Bazooka bubble gum is getting a makeover, and the comic strip is going away.

What adults may remember best about Bazooka, however, is disappearing. The tiny comic strip featuring the eyepatch-wearing brand mascot Bazooka Joe that has been wrapped around each piece of gum since 1953 is being replaced.

New inserts will feature brainteasers, like a challenge to list 10 comic book heroes named after animals, or activities, like instructions on folding the insert into an airplane. They also include codes that, when entered at BazookaJoe.com, will unlock content like videos and video games.

I still remember my favorite Bazooka Joe comic from about fourth or fifth grade: “Last night I had a dream I was eating a giant marshmallow, and this morning, my pillow was gone!”

Yup, still funny.

Hostess, makers of Twinkies, Ring Dings, Wonder Bread, and other completely-bad-for-you-but-tasty-as-hell products, has filed papers to shut down and liquidate all assets.

Hostess, which has about $2.5 billion in sales from a long list of iconic consumer brands of snack cakes and breads, said it had suspended operations at all of its 33 plants around the United States as it moves to start liquidating assets.

“We’ll be selling the brands and as much of the infrastructure as we can,” said company spokesman Lance Ignon. “There is value in the brands.”

Oh good, someone will buy up the brand names and continue making them. Whew.

The Times’ Pete Wells reviews Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square:

GUY FIERI, have you eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the 500 seats at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations?

[...]

When you hung that sign by the entrance that says, WELCOME TO FLAVOR TOWN!, were you just messing with our heads?

EVERYTHING about this review is just so so awesome.

Eater has posted the harshest lines of the review with pictures of cats.

UPDATE: The Times Public Editor weighed in on whether such overwhelmingly negative reviews should be written, saying:

Is it ever really acceptable for criticism to be so over the top, considering that there are human beings behind every venture? I think it is. That kind of brutal honesty is sometimes necessary. If it is entertaining, all the better. The exuberant pan should be an arrow in the critic’s quiver, but reached for only rarely.

During the recent Presidential election results, Twitter did not fail.

According to a blog post by Mazen Rawashdeh, Twitter’s VP of infrastructure operations engineering, Twitter users posted an average of 9,965 messages per second between the hours of 8:11pm and 9:11pm Pacific Time.

During a single second at 8:20pm, Twitter users produced 15,107 new posts, Rawashdeh writes, and during the peak traffic period of the evening they generated 874,560 posts in a single minute.

I believe I got more accurate information via Twitter than I did flipping back and forth between the possibly inebriated Diane Sawyer on ABC and the funeral that was going on at Fox. I was amazed the service stayed up, and thankful it did.

Because Twitter was able to stay up, this became the most retweeted tweet of all time.

For my last Sandy related post, the cover of this weeks New York Magazine is amazing.

Update: The photographer who took the shot explains how he got it.

NOLA to New York is a tumblr that has Katrina survivors in New Orleans talk to New Yorkers about how to deal with the aftermath of a big storm.

I am a freelance journalist and New York is my home.  But New Orleans was once.  I am in NOLA now, waiting to get home in the wake of Sandy.  So while I am pacing, worried about my husband, friends and my city, I thought up this project.  Who better than the people of New Orleans to talk to the people of NYC right now.  They know, they lived through Katrina.  They are still living with it seven years later.

Patience, compassion, and being nice to each other seem to be the keys. Too bad that a) it takes a big storm to bring those qualities out in people, and b) New Yorkers don’t have much of any of those three. New Jerseyans are even worse.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Disney is buying LucasFilm for $4 billion, but what I didn’t hear right away is what George Lucas was planning on doing with all that money: he’s donating the bulk of it to charity:

“George Lucas has expressed his intention, in the event the deal closes, to donate the majority of the proceeds to his philanthropic endeavors.”

It’s not yet clear which foundation will get the proceeds. Lucas is currently the chairman of Edutopia, which is part of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. He could put money into that or create a new foundation which would be funded from the sale.

It’s going to be weird seeing a Star Wars movie without the 20th Century Fox logo/theme at the very beginning.

The Atlantic’s In Focus has 54 pictures of Hurricane Sandy’s aftermath.

Last night, Hurricane Sandy — the largest Atlantic tropical system on record — made landfall just south of Atlantic City, New Jersey, bringing winds up to 90 mph (150 kph), and pushing a massive storm surge onto beaches and shorelines.

Update: They’ve posted another set of pictures.

NYC’s MTA has posted some photos of their system wide shutdown in preparation of hurricane Sandy. It’s really weird and erie to see some stations completely empty when they are normally bustling even at 3am and 4am. I really hope that guy made that train.

My office is closed and I’m up because I forgot to turn off my alarm clock. I’m an idiot.

The Overlook Hotel gives us the orignal, unaltered photo from the end of ‘The Shining’.

Interestingly, close examination of images from the film reveals that two different photo-composites were used: one for the long tracking shot which pushes down the hall towards the photo, and a different one for the extreme close-up.

Never noticed that. Here’s the two different photos.

A study indicates that bald men may show more leadership potential than those with thinning hair (paywall circumventing Google search).

[...] head shavers may seem powerful because the look is associated with hypermasculine images, such as the military, professional athletes and Hollywood action heroes like Bruce Willis. (Male-pattern baldness, by contrast, conjures images of “Seinfeld” character George Costanza.)

I may have to give this a try…maybe I’ll show up to Thanksgiving with the cue-ball look.

The Wall Street Journal recently spent the day in Central Park counting the number of sports played. 29.

It is hard to even think of 29 distinct sports. Beyond the obvious (softball, basketball, cycling, running), there were ones we couldn’t identify without asking the participants.

I don’t know that I would classify toy airplanes and kites as a “sport”.

Researchers believe they’ve found the spot where Julius Caesar was stabbed.

Now, archaeologists have unearthed a concrete structure nearly 10 feet wide and 6.5 feet tall that may have been erected by Augustus, Julius Caesar’s successor, to condemn the assassination. The structure is at the base of the Curia, or Theater, of Pompey, the spot where classical writers reported the stabbing took place.

The Times has a profile on how Ichiro Suzuki treats his bats.

While most players dump their bats in cylindrical canvas bags when they are not using them, Suzuki neatly stacks his best eight bats inside a shockproof, moisture-free black case that he keeps close by his locker at home and on the road.

I completely respect this, and wish more players would respect the game as he does. Maybe if A-Rod did, he wouldn’t be such a waste of air in the post season.