#exclam

[pirateplayground]

Strung Out "Town of Corazon" / "The Architect" (Acoustic on No Future)

After nearly three decades of blazing punk with a metallic twist, Strung Out returned this year with Black Out the Sky, an acoustic EP to se...

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Exclam! Comic 37: Tech Support

This is based on a true story.  Plugging the address for Yelp's first "computer repair" result for Fort Worth leads behind a strip mall.  I was at least expecting a black market representative, but, alas, no dice.

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Exclam! Comic 36: Indiana Jones and the Chocolate Cake

This strip took a long time to draw and shade, as can be seen by the fact that this is Tuesday's strip coming up on Thursday night.

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Exclam! Comic 35: Tennis

Sorry for this one being late -- I was on a road trip all weekend without access to a scanner.

For those confused, Novak Djokovic is the number-one ranked tennis player in the world

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Exclam! Comic 34: Mad Science Intern Search

To understand a bit more about the premise of this week's strip, it's necessary to understand just how much Emil Fischer did for carbohydrate chemistry.  He derived the structure of all the basic sugars from basic experiments based on how products of reactions extending the very simplest sugar (glyceraldehyde) turned polarized light (which is based partially on the symmetry of the chemical structures).

However, in doing so, he made one assumption: that the "D" form of glyceraldehyde was the dextrorotatory form (in other words, it turned polarized light clockwise); if he had assumed that the "L" form (the other possible form) was dextrorotatory, carbohydrate chemists would have had to flip all the structures Fischer had derived to their mirror images.  It was a lucky guess (confirmed to be so in the 1950s, much to the relief of organic chemists) that must have made explaining Fischer's thought processes a lot easier for orgo textbook writers.

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Exclam! Comic 33: Robespierre Plays Chess

For this strip, Robespierre has claimed Exclam! to be an enemy of the state.

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Exclam! Comic 32: Many Springs Open 56: Miniatures

I went to a chess tournament on Saturday (the 56th Many Springs Open, run by the Tarrant Country Chess Club; Many Springs 55 was the subject of the last set of comics based on a chess tournament) and managed to win the "novice section" (I was in the intermediate section last time; I suppose I was placed in the lowest (of three) sections to even them out).  These "miniatures" (both a misnomer (they're just as big as regular comics) and a chess reference (the term refers to short, flashy games)) are largely autobiographical, which may not be as funny as my regular provided fare (give them an exclam and query (!?) instead of an exclam, perhaps).