Greetings to our blog readers in England, Pakistan and Malaysia......

Happy 89th birthday to the great Mel Brooks.......

Today, we look at our top ten favorite comic strips from "The Roanoke Times" in Roanoke, Va.

The winner is Stephan Pastis, of "Pearls Before Swine" fame, whom like Jerry Seinfeld did on sitcom television, makes brilliant fun of every day annoying occurrences, like people trying to start a second line for the same bank teller (Image #1: a piggy bank is in reference to the strip).

Second place goes to Dave Coverly's "Speed Bump" in which a third cave man makes stone drawings with his food which seemingly irritates his mates. Our initial choice for an image to go with this was "Captain Caveman," but we couldn't find a suitable image.

Lastly, third place goes to Darby Conley's "Get Fuzzy" in which Satchel the Dog sees a headline in a newspaper that Australia nearly executed Johnny Depp's dogs. We will send Javier the Intern to verify if this actually did happen.

Here is our top ten:

1. Pearls Before Swine

2. Speed Bump

3. Get Fuzzy

4. Non Sequitur

5. Doonesbury

6. Dilbert

7. Jump Start

8. Agnes

9. Garfield

10. Zits

http://www.gocomics.com

Our Favorite Comics from Sunday, Jan. 18th from Comics Kingdom: Bleeker Rules Again.....

Greetings to our blog readers in Switzerland, Malaysia and Zimbabwe as well as those of you who reside in Cong. David Price's (D-NC) congressional district, which I believe includes Chapel Hill, Durham and Fayetville, so Cong. Price represents Chapel Hill on Capitol Hill (Stephan Pastis might like the pun, well maybe not!)....

"Pearls Before Swine," which is Pastis' comic strip is not actually distributed by Comics Kingdom, but "Hi and Lois" is. Today, we take a slight departure from the norm,  and focus on our favorite comic strips from the distributor rather than a given Sunday newspaper. This gives us a chance to rank "Zippy the Pinhead," one of our favorite comic strips that has a loyal cult following but is not in many newspapers, especially those in small markets, like (presumably) Altoona, Pa, Dayton, Ohio, and Charleston, W.Va.

This week, Bill Griffith, who draws "Zippy" featured an homage to the old "Nancy" comic strip from yesteryear.

Our images for today are from 1) bread bowls, which are featured in the Sunday comic strip for "Six Chix" where a café is literally serving everything imaginable in a bread bowl, 2) "Are You Being Served?," an old English sitcom which our fellow blogger and friend Chris Knight from Reidsville, NC, adores for the comic strip "Retail" and 3) a shark for "Sherman's Lagoon."

Here is our Comics Kingdom top ten:

1) Bleeker the Rechargeable Dog

2) Bizarro

3) Zippy the Pinhead

4) Six Chix

5) Retail

6) Between Friends

7) Sherman's Lagoon

8) The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee

9) Take It from the Tinkersons

10) Piranha Club

http://bleekercomics.com/

http://tinkersons.com/

http://www.zippythepinhead.com

http://www.tnaqua.org/

http://www.ncaquariums.com/

http://scaquarium.org/

Top 10 Cities We Want to See in the World: When in Rome....

Greetings to our blog readers in Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo, alas none of your cities made it into the top ten, but one city in Asia got through.

The reason why Rome (top image) and Miami (middle image, Miami Dolphins cheerleaders) rank so high is because I've been to the airports in both cities, but I've never had a chance to visit either of them directly.

Vancouver, Canada (bottom image), was a place I had planned to visit in 1994, but I ended up going to Toronto and Montreal instead.

This is a companion entry to our Daily Vampire entry (see link)

Here is our top ten:

1. Rome, Italy

2. Miami, Fla. USA

3. Vancouver, BC, Canada

4. Marrakesh, Morocco

5. Buenos Aires, Argentina

6. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

7. Stockholm, Sweden

8. Barcelona, Spain

9. Berlin, Germany

10. Kuala Lampur, Malaysia

http://www.lonelyplanet.com

http://www.roughguides.com

Today is Our 9th Birthday....

Greetings to our blog readers in Malaysia, Jordan and Argentina.

It was indeed nine years when we posted our very first entry on here.

We must profess that we had no idea what to blog about when we first started. In fact, one thing we posted was our very own grocery list!

Quotes from Off the Beat and Path (6 of 6): Courtney Love

Greetings to our blog readers in Dubai, Egypt, France, Malaysia, Mexico and Greece .


Today, we quote Courtney, a pioneering female punk and heavy singer, who is now 50 years old! She was the wife of the late Kurt Cobain of Nirvana at the time of his suicide some 20 years ago.

Here is Love's quote:

"Being a rock star is like being a cult leader_you have to be in your own religion."

Sunday Night Tweets: Be on the Look-Out for Runaway Cheetahs

During our last entry, we said that we were going to send Dutch Ambassador Rudolf Bekink (pictured center) a card to congratulate the Netherlands' successful third place  finish at the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.

Alas, a Malaysian Airlines plane carrying 385 passengers, about half of which were Dutch citizens, was shot down by Russian separatist terrorists in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, so the Netherlands has gone from a period of joy to tragedy in a very short time span. The plane was in route from Amsterdam, Holland, to Kuala Lampur, Malaysia.

It also been a disastrous week for Palestinian-Israeli relations as Israel has taken defensive measures by bombing Palestinian areas in the West Bank, killing scores of women and children, which also coincides with the Muslim Ramadan holiday.

But, we do have some light-hearted tweets as well; let's take a look:

1) Washington DC News: Pro-Palestinian Groups march to the White House.

2) Pittsburgh Post Gazette: Man arrested after barricading himself, and a 2-year-old in a Mount Washington apartment.

3) Mark Duplass (actor/filmmaker): "The Master" is now streaming on Netflix. Do it. Like now!

4) The Onion: This week, last year FBI offered $1 million for any information on cheetahs (see top image)

5) Netherlands Embassy: The Dutch embassy in DC will open a condolence register for victims of MH17 this Monday and Tuesday from 10 a.m. to noon, and from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.

6) Dallas Morning News: Dallas police handing out Slurpee tickets to kids for being good (Bottom image, actually of a 7-11 in Japan).

7) Jeremiah Owyang: Seriously, the current news cycle is morbid and bleak. Hoping for a better week, planet earth.

UVA Beats Virginia Tech in Women's Volleyball

Greetings to our blog-readers in Ireland, Malaysia and Greece.

Though this blog has a slightly pro-Hokie leading (and an even more liberal bias; our apologies to Jonathan V. Last, a senior writer at "The Weekly Standard"), we did want to salute the University of Virginia's women's volleyball for their home win in Charlottesville over the Virginia Tech Hokies from Blacksburg.

The final score was UVA winning 3-1 (23-25, 25-19, 25-18, 25-19) with Natalie Bausback leading the Cavaliers with 17 kills and six blocks. Toni Jonowski had 13 kills for the 'Hoos and Haley Kole had 11 kills. The Cavs' are now 17-13 overall, and 10-8 in the ACC.

For the Hokies, Kathryn Caine had 17 kills and Lindsey Owens had 11 kills. The Hokies remain the team with a better record at 21-11 overall and 9-9 in the ACC.

This was the first time UVA won both matches against Va. Tech since 2005.

SIDEBAR: Our tweet of the night comes from our good friend Ali Arikan, a film and culture writer for "Slant" magazine. Arikan resides in his native Istanbul, Turkey, where it is now 9:30 a.m. (seven hours ahead of New York and Atlanta). Here is his tweet: "Another weird dream last night. I was at a library trying to pick out a book with Elizabeth Banks, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Peter Labuza."

Banks is an America actress (we believe she played Laura Bush in Oliver Stone's "W"), Ceylan is an acclaimed Turkish film director whose films include the brilliant "Uzak/Distance" and Labuza is a New York-based film critic.

http://www.virigniasports.com

http://www.slantmagazine.com

http://www.weeklystandard.com (not an endorsement)

Quotes from American Presidents (1 of 16): William McKinley

Greetings to our blog-readers in Malaysia, Colombia and Egypt.

Today, we begin our series quoting American presidents from yesterday. On this blog, we are quoting presidents 25-40, and thus we begin with William McKinley. Most young people probably recognize the name William McKinley from the cult tv show "Freaks and Geeks," which took place at William McKinley High School in suburban Michigan.

There actually is a real William McKinley High School quite far away from Michigan in Honolulu, Hawaii.

McKinley was one of several presidents from Ohio, but many of them did not have much luck as two of the four assassinated presidents (James Garfield being the other besides McKinley was the second). McKinley was gunned down by a left-wing extremist in Buffalo, NY, in 1801, who was later executed. McKinley is actually considered by many historians to be the most right-wing president in American history, even ahead of Ronald Reagan.

McKinley has seen a bit of hoopla lately as right-wing scholars have written many articles and even books about him, and we imagine he is loved at the Libertarian think-tank the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, whose views we pretty much strongly differ with. But, we'll give their link any way.

Here is the quote from McKinley:

"In the time of darkest defeat, victory may be the nearest."

PS: We thought we'd throw in our favorite line from Sunday's "Roanoke Times" comics page. This quip is from "Dilbert": "Go sit at your desk or you're fired." (no exclamation point!)......


http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/presidents/williammckinley

http://www.cato.org/

http://www.dilbert.com

Image to Fill Space: Summit Skelteon Head

Greetings to our blog readers in Peru, Malaysia and Denmark............we are pressed for time today, so please enjoy this image of a Summit Skeleton Head. They retails between $25-75 depending on demand for the product.

Blogging in Three and a Half Minutes (or less).....Those Silly Board Games

We were initially going to go with Colonel Mustard, a character from the board game "Clue," which was actually made into a film! Of course, it wasn't that good. But, instead we are going with an image of Sherlock Holmes.

Our question today is which one of these board games was our favorite game during our youth.

And, greeting today to our blog readers in South Africa, Israel, Dubai, Malaysia and France.

Is the answer:

A)  Clue

B) Trivial Pursuit

C) Scrabble

D) Operation

E) Monopoly

Blogging in 60 Seconds or Less_ the Turkish Word for Octopus is.........

ahtapot........

Javier the Intern (a fictional person) is working diligently for a series of more substantial blog entries this week.

Stay tuned..........hope all is well in El Salvador, Latvia, Malaysia or wherever else you are visiting us from!

Sunday Night Tweets- Malaysia Airlines Wishes You a Happy Monday

As most of you know by now George McGovern, the long-time U.S. Senator from South Dakota died in his home state early this morning at age 90; we will have a tribute to him later in the week. One of his campaign buttons from his race for the White House against Richard Nixon in 1972 is pictured above. We also have an image of Liberace because it was the best thing we could think of of for gay marriage. And, we were not able to find an image of a flight attendant from Malaysia Airlines so we are going with this image of Christina Ricci from the 2011 tv series "Pan Am," which never quite got off the ground....pardon the pun.

Here are tonight's tweets from the 8:00-9:00 p.m. hour on Sunday night, New York time:

1) @ABC11_WVTD (ABC11 WVTD, a tv station in Raleigh, NC): "Vice president's son Beau Biden makes stop in the Triangle."

2) @Markknoller (Mark Knoller is the CBS News White House correspondent): "Earlier today, Pres. Obama issued statement on passing of George McGovern calling him a 'generous, kind, honorable man. He will be missed."

3) @davidcnsswanson (David Swanson, an author from Charlottesville, Va.): "What Senator George McGovern Got Right_ Let's Try Democracy."

4) @PeterBeinart (Peter Beinart is a columnist for "The Daily Beast"): "I will never forget reading McGovern's 1970 speech where he says 'this chamber reeks of blood' during Vietnam, would any pol say that today?"

5) @LunarAnticsZeno (Zeno is from what we can tell some sort of comic book character; and yes he apparently tweets as do family cats and dead celebrities): "The difference between stupidity and genius has its limits, Albert Einestein."

6) @TeaPartyCat (Top Conservative Cat, actually a liberal blogger who rakes Republicans over the coals): "Romney changed his position on gay marriage, but since he was changing back to a previously abandoned position, it's not a big deal."

7) @MAS (Malaysia Airlines, and yes it is Malaysia Airlines as opposed to Malaysian Airlines we checked with our correspondent in Kuala Lampur to be sure): "Hopefully your Monday will be much better. Have a great Monday, and an incredible week ahead."

http://www.malaysiaairline.com

Our Favorite Olympic Athletes- Don't Mess with Katie Taylor

Here is a sample of our favorite female athletes at the 2012 London Olympics:

1.Fabian Caludino, 27, volleyball, Brazil_ The Brazilian star who is one of the very best spikers in the world will help her team try to win gold over a talented Team America on Saturday; Brazil won the competition at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

2) Elisa DiFrancisca, 24, fencing (foil), Italy_ The Italian fencer is both a star and a sex symbol in Italy as she has often posed in bikinis for photo shoots. During the London games, she won two gold medals. One for individual foil and one for team foil.

3) Evgenia Kanaeva, 22, rhythmic gymnastics, Russia (pictured bottom)_ The competition in this sport just got started today, and it looks to be a battle between Kaaneva who won gold in Beijing and her Russian teammate Daria Dmitriea.

4) Pandelela Rinonog, 19, diving, Malaysia (pictured center)_ The Malaysian flag-bearer won bronze today in platform diving; it was the first medal for Malaysia outside of badminton.

5) Christine Sinclair, 29, soccer, Canada_ One really has to feel for Sinclair for scoring a hat trick in the team's double-overtime semi-final loss to the United States; Team America won gold today by beating Japan 2-1.

6) Katie Taylor, 26, boxing, Ireland (pictured top)_ The Irish boxer won gold today, as many had expected, by defeating Sofya Octigava in the lightweight division. Taylor won the first and only gold for Ireland at the games so far in the process.