Korben My Man

• Hey hey hey that's Bird Turds number eleven, buddy!

• Dear Camdonians, please send pics of the Crawfish Festival. I miss that shit.



• This is the new video from The Roots, which, yes, makes "Rising Up" the lead single from Rising Down, since I guess ?uestlove saw that one episode of Tyra and decided that "Birthday Girl" doesn't officially exist or whatever.

I wonder what it's like to be Black Thought. Like, aside from being the most slept-on MC with the highest profile, you know, ever. But also, like. When ?uestlove and them are like "Okay, Player, we're going to go be Jay-Z's band - which is essentially like if Jay was the MC in The Roots instead of you - or do The Star Spangled Banner on The Colbert Report or some shit. So. Latrons," what does Black Thought do?

If it was me, I'd've quit a long time ago. Because, I mean. On some level, how is the drummer going to treat the frontman like a fuckin' backup dancer?



• Last night I was at work and "Five Years" came on. David Bowie is completely on one in this performance. I think it's that he says "my brain hurts a lot" that this song kills me.

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You're a Science Baby Now!

• That right there is Bird Turds number ten, ladies and gentlemen.

• So far, it's not looking good for my Crabass ambitions, what with the Lakers leading Denver 1-0. Pau Gasol has been the thorn in my betting side for years now. I have learned that I should never bet against him under any circumstances, and yet I, in what seems like the spirit of masochism, refuse to not bet against him.

• I read this thing the other day in I-D magazine - or I.D. magazine, one - where the guy who designed this website said that he designed it in the way that he did because it's, like, a truer representation of what the internet 'really' looks like. Not only do I not buy it, I'm getting sick to death of people dressing up their recent-nostalgia trips with silly art verbiage. Especially when that kind of thing looks more like this anyway, and all the dude really did was ruthlessly jock U Mean Competitor's steelo.

{Editorial Note: We're not sure why, exactly, the author decided to include that last bit. It sort of went against an old CFY,K editorial adage that maintains that a reader's attention ought never be drawn to anything that he or she wouldn't have otherwise heard about unless it's really good. There's no shortage of websites that do that already, anyway. So. Sorry. - Ed.}

• Man. Last week I was watching this insane shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark that these like, teenagers made in the eighties. And it was good, you know, sort of. In that, like, wow-I-can't-believe-they-actually-did-this kind of a way. Then, following that, I watched this collection of outrageous clips of Japanese television. And it was cool, too. But afterwards all's I wanted to do was watch something that was either bad because it was actually bad, or good because it was actually good. Or not watch anything and just have a good cry. I felt like a copy editor at McSweeneys.

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Can't Forget Your Kite

• I bought this book the other day, you know, in an effort to try and step my Bird Turds game up. And, you know how sometimes you read something that seem like it was written directly to you? Or to me, in this case? Heh.

• Oh man. I had a bizarre-ass Venture Bros.-style B-rett-ready experience the other day. Because another thing about Bird Turds is that it has powerfully revitalized my interest in drawing pictures and reading comics. So. I'm standing in the graphic novel section of Half Price Books the other day, right? Because also I heard they were hiring but it turns out they're not hiring anymore or whatever but whatever and there on the shelf was this recruitment brochure for what appears to be a local costumed supervillain. (I have got to research this shit further.)


































• Another day, another drawing of a zombie. I don't actually ever draw zombies. But every time I draw a human face, it always looks to me like if I made it green it would be a zombie face. So there you go.

• Also at Half Price Books - doesn't it seem like it should be called Half Priced Books? - I found this book that was a collection of Robert McGinnis' mystery novel cover illustrations. But it was like forty dollars, which, at the moment, is prohibitively expensive. Luckily, the kind community over at Flickr isn't charging anything to peruse their collection of Robert McGinnis covers, and spaghetti is delicious.

• I finally got my hands on a copy of Ascenseur Pour L' Échafaud, which I've been looking for for years now because of its awesome as hell Miles Davis soundtrack. I haven't watched it yet, though. Watching a reader is kind of a big commitment, you know?

• What isn't a big commitment is watching the series finale of Rob and Big. What it is is a big disappointment that Mtv would cancel it. (I don't know if it's actually getting canceled, per se, but whatever. It sucks that it's over.) It's like. It wasn't enough that they already got rid of all the music and every good show they ever had on there. (I have to stop this before it mushrooms from an innocent rant into a full-blown Janeane Garofalo bit.)

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Bird Turds X 2

• This edition of Bird Turds is based on a youtube video of a turkey fight that S. Higginbotham told me about. And also it is based on the internet.

• Happy birthday to Happy Thawts, my erstwhile Canadian co-host. She just told me that she never had red velvet cake, which leads me to believe that they don't have red velvet cake in Canadia, which makes sense, since red velvet cake is totally awesome.

• From the "Millions of People in Addition to Me Care, But Still It Feels Like Nobody Cares But Me" file: I've been sort of mildly bummed out since Artie attacked his assistant and quit/was fired from the Howard Stern Show. I'm betting it's a hoax, though. So whatever. You guys don't care.









• So so far I've made ten Bird Turdses. (I have released nine of them, but I'm holding back on one. Because, I mean. What if I can't think of one for a while, you know? But if you ask me - and reading this at all constitutes an implicit asking-of-my-opinion on your part - today's two-fer makes up for my keeping one in the clip.)

Being at ten lends itself to all sorts of questions about which I've just begun to entertain the idea of thinking about answering, but that I won't get into here quite yet. Ten is a nice number, anyway, I think. It's nowhere near a number that would be at all comparable to the output of cartoonists both contemporary and throughout history, though.

What are there? Like a thousand Laugh-Out-Loud Cats strips? And then Los Bros have been telling stories about Palomar and Maggie and Hopey for something like twenty-five years now. And in terms of Charles Schulz, forget about it. So. What I'm saying is that I don't want anyone to fuck around and think that me making ten crude Bird Turds comics is even anything like what these dudes have done.

But I think that even having only done ten, even at the beginnings of things, you start to get an inkling as to the way things might end up going. It is already happening that I am beginning to shape the experiences that I'm having into panels and dialog in my mind while they're happening. I think that this is an encouraging phenomenon on two fronts. First, I think that it might be symptomatic of what might one day evolve into a technique of some kind. And secondly, it might be a common thing to have happen, and if it is, then it might be a difficult thing to just "turn off." And if, for the sake of argument, we assume that all that is true, then it gives rise to the notion that maybe there's a secret hidden cache of never-released Calvin and Hobbes comics somewhere in the world.

• Ok. So anyway. It had been a while since I checked out the Top 5's over at Crailtap but today I checked out Tim O'Connor's Top 5. The shit is hilarious. Especially when he gets to the part about that horrible garbage that precedes the best show ever.

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Just Make 'Em All

• The above is Bird Turds number seven. I think I did this one before, but it got lost in the move. I've always liked the way that ApeLad over at Hobotopia - author of the always remarkably well executed Laugh Out Loud Cats - draws little birds. So I tried to draw some like that.

• In other news: say it ain't so, Mr. Mora.

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One Stop Shop for Blog Rock Slop (Edited)

{original photo: Hi, How Are You? - Ed.}

• What follows is a bunch of notes that I wrote in the past couple of weeks that I was thinking of compiling into a larger article that was to be called "South by South of No North." I'm putting the best of it up here instead, though.

• My sister, Thee Famousperson, occasionally comes up with what we in our family - or, really, probably just the two of us - refer to as "Handy Tips."

"I can never remember my license plate number," I said to her over the phone one day. I was somewhere on the outskirts of San Antonio, looking for an inexpensive place to stay the night because all the hotels in Austin were booked solid through the week. The motel I was trying to get a room in needed my license plate number so they would know to not have my car towed away in the morning.

"You should program it into the 'notes' section of your cell phone," she said.
"Thanks," I said. "That's a 'handy tip!'"
I think she should start her own YouTube show, where each week she would dispense a new invaluable nugget of advice. I imagine it would look something like this:










Protip Handy Tip: Do not attempt to move to Austin during SXSW. It won't be any fun. You will not see Black Mountain play a 1 A.M. at the Mohawk even though they are your favorite band. You will be spending that time instead covered in sweat in a motel room in San Marcos with no working A/C because, like I said, the rooms in town are all full, and you don't know anybody in Austin.

• I wrote these notes in the worst notebook ever. I don't know how anybody else does it, but I everything I write generally starts out written in longhand. Anyway. The cover of this fucking thing ripped completely off seconds after I opened it up for the first time. The pages themselves are as thick and yellow as yellow toenails, and the perforated edge is totally for shit. After this I'm retiring it, by which I mean, of course, that I'm throwing it away.

• {This next little part was written after a day during which a real estate agent got all mad at the author for having the audacity to find an apartment without her, thus "taking money out of her pocket." The author, having lived in Austin now, even for a little while, isn't exactly convinced that much of the following is accurate to any degree whatsoever. - Ed.}

The sheer number of apartment locators in business in Austin - and they are in business, buddy - speaks to the impossible volume of people constantly meandering its way here. They all figure, incorrectly, as they have always figured, as I now figure I might have figured, too, that they have found themselves a little city with a cosmopolitan atmosphere and a laid-back attitude. Where no one ever steals, and you can probably just work some job for two or three days a week, which would leave you with ample time to get on with the important business of constructing dreamcatchers and repainting coffee tables in bright primary colors. They - we - are all wrong, and are all suckers who bought it. I have a suspicion that I've been lured here by the Austin hype machine, been given the old bait-and-switch, and introduced instead to the cutthroat world of hair-trigger rental property real estate in what might be a secret government plot to turn a bunch of leftover counterculture idealists into strict capitalist Little Lebowski Urban Achievers in short order. Perhaps the GOP has recognized a shortage in young devotees with a working knowledge of the Adobe Creative Suite.

















• Lyndon Baines Johnson, the thirty-sixth president of the United States of America, was a hell of a raconteur¹. As evinced, of course, by a talking animatronic version of him that I encountered when it was cold and wet and grey outside.

Some time ago I visited Austin, on a bit of a recon mission. I won't say that I immediately fell in love with the city, but I was immediately greatly intrigued by it. More than anything, it seemed like a place where a young dude like myself could start to, as they say, get his grown man on. When I visited, it was cold and wet and grey for the whole trip.

When I returned to Austin some time later - weeks? months? I have never been good with precise chronology - to find a place to live, it was, again, cold and wet and grey for like the first five days. So I thought that cold and wet and grey was just sort of how Austin was. It's not.

But it was when I stumbled into the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidential library. (Full disclosure: I wasn't really altogether aware that it was a presidential library. I thought it was an ordinary public library, and I needed badly to use the restroom. So I went there with the notion that, you know, homeless people damn near bathe in public library restrooms, and I was, in some sense, homeless at that point myself, so what the hell. 'This is how it starts,' I thought, in the parking lot.)

Leaning on fencepost, doffing cowboy hat, wearing chambray workshirt, the robot president looks over his robot shoulder to make sure Lady Bird's not around before delivering the punchline.

"'Well, hell,' he said, 'I liked what was drinkin' more'n what I was hearin'.'"

¹The other day I was in a record store, and I'm pretty sure I came across both a greatest hits collection from the Presidents of the United States of America, and the new Raconteurs record. So.

















• I've decided that if I'm going to be in Austin, I might as well get hip again, right?

{It should be noted that the author has not been "hip" since sometime around 2003. - Ed.}

So I guess I'm going to brush up. Reread that one book. Try and get through that controversial essay that Mailer wrote. Investigate the story behind Stagger Lee. Go to shows. Renew my Fader subscription. Try and get an MFA. Scarf. Vintage sunglasses. French cigarettes. You know.

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Bird Turds Number Six

• It's been a little while since I made a new installment of the Bird Turds comic strip. I feel, like, a little bit worthless if I spend any time at all lately not actively seeking employment. So. Things are touch-and-go here at CFY,K.

• I don't know if this fan-produced Mega Man movie has actually been made yet, but I would like to use this picture as Thee Famousperson's audition.

• In other FP news: I was going to tell her about this picture of the new Love & Rockets comics coming out soon, but she was already all over it.

• "The Drought is Over part 5" came out last week. I doubt if you guys care. I've been on some 90's rap shit lately, word to the Rai Chile a.k.a "Brimsta Mack."



• The Dolorean, it turns out, was the poor man's Dolorean. The lesser-known Bulldog is the purest form. Weird.

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