Pope Reborn as Superhero in Comic

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Pope John Paul II is being reborn in a Colombian comic book as a superhero battling evil with an anti-Devil cape and special chastity pants.

The artist also plans to produce action dolls with the name of his comic. He said, "He isn't John Paul II anymore. From now on, he's the Incredible Popeman."

He's been working on the comic for about a year, and in the first issue, by the strangest coincidence, John Paul II dies "and is reborn with superpowers beyond the infallibility Catholic doctrine gave him on Earth."

I have to stop now before I overdose on straight lines. Call a medic. And don't even ask about my pants.

Because sometimes Comedy Central is exactly as lame as Jon Stewart makes them sound, the network doesn't always provide accurate program guide information to sources like Tribune Media Services or DirecTV. That, in turn, means that the TiVo program guide doesn't recognize that only one of the six showings most weekdays of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart is new. (In my Central time zone, the 10:00 PM one is new. The 12:00 AM, 9:00 AM, and 6:00 PM showings the next day are repeats of that show. The 10:30 PM and 12:30 AM showings are repeats of the previous day's show.)

When TiVo doesn't know they're all the same episodes, it treats them all as "new" and wants to record all six of them. There are a few ways around this, none of them really satisfying:

• Adjust your Season Pass to only keep one episode of The Daily Show. This avoids wasting hard drive space, but if you try to watch it between 1:00 AM and 9:00 AM, or between 11:00 PM and midnight, you get only yesterday's show.
• Replace the Season Pass with a manual recording, M-F, 10:00 PM to 10:30 PM. This works, but during the 75% of the time that TiVo does know what the episodes are, it picks up reruns that you've probably already seen. Plus, you'll need to go manually delete the Friday entry each week, or pick up 30 minutes of whatever special Comedy Central has on at the time.

• What I do anymore: Keep a regular season pass for The Daily Show for first-run only episodes, and delete any strays from erroneous program guide information. Deleting can take a while on a slow TiVo, but one way is faster than others for me.

  Go to the To Do list and find one upcoming episode of The Daily Show. Press Select or Right Arrow to get more information on it, and then pick "View Upcoming Episodes." You'll see all of The Daily Show episodes that the TiVo knows about, most of them with double checkmarks because a Season Pass is going to record them. On this screen, highlight each one you don't want and press the Clear button to cancel the recording.

  On my TiVo, this quickly cancels the recording and drops me right back to the list, where I can press Down Arrow and repeat it for the next one. It's much faster than finding and cancelling them in the To Do list, where it sometimes takes the TiVo a while to come back because it has to recalculate the list.

It shouldn't bug me as much as it does - I have a dual-tuner TiVo now and big hard drives, so I'm rarely missing anything by letting one tuner record something, and I have the hard disk space to hold the duplicates. But I have to delete them eventually, and I'd rather do it ahead of time than after the fact. I especially hate it when the TiVo changes the channel on me while watching live TV for a recording it thinks I wanted that I did not. Grrr.

The really pissy part is that Comedy Central obviously knows about this problem - Jon Stewart even apologized for it on the show once - but they won't fix it. What assholes. Perhaps they're too busy trying to figure out how to run the same eight episodes of Chapelle's Show another 500 times.