The trailer is out for Wes Anderson’s latest, The Fantastic Mr. Fox:

This looks pretty awesome. Due out in November. I’m looking forward to it.

So, on my recent comic strip kick, I was talking about them with some friends last night, and Alan brought up a week of Garfield comics back in the 80s that took a turn for the deathly serious. I was able to track them down online. These ran in 1989, and they are indeed real.

Existential Garfield

In response to Janelle’s recent blog posts, I’ve come up with some wedding advice of my own.

Disclaimer: This is all crap.

Who to Marry

Marry someone you won’t fight with. This is actually impossible, but I’d feel bad if I didn’t tell you that first. Make sure you’ve had at least one serious, relationship-rocking fight before you make the decision to get married. (That’s probably the only solid piece of advice in this whole post, actually.) It’s also a good idea to invest in a Playstation and maintain separate living rooms.

Marry someone who can cook. Unless you can cook. Then, marry someone can’t cook, so they will appreciate the fact that you cook. If you don’t cook and you can’t find someone who cooks, marry someone who manages a restaurant. Unless you manage a restaurant. You can probably figure out the rest.

How to Marry

In deciding what kind of wedding to have (or whether to elope), you must ask yourself one important question, and that is, “Is this person going to plan a wedding that will embarass me?” If you both have similar tastes, plan a wedding. If you produce indie films and your partner works at the Build-a-Bear Workshop, go to Vegas.

Never, under any circumstances, do a cat wedding (for people) (or for cats).

Vows

Refer to the above section.

Traditions

Two of the most persistent traditions at weddings are the bouquet toss and the garter toss. These are not fun. They can be made palatable by altering the outcome—for instance, throwing the garter directly at the guy who just needs to hurry the hell up and ask his girlfriend to marry him. Better throw the bouquet at him too. Make sure to seat him near the front for easy access.

All speeches should be written in iambic pentameter. This ensures that only people who know how to write well will give longer speeches. Also, the rhyming couplet at the end signals that the speech is, in fact, over, eliminating that awkward is-it-over-or-is-this-just-awkward moment in the audience.

Unity candle. Seriously, what the hell?

Throwing rice constitutes a food fight, and when you throw food at me, it means war. I have direct access to both the cake and the caterer. Don’t throw rice at me, because I will not hesitate to lodge a dinner roll in your throat.

In ancient Rome, the wedding cake was actually more like bread, made from wheat or barley, and was broken over the the bride’s head as a symbol of her fertility. More traditional weddings today will have the bride and groom smash the cake into each other’s faces as a symbol of their joint fertility. If you don’t want to have kids for a while, don’t even touch the cake. Best not to take any chances.

String quartets add a nice antiquated feel to a wedding and are highly recommended for anyone born in the 18th century.

When to Marry

6:30

Warning: Lost geekery.

Wondering what those mysterious reoccurring numbers in Lost mean? Here’s the word from Damon Lindelof, co-creator of the series:

Here’s the story with numbers. The Hanso Foundation that started the Dharma Initiative hired this guy Valenzetti to basically work on this equation to determine what was the probability of the world ending in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Valenzetti basically deduced that it was 100 percent within the next 27 years, so the Hanso Foundation started the Dharma Initiative in an effort to try to change the variables in the equation so that mankind wouldn’t wipe it itself out.

The numbers are the variables in that equation. Seeing them everywhere just reinforces that these seem to be hard-wired into our society.

This is not the first time this information has been released. It came out in bits and pieces throughout promo clips and games outside of the show throughout the years. This is just the first time it’s all been said together.

That helps re-contextualize this video, shown at Comic-Con 2008:

They later declared that that video is not canon, so we can’t use it as evidence that Daniel will come back to run the camera. (Word on the street is that Daniel was supposed to stay on the island and try to change the future, but there was some complication with the actor, which is why they shipped him off and killed him off quite suddenly.)

But it’s quite obvious that someone did pick up Dharma’s work in the meantime. The Cuban missle crisis ended in 1962. The Dharma Initiative was founded in the late 60s or early 70s. Even if Dharma was founded in 1974, when Sawyer and company “landed” there, that would put the destruction of the earth in 2001 at the latest. So either the numbers were off, or the variables really were changed. Let’s not even talk about time loop theories at this point.

And now, I bring you Ninja Turtles from around the world.

The trailer is out for the new Where the Wild Things Are movie:

If you don’t know, Where the Wild Things Are is a 1963 children’s book about Max, an imaginative troublemaker that constructs his own wild world in his bedroom and becomes King of all Wild Things. In the end, he becomes lonely and homesick and travels back to the real world to find supper waiting for him.

This movie looks like it greatly expands on the story, with Max traveling back and forth between his world and the real one. It also looks like it expands on his reasons for wanting to escape, giving him more of a reason than being sent to bed without dinner.

It could just be because I’m kind of a sucker for a good, imaginative kids’ movie, and the Arcade Fire song in the trailer sure helped, but I think this looks awesome. The movie looks visually amazing as well. It’s due out in October. I’ll try to round up a crew to go see it when the movie comes out, but let’s all try to drum up some interest before then.

If you don’t like what they did to the Watchmen movie, you really won’t like the new cartoon:

But you might like the Malin Akerman Watchmen tour experience:

I’m pretty sure that’s really Malin Akerman. And the cartoon is fake, but funny as hell.

Untitled Bill and Ted Project, due out in 2010. If this is a re-make, I am officially leaving earth.

I know Keanu has mused about doing a sequel now that Bill and Ted are grown up and the future has arrived. But this one is going straight to video. That worries me.

All that talking about Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers a few posts back got me all nostalgic. I managed to find the entire pilot movie, which was released as five-part episode in season 2. So, here it is: To the Rescue! (That’s what it’s called.)

• Part 1 (1 of 2)
• Part 1 (2 of 2)
• Part 2 (1 of 2)
• Part 2 (2 of 2)
• Part 3 (1 of 2)
• Part 3 (2 of 2)
• Part 4 (1 of 2)
• Part 4 (2 of 2)
• Part 5 (1 of 2)
• Part 5 (2 of 2)

Ok, so you know those catchy little commercials for FreeCreditReport.com? The one with the guy with a guitar singing about how some hacker stole his identity? There’s one that takes place in a pirate restaurant, and one that takes place at a Renaissance Fest. Yeah, you know the ones.

Well, apparently, they’re in big trouble with the law. They’re required by law to let users peek at their credit reports once annually, but they make people sign up for a $15/month service to access their free credit reports. They’ve been through several lawsuits about this, but they’re still advertising the site and pulling the bait and switch.

Well, the U.S. government decided that they had had enough, so they created their own free credit report website. This one really is free. So how do they get the word out about their new website? By creating a parody commercial and releasing it on the Web.

That’s right. That was put out by the U.S. government. Those are our tax dollars hard at work, and I have to say, I’m glad to have given patriotically to this commercial.

But wait! That FreeCreditReport.com commercial in the pirate restaurant was really catchy. Can we get a parody of that one too?

Yes. Yes, you can.