Top Ten Comic Strips from Sunday, Feb. 8th edition of "Herald-Journal" in Spartanburg, SC: We Love Bizarro

Greetings to our beloved blog readers in Latvia, Ireland and Mexico.

What do Marvin the Martian, Lily Tomlin and U.S. Olympic skier Bode Miller have in common? Well, they each relate to three of the comic strips than we rank in our top ten of strips that appear in the Sunday edition of "The Herald-Journal" in Spartanburg, SC, not to be confused with newspapers with same or similar names in Durham, NC, and Huntington, WVa.!

Marvin the Martian is our ode "Bizarro" in which aliens present a cat to their leader and promise he will make for some nifty Youtube videos. Aliensand UFOs  were also featured in "Ziggy," a strip not carried by the "HJ."

Second place goes to "Doonesbury" which takes in an office. We thought it was somewhere like a call center which made us think of Lily Tomlin though when she did these comedy skits for "Laugh-In" circa 1968, they probably didn't have call centers.

Third place went to "Dustin," where the title characters decide to go skiing over the title character's mother's strong objections. Perhaps, they headed to Telluride, Colorado, or Park City, Utah...........


Here is our top ten:

1) Bizarro

2) Doonesbury

3) Dustin

4) Get Fuzzy

5) Garfield

6) Dilbert

7) Close to Home

8) Snuffy Smith

9) Gasoline Alley

10) For Better or For Worse.....

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: The Stars of "9 to 5"

Tonight, we thought we'd go back to the days when we blogged about the degrees of separation given stars were from Kevin Bacon through the web site The Oracle of Bacon, devised by computer scince at the University of Virginia a decade and a half ago.

With that in mind, we focus on the three female leads for "9 to 5" (1980), which was turned into a tv sitcom and a Broadway musical. The film starred Jane Fonda (pictured top), Dolly Parton (pictured bottom) in her film debut and Lily Tomlin.

None of the women have actually been in a film with Bacon, and each of them are two degrees removed from his.

Fonda was in "Stanley and Iris" (1989) with Robert DeNiro and he was in turn in "Sleepers" (1995) with Bacon.

Parton was in "Miss Congeniality 2" which I reluctantly saw at a movie theatre in Guatemala City, Guatemala, with Stephen Tobolowsky who was in  "Murder in the First" (1995) with Bacon.

Tomlin was in the Woody Allen film "Shadows and Fog" (1991) which co-starred Peter McRobbie who was in "Sleepers" with Bacon.

Parton will be performing in Portland, Ore., on June 8th for Dolly Parton Hoot Night (we are not making this up!).

Amazingly enough, Bacon is also only two degrees removed from early film star Lillian Gish and Shirley Temple, who hasn't made films since she was a child star. But, he is a full three degrees from Mary Pickford, a star in the 1920s, and Turkish actress Turkan Soray, who is known as the queen of Turkish cinema.

http://www.oracleofbacon.org

http://www.dollyparton.com

http://www.portlandlive.com