Harold Lloyd in “Among Those Present”

For today I’d like to point to the 1921 Harold Lloyd comedy Among Those Present. It’s a piece about 35 minutes long and has what I think of as a distinctly 1920s setting: people ill-fit to uppertendom. It’s easy to imagine the Marx Brothers going crashing through things, but Harold Lloyd — who’s introduced here as the bellhop and gets woven into their lives for reasons that make sense within the genre. I doubt I could pass this off as naturalistic, although I like the idea of a world where Lloyd’s bellhop might say (as in one of the title cards) something like “Gee! If I only had the glad rags — I could act like any of those swells” without it being at least a bit of an affectation. Anyway, it’s Harold Lloyd; it’s outstanding comic acting and the occasional brilliant stroke of directing (as note when Lloyd’s character gets his first look at Mildred Davis’s, or the shadow on the stable door as shown about 31 minutes in), a bunch of animal stunts, and some pantslessness.

The title cards are a treat, at least to my tastes. They’re written by H M Walker, who’s got a slightly rococo style that I enjoy. If you aren’t amused a bit by, for example, “Evening — Twelve hours and a thousand yawns before the fox hunt. A wonderful and worthless gathering of 14-carat lounge lizards and re-painted wallflowers”, maybe the occasional illustration (on this card, of lizards) will spruce things up for you. And maybe imagining the text as read by the narrator from Rocky and Bullwinkle will sell you on it.

And I’m using this chance to reblog from the journal of Trav S D, an expert on vaudeville and comedy history. His book No Applause — Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, is outstanding in explaining vaudeville not just as a set of performances but also as an industry, a way of organizing performances which made compelling sense for its era and which doesn’t quite anymore, even if many of the acts would probably stand a good chance of going viral today. It’s very easy in reviews of older performers to focus on the performances; Trav S D’s book made me pay attention to how important the network of theaters and of booking agents and management were to making vaudeville.

About the Foot-Drawing Hall of Fame

Since my recent mention of the Foot-Drawing Hall of Fame there’ve been a number of inquiries directed to this office asking for more information about this Hall of Fame, such as where it may be found and whether I made the whole thing up, and what sort of person gets inducted into the Foot-Drawing Hall of Fame. The last is easiest: it tends to be people who draw feet, although there are exceptions made for people who have made great advances — strides, to use the industry jargon — in public awareness of foot-drawing and its associated fields, such as sock envisioning or the composition of toenail apologias.

The Foot-Drawing Hall of Fame as we know it was inspired by the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame, as many Halls of Fame were. Every baseball player of serious note has or at some point had feet, or knew someone who did, and yet did they get any mention in the Hall? Not a word, and P K Shrelk couldn’t help wondering where all these players would be without their feet? Down a couple inches, was his conclusion, and that was good enough to search out a way to celebrate the drawing of feet, because when he looked into the whole foot there was too much to consider. Just thinking of all the bones alone could make someone have to lie down and come back later. He imagined someday a network of foot-related halls of fame might allow the understanding of the foot in all its complexity for the interested foot viewer. Shrelk died a very tired man.

The Foot-Drawing Hall of Fame opened in 1967 in Sick River Junction, Missouri, making use of the famous sanitarium which was once the Missouri State Home for the Tall. One needn’t worry about the former residents of the home. Medical advances and changing social attitudes allowed Missouri to sort out the patients who could be readmitted to society from those who were incurably tall. Those unlucky persons were few enough that they could be placed in more general-care institutions with cathedral ceilings. Indeed, Anthony Millest — one of the last children to be taken in to the Home for the Tall — was found to be not just healthy but to have a foot-drawing talent great enough that he became one of the earliest docents at the museum. To this day he’s three days a week, greeting kids and sharing stories of the museum’s goals and accomplishments and plucking things off the top of the refrigerator.

The first artist admitted into the Hall of Fame was one Pelter Rebleat, who was of no particular renown in the field of foot-drawing, truth be told, but the directors felt they needed to start with some impressive names. Rebleat was surprised by his induction, as the letter of invitation had been addressed to Peltier Rebleat (arguably the more impressive name) and because of what he described as the kidnapping which brought him to the opening ceremonies. Since then the policy of “once-famous, always-famous” has blocked all attempts to remove him from the hall, and people bring him fresh clothes and adequate food. He often gets together with Millest to play checkers and agree that things have changed and there’s probably not much of a way to stop that, especially on the web sites they use all the time.

Besides hosting the third-largest collection of drawings of feet among states whose names start with M, the Hall of Fame offers informational classes designed to help would-be artists overcome their natural fear of drawing feet. According to longtime museum defender Anabess Sweetkludge, the most common thing artists do wrong in drawing feet is begin too far up the leg, so that the feet fall out of frame. This can be overcome most easily by getting a slightly larger sketchbook or, for those artists who work digitally, holding the drawing tablet closer to themselves. A more complicated solution is to engineer an artistic movement by which ankles and their environs are regarded as the true measure of artistic accomplishment, but that’s regarded as too much work just for some pictures of feet.

I hope this answers some of the more serious questions. If it doesn’t, perhaps this answers some other ones instead.

Math Comics, And Isn’t That Enough?

Over on my mathematics blog there’s another of my collections of comic strips that talk about mathematics stuff, and cartoonists were able to find another way to mention the infinite monkey problem of Shakespeare-writing, so, there’s that.

I’d like to offer the non-mathematically-inclined readers some comic strips to talk about here, but right now, I haven’t got anything good, I’m afraid. I suppose I could discuss some of the comics that I find compelling in their badness, but, this is the Internet. You can find something agonizingly bad just by looking at something, and if that doesn’t make you feel bad enough, look at a forum for its fan community, or its Wikipedia Talk page, and that’s enough to make you regret things in general and that thing in particular.

How It Being Barefoot Weather Changes The Sense Of How Clean The Floor Is (Illustrated)

Figure 1. A foot, in a sock, as drawn by me.

Figure 1 shows a sock-clad foot. With the sock on, the floor feels clean, smooth, almost like that little ice rink that Jerry and that Other Mouse made out of the kitchen in that Tom and Jerry where they go ice skating to the tune of that music they lifted off Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. It’s hard to resist gliding around the living room and tripping over the fence used to keep the rabbit out of the dining room. You could imagine the floor to be liquid helium for all the friction you feel on it, except for not actually falling over.

Figure 2. A foot, not in a sock, as drawn by me.

Figure 2 shows a sock-unclad foot. It … hey, come to think of it, these are some pretty good drawings of feet. I mean, the leg in the first is clearly better, but the foot in the second is nothing to sneeze at. I’m not saying that I expect an invite to the Foot-Drawing Hall of Fame, not on the strength of these drawings alone, but I am saying that for someone who’s in my skill grade of foot-drawing, that’s doing pretty good. I mean, you can mostly tell what all the major parts of the foot are without labelling, and there’s even toenails and there’s that one where you can see the little bitty toe knuckle or whatever they call it when it’s on the foot. I’m not bragging here, I know there’s friends of mine who could draw a foot that so evokes “foot” that it would smash my drawing flat, I’m just saying that is definitely a drawing of a foot, and it came out way better than I figured it should, and I’m just awfully proud. And it’s not just a side view, this is in kind of an isometric view or something like that where you have to see things from a tricky angle, and it all works out basically all right. That’s pretty good stuff. Thanks for putting up with me. Is the big toe on the correct side of the foot there?

Theme, Parked

I don’t want to brag, but I believe I’m one of the top-notch people for being vaguely dissatisfied with every WordPress theme there is. I can pull up the samples and look over the different ways they have of presenting articles and blog names and all that and almost right away see something that I’d do at least a little bit differently, like, maybe use a color, or perhaps have some recognition for there being a “cite” tag instead of just rendering it as plain text or maybe good grief, you break anything in a “cite” tag to its own separate line of right-aligned text? What kind of mad man designed this? sorry, something or other came up.

The glory of this is it means anytime I want I can scroll through the WordPress themes and find myself dissatisfied with the world at large, which keeps me from writing cranky letters to the editor about the state of things in general. Instead I can try looking up how to make my own WordPress theme, and discover that through the use of a few simple APIs and some basic knowledge of style sheets, it’s impossible to make my own WordPress theme and I should go lie down until the feeling passes. I’m getting better at that, too. When I first started it could take upwards of a half-hour before I decided I couldn’t possibly make my own theme. Now, I can go from dissatisfaction with every theme in the world, to learning how to make my own, to lying down letting the feeling pass in under ten minutes, and I have optimistic thoughts about breaking the eight-minute barrier.

Does This Old-Time Radio Plot Really Make Sense?

So I was listening to an episode of Inner Sanctum, the old-time radio series that you maybe heard of from that Bugs Bunny cartoon where he says this creaking door “sounds like Inner Sanctum,”, and it was an episode where the newlywed husband spends the whole train ride back home tying little nooses out of loose pieces of string and warning his new wife that if he ever goes crazy she’ll just have to shoot him, which sounds pretty dire but is actually one of the more upbeat episodes of Inner Sanctum. It’s kind of what I love about the show. That and that the narrator delivers, archly, the kind of jokes that you think are gallows humor when you’re twelve, like, “a bachelor ghoul is someone who knows two can die as cheaply as one”, and I’m not even making that one up. I’m not sure anyone ever made that one up.

Anyway, the villain turns out to be the Creepy Butler, voiced by Jackson Beck, also known as the cartoon voice of Bluto or, in this particular episode, the Other Character In The Story. It turns out he, his father, his grandfather, and so on back for generations have been the servants of the groom, the groom’s father, grandfather, et cetera, going back generations, and each of them have been busy waiting for their employers to get married and then kill their wives in horrible mysterious circumstances so as to perpetuate a curse, all because generations ago the groom’s great-something-grandfather wronged Bluto’s great-something-grandfather.

Gotta say. I admire traditions, especially quirky local traditions that are clearly not mass-produced and supported by commercial interests. I just don’t see how being a lifelong servant of the guy who’s wronged you pays out, especially given the extra workload involved in being a serial killer. And passing that down through generations? I mean, I can barely keep track of my own grudges, and I only have two of them. If my father (hi, Dad!) wanted me to pick up one of his grudges, I guess I’d tell him I was going to, but I can’t see putting more effort into it than making some snarky comments about someone on the Internet. I realize that wasn’t an option in the days of Inner Sanctum, because that series ran from 1941 to 1952 when the Internet was just a big round-robin typing circle, and typewriters were strictly rationed during the War so it’d be hard to requisition one just to insult someone your Dad was angry about, but.

Of course, if all Bluto’s ancestors in this were that good about killing their employers’ brides, how have they got around to like four generations of this? I guess I’m just having problems with the inner logic of this. I hope I’m not hurting the feelings of whoever wrote that episode. I don’t think I’m hurting Bluto’s feelings by saying all this.

Also, you know, killing wives for decades because one guy cheated another guy about a gold mine or whatever it was people in the west did to wrong themselves in the mid-19th century? Besides being a ripe slice of evil there’s also incompetent planning at work here; there’s supposed to be a karmic link in a good story of horror and retribution and here it’s just … what? Yes, the groom are being pretty irresponsible in not mentioning the “long string of horrible, mysterious deaths” to their wives before getting married, and introducing it by giving her the gun she should use to shoot him if he starts getting murder-y is just … you know, I’m glad I don’t live in an old-time radio suspense series, that’s all I can really say about it.

Statistics Saturday: Some Words Which Are Auto-Corrected And Some Words Which Are Not

Word	Other Word
Lugubrious	Rake
Councilig	Mediocratize
Stele	Reak
Rhythmus	21
Sward	Roke
Productiver	Impatiens
Aker	Screetch
Value-Neutral	Whimisical
Hosta	Hofstra
Instanec	Pais

Betty Boop’s Penthouse

For today’s video, please consider Betty Boop’s Penthouse, one of those Fleischer Brothers shorts I couldn’t remember anything about from the title. In story terms, it’s rather generic: Koko the Clown and Bimbo putter around a little, notice and get a crush on Betty; Betty sings an unmemorable song; there’s a monster who threatens Betty, and the threat dissipates in a moment.

Story isn’t everything. One of the defining traits of Fleischer Cartoons at their best is that they’re stuffed with little throwaway gags. This short has one of the highest throwaway gag counts I’ve noticed; I wonder if the cartoonists didn’t realize there wasn’t much story so they had to fill it up instead. (Or if, in the absence of plot, they could stuff everything in.) There’s throwaway explosions, metamorphoses, skeletons, gloves that clap by themselves, anthropomorphic flame, a Frankenstein allusion, and plenty of good old-fashioned nightmare fuel.

That said, there’s also a blackface joke, the Al Jolson reference that’s so obligatory I wonder if animators even realized they had a choice not to include it when a character’s face was blackened by an explosion, and a bit that seems to be floating around the homosexual-as-pansy stereotype that I guess at least makes sense in the story.

There’s also a really striking moment of seeing Betty Boop in the reflection of a water-drop which shows that when the Fleischers wanted they could do some pretty stunning special effects, and a few unusual camera angles — including a shot of Betty Boop from above that I don’t remember ever seeing done somewhere else — which add to the cartoon’s appeal.

How The 11:00 Conference Call Turns Out

10:45. You set your cell phone on the table. Turn it on. Stare at it anxiously.

10:55. Wonder if there’s enough time to read all of TrekBBS before the call starts.

11:00. Watch entire minute pass without the phone ringing.

11:01. Elation: you have avoided being called into the conference call. Elation gone when you remember they probably haven’t excused you from the call, they’re just saving up to have you be even more in the conference call.

11:04. Realize that you have a need to go to the bathroom more intense and more urgent than any other need you have ever felt in my life. It’s the way you might feel the need to move your foot if it were underneath the rear tire of a truck holding a lump of neutron star, although with less of the mass of three Jupiters pressing down on your foot and more a wondering if you could hear the phone from all the way in the bathroom.

11:10. Wonder if they’ve forgotten you.

11:15. Send e-mail to someone supposed to be in the conference call to see if they’ve forgotten you. Kind of hope that they have, except that might encourage ideas of maybe they don’t need you for non-conference-call things. Wonder if maybe you should’ve been running March Madness pools so they’d want you around for that at least. It’s desperately far from March. It’d look odd if you started talking up next year’s anytime before June 22nd. The conference call will probably be settled by then.

11:25. Phone rings. This call is to warn you the real call is running about a half-hour late but they didn’t want you to worry.

11:32. You’re worried.

11:38. It may be preferable to explode from bathroom-related needs than wait for the call.

11:40. They call. The conference call is starting, except two of the participants have to finish up other calls that have been going since the late Middle Ages. These calls are cherished, handed down from a long line of mid-level management, to be someday handed down to levels of mid-level management not yet imagined. They cannot be discharged or dismissed lightly. You might be on hold. Suddenly you appreciate hold music: listening to something you don’t want to listen to provides reassurance that you are remembered to exist by telephone systems that are not aware you exist.

11:43. Everyone is able to talk with everyone else and would like to explain how glad they are that everyone else is glad to be there, and doing well, and all agree that it’s been far too long since we had a chat like this, and we’re looking forward to the way we’ll smooth out a couple of little issues.

11:46. The conference call enters that condition of being pretty much the same as guiding your parents through updating their digital camera’s device drivers only your boss is listening in.

12:02. The phrase “the button marked SUBMIT in the upper right corner” is proven to be either intolerably vague or to not refer to anything the other people on the call have ever seen.

12:05. logmein is summoned.

12:07. Emergency e-mails to people who thought they were going to lunch already establish that logmein would have worked except we had the password wrong, the capitalization wrong, and some kind of domain thing wrong.

12:18. You apologize for needing to step away for a moment, which they take to mean that you need the bathroom, which you do, but you use the moment to step outside and berate a chipmunk who proves to have a perfectly good understanding of the limits of Ajax-enabled web technology blah blah blah and why yes, it does have to have Internet to work.

12:29. All agree this has been about the greatest and most productive conference call since the idea of communication began and we’ve done enough of it, and hang up before anyone can suggest otherwise.

1:04. You emerge from the curled-up ball of yourself that was underneath the table weeping.

2:45. You finish editing the things you needed to get out of the conference call into a series of four questions, e-mailed to the other main party, with the explanation you need to know which of the two options for each question they want before you can do anything.

Three Days Later, 9:15. The e-mail is returned with the note, “That’s great, exactly that! Thanx for understanding.”

Eight Days After That, 3:23. The suggestion is floated that maybe we just need one more conference call to sort it all out.

Trouble In The Yard

And now it’s been literally days since our pet rabbit was last out, and so of course things are going wrong. The weed maples have been brutal, scattering all over everywhere and everything, and now some of the hostas came in to complain that some of the little trees have been ganging up and bullying them. I take this seriously, of course, as hostas are really not drama-prone plants and I just know if they’re driven to complain then some plants with lower self-esteem, like the lemon balm, are probably being driven almost out of their xylem with frustration. Don’t tell our rabbit; he’d insist that he told us so, and he didn’t say anything of the sort when we’ve talked about the yard.

PS to whoever at WordPress is in charge of stuff in general: is “xylem” a plant thing? If not pls replace with something that is. Pref not too sticky; have enough of those things that need weird-colored goopy things to clean. Tnx.

A Labor Of Like: What You Don’t Know About Colors

[ John, author of the A Labor of Like humor blog, was inspired the other day by my guide to the risk I’ll correctly identify a color. With his permission I’d like to put his comment up on the front page so people have a better chance of reading it. ]

What most people don’t know is that Indigo started as a Violet separatist movement by wavelengths that thought the name “purple” sounded stupid, and wanted their own, slightly bluer homeland. The establishment of the Indigan state occurred near the end of the 30 Hues War, which began in 1905 when colors such as brown and silver demanded seats at the wheel of the Knights of the Round Spectrum. After the War ended at the Battle of Rainbow Bridge, the Councils of Tempera and Crayola increased the size of the palette to 16 and 64, respectively. Indigo now holds a permanent seat on the security council of the United Colors of Benetton in New York.

Indigo is a monarchy, currently ruled by King Royston the Fourth, Duke of Grape and Earl of Blueberry. His people lovingly refer to him as “Roy ‘GB’ IV” for short.

So, In Short, We’re All Doomed (Corporate Capitalism Edition)

The offering comes in the mail from a corporation, one of those big ones that I suspect is a multinational although I can’t work up quite enough interest to look it up. It had the odd size of the smaller greeting cards, and a brown envelope, and that lettering that looks like handwriting if you haven’t looked a lot at handwriting. Clearly, the company, which my Love has been a customer for for years, possibly a decade now, wanted to make sure we had the experience of something with the flavor of a personal connection, so as to convince us to buy something we didn’t want.

The letter got our name wrong in no less than two prominent ways.

Mind you, that’s partly our fault, since the name used to be wrong in only the one way, and getting it fixed resulted in introducing the second glitch. Extremely boring conversations about this have allowed us to determine that the easiest way to get the glitches fixed is to wait for the company to go bankrupt and be liquidated, to be replaced with another company providing similar services which aren’t quite as good but which cost more, at which point we’ll get a chance to have fake handwritten greeting-card type advertisements with even more parts of our names wrong.

I’m just not completely sure that we’re any good at things anymore.

Math Comics and the Quintessence of Wimpy

Once again over on my mathematics blog there’s a group of comic strips with mathematics subjects. It’s also got a bit of talk about the Rubik’s Cube, which based on the tweets of my friends today turns 40 years old, ah, today. I had no idea and if I had, I’d probably have still fumbled doing something interesting about it. Anyway, I mention the Rubik’s Cube cartoon but don’t watch it because I just know I shouldn’t have watched it to begin with.

A quintessential moment of J Wellington Wimpy: he’s exactly the person who’d decide to develop an algorithm for a social network.

Meanwhile, in other Popeye-based news: while the weekday Popeye comic strip has been in reruns for over two decades now, King Features has for some reason contracted Hy Eisman to draw new Sunday panels. I don’t know why. I guess they just like Hy Eisman and don’t want him to go completely unemployed — they also have him drawing The Katzenjammer Kids For Some Reason on Sundays — but don’t quite like him enough to have him write and draw a daily strip that’s run in like six newspapers worldwide, three of which are the fake newspapers that police officers in cop shows pick up to see that there’s been a new murder or a politician has said something about their case.

Anyway, here is the May 18th installment, in which — with his talk of having “made up my mind to develop an algorithm for a social network” — you just see how Eisman has captured the essential worldview and rhythms of speech and patterns of plotting that really make J Wellington Wimpy, and for that matter, the whole Thimble Theater universe. It’s just perfect Wimpy.

Statistics Saturday: Risk That I Will Correctly Identify A Color By Its Name Alone

Color	Risk That I Will Correctly Identify This Color By Its Name Alone	What CSS Thinks The Color Is
Red	99%
Blue	99%
Green	99%
Yellow	98%
Cyan	94%
Magenta	65%
Prussian Blue	38%
Teal	35%
Maroon	24%
Fuchsia	18%
Chartreuse	0%
Turquoise	16% (This is what I think Teal ought to be)
Goldenrod	12%
Ivory	99 44/100%
Violet	95%
Indigo	(Still not sure this isn’t just purple with good marketing)
Mauve	(Only if this is 1894 for crying out loud)
Plum	60%
Aquamarine	(This isn’t just Aqua? Colors why must you be difficult?)
Lavender	33% (Higher if you’ll just let me call purple or indigo “Lavender”)
Khaki	40%
Atomic Tangerine	(What, really?)
Avocado	55%
Viridian	(whimper)
Heliotrope	0% (This is what I think Chartreuse ought to be)
Battleship Grey	85%
Puce	(Oh good heavens Wikipedia Talk pages make this complicated)

Alice In A Silent Wonderland

I’d like to again point people over to the Movies, Silently blog, as this week they’ve posted another interesting movie: a 1903 British film version of Alice in Wonderland, thought to be the oldest made. It’s hard to see how much older an adaptation could be, although narrative stories were being made for a few years before this.

The film hasn’t got the wealth of camera effects tricks of Georges Méliès and A Trip To The Moon — a year older than this — but it’s still wondrous to see, particularly since the tricks they do use are effective in adapting a couple scenes of Lewis Carroll’s work. And the sets and costumes are magnificent in that late-Victorian/Edwardian style that just looks so eagerly like itself.

After Our Pet Rabbit Had A Day Outdoors

“The floor isn’t food here!” complained our pet rabbit.

It was a complaint I knew was coming. I couldn’t realistically pretend otherwise. So I said, “I agree with you.”

He sat up and rested his front paws on the cage, the traditional pose for indicating this was a major issue or it was dinnertime. “So make it better!”

We had taken him outside a couple days ago, when it was warm and sunny and we had some work to do on the yard. So we set up his pen and then pulled him, against his express wishes, into the pet carrier for the trip outside. Once there, and convinced that we weren’t going to take him anywhere in the car, he came out of his shell, or at least the carrier, and judged that this was all not intolerably bad.

Our pet rabbit, as seen outside in the yard.

“You don’t want me to do that.”

“I know it means going in the box but it’s so short a ride in the car I’ll forgive it!”

“Yes, but it’s cold out today, and it’s rainy. You wouldn’t like having water drizzling all over your body all the time you’re out there.”

“I’m not scared! I drink water all the time.” It’s possible we haven’t let him outside quite enough to understand.

“You’d hate it. It’d tamp down all the fur you were planning to shed for a couple days and nothing would get into the air. It’d set you back by days.”

“Oh.” He’s still recovering from when we vacuumed out his cage, filling nearly two bags and reducing the amount of fur in the room not at all. “Are you fibbing?”

“ … Fibbing?”

“Because you’re afraid of what I’ll do out there!” I brushed his head, which made him squinch his eyes a little, and made enough fur shed that I had a loose glove when I took my hand off. He shook it off and said, “I’m ferocious!”

“I saw you out there. You really mowed down those dandelions.”

“I ate a tree!”

I nodded, but, “Technically.”

“All the way, too, leaves down to roots!”

It was a weed maple, something with about two leaves and maybe three inches tall, including the roots. It’s been a banner year for weed maples, with something like four hundred thousand growing in the driveway alone, and their getting even denser on the ground where there’s dirt or soil or older, less self-confident plants to grow on top of. We don’t know why; maybe it was the harshness of the winter, or maybe the local innovation center gave the maples a seed grant. Anyway, our rabbit had spotted it as a thing, and hopped over, and started eating before we could wonder whether he ought to be eating itty-bitty little maple trees.

He noticed how impressed I wasn’t. “Did you ever eat an entire tree?”

This seemed like something I’d have to answer no, but, could I be quite sure I hadn’t ever eaten something which could be taken as equivalent to a tree? I thought about whether eating an acorn could qualify as eating an acorn tree, except that I couldn’t think of myself eating an acorn, unless I did it when I was very young and so put anything in my mouth. Later, of course, I’d realize that I have eaten apple seeds, and any definition by which acorn-eating qualified one for tree-eating status would be satisfied by apple-seed-eating (I don’t share a birthday with Johnny Appleseed for nothing, though I haven’t got much out of the coincidence), but that’s the kind of idea that comes to me too late. This sort of thinking is why it can take me up to five minutes to answer a question such as “would you like to buy this pair of pants?” There’s too much to ponder about the issue of “like”.

“Look, even if it weren’t pouring out, it’d be unfair to take you outside because you scare the squirrels.” And this is without exaggeration true. There are normally anywhere between two and fourteen hundred squirrels are in the backyard. When we took him out, the squirrels all vanished. Yet within a minute of his going back in, they’d come back. None of the squirrels said they were afraid of him specifically, but, they were.

“I’m ferocious!” he said. “But I’ll let squirrels share the floor with me. Tell them that.” I nodded, but he said, “Wait! I’ll share it just as soon as the floor is food again! Work on that first.”

I peeked in his dishes. “You’ve got lettuce left over from the morning. Eat that first.”

“But that’s just lettuce,” he said.

“You’re not hungry if you’ve got lettuce left.”

He hopped over with some ka-dunks that rattle the living room floor, and said, “I can eat whole trees.”

“Technically.”

“And any time I want.”

Math Comics and Ziggy

Once again my mathematics blog has gotten a bunch of comic strips to talk about, and while I know there’s a good crossover in the humor blog readership and the mathematics blog readership, there’s people who follow one or the other and might be interested in the other.

I’m afraid I haven’t got much else of interest in comic strips to talk about, so, let me point out that Ziggy asserted last week that Ziggy is Popeye’s third cousin. This doesn’t seem to advance the thoroughly dropped question of Popeye’s last name any, but, it’s there. I don’t know Ziggy’s last name.

Robert Benchley: Noting An Increase In Bigamy

[ I’d like to turn again to the pages of Love Conquers All and Robert Benchley writing about … well, nominally, about a rash of bigamy reports that I suppose were current sometime around 1920. Benchley starts from that and follows a series of distractions that cause me to think he was self-satirizing. Benchley articles often pull in marginally related topics, and this reaches a relative extreme. The result is, despite a couple reminders that the article is from about 85 years ago, strikingly modern. Make a handful of edits to remove distractingly dated terms and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Dave Barry submitting this same piece. ]

Either more men are marrying more wives than ever before, or they are getting more careless about it. During the past week bigamy has crowded baseball out of the papers, and while this may be due in part to the fact that it was a cold, rainy week and little baseball could be played, yet there is a tendency to be noted there somewhere. All those wishing to note a tendency will continue on into the next paragraph.

There is, of course, nothing new in bigamy. Anyone who goes in for it with the idea of originating a new fad which shall be known by his name, like the daguerreotype or potatoes O’Brien, will have to reckon with the priority claims of several hundred generations of historical characters, most of them wearing brown beards. Just why beards and bigamy seem to have gone hand in hand through the ages is a matter for the professional humorists to determine. We certainly haven’t got time to do it here.

But the multiple-marriages unearthed during the past week have a certain homey flavor lacking in some of those which have gone before. For instance, the man in New Jersey who had two wives living right with him all of the time in the same apartment. No need for subterfuge here, no deceiving one about the other. It was just a matter of walking back and forth between the dining-room and the study. This is, of course, bigamy under ideal conditions.

But in tracing a tendency like this, we must not deal so much with concrete cases as with drifts and curves. A couple of statistics are also necessary, especially if it is an alarming tendency that is being traced. The statistics follow, in alphabetical order:

In the United States during the years 1918 – 1919 there were 4,956,673 weddings. 2,485,845 of these were church weddings, strongly against the wishes of the bridegrooms concerned. In these weddings 10,489,392 silver olive-forks were received as gifts.

Starting with these figures as a basis, we turn to the report of the Pennsylvania State Committee on Outdoor Gymnastics for the year beginning January 4th, 1920, and ending a year later.

This report being pretty fairly uninteresting, we leave it and turn to another report, which covers the manufacture and sale of rugs. This has a picture of a rug in it, and a darned good likeness it is, too.

In this rug report we find that it takes a Navajo Indian only eleven days to weave a rug 12 x 5, with a swastika design in the middle. Eleven days. It seems incredible. Why, it takes only 365 days to make a year!

Now, having seen that there are 73,000 men and women in this country today who can neither read nor write, and that of these only 4%, or a little over half, are colored, what are we to conclude? What is to be the effect on our national morale? Who is to pay this gigantic bill for naval armament?

Before answering these questions any further than this, let us quote from an authority on the subject, a man who has given the best years, or at any rate some very good years, of his life to research in this field, and who now takes exactly the stand which we have been outlining in this article.

“I would not,” he says in a speech delivered before the Girls’ Friendly Society of Laurel Hill, “I would not for one minute detract from the glory of those who have brought this country to its present state of financial prominence among the nations of the world, and yet as I think back on those dark days, I am impelled to voice the protest of millions of American citizens yet unborn.”

Perhaps some of our little readers remember what the major premise of this article was. If so, will they please communicate with the writer.

Oh, yes! Bigamy!

Well, it certainly is funny how many cases of bigamy you hear about nowadays. Either more men are marrying more wives than ever before, or they are getting more careless about it. (That sounds very, very familiar. It is barely possible that it is the sentence with which this article opens. We say so many things in the course of one article that repetitions are quite likely to creep in).

At any rate, the tendency seems to be toward an increase in bigamy.

Why People Just Stop Talking To Me Until I Wind Down

One friend: “Saturdays are usually busy for me.”

Me: “What with?”

That friend: “It varies, but usually trails or volunteering related.”

Other friend: “You volunteer to be a trail?”

Me: “She was always prone to letting people walk all over her.”

(Correctly, no one laughs.)

Me: “She tried sitting up, but they fell off.”

(And everyone is silent until I remember that just because a sentence appears in my mind that’s no reason I have to put it out where anybody else has to live through it.)

NBC Cancels Entire Primetime Lineup; Will Air Reruns From ’90s

Since my last bit of humor reblogging worked out well for all involved, why not go again? Austin Hodgens is an indefatigable writer with pretty near daily mock-news articles, many of them focused on the center of general weirdness which is living in Maine.

This particular article isn’t, obviously; it’s a bit of more general absurdity directed at NBC, which kind of deserves whatever you might say about it. (Well, almost. I am at peace with NBC’s cancelling Community, much as I like the show, because I can’t very well say they didn’t give it plenty of chances to find an audience. I would have liked their final episode to feel less like an unfinished draft for the final episode, but I don’t think that’s NBC’s fault either.) Anyway, do please enjoy the article, and his other writings, if you do.

The Return of the Modern Philosopher

This is the time of year, Modern Philosophers when the television networks announce which primetime programs are being renewed or cancelled, and which new shows will be a part of the Fall TV lineup.

NBC, long mocked for its horrible programming, has decided to make a very bold move.  The network announced today that it was cancelling every show in its primetime lineup, and replacing them with reruns of old NBC hits mostly from the 1990s.

“We know it’s a bold move,” admitted the NBC executive who drew the short straw and had to face the media.  “But when you think about it, what choice did we really have?”

This Modern Philosopher is not a fan of the move.  I will certainly miss shows like “Parks & Recreation”, “Parenthood”, and “Revolution”.

Wow.  Is that really all I watch on NBC aside from “The Tonight Show” and “Saturday Night Live”?  Yikes!

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Statistics Saturday: The Whole Numbers Zero Through Twenty In No Particular Order Of Any Interest

1. Eleven
2. Three
3. Zero
4. Seventeen
5. Fourteen
6. Thirteen
7. Eight
8. Nineteen
9. Sixteen
10. Four
11. Eighteen
12. One
13. Ten
14. Five
15. Seven
16. Twelve
17. Two
18. Nine
19. Fifteen
20. Six
21. Twenty

Frankenstein 1910

I’ve had something of a running theme of humorous movies running on the Friday night/Saturday morning entries around here and I was casting about for one for this week, and got diverted. This isn’t a funny movie, but, it captured my attention and my interest and this is my blog so I’ll post to it anyway.

Over on Movies, Silently, a blog dedicated to silent films, they’ve posed the 1910 Edison production of Frankenstein, which was thought to be lost forever. It’s a fascinating production, partly because of its age, partly because it shows a filmed Frankenstein that stands independent of the Boris Karloff version. The Creature doesn’t look like Karloff’s, nor like something designed to not be Karloff’s.

It’s also got two particularly interesting scenes in its twelve-minute runtime. One is impressive just on its technical prowess: the forming of the Creature is done in a visually striking way that I think would still be effective in a modern production, even if the audience would more quickly recognize the trick. The other is more one of framing: the Creature intrudes on Frankenstein in his lounge, and is first seen opening and entering in a mirror on the right of the screen. The Creature then appears on-screen from the left, which is surprisingly unsettling, and so effective. I’m surprised that staging hasn’t been used more.

Popeye Space Ark 2000 Pinball … I Don’t Even Know

Popeye Saves The Earth was a pretty mediocre 1994 pinball game designed by Python Anghelo, the famous game designer behind Joust, one of the leading early 80s video games about bludgeoning people with ostriches. Recently I acquired a document purporting to be Anghelo’s proposed theme for this pinball through the elaborate process of looking up the game on the Pinball database. It’s a mere nine-page document and yet it’s the most wonderfully deranged Popeye-related thing I’ve seen in weeks. I recommend you read the whole thing, so let me share the good parts, so you can go on to be disappointed.

Anghelo observes that based on King Features’ strips it “became very obvious to me that Popeye The Sailor has not kept up with the times”. This is true. After a long and successful run, Popeye left pop culture after 1985, when creation of the Fox Network meant there weren’t independent TV stations running two-hour cartoon blocks of his work anymore, and he hasn’t been let back in since. How does Anghelo set up a new adventure for the sailor man?

He sets Popeye as 50, comfortable and bored, watching “the Simpsons, reruns of the Flintstones”, even Mickey Mouse, as we all did in the early 90s, but “consuming too much spinach brew”. Olive Oyl is his “still faithful wife”, tending one of the world’s largest seashell collections, and Swee’Pea is in his early 30s, having retired as a Navy pilot and facing the tough job market by considering a degree in astrophysics, which has always been a license to print money. Bluto’s now an oil tycoon, despite a recent oil spill, and “The Sea Hag runs and owns a Japanese/Norwegian fishing fleet that kills whales [and] porpoises”. I kind of appreciate a multinational just being open about it. I imagine its Chief Financial Officer appearing on CNBC — no Indiegogo for an outfit this organized — to say, “Hi. I’m Jeanene Evil. Give us money and we will kill whales.”

Anyway, Popeye goes fishing and finds nothing but plastic bags, tires, styrofoam cups and all that. Olive, seashell-hunting, gets gobs of tar from Bluto’s oil spill all over her feet, tangled in a drift net, and “stung by a discarded syringe that washed up on the beach”, because if you’re playing pinball, it’s because you want to see a tarballed, net-stuck Olive Oyl jabbed by a discarded syringe. Popeye heads to the United States for some answers, and finds pollution in New York harbor, a devastated shrimping industry in New Orleans, and depleted tuna stocks in Los Angeles, and sees Jacques Cousteau, Diane Fosse, Carl Sagan, Peter Moyers, and Greenpeace calling for a stop to the insanity, so, he calls in some favors from Vice-President Al Gore, sells the rights to show Popeye cartoons in 1994 for enough scratch to buy Howard Hughes’s Glomar Explorer (“the biggest ship on Earth”), and mounts it atop eight shuttle boosters as Popeye’s Ark 2000. I should warn you, from here the proposed backstory for this pinball game gets a little nutty.

So Popeye goes to all the continents, gathering, for example, from North America two buffalos, two bald eagles, two chipmunks, two manatees, “and the last 2 condors in existence”, which makes him sound like kind of a jerk, because we might need those chipmunks. Somehow, Popeye’s plan to launch chipmunks into outer space on the Glomar Explorer is “heavily ridiculed”, but Popeye answers everyone’s doubts “in an extraordinary two-hour telecast underwritten by Texas billionaire Ross Perot”, because the one thing that absolutely shuts down widespread ridicule of an insane plan is the timely intervention of any billionaire Texan. Also they blast off right away.

Popeye “heads for Saturn — the biggest planet in the solar system, and enters its orbit to use as a sling out of the solar system”, which suggests that despite his game-design prowess Anghelo had only a layman’s understanding of orbital dynamics and couldn’t develop it into something realistic. That or maybe Jupiter was stolen by a space chipmunk? I don’t know.

As the good Professor Holkus-Polkus warned Popeye “over Spinach Schnopps”, out past Pluto the Ark enters a “terrible river of space storms … a spatial gulfstream of whitewater rivers that flow between solar systems and galaxies”, so soon, Popeye’s Ark “travels in one week to places that comets and pulsars travel in 100 billion light years”, which is pretty good for the Glomar Explorer weighted down by manatees and chipmunks.

On the 99th planet they set down, in one of the ten seas, to discover the planet stinks. The leader has “three eyes, a huge mouth, and no nose. Popeye notices no one has noses, or a sense of smell! The planet is Odorsphera”, and as people who have noses and visit Odorsphera suffer and die “from unknown causes”, the inhabitants helpfully kill them first. Rather than have his nose chopped off Popeye relaunches into space, with a pair of three-eyed tarantulas as a gift.

From here Anghelo’s proposal gets a little sketchy, suggesting the exact play of this pinball game hadn’t quite been worked out. On the next planet, the King is spotted on the front, striped on the back, and everyone is either spotted or striped, while Popeye and his crew are neither and so feel the eye of striped/spotted-on-plain prejudice. “Next planet — red planet — everything red”, which tries to bridge the gap between innovative pinball design and haiku.

Next, at the top of page eight, comes a paragraph I must quote in its entirety:

Alternative planet — unisex — gay — do not want pairs of heterosexuals. Jeremy, explore this one.

I do not know what Jeremy discovered. I imagine that if I were Jeremy, my report on exploring this one would have been, “We’re trying to design a pinball game based on Popeye”, with maybe a mention that Popeye’s traditional strengths have been more in the fields of “sailing” and “eating spinach” and “punching things” and less in “chipmunk-bearing spaceflights to Unisex Gay World”.

Other planets include Canibalia, where animals are extinct and higher mental beings use lower mental beings as servants and protein; one with a “high society of animals — eagles” that don’t allow people; “no water planet, 3 moon planet, female planet, planet with 2 suns — never nighttime” and the admonition, “Jeremy, go crazy with these”. Were I Jeremy, my response would be: “Go?”

Anghelo’s proposed pinball narrative goes on to note Popeye’s been travelling too long, the animals are multiplying, the ship needs repair and, oh, yes, “Somehow incorporate Bluto and Sea Hag in the ship’s adventures”.

So, the game would have Popeye “leave the cosmic river and return on a cosmic shortcut through the Pavronian system of interstellar gaseous storms” back to Earth, a polluted, oily, cloudy Odorsphera-like planet with no animals and widespread death, disease, and cannibalism among surviving humanity, which really captures the heart of both Popeye and pinball. The animals are released back into their natural habitats, where they had been taken from before all their species were extinct in the wild, “and there is great joy!”, naturally.

I admit this is staggering, and I can even kind of see where elements of this might have made it into the final produced machine, which folks managed to play nearly two-thirds of a game on before finding it was too dull to continue. But it’s also impressively wild, and I have to wonder what the backstory is like for his other games, specifically, Bugs Bunny’s Birthday Ball.

Also, somewhere in the multiverse, someone — I’m thinking maybe even Jeff Wayne — has turned this outline into a prog-rock opera, and I’d like to see the album art Roger Dean made for it.

Coming Clean

So, the sink needed a little bit of a cleaning-out because one of the basins had maybe too many congealed remnants of meals we might even have ever had soaked into it, you know how that happens, and fortunately we have a bottle of that orange-colored faintly lemon-smelling stuff to spray around and get things to more shiny clean un-congealed states, and you know how that makes it clear the countertop really needs to have all this random crumb debris brushed off it onto the floor, which means the floor needs to be swept, meaning the rug next to it has to be vacuumed, which really points out how there’s this layer of dust on the desk, and that points out how the front porch could really use a bit of cleaning too what with most of the winter’s snow being nearly melted at this point, and so anyhow I have to shoo everybody out of North America for maybe fourteen hours while I finish mopping the place, and when I let you back in you better not go tracking Australasia all over my nice clean floors, OK? Now scoot.

From The Dream World Movie Guide: Armonk Calling

Armonk Calling. Strange, unsettling, faintly Altman-esque entry in the “Inept Invasions of America” comedy microgenre. The perfect surprise the Wehrmacht achieves by invading Manhattan in 1973 is defeated by the hassles of then-contemporary urban decay. Flashes of satirical insight in the modern-life-as-warfare theme give the film many chances, none quite capitalized on, to overcome the unease of the premise’s dubious taste. It’s an odd entry even for the experimental wing of 1970s American Cinema. Famously features Nick Offerman, much older than his age would suggest, as the teen who takes the invasion as his chance to throw dynamite into Times Square manholes to big and impressionistic effect. Suggestion: for a less troublesome project by nearly the same, supremely appealing, cast and crew try the family-fare yet affecting 1974 film The Cheesestronauts instead.

Playing about an hour before sunrise. Some scenes fragmentary.

Math Comics, and Popeye’s Last Name Resolved

Over on my mathematics blog I had a rush of enough mathematics-themed comics to justify listing another collection of comic strips. Several of them also opened up the sorts of meaty subjects I can really talk about, like, infinite series and entropy and the like. So if you missed all that, please, give it a try and see if you like this not-intentionally-funny discussion of comics.

Meanwhile in the Bud Sagendorf reruns of Popeye I learned just how he carried out eight more weeks of Popeye fretting about his last name without ever revealing it on-screen: he didn’t. Sagendorf’s stories routinely twisted their way into nonsense unrelated to the starting incident, and ended without actually resolving things, but here apparently the list I had of how long his stories took had an error.

After Saturday’s admittedly stirring moment in which Popeye declares he knows who he is and his name is irrelevant — almost that he yam what he yam, or something like that — the next daily strip was a new story: “A depressing tale of — One Of A Kind!”. I admit wondering how we’re supposed to get to something “depressing” from an inappropriately locked toolshed, but we’ve got twelve weeks to develop this, if my list hasn’t got any more glitches in it. I’m guessing something Eugene-the-Jeep-y. Also that Swee’pea has good reason to be going into the toolshed on his own.

Spider-Man Disappoints

For reasons that make sense to someone I got a copy of Friday’s USA Today, the front-page Snapshot of which asked, “Will Fifth `Spider’ Be A Superhero?” Its observation was:

No “Spider-Man” movie is among the 18 films that have grossed over $1 billion globally.

I find myself strangely affected by USA Today‘s decision to be disappointed in the Spider-Man movie theme franchise. Without really trying I could probably list five movies which haven’t made a billion dollars in worldwide box office [1], so why pick on these particularly?

Or if they’re just looking for things to be disappointed by in the Spider-Man movies, why not, say, be disappointed they haven’t done a movie where Spidey battles the Headmen, a group of loser-ish superheroes led by a mad scientist who was planning to mad science the world with gorillas, only the gorillas mad scientisted him and now he’s got the body of a gorilla and the head of a mad scientist, and his sidekick is a junior mad scientist from the comic strip Herman, and I swear this isn’t my stupid dream?

I should probably explain that I mostly know Spider-Man through his newspaper comic strip appearances, and that his newspaper comic strip is still a thing that exists, even though Spider-Man in it is regularly foiled by inanimate objects, including bricks and alarm clocks, and I’m not sure he’s saved a day in the past eighteen months without another, better, hero doing the actual work.

[1] Let’s see if I can. Um. Tod Browning’s Freaks, obviously. Tom Schiller’s Nothing Lasts Forever. Robert Altman’s Popeye. Tony Richardson’s The Loved One. James Cameron’s Avatar. Dang, this is hard. Maybe I shouldn’t be mocking the Snapshot editor of USA Today.

Statistics Saturday: The Time of Writing

Time	Self-Evaluation
2 Days Before Publication	I have no idea what to write
1 Day Before Publication	I will never know what to write
12 Hours Before Publication	I may never be able even to read again
6 Hours Before Publication	Anything would be better than writing
3 Hours Before Publication	This might be a marginally acceptable thing to write
2.5 Hours Before Publication	This might be the best thing I’ve ever written
2.25 Hours Before Publication	This might be the best thing anybody’s ever written
2 Hours Before Publication	It’s sad but at least it will do
1 Hour Before Publication	I hope nobody I know will read this
30 Minutes Before Publication	Maybe I can hide this from everyone
15 Minutes Before Publication	With some context maybe they won’t think too much worse of me
5 Minutes After Publication	Please nobody mention it to me
25 Minutes After Publication	This isn’t too bad after all
2 Hours After Publication	Why aren’t people praising me for this?
3 Hours After Publication	Why aren’t people praising me more for this?
1 Day After Publication	Oh, yeah, that’s why
3 Days After Publication	I guess it didn’t break anything to write that
2 Months After Publication	Some alien entity using my body must have written this
2 Months, 5 Minutes After Publication	That alien entity’s good enough, how can I make it work for me again?

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: Mechanical Cow

Today’s cartoon is another silent-era one. I hope I’m not trying people’s patience with these, but they are more commonly public domain (so I feel safer including them), and I find them fascinating, and this is after all a place where I share stuff that amuses me. But, anyway, this one is an Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon, called, aptly, Mechanical Cow. It comes from Walt Disney Productions, directed by Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks and surely others, though it was produced for Universal Pictures, before Disney went into business for himself proper. Famous-in-animation-circles story.

Anyway, the plot is what might as well be the standard-issue black-and-white cartoon: genially pleasant, faintly Harold Lloyd-ish lead character goes about his business, with a string of amusing gags where he does something clever with the stage business, and then his girlfriend gets introduced and gets captured by the big bad guys, and then, the lead has to go rescue him. The plot doesn’t matter. Look at the animation: it’s much smoother, more naturalistic, more skillful than even the very good work of the Fleischers or the other studios of the time. Disney and Iwerks had great talent and great craftsmanship, and that shows through in, for example, the moment when Oswald steals the cow’s bed.

Curiously to my eyes, the fact that this is a mechanical cow doesn’t seem to figure much. You could recast it with a real cow and … all right, some of the jokes would become more disturbing, but I don’t think they’d be that much worse than was already the norm for silent-era cartoons. I have to wonder if the animation team started with the title — and it’s a good starting point for a cartoon, certainly — and then developed the short without quite making full use of it.

Are You There? If Not, Then Who’s Ignoring This?

What is a person, and how do you know if we are one? People have been worrying about this for many centuries, which we smug moderns might think makes them look foolish. This is a trick of perspective: they had no way to know that we’d look back and see people worrying about whether they were people, which would have given an answer if they’d known it. People of past ages were foolish in many ways but they wouldn’t go begging the question like that when they could be instead riling up people who misuse phrases like “begging the question”.

However, since we can’t know what future generations will think of any of us, we can’t rest assured that any one of us is a person. There are many possible answers, none of which satisfy anyone but the person who thought the answer up. One I’ve found satisfying is that a person is “an agent which, given sufficient time, will realize that I’m just prattling on about any foolish idea that pops into my head and so falls gradually into a state of ignoring me altogether”. This is a solid test as long as I’m in the sort of mood where I feel like talking about what’s on my mind.

For example, I might ask how you’re doing, and you might say, “Oh, I’m surviving”, and then I observe how that’s doing pretty good because it beats the alternative, except for the zombies, of course, and the ghost community. Possibly the vampires depending on their exact circumstances of vampirism. Before long I might be rattling off a long list of undead entities and you don’t want to hear any of that, but I won’t notice, so you can just start ignoring me. This establishes your person nature very effectively, and pretty correctly.

This test fails if you consider it possible for non-person things to ignore me. For all the time that I’ve spent hollering at the Swiss Alps, have they ever responded to me in the slightest? And given that utter lack of response, can’t we consider that to be a state of ignoring me? Ah, but what if it turns out that I haven’t ever hollered at the Swiss Alps and can’t even swear that I’ve seen a single Alp of the Swiss variety? Then, we’ve neatly shown that I must be a person, at least in the eyes of the Swiss Alps, because I’m clearly ignoring them. Now consider all the many people who’ve got around to ignoring me as a result of that paragraph alone.

If I’m not available and you’re not convinced by the Swiss Alps test, however — and I don’t blame you being unconvinced, because, for example, imagine that the Swiss Alp you were using to test whether you were being ignored turned out to be mostly a golem who was under directions to ignore things regardless of whether they were people or not? — you can turn to other and no less operational tests. For the best of these you’ll need a work computer, and some problem with your work computer. If you haven’t got a problem with your work computer, you’re not trying hard enough, because it’s surely doing something annoying.

Try to communicate the problem with your work computer to the Information Technology Or Whatever Department, who are supposed to fix it, while leaving out words about exactly you were trying to do or what you expected. Bat off their follow-up questions — for example, if asked when they could come up and see you have the problem, include subtle incompatibilities like “anytime before lunch this Monday, April 30th afternoon” — and eventually, someone’s bound to lose patience and cry out, “I WILL TEACH YOU PEOPLE TO FILE A BUG REPORT IF I HAVE TO KILL YOU ALL”, and run out of the ITOW offices, never to be actually seen again, but occasionally spoken of as a legendary figure haunting the boardwalk and berating people who complain they can’t beat the ring toss. When you hear this ITOW agent screaming and running out, you have evidence that you are one of “you people”, and are therefore at least one person. QED.

The natural next question after working out whether you’re a person is, if you aren’t one, can we rule out your being two?