get a copy of the holy book for one dollar at an estate sale; the image below is of a synagogue in the Czech Republic).

7) Go through old records........as in stuff from bands like The Bee Gees

8) Write a poem (for myself, not for a woman- that never seems to work in real life)

9) Get stamps

10) Read the current issue of the Sunday "Washington Post." (We personally love how the woman always says the man that she is hooked up with in 'Date Lab' is never good enough or lives a few many Metro stops away from her!).

Greetings from Mister Frog

Yes, even though we know frogs are amphibians instead of reptiles, we are stubbornly featuring them as part of Reptile Week because every frog deserves his or her day.

The frog being featured here is the American bullfrog, which is usually green or yellow with a white belly. It can be found quite readily in southern states, such as Louisiana. We would give a shout out to Louisiana's governor Bobby Jindal, but we don't want to be mistaken for a Republican although Jindal did have the guts to criticize Mitt Romney for his sour grapes speech to major campaign contributors regarding his well-deserved loss to President Barack Obama.

Apparently, the difference between amphibians and reptiles are that amphibians are born as soft eggs in water then hatch into eggs whereas reptiles are born in shelled eggs. Zzzzzzzzz.........sorry, thought I was back in my 10th biology class at Ragsdale High School in Jamestown, NC, a suburb of Greensboro.*

Reptiles and amphibians can be seen at the San Diego Zoo though at the moment, it appears that a giant panda cub who was formally named "Little Grit" on Tuesday (the cub was born over the summer) is the latest animal celebrity at the park.

SIDEBAR: In ACC women's college volleyball action tonight, the home team Clemson Tigers won a tough 3-2 game (25-21, 16-25, 25-19, 16-25, 15-12) over the visiting Duke Blue Devils on Senior Night. Serenat Yaz, a Turkish player for the Tigers who wears number one, was among the four seniors who were honored for Senior Night. Yaz had 13 kills and 13 digs for Clemson. Moneisha Simmons, a junior from Bufford, Georgia, contributed with 14 kills and 7 digs in the victory for the home team.

Here are other results from ACC volleyball games from Friday night; the home teams are marked with the # symbol:

#Georgia Tech 3 Wake Forest 0

# UNC 3 Virginia Tech 0 (more details on this are available on our sister blog "The Daily Vampire:" http://www.nocturnalguy38.blogspot.com ).

#Maimi (Fla) 3 Boston College 0

#Florida State 3 Maryland 0

#North Carolina State 3 UVa 0

http://www.louisianatravel.com

http://www.coolamphibians.blogspot.com

http://www.sandiegozoo.org

http://www.clemsontigers.com

http://www.ragsdalemarchingband.org

*- We did not go to Ragsdale High School, but we hear that they have a great marching band!

Road Trip USA (1 of 20)_ A Night at the Opera

While we were listening to WVTF, the NPR station in Roanoke, Va., yesterday, I thought it was interesting that we heard the last minutes of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," which was being broadcast from Spartanburg, SC. Then, the next NPR show that aired was a live broadcast of the contemporary opera "Nixon in China," by the New York Met Opera.

All of this made me wonder how long it would take to get from Wade's Family Restaurant in Spartanburg (a city that is relatively close to Clemson University), which was mentioned in "Wait, Wait..." to the famed opera house (the opera pictured here is actually one of my favorites "Rigoletto.")

And, you get to take a guess here as to that answer...

Is it?:

a)10 hours and 17 minutes
b) 11 hours and 49 minutes
c) 12 hours and 28 minutes
d) 13 hours and 42 minutes

You would actually go through Roanoke while taking this trip!

SIDEBAR: Since I am a huge college gymnastics fan, I thought it would be interesting to mention that long-time powerhouse The University of Utah will be hosting Michigan on Friday. And, the Utes have a very unique promotion called Short Person Appreciation Night. Anyone who is under five feet tall gets in free! Today, happens to be the 19th birthday of sophomore Fumina Kobayashi of the Utes who is 5'2. Her teammate Nansy Damianova, a Canadian freshman from Montreal who speaks Bulgarian (?!), is 5'1.