You’ve boarded your plane, you’ve found your seat, and you’re waiting for everyone else to board. Awesome.

You look out the window, down at all the utility vehicles drivin’ around the plane, and that’s where things get weird:

These trucks aren’t just modified Fords and Chevys: They’re weird, squished, alternate-universe permutations of normal road vehicles. Ain’t nobody at an airport driving anything approximating a “car” or a “truck”: These are vehicles that look like they should be drivin’ around the town of Stumpyville. Like they should be driven by Gimli, son of Gloin.

The dwarves fled the fires of Smaug, my friends, and are now baggage handlers.

YOU CAN NOT UNLEARN THIS FACT.

We’re about to change the way we do shirts in the Sheldon store, and so right now…all existing shirts are going on clearance sale price with FREE shipping in the U.S! (Europe/Aussies/Canadians: Take heart — you still get the clearance price!)

To snag your shirt, head on over to Ye Olde Sheldonne Storre, established 1643.

There’ve been a few funny e-mails regarding the recent strips. Mostly stories of local businesses in their town, such as “Crapo Insurance” or “Crapo Transmission Repair”….stuff like that. But Sheldon reader Ginger S. wrote in with one of my favorites:

“Just wanted to say I’ve been laughing really hard at the Crapo storyline right now, mainly because I have a Crapo story, too. The Crapo family donated money to my undergrad university to remodel a building into a theatre. Normally the school would have named the theatre building after the family but the idea of the Crapo Theatre made them change their minds. Over 20 years later the theatre is still called the New Theatre. There’s a lovely plaque in their honor…but the idea of the Crapo Theatre always made me laugh. “

Ha! I love it. “Crapo Theatre” particularly cracks me up.

Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics fame has a pretty hilarious-backslash-awesome write-up of his recent lake misfortunes. If you you have a moment, it’s well worth the read.

Architecture student Amanda W. sent in this shot, today, from her graduation. In honor of what powered her through long days and nights of architecture classes, she wore her Coffee: It’s What’s For Dinner shirt to to ceremony. I love it! Thanks, Amanda!

Sheldonista Sanna S. sent me a link to a hilarious blog, the other day, and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s a blog that shares all sorts of terrible cakes made by “professionals”. Or, as the blog terms it “When professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.”

Ladies and Gents, I present Cake Wrecks.

A lot of folks asked me for a wallpaper of the cake-bloated Arthur from the “Living Dangerously” cover, so I whipped up a free wallpaper for everyone! Just click on your monitor’s resolution, below, and voila: Instant Wallpaper.

[Not sure which screen resolution your computer uses?  Click here for the instant answer!]

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I thought I’d give you a sneak peek at the next Sheldon book, Living Dangerously (With Saturated Fats). Mainly just to share pictures of a duck belly-floppin’ into cake. [Click for a larger image]

And, since you can’t really read the text, there, let me blow that part up:

For those wondering: The book *will* be available at San Diego Comic-Con, as well as the July(?) book-launch party in Los Angeles, and in the store by August.

Not getting your daily Sheldon e-mail in your GMail inbox?

Solution: Go into your Spam/Junk/Filtered folders, find a Sheldon e-mail and label it as “Not Spam”, and that should take care of it. The problem is on GMail’s end, unfortunately.

This happens from time-to-time on the bigger mail systems like Yahoo, GMail, or in corporate/government systems: Because their spam algorithms are shared across users, when something flags the Sheldon deliveries as “spam” in their system, then suddenly it’s spam for everyone using that system. It’s annoying…but not having aggressive, shared spam filters would probably be more annoying in life.

So! If and when you don’t get your Sheldon daily e-mail, check your computer-based or server-based spam filters. 99.99% of the time, that’s the problem.

(Also: If there are Gmail or Yahoo engineers who’d like to offer up a more permanent solution, that’d be awesome.)

Long-time readers know I’ve been looking for a site where Sheldonistas could give honest, independent feedback on the books they got in the Sheldon Store. We tried Yelp for a while, but Yelp is designed for brick-and-mortar stores…so it didn’t really work.

But! Yesterday, a kind librarian reader pointed me to a site called “Good Reads”. It’s a social network built around books and book lovers. I went to check it out, and there were already 80 reviews for Sheldon books in their system! So let’s try it out: If you’re already on Good Reads, swing by the Sheldon book page and rate the books you own.

So far, “Pugs” is in the lead, with a 4.57 out of 5 points!