Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!

Well, you wouldn't think that I would have seen so much Weird and/or Awesome what with being offline for most of the last ten days (aside from swiping time here and there at work to check my e-mail and throw up quick blog posts and Facebook status messages), but Boy Howdy, has that turned out to not be the case. I've seen plenty! Hooray for the Interweb! Oddities and Awesome, as always, abound!

:: The folks behind Archie comics are experimenting with "Real World Archie", or something like that.

But as the Archie brand expands, a new monthly magazine series sold in major bookstore chains and Wal-Mart, Life With Archie: The Married Life, has been quietly ripping apart the fabric of life in Riverdale. The recession looms large and disease and infidelity intrude on longtime friendships and young marriages. Life With Archie is a spin-off published by Archie Comics, so it's not a rogue parody. But within just a few months, Riverdale has turned from a 20th-century middle-American paradise into a 21st-century middle-class hell. Is all this grit really necessary in a universe that has blissfully hummed along for decades without it?

Ooooh! How about a CSI: Riverdale? Maybe one murder can revolve around the wounds matching the spikes from that hat that Jughead always wears. I, for one, hope this trend continues! Let's see versions of Richie Rich wherein our hero and his impossibly wealthy family are done in by the Great Recession, or by an insider-trading scandal, or stuff like that! Let's see the real class struggle between Richie and girlfriend Gloria! Let's not ask how it is that I was able to call up the name of Richie Rich's girlfriend without having to Google it!

:: I imagine most of you will have seen this already, but it's too amazing not to share. Since the Minnesota Vikings were to have a home game today, the FOX Sports people had their cameras all set up a few days in advance for the game-day broadcast. So they had the cameras running when, after a major snowstorm pummeled the Upper Midwest, the weight of the snowpack on the Metrodome's roof finally became too much for the air-supported structure to bear.



That is some amazing stuff!

(And this is the fifth time the roof has collapsed!)

:: A science writer blogs about the Apollo 11 moon mission for NPR, and gets a response...from Neil Armstrong. That is some serious Awesome, I have to tell you. It would be like if George Lucas were to e-mail me in response to, well, anything I write about Star Wars!

More next week!