One of my favorite things to do on Facebook and Twitter is play the straight man. No, not that way. I’m talking about setting people up so they can try their hand at a witty comment. For example, I recently posted that if I were a serial killer I would only do my job while listening to “Annie’s Song” by John Denver. People got a chance to change the lyrics in a fun and — as one friend described it — sacrilegious way.

Earlier this week I posted something so shocking that it began a series of funny exchanges, the best being the Twitter battle with my friend Scot who defended the band Bread. What ensued can only be described as a Puntabulous-style debate sans the funny pictures. That reminds me, I’m supposed to do a guest debate one of these days with Craig.

For your entertainment, here is the conversation without all the Tweets from others mucking up the flow:

@soanim8ed: Christopher Cross is the best soft rock artist of all time. Let the controversy begin!

@scolford: SHAME on you! Bread is eminently better than Cross! Seriously, I bet you can sing every song on The Best of Bread. Cross, not so!

@soanim8ed: Shows you. I can sing every Christopher Cross song. AND we share the same birthday. WIN!

@scolford: But I don’t believe he has enough to make a greatest hits album… Plus Bread has a butterfly on theirs.

@soanim8ed: Let’s see. Bread – 6 albums, Christopher Cross – 8 albums. WIN!

@scolford: Hmm, well Cross – 10 singles in Billboard top 100, Bread – 13! PWNAGE!

@soanim8ed: Oh, look, Bread’s Oscar shelf is empty. Is Bread the ONLY artist to win the big 4 Grammy awards in the same year. No. WIN!

@scolford: All I got to say is, when Bread sings Make It With You, you have to say “yes”. No one wants to make it with Christopher Cross.

Touché. I call a tie.

Diesel is the author of Mattress Police which I’ve read for a couple of years because I find his stuff pretty darn funny. Of course, it helps that he found a tag line I wrote funny enough to use on his site.

Like many blogs that stuck it out, Rob is an aspiring author who thought he had this great idea for a book called Mercury Falls which would be a Cataclysmic Comedy — or a funny book about the end of the world. Unfortunately that meant dealing with the publishing world. Slagging the industry, he decided to self-publish and then use his almost vast network of blog readers to promote.

His latest promotional gimmick is a blog tour and today he stopped by to answer some questions. Let us begin.

1. Mercury Falls has angels who do things. Speaking of angels who do things, who would be in your secretarial pool of angels?

There won’t be any angels in the pool. They’re afraid of water. Just like cats. I don’t know why angels are afraid of cats; you’d have to ask them.

2. I’m seeing comparisons to Douglas Adams. What sets you apart from him other than not being British or not really knowing how to make a good cup of tea?

Well, for one thing, I’m not British. And for another, I can’t make a good cup of tea. Beyond that, I’d say that Douglas Adams does a better job of reading an entire question before answering it.

3. What CAN you make a good cup of?

I’ve been known to make water on occasion.

4. You make light of the end of days. What are your plans in Hell? And what do you think of Gov. Arnold?

Jeez, Howard, why not make a reference to The Last Action Hero while you’re at it? Actually, I was just thinking about Arnold this morning in the shower. No, not like that. I was thinking about how I really needed to start working out again, except that the last time I tried to work out I totally messed up my back because I’m 39 years old now and I have to take it easy but friggin’ Arnold was HUGE in T3 and he’s like FIFTY and how does THAT work, and you’d think that a guy who has the discipline to make a 50 year old body look like THAT could fix California in no time, except that he’s got all those whiny Democrats to deal with and they won’t let him make governate on steroids.

5. What’s your deal with linoleum?

Why do people keep asking that? Did people say to Melville, “Hey Herman, what’s up with the whales?” No, and you know why? Because Melville was freaking 8′ feet tall and built like a dump truck. He’d rip your arms off as soon as look at you. Which is coincidentally why he didn’t have many friends and spent most of his time writing.

6. Sell the plot of your book in 10 words but don’t give anything away or we will all give you one-star reviews on Amazon.

“When a womanizing bachelor inherits his teenage daugher, hilarity ensues!”

Wait, that’s the sitcom I’m working on. Can I start over?

7. What happened to the Diesel moniker?

Okay, here’s the deal. That started as a real life nickname, which I then started using as my blogging name. Now that I’m a big-time author, though, I have to use my real name. Well, I didn’t HAVE to, but otherwise how would my junior high teachers know that I’m a big success? So while I wish I could keep going by “Diesel” (and I still do at work, believe it or not), I have to give in to the demands of authorhood. Authorship. Authoringness.

8. Will you friggin’ blog more often now?

No. Unless they can fix that thing where nobody has to pay to read your blog.

9. You use gender-specific pronouns with your angels when we all know angels have Barbie-doll non-genitals. Please explain.

You’re telling me that you really believe that Alan Rickman has no c**k? That guy is hung like a whale.

10. Who’s on your celebrity guilt-free “to do” list. Don’t worry. Your wife doesn’t read me.

Officially, I have no list, but I’ve always wanted to give Salma Hayek a nice firm handshake.

11. What’s next? Or is this the one great novel you have and soon you will become a Thomas Harris recluse?

I’m actually working on a sequel in which Mercury eats Ray Liotta’s brains. Stay tuned!

12. READER QUESTION (I kid. I have no readers.): If you can’t get enough attention, will you pose for Playgirl?

Only if they’ll have me.

Well, they got Levi Johnston, so I’m sure you’re next. Thanks, Mr. Kroese, for taking time out of your busy schedule of Twitter updates and making Google a better place to store every nuiance of public and private information.

Mercury Falls is available from Amazon. I’ve only read the Prologue (and a few pages of the first Chapter) and so far so good. An official review will appear soon.

I’ve never talked about my World Of Warcraft playing here because — c’mon — I’d be opening myself up to many levels of shite poured into the comment section. Plus nothing really funny has ever happened in the game.

Until now.

Sunday night I noticed an event in the guild calendar called “Emo Death Cult” but didn’t look further into it. I was busy trying to unseat some baddies off their horses with my lance. (If you know what I mean.) On occasion a repeated appeal would show up in guild chat — something about making a character and joining the death march. So I asked what was going on.

“Create a first level character and we’ll port you to Dalaran [major city in the game] where we are all going jump off the top of the Violet Citadel and then log out leaving our bodies on the steps.”

“I’m in.”

Logging out and hitting Add New Character, I decided on making a Priest figuring that would be the funniest class to join a cult. The only prerequiste was naming the character something Emo. Others were Icutmyself and Painisgood, for example. After calling Monkey Shari who does a killer Emo character, we came up with the name Barrentree as the name of my Night Elf whose destiny had been decided by the User. Thinking back I should have called him Thefray.

After being ported to the top of The Violet Citadel, I saw all my fellow cultist standing around crying and saying things like, “This world is pain” and “We can’t go until I write this last entry into my journal”. Okay, that second one was me, but you get the picture. In the meantime, I noticed that I stood out from the other members for some reason.

“Somebody give Barrentree a black dress.”

A trade window opens and I’m given a black robe to put on — just like everyone else. His own personal black Snuggie to wear after he throws his body to the steps below in an expression of the pain that he shares with the others.

We jump. We die.

Quickly logging in to my main character, Uuvar, I had him make his way to the steps. There — strewn upon the steps of the Violet Citadel — are his former guild members. “Oh, Barrentree,” he says while kneeling before the bodies, “how we barely knew thee. May the light of the Naaru embrace you.” And with a /cry, Uuvar began to weep for his fallen comrades. There were other players standing around and I hoped their reaction was something along the lines of “What the F*CK was that?”

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Howard /laugh and /laugh, logs off and orders dinner for Cameron and himself.

The blog is moving. Here.

As life changes, so do some priorities. I haven’t been blogging much as you can probably tell, but I want the blog to be there when the mood strikes. To accommodate this, The Web Pen is moving to a free site and — in about a month — I’ll be canceling my hosting. This means the following things:

1. All @thewebpen.net email addresses will go away (I found a way to keep them for a while) so update your contact info. New email will be an old, old one: soanim8ed at gmail dot com. (For those of you who have the comicoftheday Gmail account, that will still work since it’s forwarded.)
2. After the change, thewebpen.net will still work, but it will take you to the free site at webpenblog.wordpress.com since I own the domain for another 3 years or so. However, thewebpen.net/blog will NOT work any longer.
3. Many features on the old site will disappear but I was wanting to clean house anyway. The Favorite Music of XXXX will still be around but moved to the music blog that has been sitting in limbo until now – The Musical Measure. I will be moving those years written to pages within the music blog.
4. As for subscriptions (if you are so inclined), anyone who signed up via Feedburner (this includes emails subscriptions) will have to do nothing as all new posts will take you to the free site. If you would like to update your subscription, please use http://feeds.feedburner.com/webpenblog. To subscribe to the music blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/musicalmeasure.

So to recap, I’m making my Internet life a little simpler  and cheaper. Personal blog will soon be moving, but will be updating both sites until the original is shut down.

New music blog! Music reviews will be separated out from now on and posted The Musical Measure.

Now I need to remember to download the old site soon so I have backup copies of pictures and junk. Someone remind me, would you? Aren’t you a dear?

Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy – On October 7, NASA announced that its Spitzer Space Telescope had made an amazing discovery: a previously unknown ring around Old Man Saturn. Scientist are baffled by the super-sized ring which is so large it could contain one millions Earths. “It’s an amazing discovery,” said Douglas Hamilton, one of the co-discoverers and an astronomer at the University of Virginia. “The ring is very faint and can only be seen in infrared which made us wonder why Saturn would want to hide it.”

“Well,” said Saturn via radio telescope, “it was supposed to be a secret, but I’m Mr. Milky Way.” Saturn went on to say that he and Mrs. Galaxy have been dating since the sun was blue. He added enthusiastically, “I just love older women.”

As it turns out, they had to keep the marriage secret. “The Universe has very strict rules about intra-galaxy dating, but I didn’t care. She’s is a thing of beauty and her body — heavenly.” Saturn said they exchanged vows around 0 B.C. “The people of Earth still talk about our honeymoon night. We were quite rambunctious and were so stellar humans could see us. I hear they still celebrate our nuptials every year.”

Saturn explained the hidden ring was to keep things from The Universe. “My Milky just took some stuff floating around and made it for my wedding present,” he explained. “Even though it’s impossible to see in the visible spectrum, it is still very precious to me.” He added, “Besides would you look at the size of that thing? Don’t be jealous too much, Venus.”

Neighbors said they had noticed a change in Saturn’s behavior recently.”He has had a spring in his orbit for the past 25,000 years,” claims Jupiter. “For as long as I’ve know him, he’s been the quiet, introspective gardener caring for his moons and then one millennium – BAM – he was welcoming Earth’s satellites over and showing off for some reason.”

Mrs. Galaxy was unavailable for comment.

It is unclear at this point whether Saturn and The Milky Way Galaxy will be reprimanded for breaking Universe policy. Saturn could face a demotion similiar to Pluto’s after it was uncovered that he and Planet X were having an affair in the Kuiper Belt, a local motel in a remote area where guests can pay by the orbit.