The weather may be cooling off and sun may be setting earlier, but at least you’ll have the Urban Blah to warm your heart and brighten your day. Did I say warm your heart? Oh my.

Can’t quite decide if it should be hyphenated or not.

Wouldn’t that just be fuzziest little grand unified pooka-bear theory ever? Oh, you’re a pretty kitty. So pretty! Okay, get away from me, you stupid cat. Et cetera.

Perhaps you did not know that it was still en vogue to make fun of Yakov Smirnoff. Perhaps it isn’t. But it’s too late to unring this bell.

Dare you doubt Lovisa’s brilliance? I give her the directive, “asleep at his desk/in meeting/whatever’s funniest,” she gives me that bottom panel. Dare not.

Given that the Urban Blah’s next step on the path to global domination might be to try to get printed in physical newspapers, maybe this comic isn’t the wisest choice. Then again, it’s not wrong, is it? Plus, I’ve heard one result of newspapers dying is that they’re no longer interested in shelling out money (or pages) to awesome comics. I can’t say I blame them either.That said, we’d be more than happy to join any ancient religion that would have us as a member. He says, brutalizing the Groucho Marx quote nearly beyond recognition.

The new Mario game is full of cute music, dancing flowers, silly noises. Play with more than one player and there’s bound to be bouncing on each others’ heads. It’s all so wonderfully G-rated that I almost forgot that Mario and Luigi pretty much kill anything that moves. Stomping on turtles, shooting things with fireballs, freezing and smashing enemies. If you manage to shoot one of the Venus flytrap guys that spring from a pipe, they actually cry out in pain. It was enough to make me wonder, could you play a vegetarian version of Super Mario Brothers? I think you can’t — there are certain enemies that just can’t be bypassed without slaughtering them.

But if anyone can do it, it’s intrepid Urban Blah illustrator Lovisa Loiselle. She’s a gamer supreme, beating Mario in the time it took us to get to World 4-2. And I suspect she didn’t burn through nearly as many Luigis as I’ve sacrificed in the name of saving Princess Peach. A gaming nation turns its lonely eyes to you…

Despite this comic, I see nothing wrong with saying the word “Sigh” as a replacement for actually sighing.

I don’t really want to say more on the subject, as I’m pretty sure this could be the subject of my eventual PhD dissertation.

This comic features a lyric from the song “Dwyck,” and although it isn’t a Guru lyric, it is from a Gang Starr song, and I wanted to pay tribute in my own meaningless way. I have way too many rap lyrics burned into my brain, and an inordinate amount of those are Guru’s. He will be missed.

I first stumbled across Gang Starr the way most white kids in the late ’80s discovered hip hop: through Yo! MTV Raps. It was “Ex Girl to the Next Girl” and I remember being blown away by the monotone — you can just do that?! If that had happened today, I’d just buy or download the CD, but in those days buying music involved saving up and begging for a ride to the Walpole Mall. Gang Starr was added the long wish list, to be purchased at some later date.

In late high school, I chanced into free copies of the Brand New Heavies’ first album, featuring a Guru song, and also Jazzmatazz, which I was excited about but didn’t give a fair shot to until years later. In my first job after college, while writing an article about Internet radio, a hip hop station had “Code of the Streets” on its heavy rotation and I decided to divert the time had come. I bought Daily Operation and Hard to Earn and never looked back. These albums struck a deep chord with me; when my college asked for alumni updates, I remember including my newfound fondness for Gang Starr in a laundry list of what I was up to since graduating.

I’ve been a fan of hip hop almost as long as I’ve been a fan of music, but for whatever reason, Gang Starr has always been a private love affair. I’ve had friends who liked A Tribe Called Quest and Public Enemy and even Young MC, but I never really knew anyone who liked Gang Starr or Guru. So at 21, I’d put on headphones and listen to “The Militia” at my desk while doing my first post-college job. At 34, I’ll put on “B.Y.S.” when I’m in teh car and want to rap along to a song I know all the words to.

Part of my love comes from the fact that I discovered Gang Starr during one of the great transitional periods in my life: Not only was I moving from college to The Real World, I had just started dating a girl who later was to become my wife. I remember playing “When You’re Near” off Jazzmatazz for her really early in our relationship, showing her the music I was into at the time, and her liking it burned it more deeply into my brain. Guru’s music has been a recurring soundtrack to me life for the 13 years since, and even though my favorite work of his came from the early ’90s, I’m still extremely sad about his passing. As he once said in a tribute to the many fallen rappers he’d known over the years, I wish you were still living. Rest in peace.