Author Philip Roth, quoted in a New York Times article about his recently announced retirement: “Every morning I study a chapter in iPhone for Dummies, and now I’m proficient. I haven’t read a word for two months. I pull this thing out and play with it.”

Day One: Wow, is this thing amazing! It fits so perfectly in my hand, I just can’t stop touching it. Warm to the touch, responds to my every whim. The manual says I can even make it vibrate?!

Ben and Winslow watched a shooting star scream earthward last week, and now Winslow’s actually found the damn thing. But, like all of history’s greatest thinkers, Winslow has questions. Where did this magnificent, still-smoking piece of space debris actually come from? The answer will no doubt shock you.

In 1847, the unrepentant 29th American Congress voted to repeal a piece of legislation, enacted in 1812, that forbade “public procreation and all acts of a carnal nature” from “finding roost within the civic eye.” This repeal caused an outcry at the time, particularly in the then-fledgling Western states. One Oklahoma columnist expressed her outrage in a church circular: “Damnation shall rain like fire upon the heads of our deeply misguided congressmen.” This prophetic conjecture was wrong in its particulars, but correct in its general thrust. Four days after that circular went to press, Democratic Speaker of the House, John Wesley Davis of Indiana, was vaulted into a fiery fissure that split open the floor of the Capitol building.

  One of my friends, a film professor, has given himself a project for 2013. He’s going to watch one movie he’s never seen every week this year. That’s fifty-two films to add to his repertoire and I was like, “Whoa! That’s a lot of movies.” Ok, so then – I saw this on Facebook: This

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I admit that today’s strip is pretty ridiculous. But I won’t apologize for it. It was created at the last minute from the molten gray matter bubbling at my brain’s core, and when forging something from such raw, elemental materials you can’t stop.