Perhaps one day the Detroit con might improve - there was a time, not so very long ago, when Seattle's Emerald City Comic-Con was a pitiful little affair. (For that matter, I remember my first SDCC, when it was still being held at that little hotel convention center up the road, back in the '80s - I got to meet Larry Niven. No idea back then that this little day-and-a-half affair would blossom into one of the biggest cons in the frakking world...)

Could be worse. For a while, I worked for an auto auction place in Oceanside, as a driver; we would be dropped off at various locations in LA, Orange, and San Diego counties, and have to drive cars from there back to the auction house. (Protip: NEVER buy a Jaguar. When the Jag dealership in Irvine went bust, we had to drive the cars down to sell. Every single one had to be jump-started, and you had to put gas in with the engine idling, because you might not get it started again.) I drove through that traffic four or five times a day. It was okay when we did things like picking up last year's Town Cars from the Lincoln-Mercury up in LA, because those generally had working AC, and you could get funny looks as you cruised through rush-hour traffic in your luxury car with Bat Out of Hell or some Type O Negative blaring from the speakers; but when it was, say, the five-year-old repossessed Trans Am with the dust in the vents and the passenger-side window that wouldn't go down, not quite as much fun. (Especially since that last was from clear up by the Reagan Freeway, and I had to drive it all the way to frakking Oceanside...)

"A rousing game of killer bunnies" - is that what the kids call it these days?

Seconding JL: Generation Lost. Remember when Max Lord killed a bunch of people, then made the world forget? So do some of the people who used to be in JLEurope - and since Max was brought back by the White Entity, they're trying to make him pay for his crimes. First up - proving he exists, since no one remembers him. Second - proving he did anything. To anyone. *Ever.* Also, for a while now, Action Comics has been about Lex Luthor. This version is an unrepentant jerkass - for a reason; in his experience, *everyone* has a hidden agenda, and he wants to know what the agenda is of that big alien everyone loves in Metropolis. In a recent issue, Lex had a near-death experience - and got to meet Death, who had some advice for him. (I haven't read Sandman yet, but from osmosis I gather the Death in Action Comics is the same Death from Sandman - young lady, pale complexion, into elaborate facial makeup...)

"This is a whole different kind of smurf photo."

I've got all the punctuation I need - I import it all from Donchaunnastan, a former comma-nist country (for a period, anyway).

Well, no matter the teaching method, some people do suck at math, due to a condition known as dyscalcula. In dyslexia, the order of letters in words gets scrambled in the head; in dyscalcula the same thing happens with numbers. Nothing to do with intelligence, just perception. That link for the mp3 of "Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers" just gave me a 404, but I did find a bibliography, for those who still read actual words on paper... :) http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?40786 (Copy and paste - my html-fu is weak.)