For the record, I really don’t feel like there’s nothing to talk about in movie-land at the moment. For example, there about a hundred and one cheap shots I could take at that johnny-come-lately end of the world flick The Core coming out on Friday. But why spend all your joke money in one place? I thought it would be kind of fun to do a short strip on the Oscar let down.

Does anyone else notice how the entire ceremony just vanishes from your memory like a fart in the wind after just a few scant days?

Secondly, I don’t want anyone to think that today’s strip is some how a reflection on my relationship with Jared. Things are fine. We talk to each other quite often. This isn’t Movie Comics, y’know! 🙂

Truth be told, things couldn’t be much better. If you read Penny Arcade at all, you’ll know Jerry and Mike will be making an appearance in Kansas City this weekend at the Planet Comicon convention. Guess who is going to see them? That’s right! US!

Kansas City is about 3 hours away from Des Moines, so we thought it would be a fun way to kill an afternoon to go to the show. We’re leaving early so we can be there when it opens at 10am. The day wraps up at 5, so it would be no trick to go home in the same day and be back before Saturday Night Live.

I’m going to take my camera and hopefully we can get a picture with the two of them. If it turns out their 300 pound bodyguards keep us at bay, I’ll try and snag a photo with Lou Ferrigno instead. If I get any good shots, I’ll be sure to post them on the site.

I’m really pumped about going and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t entertaining the thought that Jerry and Mike might be familiar with what goes on over in our little corner of the Internet. I would introduce myself, tell them I’m a fan and ask them if they’ve ever heard of Theater Hopper.

The conversation could go one of a few ways, I suppose. They could say they’ve seen it and liked, the could say they’ve seen it and thought is sucked, or they could say they’ve never heard of it. If the latter proves true, maybe I could turn them on to our littler operation. Jerry would link to me from his blog and hordes of fans would crash the server just before flooding my inbox with hate mail!

It’s the stuff dreams are made of.

Either way, I’m buying a poster and asking them to sign it. Gotta cash in on eBay after they hit the big time! 🙂

You may have noticed that I took the poll off of the site. I know that it was kind of popular among my regular visitors, but I got tired of trying to come up with new questions. Plus, it never worked completely right and I think it kind of looked ugly, so I pitched it.

I’m thinking about starting up the forums again, but this time going with phpBB instead of IkonBoard. I know there is a poll feature in there, so I’ll probably make a special folder for it. I don’t know if that’s happening any time soon, but it’s part of the evolution of the site.

An item of interest: I watched Ghostbusters tonight on DVD. I put off buying it for the longest time. But when you sit down and watch it, you realize just how great a gift it is to American cinematic comedies.

It’s like, you’ve seen it on TV a million times. It’s been part of the background noise of your life for decades now. But it really is freakin’ hilarious. Every time Bill Murray quips, I pass out in laughter. If I had half his easy-going confidence, his total command of that playful B.S. swagger, that would be the coolest.

The best part of watching the movie for us is that we could see the hotel we stayed at while we were in New York a few weeks ago.

There’s a scene where Murray comes up to Sigourney Weaver at Lincoln Center. They do a wide shot, and our hotel – The Empire Hotel – was in the background. Now when we show people pictures from our trip, we can slide Ghostbusters in the DVD player, skip to that scene and say “See that building in the background? That’s where we stayed.” A lot of the action in the movie takes place around Central Park West which was pretty much the nexus of our visit. It’s cool to see that stuff on celluloid.

If you haven’t watched it in a while, I strongly suggest picking it up. Besides, we all know movies are much better when the swear words aren’t replaced by nonsense words like “bulldip” or “crud”.