Okay, there’s a lot of nonsense out on the interwubs today, and plus I have been wanting to drink beer a dentist appointment in a little while, so let’s just do this quickly and retreat from the very clever funsters¹.

Okay, you got me, there was a Lirpa Loof gag that amused me, one that got me good², and I’m half-conviced that the lack of a new xkcd today will reveal itself later as some elaborate hoax or another. But one thing isn’t a gag and I think you should check it out.

Bernie Hou is the creator of the long-hiatused Alien Love Predator, a comic about which I wrote a piece that I still really like³. More recently, he’s been the driving force behind Comics Chameleon, and he’s been away from making his own comics for entirely too long.

Until today:

Hey! I’m drawing a brand new comic, it’s all about sports. Just in time for the new sports games. Check it out at berniehou.com

Actually, Sports Happen has single-panel sports-themed strips from April of 2014, plus four (much more polished) new ones to kick-start an archive; no mention yet as to update schedule, but I imagine it will be more frequent in the periods of time when Sport Happen, which we seem to be in right now. I don’t really follow sports (other than to be enraged at the manner in which US Soccer is treating the women’s national team — seriously, the men fly business class and the women fly coach?), but you don’t need to be up on sports to understand that statistics and biometrics are not always good things.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Sports Happen, and those of you that like sport mixed with your comics? This is your new best friend, especially seeing as how your alternative is Gil freakin’ Thorpe. Welcome back to the cartooning game, Bernie; it’s good to have you around again.

Spam of the day:

Bosley — Yes! Financing is Available

I don’t know how to break this to you, spammers purporting to be a hair-restoration clinic/service, but I have a head of rich, luxurious hair with nary a sign of receding or thinning. Seriously, my new barber⁴ complains about how much of it there is. Oh, and I notice that your return address is the same as the sender of other spams regarding liposuction, Russian mail-order brides, the importance of buying gold before the world goes to hell, tactical flashlights, and stool softeners. Heck of a wide range of business interests you got there.

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¹ I hope I don’t need to remind you of the failure mode of clever.

² Turning my entirely justified despising of the entire Internet of Things against me? Darn you, Jam!

³ You know that loathing that artists have looking at their old work? Writers are the same reading their old stuff. I like this ALP review, my review of the first Dinosaur Comics book made up entirely of Dinosaur Comics quotes, the year MoCCA Fest almost burned down and that’s it. I’m a total hack.

⁴ I’ve spent much of the past two years trying to settle on a new barber, on account of the guy I went to for 28 years — a Sicilian gentleman with monstrous hands named Luigi; his shop was strictly first-come, first-served, and was a microcosm of everybody from kids getting their first trim to local politicians to wannabe mobbed-up guys from ten towns north — died at the age of nearly 80. He (without a trace of malice and no little irony) always called me Big Guy and we usually talked about his koi pond when I was in the chair. He had a major grudge against the herons that treated it as a snack bar. Requiscat in pace, Lou.