Whenever a new issue of Hi-Fructose shows up in my mailbox, I climb on my roof and genuflect in the direction of Arcturus to pay homage to master Zogg for allowing such beauty to exist in this lowly mortal plane.

Volume 5 of the best art magazine in the Universe has articles about Travis Louie, Parskid, Lori Early, Amy Sol, Mark Jenkins, Aaron Noble, Mars-1, Friends With You's Rainbow Valley, Brendan Danielson, Josh Keyes, and other artists. There's a lifetime of material to study in these pages. Now that I have this, I may stop buying books and magazines altogether. Link

(Click on thumbnails for enlargement) I went with my wife and kids to Topanga State Park a couple of weeks ago. It offers wonderful hiking, rock climbing, and pond swimming. The best part of the day was watching the brave souls jump from the 40 or 50 foot cliffs into a swimming hole. I shot a video of the divers, which you can see here: Link

Graphic designer and cartoon historian Leslie Cabarga, went to great pains to clean up the excellent artwork in this 480-page homage to Casper the Friendly Ghost.

I've always been a fan of a clean line in cartooning, and the Harvey artists who drew Casper were masters of this appealing style. I loved Casper comics as a child, and seeing them again with adult eyes, I can understand why. The presentation draws you in immediately. I prefer to the scratchy hyper-dynamic, border-busting work that's so prevalent in contemporary comics. Today's cartoonists could learn much from the Harvey style.

Casper the Friendly Ghost has a knowledgeable introduction by Cartoon Brew's terrific animation historian Jerry Beck.

Dark Horse, the publisher, also has been publishing a terrific multi-volume anthology of Little Lulu comic books, which I highly recommend.

$13.57 on Amazon

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) Yesterday I was harvesting figs from my tree before the fig thieves who regularly drive through the neighborhood to poach fruit could get to them, and I spotted these three large shiny green beetles gorging on a fig. The topmost beetle had his entire head buried in the obscenely red meat of these delicious figs.

Unlike the human fig thieves who eat my fruit, these iridescent scarabs are always welcome guests at my home.

Appropriately enough, they are called figeater beetles. Link to Flickr set

Last year, I stumbled upon Ira Mitchell's blog, Glassyeyes.com, which is all about buying inexpensive eyeglasses from online retailers. Here's a recent Minneapolis Star Tribune article about Mr. Mitchell and his blog. Here's an excerpt:

Ira Mitchell of Eagan has nothing against eye doctors. It's the markups on frames and lenses that make him rant about the high cost of eyeglasses on his blog, which he began last November. "Eyeglass stores are for suckers," he wrote.

Indeed, the markup on glasses can easily exceed 500 percent, according to EyeglassDirect.com. In his photo at Glassyeyes.com, Mitchell has the look of someone who is not going to pay a 500 percent markup anymore. So when he broke his frames and found that a pair of frames and lenses at LensCrafters would run $400, he did what few people had done before -- he shopped for eyeglasses on the Internet. Judging from the 250,000 sets of eyeballs that have viewed his site, he's not alone.

Since discovering Glassyeyes, I've ordered prescription eyeglasses from two different online retailers, and I couldn't be more pleased with the results. You need to have a current prescription handy, which means you need to get an eye exam. The optometrist probably won't want to give you the prescription, because he/she will want you to buy glasses from him/her instead of going to a cheaper place. Insist on getting a copy -- say your insurer or employer requires it.

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When I ordered a pair of glasses from Optical4less.com on July 23rd, I didn't know the company was based in Hong Kong. It wouldn't have made any difference. I paid a total of $70, including shipping for two pairs of prescription glasses (regular and sunglasses) in my favorite Clark Kent style. The box arrived, loving wrapped in brown paper with beautiful bird stamps on it.

The return address is A. Poon, Shop 137, Chung Fu Shopping Center, Tin Shui Wai, N.T., Hong Kong. Thank you, Mr. Poon!

I like these sunglasses even more than the $200+ pairs I have been buying for years. Note the nifty day-glo cases they are stored in.

A perfect fit! I couldn't be more delighted with my purchase.

Optical4Less's plastic frames page is a good place to start looking. They charge $29 for single vision eyeglasses using these cool, chunky framed glasses. Link

My 9-year-old daughter is at summer camp for a week. She sent this letter to us:

Dear Mom and Dad,

Last night was so awful. Lilli had a migrain all night. A girl needed medication at 10:00. Are bedtime is 9:30. When the conslers were getting the medication a girl started to puke! A different girl was moaning. A huge spider was on the floor. The consler came in to help. We got to sleep at 12:00! Everything is fine. I'm having a great time.

Love,
Sarina

Automata maker extraordinaire Dug North says:

I went into an antique shop that was going out of business and picked up a large-format magazine/book entitled How to Make It. The book is made up of selected excerpts from Science and Invention Magazine published in 1926. You would not believe the stuff in there -- some of it really cool and really dangerous.

• An motor-powered ice sled that uses a sawmill-sized circular blade as the front wheel.
• A brazing torch powered by gasoline
• An airplane using a motorcycle engine
• A xylophone/thumb-piano made of razor blades
• A motor driven mono-wheel that you ride inside of
• And so on...

It made me think of you and your magazine.

G.J. Echterncamp is a young video director and documentary filmmaker. His latest subject is an utterly absorbing movie about his parents, Frank and Cindy.

In the 80s, Frank was a rising new wave pop star in a band called OXO. He was in his early 20s when he married Cindy, a vivacious blond woman almost 20 years his senior. Shortly after they married, OXO broke up. Cindy supported Frank for many years as he worked the club circuit in Florida, to no avail. They both began drinking and drugging. They also had a child, G.J., who grew up under their non-care for most of his life.

G.J. stays behind the camera most of the time as he films his extremely loquacious, alcohol- and drug-addled parents. I'm surprised he survived, as they are both revealed here to be incompetent, narcissistic, and childish. In spite of their odiousness, there is also something endearing about them, which is why this documentary is so good. You want them to do well, to get cleaned up, to get jobs, to stop hating each other. It's hard not to be disappointed when you discover that they'll never change.

I laughed out loud as many times as I shook my head while watching this. Link

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement) *Please*, do your fucking dishes! Thanks!

Previously on Mad Professor:
• Passive aggressive taxi cab sign

Shawn Wolfe says: I love looking at (ie. studying, meditating on, losing myself in) this collection of old architectural renderings of supermarket prototypes, found by their owner in a photo album purchased at a garage sale. They appear to be from the early 1960s.

Store names are delightfully awkward word-play experiments and made-up sounding. I assume these renderings were used to simply show prospective clients what is possible in the way of modern "Food Mart" architectural stylings.

Granted, they are images of hideous chain stores, harbingers of terrible things to come. But in retrospect and as portrayed here these places seem so quaint and enchanted, wet, moonlit, not overly big-boxed yet, visited by a small handful of sophisticated men in trench coats and their nicely-groomed wives. Link

Update:

Here's a musical slideshow with the renderings.

I am enjoying Glyph Jockey's cell phone photos of interesting sites in Tijuana. Link

My four-year-old daughter made these masks at summer camp today. They remind me a bit of the characters in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends.

This no-nonsense cabbie wants his fares to know what's what without having to speak to them. Xeni Jardin snapped the photo with her iPhone and added incisive comments in her Flickr stream. Link

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Mister Jalopy gave me this cake of Tio Nacho. It's a medicinal soap made by Bustillos in Mexico.

Take a look at Tio Nacho ("Uncle Tio"). He's undeniably related to J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the holy figurehead of the Church of the SubGenius, of which I am a devout member. Here they are, side-by-side. Can you deny the resemblance?

It's safe to say that Uncle Nacho was J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' uncle. This fact alone was enough to guarantee my lifelong brand-loyalty to the soap, no matter what was in the box.

Of course I was eager to open it anyway. Could it be that Tio Nacho's active ingredient was the sacred herb habafropzipulops (or 'frop, as it is known in the street)?

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' pipe bowl is stuffed with this beneficial plant, which, according to Everything2, is

The revered and despised grief-easer of the mountains, the warrior against pain, the healing herb. Whether taken as smoke, liquid, food, or as "Bob's" pills, it, above all other medicinal substances, "spells relief." From the hearty young stalks protruding from the Himalayan snow to the white 'frop-dust that settles on the rim of "Bob's" Pipe, it is the closest thing to the untainted essence of ODIN on Earth. Habafropzipulops is not merely safe, but beneficial -- nay, even necessary -- to bodily health. We encourage our children to partake of it copiously, to their little heart's abundant desires.

Amen to that! The side of the box has a list of ingredients:

Pine tar...................... 1.80 G
Sulphur....................... 1.80 G
Resorcinol.................... 0.90 G
Neutral Soap
(Sufficient to complete) .... 90.00 G

After looking up Resorcinol on wikipedia, I'm certain it is the resin of habafropzipulops. (Please don't email me in an attempt to convince me otherwsie, as my mind is made up on this matter.)

As soon as I opened the box, I was struck by a powerful aroma, one that was both sweet and burned. I detected hint of cloves and granny perfume. The soap came wrapped in a piece of paper emblazoned with the emblems of various expos dating back to 1880 (Silver Medal winner at the Pan American exhibition in Puebla):

Also of interest was a fold-out instructional pamphlet enclosed in the box. The cover featured a 50s-style cartoon character reading the very same pamphlet, but unlike the famous infinite regression Borden's Dairy Cow logo, the little pamphlet the man was holding was blank. It really should have had the same drawing of the man reading the pamphlet. I was disappointed.

The other illustrations in the pamphlet were excellent, though. I don't understand Spanish, but it looks like Tio Nacho is good for six things:

1. Washing babies. It also makes fun bubbles!

2. Google translates "En la piel cabelluda" as "In the hairy skin." I'm taking this to mean it promotes hair growth. At $1.95 a cake, it's much cheaper than Minoxidol.

3. I don't need Google Translate to tell me what's going on here. This loving couple has contracted a serious skin condition. The fact that they are a couple makes it pretty clear that this particular disease is contagious. Judging by the expressions on their faces, I'd say the girl gave it to the guy, and not the other way around.

4. Itchy Scalp. Now we're talking. If I skip a day of washing my hair, I go out of my mind with itchiness. I often wake up in the middle of the night feeling like my hair is infested with crawling bugs, Charles Freck-style.

5. Dandruff. I use Neutrogena coal tar shampoo to control my dandruff. It works wonderfully, and never in my life have I smelled anything as delightful as coal tar. When I die, I want to be entombed in a tank of it.

6. Excessively greasy hair. That's me! My head is itchy, flaky, and greasy. Please help me, Uncle Nacho.

The soap is brownish red. The color reminds me a bit of Neutrogena shampoo. It's a good color, but wouldn't jet black be the best color for this soap?

Now it was time to put the soap to the test. As soon as it got wet, it released the smell of sulphur. The odor overpowered the other smells it had. It reminded me of the chemistry set I played with as a kid. It's not a bad smell, but after a while it gets to be a little obnoxious. I washed my hair with it once, twice, rinsing it with the coldest water I could stand (cold water rinses out soap better than hot water.)

When I was done. I could still smell the sulphur, but my scalp felt good. I scratched my scalp over a black sheet of paper, and some small flakes fell out. So the soap isn't perfect. Maybe it takes several applications to fully kick in. I'll let you know.

If want to try this product, be sure to heed the warning:

"AVOID GETTIN IN EYES AS IT MAY CAUSE TEMPORARY SMARTING."

$1.95 at Del Sol

I like my iPhone very much, but I was unhappily surprised to learn that it doesn't have iChat and AIM built into it. I suspect this is because AT&T wants you to get used to paying for SMS. But I just learned about a service called JiveTalk that lets you use instant messaging on your iPhone. I tried the alpha version it and it seems to work well.

JiveTalk for iPhone (alpha) Features:
• Multiple IM networks, multiple accounts per network: AIM®/iChat, MSN®, Yahoo!®, GoogleTalk®, ICQ®, and Jabber
• Automatically reconnects in case of data service disruption, including phone calls, loss of cell coverage
• Real-time chats, quick switch between multiple simultaneous chats, intuitive chat interface: - click to browse, call, or send an email directly from the chat screen
• SSL encryption of all over-the-air data transmission

Future versions promise to include buddy list management, privacy controls, and the ability to email your chats. Link