Happy New Year from Tintin

Happy New Year from all of us here at The Daily Vampire and our beloved Belgian comic book reporter Tintin. Though we hate fessing up to mistakes here, we must admit that we wrongly identified Tintin's white fox terrier dog earlier this week. For the record, the mutt's name is Snowy, not Fluffy.

But, since Tintin's creator Herge (1907-1983) we may not get yelled out for making this blunder. Titin debuted in 1929, and it has been translated into 80 languages.

I discovered Tintin back in 1978 when I was eight years old and we were living near Zonguldak, Turkey, and I came across "Tintin Tibet'te" which was a Turkish translation of Herge's 1960 book "Tintin in Tibet, a book that remains a favorite among Titin fans.

While researching this, we found out that The Tintin Shop in London (there are other Tintin stores in Belgium and France) will be closed in May of this year, but it will be replaced by a coffee house called Haddock's, which will pay homage to the Tintin character Captain Archibald Haddock.

The New Zealand '80s New Wave band Thompson Twins ("Hold Me Now") also took their name from Tintin characters.

A museum devoted to Herge was opened up near Brussels, Belgium, in 2009.

SIDEBAR: One can still see photos of deep-fried turkeys, a specialty of my friend and fellow blogger Chris Knight of Reidsville, NC, on his blog "The Knight Shift" (http://www.knightshift.blogspot.com).

Today is also the birthday of my friend Devrim Kale in Edirne, Turkey.

And, we wish to congratulate Jocelyn Skye Jimenez of Elizabeth, NJ, Keegan Lee Kinzel of Huntington, WVa, and Roxana Santos of Rockville, Md. Each of these New Year's babies were among the first babies born after midnight in their respective localities today.