The website for Grassroots Skeptics, my new volunteer organization, is now live. Please take a minute to go have a look.

Okay kids. Studying for the Pennsylvania Bar Exam, getting ready to move into a new apartment and helping to raise my infant daughter are kicking my ass. I’m sure that the lack of regular activity around here hasn’t escaped your notice. Based on the response to the few posts I have managed to cobble together, I don’t think anyone has been too devastated.

Given all that, I think it’s time to make it official. Suburban Panic and I are going on hiatus, at least until after I take the bar. And I’m doing it right, too. I’m uninstalling my Twitter client, ignoring Facebook and Livejournal, unsubscribing from most of my podcasts and purging all but the most vital channels from my feed reader. I may pop up once in awhile (here or on Mario Kart Wii-Fi), but only sporadically, and never for an extended period of time.

In the meantime, I’m keeping a small room open in the back of my brain, where I’ll be haphazardly storing ideas about what I’d like to do with the site once I’m not staring down the barrel of the most important test I’m ever likely to take. If you have suggestions for things you’d like to see, or things you’d claw your eyes out to avoid looking at, feel free to leave them in the comments. For urgent matters, I am available by email at oskar[at]suburbanpanic[dot]com.

See you in August.

Foo-Foo McKinley went for her first ultrasound today, and came away with a picture of her beloved meat peanut. She unwisely posted a copy online, despite being warned about what I would do to it.

Bonus LOLtrasounds under the cut.

Appearing on a television show with the word “celebrity” in its title actually increases the effect. ”I Have Vastly Overestimated My Popular Appeal, Get Me Out Of Here” doesn’t have the same ring to it, I guess.

Why does the strength of an entertainer’s fame seem to inversely correlate with the size of that entertainer’s ego? It’s one of the great unanswered questions. Also, it was literally keeping me awake last night. The result of my insomia was this comic. So now it sucks for all of us.

I mostly follow my own advice. I hardly ever drink to excess, and there is exactly zero demand for pictures of me naked, so it’s relatively easy.

I find myself saying that a lot these days.

Trying to keep my hand in drawing, and maybe even change my style up a little bit. Although I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve just drawn a self-portrait + twenty years.

Oprah Winfrey has enlisted a dangerous new ally in her war to conquer the media and wipe out rationality. Unlike Oprah’s earlier recruits, Jenny McCarthy has a body count. Dr. Phil may be a self-important blowhard with an angry elephant approach to therapy, but at least he isn’t helping the resurgence of diseases that kill infants.

Can Oprah brand homeopathic pediatric cancer treatments be far behind?

Among the economists that I see and hear in the media, there seems to be an almost uniform lack of ability to conceive of what actual life is like for anyone who lives below the middle class. I figure it’s probably hard to be an ivory tower academic if you’re stepping on roaches when you go for a midnight snack. I’m just sayin.’

This comic is dedicated to NPR’s Planet Money podcast. The show does a great job of demystifying complex economic concepts, and has a surprisingly low percentage of stuffed-shirt market fetishists among its guests. But even they occasionally talk to somebody who desperately needs to live on plain pasta and powdered milk for a year.

Also, I’m aware that you waited almost two months for a new comic, and it was totally not worth it. Not only did it take forever, but if you follow me on Twitter, it’s kind of a re-run. I’d love to say that I’ll be able to remedy that in the near future, but that would be crossing the line from harmless fib to blatant falsehood.

I suppose I should come clean and admit that I’ve never actually seen any research which refutes the claims made by the makers of “energy shots.” Nothing in the ingredients list appears to be able to do the things they claim the drink can do, but I’m operating purely from my own common sense, rather than any evidence. I am a bad skeptic. But it makes a half-decent joke.

Can anyone help me out here? Have you read anything supporting or refuting the claimed effects of these drinks? Can I safely call shenanigans, or is it possible that the drinks do what they say they can do?

Also, it’s exceedingly rare that the picture I have in my head translates almost directly to the finished comic, but this time I nailed it pretty solidly. I’m going to take a moment to bask. Then I’m going to remember that it took me all friggin’ night to make that stupid little picture of a bottle, and I’ll be back to my usual self.

I stayed up way too friggin’ late and, between diaper changes (my baby’s, not mine) I managed to get transcripts and hovertext entered for all of the strips in the archive. This means that the text of the comics is now searchable. If you remember a word or two of the dialogue, you can enter it into the search box at the top right of the page, and pull up any strip where I used those words.

To ensure that I haven’t wasted all this time for nothing, I’ve devised my first ever Suburban Panic reader contest. The rules are these:

1. Use the transcript search box to find a strip in the archives.
2. Leave a comment on the strip, telling me what words you searched for.
3. The person whose search I find the most interesting gets to be drawn in as a cameo in an upcoming strip. (By interesting, I mean what fun, funky words or combinations thereof can you look for that will return a result?)

Simple, right? And it means that (hopefully) the search feature will be used at least once, and I won’t have entirely wasted the last three nights. So get to searching, and if you notice any transcription errors, feel free to point them out.

EDIT: Contest is now closed. Thanks to everyne who played.