The Exciting Conclusion Of The Popeye Snuff Storyline

I have to go to a wedding this afternoon — of two of my high school friends (gaww) — but I wanted to update you on the further adventures of Popeye. As you may remember, on Wednesday Olive Oyl threatened to kill herself. As I’ve since learned, the Olive Oyl lookalike is apparently Olive’s cousin, who egged her on. Yesterday, all the characters turned into dogs.

And as you can see today, Olive Oyl has apparently disappeared and now we’re on to talking about hamburgers or something. I have no idea. I didn’t even know there was a Popeye comic strip until two days ago. Back in the early 1990s, the artist of Popeye was fired for joking about abortion. Yeah.

I’ll be posting over the weekend from now on (I think), so youse can check in over the weekend to distract yourself from bad TV as opposed to distracting yourself from work.

If you’re bored for the rest of the day, have fun counting all the punny lines in this article from Pittsburgh. I’m not done, but I’m up to 4500.

A LOVE Park You Can Skateboard On, Still

Speaking of John Street, there’s a nice little screw you to him in the upcoming Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, the 79th (I think) installment in the skateboarding video game series. And by “a nice little screw you,” I mean “a completely rendered version of the new LOVE Park that can be skateboarded on.”

See, suburban white kids? You can have you revenge on John Street after all. Well, you know, kinda. Hey, if you can’t do it in real life, then do it in a video game. I guess that works for Grand Theft Auto, too.

Tony Hawk 9: Love Park?! [Planet Tony Hawk]

Scotch And Tequila At Civic Associaton Meeting

There’s trouble a-brewin’ in Northwood. The Near Northeast Philly neighborhood had a rather contentious Civic Association meeting last week.

Things got bad when the board attempted to read the minutes. There’s a split in the Northwood Civic Association board, with all but one member against president Joe Menkevich. The rest of the board wants to change the bylaws to impeach him. After Menkevich began to get angry, another board member responded with this:

“The board of directors voted for you to sit down.”

Ha ha, ICE BURN! Menkevich wasn’t taking this sitting down, though. He attempted to not only disrupt the meeting, but turn this civic association meeting into an all-night party as well.

The embattled president loudly responded, “This meeting’s illegal.” Menkevich threw the paper ballots on the variance question on the floor. He later picked them up and handed them to people at their tables. [...]

Menkevich’s allies were taken aback at the board majority’s actions. “This is a dictatorship,” [a supporter] said before walking out of the meeting. Menkevich, who will likely resign before an impeachment attempt, invited his supporters back to his Castor Avenue home for tequila, beer and scotch.

Whoo! Free beer! I gotta start attending more civic association meetings.

President, board clash in Northwood [Northeast Times]

This Kind Of Sums Up Eight Years Of John Street

Click to enlarge.

Update, 11:39 a.m.: For photos taken by, oh, I don’t know, an actual photographer, the Daily News‘ Alejandro Alvarez has a slideshow.

Update, 1:51 p.m.: Teresa Masterson has pre-dawn photos of Mayor Street waiting in line for his iPhone. Impressive.

Earlier today: John Street In Revenge Of The Nerds

Abridged ‘Daily News’ Columnists

Ronnie Polaneczky: The Dell East is getting a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Elmer Smith: Looks like the Philadelphia Public schools support, uh, “intelligent design.” (This is a metaphor, whatevs.)

John Baer: The budget won’t be passed in time. OH NO!

Debbie Woodell: Gay retirement communities!

John Street In Revenge Of The Nerds

Earlier this week, I read an excellent column from The Star-Ledger about Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker is alerted on his Blackberry anytime there was another homicide in the city. He also is willing to go to jail to protest the pointless War on Drugs. (The only war currently going worse than Iraq!™)

Our mayor, John Street, is similar in a lot of ways. He, too, has a Blackberry. And he is willing to wait in line for an iPhone on 16th Street. He’s been there since 3:30 a.m.

“I want to know the kind of things that are on the market,” Street told KYW 1060. “I believe that we are a city that’s leading the way in many respects in the use of technology. We got a late start in this city but we’re trying to catch up…. I might be able to learn something here with the use of this technology that might help us in the city.”

That’s right: John Street is going to fix the city with his downloads of White Stripes MP3s. Of course, the mayor has to do things like, oh, I don’t know, be the mayor of the city, and the iPhone doesn’t go on sale until 6 p.m., so he’s going to be signing all his important papers (or whatever the hell a mayor does) while waiting in line for his phone.

He also has to leave for a few events during the day and will have someone sit in his chair. Please, please, please let it be a homeless guy I’m friendly with so I can steal his seat. Actually, wait: There’s Wi-Fi there, isn’t there? I could blog from John Street’s folding chair. Well, maybe not. Either way, Street will be cutting in line since he has to leave to go cut ribbons.

“We live in a geeky little world here,” Street said to Mike DiNardo. “Times have changed dramatically. It used to be the people seen as geeks were kind of looked down upon. But not anymore!”

Hm. I’m a little torn here. I do think the mayor should have better things to do than wait in line for an iPhone. However, if I were mayor — I had photos of all the other candidates with Shetland ponies who were not their wives — I’d totally get an iPhone. I might work on that homicide problem, too, though.

Update: Photographic proof.

Mayor Street in line for iPhone [KYW 1060]

J-Roll Would Like You To See The Simpsons Movie

A commenter posted this ad for baseball’s All-Star Game yesterday, and it’s worth watching. It’s a pretty cute ad, with the baseball players riding San Francisco’s cable cars. At about the 30 second mark, it gets good. Ryan Howard and Chase Utley laugh maniacally as the cable car nearly kills a marching band, and then Jimmy Rollins randomly eats a donut, mimicking an ad for the Simpsons movie. Coincidentally, Jimmy Rollins will be home eating donuts during the All-Star Break this year.

2007 MLB All Star Game “Cable Car” Ad [YouTube]

This Is Enough: Alycia Lane Comments, Part 3

Okay, ha ha, get it? Oh so wacky! Putting Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz’s head on the head of a model in a bikini to represent today’s oh-so-exciting changeover: “Alycia Lane” will become “Glenn ‘Hurricane’ Schwartz.” Wokka wokka!

As you might have guessed, I’m a bit tired of this — the changing over, I don’t really care about the comments — and as such this will be the last day. And I suggest, if the Alycia Lane comments really annoy you, then stop reading this site.

No, wait! That’s not good. What I meant to say is: If the Alycia Lane comments annoy you, well, then ha ha, sucks to be you.

Hmm, that’s not good either. Oh, well if this keeps up I’ll ban the commenter if I remember, or whatever. Feel free to continue mocking his sexuality, his hygiene, his lack of social skills or his IP address, which is 199.72.242… okay, okay.

Dr. Joel Fish To Console Players Unfortunate Enough To Be Drafted By 76ers

Do you prefer your news from a biased source? How about an unabashedly biased source? Well, tonight is the NBA draft, and the 76ers are covering the draft on Sixers.com!

Actually, the updates aren’t bad at all, but I’m not coming up with another lead. I mean, I did I learn this:

Dr. Joel Fish, the team’s psychologist, is also in the draft room now, there to lend his thoughts when needed.

Now why would the 76ers need Dr. Fish? Oh, oh. If a player’s drafted by the 76ers, he’s going to be despondent. That makes sense then.

If you’re looking for other Sixers draft coverage, Philly.com is going to have 2400 people blogging the draft. I also tremendously enjoyed my friend Dave Zeitlin’s day-before-the-draft wrap-up yesterday, and he’s also blogging tonight. Be sure to check it out if the West Chester Daily Local’s server is working, which it almost certainly won’t be.

Draft Day Frequent Update [Sixers.com]
Sports Corner [Daily Local]

So This Is What NJ Residents Do After Leaving Old City

There’s not really much I can do with this article about Camden’s streets at night from the Courier-Post so I’ll just print a few of the excerpted quotes.

• The harsh, bright lights illuminated a crowd milling near the Crown Fried Chicken on Mount Ephraim Avenue.

  Inside, Tara Kittrell, 28, wore a tight-fitting white T-shirt with the words “Baby Sex” on it. After a night on the town at a Philadelphia club, she was back in Camden, trying to explain why it’s important to keep the late-night fast food restaurants open — even though some officials say they are magnets for crime and should close by 1 a.m.

  “People go out. They get drunk. They want to get something to eat,” Kittrell said. “They got to feed their liquor. They don’t want to be going home, throwing up all over the place. They got to eat so they don’t get no hangovers.”

• “Yeah, I’m concerned. But I’m watching my head before I’m watching someone else’s,” said Pop Marcus, 20. “Shooting? Yeah. That’s daily here. . . . But it’s survival of the fittest, dog eat dog. . . . Everybody wants to get out, eventually, but you got to deal with the situation at hand.
• As he leaned against the doorway of the takeout restaurant, Jose Rosa took a long drink from a plastic bottle and complained that the Camden police are picking on him and his friends.

  On this cool, quiet evening, just a short time before the nearby bars will close, Rosa, 50, says he’s feeling a little resentful about an incident earlier that night.

  The police shouldn’t have asked him and his friends to stop drinking in public, he says.

  “We’re not the problem,” he says, in Spanish-accented English. “It’s the jitterbugs.”

  Jitterbugs?

  “This is a stick-up place,” he says of his neighborhood. He blames the “jitterbugs,” which is his name for the young, nervous, armed bandits who pull guns and steal from people in the community.

Uh, I’m pretty sure that last one is his derogatory term for black people, but whatever.

Camden streets at night [Courier-Post]