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By the way, get ready for an influx of new neighbors.

And while I probably won’t be doing any surfing, this is a fun way to imagine how a beach vacation might be:
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And of course, despite my best efforts, this is playing in my head.

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An Oakland (Calif.) police officer works the scene of a homicide.

So, how many of you here in Georgia need feel the need to be able to buy several handguns as often as you want, you know, for hunting purposes? I can tell you how many times I’ve looked out my back door, saw a seven-point buck and brought it down with my Saturday Night Special.

It’s no big secret that Georgia is gun happy—this is a pending bill in the state House that would allowed to carry concealed weapons in bars, public schools, most government buildings, college campuses and places of worship; as you will remember from Sunday School, Jesus was really big supporter of the right to shoot the crap out of your enemies.

It is also true that Georgia is the gun purveyor to U.S. criminals, and has been so for several years. My friend and former SF State Journalism School classmate Cecily Burt put together a great piece for today’s Oakland Tribune about how lax gun laws in Georgia and other states lead to gun crimes across the country, especially California:

Follow the Guns: From Georgia to Bay Area Streets

On April 13, 2009, Crystal Erin Davis walked into the Cherokee Gun and Pawn shop on Knox Bridge Highway in Canton, Ga., and bought a Cobra Enterprises .38-caliber pistol, commonly known as a Saturday night special. She filled out paperwork that said the gun was hers.

“But in fact Davis bought the weapon—and, on other days, 20 others—for her boyfriend, Jeffrey Martin Colon-Moore, a Vallejo, Calif., native and ex-convict who could not legally buy guns from licensed dealers. He sold and shipped the firearms by overnight delivery to buyers in the Bay Area that spring.

“Those buyers, in turn, put the weapons in the wrong hands.

“About 15 of the 125 guns Moore’s crew bought from gun stores or gun shows have since been recovered by law enforcement. While none has been directly traced to a killing, they’ve been taken from parolees after car chases, from juveniles after a robbery and from a car searched after a fatal shooting at a San Francisco nightclub.

“The story of those guns—which emerges from a federal trafficking case—provides a rare view of the ways criminals get firearms, and just how easy it can be. It also helps explain why, when Oakland police seize an average of 1,200 to 1,500 firearms every year, there is a steady supply to replace them.

“ ‘It is definitely frustrating,’ said Sgt. Nishant Joshi, head of the Oakland Police Department’s Gangs/Guns Intelligence Task Force. ‘A lot of guns come from out of state, a lot of straw purchases. Guns are not manufactured in Oakland. There’s no big warehouse in Oakland where you go in and buy what you want.’

“Instead, there are a variety of black-market sellers, receiving guns from states with less stringent gun laws. In California and many other states, buyers undergo background checks and a waiting period before they can take home a gun. But in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada—some of the biggest sources of illegal guns in California—there is no waiting period. Those states also allow person-to-person sales without paperwork.”

Great work, Cecily. The absurd gun laws—pending and existing—in Georgia need to be changed, but the odds of that happening in this redder than red state is just about nil. There’s no talking sense to some folks.

University of Georgia’s star tailback Isaiah Crowell was arrested last night on weapons charges. Bulldog fans are unsettled.

In a related incident, many folks in the state are up in arms today because a 19-year-old was on arrested on charges of possessing a concealed weapon, having a weapon in a school zone and having an altered ID mark on that weapon (the serial number was scratched off). Half the state is ready to throw the book at this young man while the other half is rushing to his defense. What makes this one college sophomore’s fate so riveting to so many people? Maybe it’s because he’s the University of Georgia’s star tailback Isaiah Crowell.

BREAKING NEW:

According to sports talk radio and the Atlanta Journal-Consitution, Georgia head football coach Mark Richt has had enough of the talented but pain-in-the-ass Crowell and booted him off the team.

Feeling like a being a pain in the butt, I put on  my best Bogart impression and told him, “The stuff that dreams are made of.”

I got a blank stare.

And I heard crickets. No, seriously, there are crickets all over this part of Georgia.

This began a thoroughly detailed—and unappreciated—dissertation on Humphrey Bogart and his movies.

Blank stare, continued.

“He was in some of the greatest movies ever. He was in ‘The Maltese Falcon.’ You know that movie, don’t you?”

Crickets. And the stare.

“No.”

Ah, I’m getting through to him.

“He played tough-guy roles. You know what that means, right?”

He scrunched up his nose and thought for a moment. “Oh, you mean like Taylor Lautner?”

Crickets and a blank stare.

Bogart and Lautnery: great movie tough guys.

Sloan Wilson

“Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders..”

— Sloan Wilson

Yeah, smile now, hotshot, but just wait until it’s time for you to get neutered.

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(Tip o’ the hat to Buzzfeed)
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Oh, and there’s this bison, who is in a special class of ass all of his own:
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Edwin Land

“Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.”

— Edwin Land

Carl Zimmer over at Discover Magazine elucidates about the science behind the illusion:

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As you’ll notice, the circles seem to rotate in response to where you look at the illusion. So [Stephen] Macknik and his colleagues tracked the movement of people’s eyes as they gazed at two of these wheels on a computer screen . . . [they] found a tight correlation between the onset of the illusion and a kind of involuntary movement our eyes make, known as microsaccades. Even when we’re staring at a still object, our eyes keep darting around…the pattern of colors and contrasts in the Rotating Snakes Illusion causes our eyes to send rapidly changing signals to the brain even during microsaccades. The motion neurons switch on, and the snakes start to slither.

Thomas Huxley

“History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.”

— Thomas Huxley

OK, for all of you nerds—and I use that term in only the most loving way—who are planning on going to see “The Avengers” sometime this weekend, here’s a question for you: When was the last time you bought and/or read a comic book featuring your favorite superhero? I’m guessing it’s been a very long time.

Comic books, where all of our favorite action movie characters came from—after The Avengers, the third Dark Knight (Batman) movie will be out this summer, to be followed by a new Spider-Man treatment and a Superman re-launch—is sort of on life support.

According to an article on comic book prices:

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[I]n 1945, roughly half of all Americans read comic books, including 95% of all boys, and (and!) 91% of all girls, between the ages of six and eleven. “In 1947,” Van Lente added, “one out of every three periodicals sold in the United States was a comic book. That’s 180 million comics in one year.” To experience market penetration like that, you’d pretty much have to be the Internet.

And if you glance at these lists of circulation figures for the time, you see that by 1946 you have four different comic book titles that were selling more than a million copies per month. (Whereas now, there are only three titles clearing (barely) two hundred thousand copies monthly.) So in comparing the 40s with now, we’re comparing a time when comic books were hands-down no-joke the undisputed dominant paradigm of entertainment for American children to now, a time when the characters and storylines of comics constitute a very American mythology while the vehicles that brought them there, the comic books themselves, sit off to the side.

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I had not picked up a comic book since the mid-1980s. But one of the writers I edit at WorthPoint, Matt Baum, writes about collectible comic books, from those of the million-dollar Golden Age books featuring the first appearances of Superman and Batman, to those titles that are coming out next Wednesday that may be worth something down the line. Editing that column now for coming up on four years, I’ve sort of picked up a new appreciation for comics by osmosis and feel the need to champion their cause.

Coincidentally (or not), tomorrow, Saturday, May 5, just happens to be Free Comic Book Day across North America and around the world, where dealers will be giving away comic books absolutely FREE—mostly short sample stories designed to introduce or reintroduce characters to the uninitiated—to anyone who comes into their stores. I took my kids to this a couple of years ago and now, I’m happy to say, they have been bitten by the comic book bug (although, unfortunately, not a radioactive spider with the expected results). The girl reads Wonder Woman and the Amazing Spider-man regularly, with some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Zorro thrown in, while the boy likes Aquaman and Bat Wing. I buy them the new books each month, and a few more for myself, and we read them all.

And since there were not around for the original run of the various superhero movies, at their behest, we have been watching them on Netflix—even the bad ones; sorry producers of “The Incredible Hulk,” both the 2003 and 2008 versions. They are very jazzed about The Avengers and we’ll be going to see it between soccer games and other kid activities this weekend.

So, here’s a challenge for you: If you are a big a fan of Iron Man, Captain America, et al, as you say you are, go visit your friendly neighborhood comic book shop and buy a couple titles. Bring your kids (or nieces and nephews, you childless slackers), and introduce them to your favorites superheroes. And for those of you worries about adult themes in comics today (yes, there are adult themes in comes today—Batman and Catwoman have been known to do the rooftop nasty—and depending on the title, some can get kinda gory) there are kid-safe versions of all your favorites, so turn ’em loose and see what catches their attention.

And, if you have forgotten who you just might find in the comic books these days, here’s a primer:
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