THE FRIDAY NAME GAME ONCE AGAIN

Here's another installment of names generated by Lore Sjoberg's comedy duo name randomizer and what I think they're actually up to. This one will be double-sized because I missed last Friday, due to being away from the internet.

- Safford & Kio: You know what I see? I see a pair of thin dudes in button-down dress shirts out in the desert. They're botanists.

- Motonaga & Waibel: Travel about 600 years forward in time and have a peek into a technocastle in eastern Europe, and you'll find these two. They hunt monsters -- actual monsters, with claws and tentacles and everything. The future's a scary place.

- Denna & Grun: There's a place here in San Francisco called Cafe Gratitude that's kind of a raw cuisine hippie-love horrorshow. These two, nothing but wide-eyed innocence and brimming with the love of Gaia, tried to start a similar restaurant someplace outside the Bay Area, and are now buried under a Port-a-Potty in a vacant lot next to a 7-11.

- Charsky & Oh: One's a foreigner with an amusing, nebulous Euro accent, weird personal habits, and a bumbling but winning manner with people. The other's a laconic, cynical local who's almost never seen without sunglasses and a slick suit. They're cops. They're partners. They are the law.

- Hollinghead & Dodwell: Is it possible for people to be assassin butlers? I'm just asking here.

- Cun & Stell: There's nothing my brain can generate that I feel okay with typing out. I am sorry about this.

- Cuff & Monson: These aren't people. You know those giant stuffed animals they give out at carnivals? Two of them came to life and have been wandering the Midwest for about a decade, solving problems for kids 10 and under.

- Bullion & Lamance: If you're on a secret, illegal cross-country road rally and you get passed by a DeLorean doing 140mph with a chef and a bodybuilder in it, now you know who those motherfuckers are.

- Flenard & Putzel: I've always wanted to have henchmen! And look, these came ready-made! They might not be the best at what they do, but at least they're not the worst.

MYSTERY: SOLVED

The mystery bubbles are coming from the roof of Presidio Building 35, which is apparently "The Bay School of San Francisco." I didn't see the bubble-generation apparatus, nor did I see any people, so I suppose it's possible the bubbles may have come from somewhere else and were simply captured by updrafts adjacent to the building, giving them the appearance of having come therefrom, but I think I'm right. I am the world's greatest detective.

YOU COULD NOT ESCAPE THE MONTH

That's right: Dogblog update.

The only other thing I have to tell you about is that I skipped my bike ride to work today because my glasses don't have windshield wipers. As I sat on the shuttle bus on its way out of the place, I saw first one and then two enormous, head-sized soap bubbles floating in the air near the Presidio firehouse. No humans anywhere in sight. No bubble machines anywhere in sight. Where did these bubbles come from. It's a damn-ass mystery.

COMING UP FOR AIR

Never again am I going this long without access to email or Twitter, especially if I'm at something like San Diego Comic Con. 24/7 access to these things are basically a necessity now for a man of my particular lifestyle. I've been waiting for a sexy Android device, but it may be iPhone time. Dammit.

What can I tell you about SDCC.

- It was great
- I hung out with basically all of my favorite people
-- Which is hard to do when you've got different sets of friends that don't overlap
-- And there's only one of you
-- But I more or less made it work
-- Although I did end up pretty hoarse by the end, from yelled conversations in noisy bars
- I got to make a pretty good joke out of something that's long creeped me out about these conventions
- I got a free giant foam hand that, instead of putting up a single finger, throws the Vulcan salute
-- Yeah
-- It was like that

IT IS TIME ONCE AGAIN

Tomorrow night I will depart for San Diego, and the Comic Con that awaits us all at the end of our lives. Consider the following, however:

- I don't own a laptop (I have a desktop machine at home)
- I have no iPhone

I will be living as an animal. Using my phone for phonecalls and SMS only! Pushing updates to Twitter, not pulling! No email! No email!

Pray to your dear and fluffy god that I survive this.

FRIDAY, FRIDAY, FRIDAY

Friday means more pairs of fictional characters described from Lore Sjoberg's comedy duo name generator.

- Parreira & Salmans: These are chefs from a snobby restaurant who think they're such hot shit, they're always photographed standing in that "back-to-back with arms folded" pose.

- Torgerson & Maduro: Monster Hunters. End of line.

- Millberg & Schessler: Why do so many of these names bring up images of people who work in Accounts Receivable? I don't even know what that technically is.

- Dellacioppa & Baynham: These guys operate a butcher shop that occasionally offers meats from animals that aren't supposed to exist. Like unicorn steaks. Or dragon-skin cracklins. Baynham is the one who "procures" them. Their knife rack looks like a medieval armory from the future. I know that sounds weird, but trust me on this one.

Incidentally, I can't believe I haven't mentioned this until just now, but: The Definite Articles are playing a show at Bottom of the Hill(!) on Sunday night at 8:30pm. You should come. We're the first act. This'll be one of the only shows we play this summer, so if you've always been curious to know what we sound like, now is the time.

FASHUP

It's a party idea: Fashion Mashup. Fashup. Mashion. The only requirement is that attendees' outfits mix two different things to produce something terrible.

Electrohipster hippies. Steamgoths. Retroravers. FRATBRO-GOTHS. The mind reels.

HOW WOULD WE KNOW

This settled into my brain during the bike ride to work: bling rap album covers. We all know what they look like, and have a vague idea of the elements they're supposed to contain. Are there conclusions we can draw from this? Has anyone ever done a study on them? Whose department would that be? Semiotics? Anthropology? This is actually a serious question.

ANOTHER LITERARY EVENT WE NEED

I call it "Tomato Time." It's a poetry reading you hold at a bar. If a person gets up on stage and uses that terrible "slam poet" cadence, everyone in the audience throws tomatoes at them until they go into a coma.

In gratitude for this idea, world, you may send to me all of the gold and fine spices your vaults contain. Send some to Lynn, too, for coming up with the name.

THESE ARE NOW A THING

I'm starting to view these as a kind of low-rent writing exercise. It is here that I will implore Lore Sjoberg never to take this down.

- Mccutchan & Maggs: Does the term "cowboy plumbers" mean anything to you? No? Well, it should.

- Blood & Kaller: I both can and can't believe "Blood" was a real last name that ended up in this database. These don't actually strike me as people so much as a pair of personas adopted by a couple of Ohio teens who think they're releasing the best gothwave darkcore album the world has ever seen.

- Panell & Descoteaux: A male/female couple who are scientists. They get interviewed by magazines like Wired and Seed constantly, but what's weird is that every time they appear, their job is described differently, because nobody really understands what they do -- one month, they're "evolutionary exoclimatologists;" the next, they're "nanochaos metafuturists."

- Cantadore & Gingles: These are literally refugees from a parallel universe where elves have been living alongside humans since the start of recorded history.

DNTWRNG

There are few things as frustrating as looking at someone else's vanity license plate and not being able to decipher what the fuck it's supposed to stand for. You paid money to put that on your car! What are you trying to tell us.

What we need is for there to be a game show where people try to guess the meaning behind an indecipherable bullshit license plate. The owner of said license plate is also on the show, front and center inside a 9-foot tall floodlit acrylic cylinder where s/he is subjected to sarcastic ridicule from the show's host between guesses from the contestants.

The title of this post was as close as I could get to fitting "DOIN' IT WRONG" inside seven characters.

IT WILL ALWAYS HAPPEN

I missed last week's installment of this, so you'll probably get two this week.

- Haggerton & Planck: A surly butcher from New Jersey and a quantum physicist who team up to solve paranormal mysteries neither of them quite believe in.

- Steffy & Dorough: I see a Norwegian and an English banker who've opened up a prim brunch restaurant together. The walls are wood-paneled and there are Viking helmets mounted on them near the ceiling.

- Brownlee & Scholin: They're textbook authors with fashionable glasses who share an apartment.

- Braff & Sabota: A Hollywood star and the transdimensional alien entity that shares his consciousness. It hasn't made its intentions known, but it only seems to want control of his body once every few years, so he's been content to let it occupy him. Although it's not like he has any idea how to get rid of it even if he wanted to.

CURIOSITY LEADS TO WEIRD PLACES

For some reason I no longer remember, I was contemplating whether any other religions or cultures ever put a dog's head on a god the way the Egyptians did with Anubis. I think I was just curious to know what breeds might've popped up in which pantheons. But anyway, it led me to this Wikipedia page. And now you have it.

You're welcome.