After snarking on the Vatican I should mention that they've apparently worked out a deal whereby gay men who can stay chaste for a couple years can be priests (in the rough draft I accidentally wrote this as "can bone priests," but I swear it was a typo.) I'm sure the all-or-nothing crowd on both sides of the issue are cranky, but I'd call it a perfectly reasonable compromise. Nice work, Holy See!

I remembered a few more funny comics I forgot to mention:

Cromartie High School. This is a manga that non-manga fans might enjoy, about a low-grade high school full of thugs and wannabe thugs. It understands the comic value of sincere dullwittedness. One of my favorite gags involves a tough, smart gang leader who gets motion sick easily, but always has to travel. The comic never goes the obvious route of vomiting humor; instead it milks laughs out of the guy's ludicrous attempts to keep his cool and not let on how sick he is: micromanaging peoples' conversations so they won't talk about things that might upset him, etc. The art is pretty clip-arty, but it works in much the same way those manipulated "found-object" figures on shows like Sealab do. Volume 1 is a scream; Volume two has major sophmore slump, but still has a few laugh-out-loud bits. I'm told Volume 3 ups the ante considerably, but I haven't gotten that far yet..

I'll get to the others when I'm bored. Other planned when-I'm-bored projects include comparing and contrasting Mervyn Peake's Titus novels to one another and to the BBC miniseries Gormenghast, an account of my days in the improv troupe Torrential Downplay, and the tale of the local production of Angels in America II (to go with my largely-ignored account of AiA1.).