This year’s most famous (real) pregnant teen happens to live in a town that’s a homonym for the name of last year’s most famous (fictional) pregnant teen. The result, of course, is a Photoshopped movie poster advertising that quirky comedy hit, Juneau!

You may have heard of “Garfield Minus Garfield.”

That’s the Web site that takes Jim Davis’s iconic comic strip, removes the titular cat from all frames, and leaves behind “Jon Arbuckle… an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness.”

Well, now there’s going to be an official Garfield Minus Garfield book. It’s authorized by Davis and published by Garfield‘s regular paperback licensee.

…Kids WB signed off in May. Someone calling himself Peter Paltridge did notice, and offers a retrospective of the cartoon programming block’s first and last days on the air. If you don’t understand why Earthworm Jim was a greater show than Skunk Fu, you soon will.

…refer y’all to any Wall St. Journal opinion essays. But here’s one I like. It’s all about a serious modern poet’s love for Warner Bros. Cartoons. Really.

…by people with far too much time on their hands: A comprehensive guide to fictional breakfast cereals.

One of Frank Zappa’s kids will edit Disney comics.

Now the Great Gazoo will never get back to his home planet.

Saturday just happened to be the first warm day of the year; a perfect setting for the already much-documented Dalai Lama show in the pro football stadium, where he talked about compassion and coexistence for all people.

(No, I see absolutely no cynical irony in that. American football is a game of confrontation, but it’s also a game of cooperation.)

His message, and the other messages at the Seeds of Compassion confab, have been both simple and deep. I’ll probably have more to say about them later this week.

Later that evening, I found myself at the Georgetown Art Attack gallery crawl. Saw some lovely informal paintings at Georgetown Tile curated by my ol’ pal Anne Grgich; then caught some great buys at the Fantagraphics bookstore’s scratch-and-dent sale.

Sunday brought us the last day of the last bowling alley north of the Ship Canal, Ballard’s totally beloved Sunset Lanes.

It was also the day of what just might have been the last pro basketball game in Seattle. Maybe. If we don’t do something about it.

Even after a deliberately thrown season, the finale was sold out. Fans booed the home team’s owner Clay Bennett, and cheered the opposing team’s owner (Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, who opposes Bennett’s desired team move to Oklahoma City). You saw little to none of this on Fox Sports Net; under terms of its contract with the team, FSN’s announcers said almost nothing about Bennett’s threats or the real importance of Sunday’s game.

Also Sunday evening, and this takes the whole entry full circle, CNN held what it called a “Compassion Forum,” in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (appearing separately) discussed their religious and/or spiritual foundations. Of course, because they are rival applicants for a really big job, some pundits just had to compare and contrast who’s really the most faith-based.

…claims you, the avid Internet consumer and blog reader, just might be a “virtual crackhead.”

I’m a little skeptical of these scares. Remember how horror comic books were supposed to turn cleancut suburban boys into juvenile delinquents? When the mere act of viewing an operating TV screen was supposed to turn everybody into brainless zombies? (Oh wait, that accusation’s still being made.)

So go ahead and keep browsin’. Learn a few things. Have some laughs. Just make sure to fulfill those pesky work and home duties.

…Robert Boyd has a blog of his own these days, principally concerned with unearthing the many unsung, everyday wonders of Houston.

…who still read printed newspapers for the daily ritual, and were perturbed whenever one aspect of that ritual goes missing, here’s today’s Tank McNamara strip. (If you’re reading this after Oct. 1, set the “Current” box on the linked page to Oct. 1.)

The P-I has made no explanation for the strip’s Monday absence. In the past, the P-I has run comic strip episodes from which other papers around the country have demurred (in such series as Non Sequitur and the late, lamented Boondocks). So I wouldn’t expect the paper to shy away from a Tank episode that compares athletes who don’t give a darn about other athletes’ health problems to “neo-cons.”

…this report, the Weekly World News is shutting down. Unlike most of my readers, I won’t miss it.

WWN, that most beloved of all periodicals by the would-be hipsters and the easily amused everywhere, began in 1980 as a spinoff of the National Enquirer. The Enquirer was morphing from its previous weird-news format into the highly successful celeb-gossip sheet it is now. The WWN was created to service fans of the material the Enquirer would no longer emphasize.

The rag found its market niche among all the kids who bought it to sneer at all the other people who supposedly bought it. By 1985, it was being written and edited by hip young adults for hip young adults, but still pretending to be targeted at the mouth-breathers out in flyover country.

It traded on its outrageousness. But that’s difficult to maintain. Every year the WWN became more over-the-top, more ridiculous. Its fake news evolved into a house of mirrors–they knew it was fake, you knew it was fake, they knew you knew, but they pretended they didn’t know you knew, and you pretended they didn’t know you knew.

It’s amazing they kept it up this long.

The beginning of WWN’s end may have come when it hired my ol’ acquaintance, cartoonist Peter Bagge, to create a weekly comic strip based on “Bat Boy,” a character whose airbrush-created face made the paper’s cover at least once a year. The pretense had ended with Bagge’s arrival. The editors had included true urban-hipster material.

American Media, current owners of the Enquirer and WWN, apparently turned down at least one offer to buy the publication, for reasons unknown.

We no longer have to deal with cloying, unfunny religious-right sermons from a comic-strip caveman whose very name means Christ hasn’t been born yet. But, the defenders will say we should remember Hart’s earlier work, back when he was still funny and creative. I would say that even then, his work was often slipshod and formulaic. Hart’s ’60s-’70s peak came during a low point in the comic-strip scene, as newspaper editors slashed space and promoted the most banal forms of graphic entertainment. Hart was a hack who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and who was occasionally capable of rising to, if not heights, at least medium-heights of whimsy.

…with today’s Mother Goose & Grimm strip. (If you’re viewing this link after 3-17-07, reset the date box on the linked page to see that day’s strip.)

…Here’s a ’40s-era abridged and illustrated version of Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The original book was an American “free market” economist’s thesis on how “centralized planning” would always lead to one or another flavor of fascism. Hayek (no relation to Salma) clearly intended an anti-liberal (specifically anti-New Deal), pro-libertarian statement. But, at least in this condensed version, it’s eerily prescient about modern pseudo-“conservative” ideology.