Betty Boop: Bimbo’s Express

I admit I’m feeling a little lazy today, so I’m going to watch a cartoon instead. This cartoon was originally released the 22nd of August, 1931, as part of the Fleischer studios Talkartoon line. It’s from early in Betty Boop’s career, when the studio still thought that maybe Bimbo was a character people would like to come see, what with him existing and probably having some distinct personal traits or something.

So a thing about the Fleischer cartoons you maybe knew, or that you worked out when you think about the story structure. They didn’t really write out plots before they started animation. Especially in the earlier days they’d pick a theme and then stuff some scenes around it. In the best cartoons this produces a raucous, jazzy feeling as you see no end of surprising riffs on jokes. In the worst you realize nothing is going anywhere.

This is a middle one. It doesn’t start out promising, what with spending a minute of screen time just getting Bimbo and his moving company to Betty Boop’s house. Someone making a cartoon on this theme today would establish the moving company in about ten seconds of screen time, and that if they wanted to make sure everyone in back got it. In trade for all the time spent getting to the start of the story is little bits of silliness: the horses’s goofy pace, or the tiny cat emitting a tiny “mew” every time he’s squished by the gorilla(?). Every little “mew” tickled me.

When the action proper does get started, it’s solid stuff. It’s all a bunch of scenes of Bimbo and company moving stuff in more complicated ways than they need to. None of the jokes are very deep, granted, or really character-driven. But there’s a good number of them, and none demand too much time or attention, and there’s usually some cute little fillip along the way, such as the horse flipping the egg on the stove.

Another symptom of the plotlessness of the affair: there’s no climax. I expect a cartoon of this vintage, especially a Betty Boop cartoon, to end with at least some scene of peril that she escapes or gets rescued from. It’s easy to imagine a virtual avalanche of objects being moved threatening to crush Betty, or the moving van to go tumbling down the street. None of that there. It’s just under six minutes of jokes about how can you take stuff out of one place (and not even put it in the new!). Curious affair, overall.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped five points in trading amidst accusations that Lisa was pocketing some of the good-looking points and keeping them for her own nefarious purposes. She insists the purposes are not nefarious, but didn’t like the suggestion they were for scandalous purposes either.

207

Is This Funky Winkerbean Supposed To Make Sense?

So a little something roiled the normally calm world of ridiculing Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean. Last week the strip did one of its occasional grab-bag weeks, with just spot gags and no storyline or attempt at one. Before I get into that, let me share this link to my mathematics blog, since I did my usual Sunday comic-strip review over there. Thank you.

So. Snark-reading Tom Batiuk strips is usually pretty easy. The comic presents a couple of the lumpy, sad main characters talking about one of their ongoing problems, with something involving words used in slightly unusual ways in the last panel, while everyone smirks and waits for the death of joy. The snarky reader looks over this, points out the joke barely parses, and that the problem as presented could not happen because something or other does not work like that, or because he’s confused parts of the continuity. Then the snark readers wait for the next day. I’m not ruling myself out of this group, by the way. Rolling eyes at Tom Batiuk strips is one of the joys of being a comics fan who never gets enough chances to showcase learning what “bathos” meant for that vocabulary quiz in eighth grade. (Hi, Mrs Furey!)

Then this came in on Tuesday.

Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean for the 23rd of May, 2017. Surely not intentional but in the first panel Crazy Harry looks like he’s upset Donna walked in on him googling adult images for the tiny modernist yacht he’s got a model of in the second panel there.

So, the question: what the heck?

More specifically, who are we supposed to be laughing at here? The Comics Curmudgeon laid out how it’s either a joke that Crazy Harry can’t shampoo correctly, or else it’s a joke that … Mrs Crazy Harry who probably has a name … imagines that head-cleaning solution would be an exotic name for shampoo. (It’s Donna.) Son Of Stuck Funky guest author Billy the Skink thought it more likely that Donna didn’t know what head cleaner was, and identified this as dumb given that she ought to know something about Crazy Harry, whose days are filled with transferring stuff from VHS and moping. Comic book superstar author Kurt Busiek tried to autopsy this mess:

Today’s FUNKY WINKERBEAN. What? https://t.co/LkzqSh7ZKS

— Kurt Busiek Resists (@KurtBusiek) May 23, 2017

And now I’d like to make my argument. Please feel free to disagree. Busiek’s right, by the way, that the deadly problem is the comic timing. The first two panels are nothing. Trying to make the punchline also carry the load of setting up the strip is a mess.

But I think the snark-blogging interpretation, that Donna or Crazy Harry has to be too stupid to be plausible, wrong here. I think that Donna’s supposed to be facetious. To say with a straight face the obviously ridiculous is so important to comedy that if we’re to rule it out then I can’t comment in any web forums or Usenet anymore. I think there are line readings that would make the joke work. At least work as well as it can given the attempt at jamming all the setup into the punchline.

Which is still a structural problem in the comic. Written comedy has limited powers to direct how a line should be read. A comic strip has a bit more power, since it can show characters reacting. But the Funky Winkerbean standard is to draw people moping, smirking, or despairing and that doesn’t offer much support for whimsy. A comic strip also has more power to suggest timing and where to pause a line and what to emphasize in it. But those tools aren’t used here.

So that’s my best attempt at making this Funky Winkerbean make sense: Donna is being silly and playful, and we don’t know how to react to that anymore. I’m curious what you kindly readers make it out to be.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose two points as the market digested reports that the Earth has an extra layer of tectonic plates within the mantle, which should be reassuring to everyone worrying about whether we had enough. It might have pushed the index higher still if we were sure we understood why it doesn’t look like any other planets or moons have tectonic plates, which seems like a weird oversight. Are we maybe looking for theirs in the wrong places or something?

212

What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? February – May 2017

And as with my other low-daisy-content story strip reviews, this one might be out of date. This post should be good for explaining plot developments in the couple of months before late May of 2017. If it’s later than, oh, August 2017 when you read this, then if all’s gone to plan I have a new post updating things further. My most recent Gasoline Alley posts should be at the top of this link. Thanks for reading and I’ll do my best to be not too wrong in describing the goings-on.

Gasoline Alley, 27 February – 26 May 2017.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley has four major kinds of storyline, with many variations possible in those types. Three have been seen since late February. The missing one is the magical-fantasy storyline, wherein Walt Wallet or crew visit the Old Comics Home or something similar. The kind of story that just warps what reality could be. That hasn’t been around the last few months.

The second time is your classic old-style sitcom, ah, situation. The kind where one of the main cast has some scheme that gets advanced and then falls apart. You know, every sitcom from the 50s and 60s, and many of the radio sitcoms from the 40s. It’s an old-fashioned format but it’s still a perfectly workable one. Last time we looked at Gasoline Alley they were coming near the end of one of these. Walt Wallet had been invited to the TV show Shark Bait to pitch inventors his idea: put every household appliance together in one big raging appliance monster. The millionaire or billionaires (the strip made a point of raising confusion about this) don’t see how it would work, and one of them finds that exactly this idea was patented by the Hotenkold Appliance Company in 1935 and still makes the things. As predicted by everyone who’s encountered stories before, Walt Wallet does not go home wealthy. (The strip didn’t pay off the millionaire-or-billionaire question.)

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 7th of March, 2017. One storyline gives way to another. Yes, Boog is the kid’s name and yes, much of the online comics snark-reading community is horrified by his name and his appearance but that’s just because he has those huge devouring-void black dots of eyes that suggest the Mirror Universe Dondi.

The strip passed things off to Hoogy Skinner and her kids Boog and Aubee, for a medical check. This led a couple of weeks of pediatrician jokes and let us follow the Physician Assistant, Chipper Wallet, into the third of the stock Gasoline Alley plot kinds. And I’d like to mention the smoothness of the segue: we followed Walt Wallet out of the TV show plot, passed off by switching from one car to the next with characters that brought us to Chipper Wallet, and from that into his story. It’s all smoothly done; I wonder if daily readers even notice they’re being passed on like that.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 18th of April, 2017. I never spend time discussing this in the main articles so let’s take some here. Boy does Scancarelli draw well. The scenes are well-composed and nicely balanced, and look at how good Wallet’s hair and beard look in the second panel there. The third panel is also a treat; comic strips rarely get to display depth of field, but here it is, used for good dramatic effect.

Anyway, this third kind of storyline is the public service announcement. Chipper Wallet leaves the office to drive to Durham, North Carolina, where he’s to speak at the dedication of the Veteran’s Memorial Garden of the Physician Assistant Society. Wallet gets waylaid by some car trouble and meets Reverend Neil Enpray and mechanic Don Yonder whom I’m just going to assume are from the Earth-2 Gasoline Alley. They gave me the vibe of being established characters but I don’t know the canon nearly well enough to guess. But it’s mostly a chance for the characters to explain to the reader about what they are, what they do, why they’re important. The story ends with Wallet being reunited with a woman he, as a Navy Hospital Corpsman in Vietnam, helped deliver a child. As I say, a bit of story and a good bit of public service announcement. It’s also a chance to fundraise for the historical society.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 12th of May, 2017. I know this is my own peculiarity, but: oh, I’m not looking forward to this. Not because I expect the story to end badly. I project it turning out pretty well for Scruffy and his family. But just because I know, deep down, there’s a depressing number of real-world families going through this and the story will end without things getting better for most of them, and that’s the sort of thing that breaks my heart. It’s not Scancarelli’s fault, and I certainly don’t blame him for telling a story about one of those sadly realistic problems and having it turn out well for his characters. But it does make me think of deep down what a rubbish job we do at having a society.

And this led into the current storyline, one of the fourth type. It’s the weepy melodrama. It stars Joel and Rufus, two of the (bluntly) stupider adults in the strip. They’re usually busy with more outlandish hijinks and misunderstandings. (The segue for this story was Rufus bringing his cat in to see Chipper Wallet on the grounds that of course he’s a vet; he served in the Coast Guard.) Rufus has just met Scruffy, a kid whose family just moved into the abandoned old grist mill and is so poor they can only use parts of the Walt Kelly Pogofenokee comic-strip-southern dialect. The story’s in its earliest days so not much has been established past that the family’s desperately poor. I expect this is going to lead Rufus and Joel in a story in which they make some grand and slightly overcomplicated gesture to help that which misfires but still results in their being a little better off. (At this stage it’s playing Santa Claus Running Late. This may evolve.) That’s the kind of story Gasoline Alley does.

The Sunday strips have all been one-off jokes, mostly characters setting up and delivering corny old gags well, and not part of any continuing storylines. That’s fine and pleasant but there’s no context I can usefully give to them. They’re whole on their own.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose eleven points as everyone was relieved to learn everyone else had clicked on that silly clickbait ad about ten ways to earn money from your hobby and there was no reason everyone should feel ashamed that, like, apparently there’s people whose hobby is investing in real estate? I mean, come on. Anyway the index is at 210 and that’s not even an all-time high and isn’t that amazing too? It’s amazing, yes.

210

Statistics Saturday: Toto’s ‘Africa’ By Parts

Because sometimes you just run up to deadline and you have to go with what you have and those are always the bits people like best anyway and sometimes I wonder why I go into writing a second hundred words anyway and I just want a hug thank you.

Meanwhile: if you need to score a movie or TV scene and want to evoke mid-80s nostalgia without digging deep you’re going to pick “Out Of Africa”, sure. But what’s the equivalent for other decades? If you just want a wash of mid-90s nostalgia without digging deep then, sure, Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic”, or maybe Nirvana’s “Oh Whatever You Have On Hand”. But what about the 70s? The 60s? For the 50s I’d say “Mister Sandman” but that might just be Back To The Future talking. For the 40s there’s Glenn Miller’s “American Patrol”. How about the rest? Yes, start from the 1750s.

Not pictured: looking at the official music video for the first time in like three decades and feeling all the time like, oh this is uncomfortable and waiting for it to get really bad any moment now and boy but the whole thing stays pretty white-male-gazey. But boy those instrumentals.

Also not depicted: realizing like thirty years after that of course the song isn’t called “Out Of Africa” and you’ve been naming it wrong all this time.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped two points as traders got around to watching Wednesday’s The Price Is Right and it was another double overbid in the Showcase and it sure seems like there’ve been a lot of them this season. There was even one on, like, the Mother’s Day show. Everyone’s all cranky about this now and trying to undrestand how this keeps going wrong.

199

Advertising-Wrapping Newspaper Continues Demands

If the Lansing City Community News demanding that I explain why New York execs are investing in Lansing’s fledgling fashion industry was a start, then this is a continuation. The next week’s installment of the four page “edition” of the Lansing State Journal starts out:

Investors are bringing their millions to Lansing. Here’s why

Alexander Alusheff

LANSING – Three multi-million dollar venture capital firms have opened in Greater Lansing in the past six months.

Investors from Ann Arbor and New York have come to invest in businesses started at Michigan State University and even local fashion designers.

The number of early stage investment firms in Greater Lansing now stands at six, on par with the Grand Rapids region.

The question is: Why?

The article goes on to explain there’s a bunch of venture capital firms intersted in Lansing now. There used to not be so many interested, and that was all right, but now there are more, and that’s all right too. What I really spot, though, are the points that Alusheff clearly got a note from someone that they just ran a piece about the fashion industry being invested in and made sure to mention that; and that the headline didn’t bother punctuating the “Here’s why” even though it’s so close to the period at the end of the first sentence. I’m not going to be staying up all night worrying about that now that I’ve seen it! Ha ha!

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index dropped eleven points and oh you would think it was the end of the world or something. Oh, the howling, oh the complaining, and meanwhile is anyone even looking at the futures market? No, because someone got the bright idea to start selling peeks at the futures market at 25 cents a pop and now suddenly everyone’s scared they’re going to run out of quarters. Really makes you wonder if a trading floor is worth the bother.

201

Really On The New Computer

Despite all the attempts by friends to help, my new computer arrived and I got it unboxed and everything. I wasn’t sure if I should unbox it without taking photographs but then I remembered I have never looked at any unboxing photograph, my own or anyone else’s, and neither has anybody else. Also I think my camera was eaten by that tangle of wires exposed when we replaced the TV set. It has been a season of consumer electronics suddenly breaking around here and I’m not looking forward to what summer has to bring. My guess: the oven declaring it’s done with this “making stuff more warm” job and going into business as a breakdancing instructor. This will be inconvenient for us, since we often like to eat food that’s more warm. But it will save the neighborhood rec center, so there’s that.

Do you see the digital camera in there? Really? Could you e-mail me with directions?

My new computer is lighter than the old, and thinner too. That’s just what people look for in laptops. I thought my old one was respectably light and sleek, but in comparison, it’s a kitchen appliance. The new computer is made of modestly compressed yawns encased in soap-bubble foam. It’s prone to floating as much as two inches in the air above the USB cooling fan base that I have, and I lost the power cord for that like six years ago. Often it’ll slide down the table a couple inches when I give it a heavy glance. I’m keeping it on a power cord so it stays tethered, and when it gets back to window-opening season I’m going to attach a kite tail and see how high I can sail it over Ralph W Crego Park.

It’s not the newest model MacBook Pro. I bought refurbished. I’ve gotten into that habit, on the grounds that the extraction of the metals needed for electronics is so brutal to people and the environment, and the actual assembly of these parts is no less foul, that it’s irresponsible to require more new stuff than necessary. You see, unlike most people, I like turning everyday actions into smug superiority. Also it’s cheaper and so am I.

This model MacBook Pro doesn’t have the name MacBook Pro on it. Nor the name Apple anywhere I noticed. (I didn’t check by the vental fin, as I don’t wish to offend its modesty and I don’t need to check that unless I want to breed it.) This is part of the minimalist design Apple’s gone crazy for. The current model MacBook Pro, besides not having the product name on it anywhere, also does without keys, a screen, any plugs, a touchpad, a box, or any physical existence. You just go to the Apple-authorized retailer, give them some money, and return home to ponder the nature of computing and what the networked world is like. It’s not the best hardware for gaming, but the three-year AppleCare extended warranty for your wholly imagined computer is a very reasonable $49.99. I’m hoping to pay for that with the sound of a jingling bag of quarters I can use for pinball league later. Yes, I know, you’re calling that a scam, but wouldn’t you like to be in Apple’s position right now? I understand if you say no because you have hay fever and don’t know what the pollen count is at Apple Master Command. But if you don’t, then, well?

Since getting it up and running I’ve spent a lovely week setting options on things. That’s the good part of a new computer, going around and breaking up with old typefaces and installing new ones and figuring out what window sizes just work for stuff anymore. That last is a Mac thing. Experience with coworkers suggests that Windows users think whatever program they’re using has to use up the whole screen. Of all the human behaviors I have encountered this is the one I understand the least. It’s at least eight percent more baffling than how the house down the street throws out a sofa every two weeks and how someone else apparently takes it. You know a house like that, and you don’t understand it. How can I understand this? Anyway I’m thinking I could make my fortune by selling cheap disposable computers which do nothing but let buyers set options on things. Once they’ve got it set, they throw the finished computer out and start again. If we can retail these for like thirty bucks I bet it’ll be a hit.

The dangerous part of this is I have an excuse to fall behind my Internet social obligations now. Normally I’m just awful. Somewhere along the line I got to thinking, you know, if I answer that e-mail they’re just going to answer back and I’ll be right where I started, so why not stay there? This is fine for trivial stuff like work e-mails but it hurts hanging out with people I know because I have common interests or stuff. And now? People can’t fault me for not writing back when I’m going through the trouble of setting up stuff to write back. I could probably milk this one for months while people gradually forget I even exist. And then where will I be when I send out an urgent e-mail warning about the oven having gone off on its own? Ignored, correctly. It’s no fair, if suffering the obviously foreseeable direct consequences of my own freely made choices is no fair.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose one more point, to another all-time high of 212, prompting investors to get all panicky that now this means it’s just going to plummet to like negative 112 and balance all this out and even promising people that negative numbers don’t make sense in this context doesn’t help. “Have you seen 2017?” they reply. “We’re going to be lucky if the index doesn’t drop to four blue squares all labelled `red’.”

212

Also the Other, non-Alternative Free Weekly is Getting Demanding

So for once I don’t have something to say from the pages of the local alt-weekly. I’ve got something from the pages of the main-weekly. I mean, the Lansing City Community News, which is four pages of human-interest articles indifferently ripped from the Lansing State Journal and wrapped around a bunch of coupons for stuff we have never needed but go through every week just in case. The big headline for last weekend’s issue was:

Why are New York execs investing in Lansing’s fledgling fashion industry?

I’ve rarely felt so threatened by a free four-page weekly newspaper I don’t really read. I worry I have to have an answer. What if the Community News editor spots me on the street, pushes me to the ground, and sits on my chest, demanding, “Well? Why are New York execs investing in Lansing’s fledgling fashion industry? Huh? Better have an answer, mister!” And I’ll just sit there, sputtering. “I don’t know! I have nothing to do with Lansing’s fledgeling fashion industry! I don’t even know any New York execs! I went to college with someone who’s an editor for the Hollywood Reporter, I think, but that’s it! I don’t know!” And then he’ll threaten to stuff my mouth full of coupons for dollar store Frozen-brand expanding towels and Finley’s Grill and Smokehouse.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose another eight points to a new all-time high after Another Blog, Meanwhile traders spent the whole early afternoon reading the Commodities news page on Reuters.com which always makes them feel smarter. Like, here’s this piece about the top grains traders working out what sort of industry consolidation might best respond to a worldwide supply glut. Don’t you feel more in touch with the financial world just letting your eyes glaze over that sentence? So you see why they’re feeling so good.

211

In Which I Am Insulted By My Reading

So I was enjoying some of my light early-summer reading, Carl B Boyer’s The History of the Calculus and its Conceptual Development, 1939’s feel-good hit of the mathematical history book trade. And early on in the second chapter he had this:

Pythagorean deduction a priori having met with remarkable success in its field, an attempt (unwarranted, it is now recognized) was made to apply it to the description of the world of events, in which Ionian hylozoistic interpretations a posteriori had made very little headway.

Well, I mean, good grief, how did Dr Boyer even figure that sentence was needed? Is there anyone who goes around saying, “boy, but the Ionian hylozoistic interpretation a posteriori is a fantastic description of the world of events”? We’re not savages. My father — Dad, back me up on this one — I remember sitting me down, before he ever took us up to see Santa Claus at Macy’s in Manhattan for the first time, pointing out the unwarranted nature of applying Pythagorean deduction to the world of events. I don’t even know who those parentheses are for. It’s like he has no conception of his audience. Ionian hylozoistic interpretations, sheesh!

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The trading floor was consumed today with a hypothetical question. Consider there must be some part of the United States government that works out plans just in case an extraterrestrial alien is found on Earth; it’s a remote possibility, but one of such enormous historic import that at least a working plan ought to be in mind. Anyway, they surely have some name to designate the lifeform and what it might do and who’ll be responsible for showing it a good time. Well, what if in the 1980s they designated the thing as “Alien Life Form” and then the sitcom came along and made it just impossible to use that name and be taken seriously? Huh? Anyway, when they were all done pondering that secret government agency having to change a name they found the index had risen 23 points, which has got to be the most it’s ever done in one day but who can tell?

204

While I Continue To Stagger Back To My Feet

Won’t fib; the computer problems threw my week for an even bigger mess than I expected. I’m just now getting to the point I think I have my photograph library in order. And that’s none too soon because there’ve been big developments with that auto care place down the street having some massive relationship drama through its sign board. Just wait and see! In the meanwhile here’s this past week’s bunch of mathematics-themed comic strips. I hope to have stuff kind of normal-ish soon, once I’ve got settings and options and updates and missing programs set up. In the meantime:

“What the — I — why are you playing The Electric Prunes? What exactly in my selecting the next episode of the Movie Sign With The Mads podcast made you think I wanted to listen to my music in alphabetical order by song title? What are you doing and WHY WILL YOU NOT STOP? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS? WHO DESIGNED YOU???”

Man but the iTunes interface sucks.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Despite concerns about the unusually high values of the Another Blog, Meanwhile index traders rallied, bringing the number to a new all-time high after someone noticed in their how-to-draw-animals book a page labelled “Unusual Horse Positions” and now everybody’s got the giggles. People, it’s about like when they stand on their hindlegs or reach for something with a front leg, or when they’re bucking or rearing up and it’s not … oh, now you’re doing it too. So immature.

181

What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? February – May 2017

While Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant runs fewer strips than any of the other syndicated story strips, it’s still worth reviewing. They take a good bit of space, and they pack events into it. If you’re reading this much after May 2017, you may want to check if I have a more recent update. It should be at or near the top of this page’s links. Thanks for reading.

Prince Valiant, 19 February – 21 May 2017.

We left Prince Valiant and crew resuming their journey to the Mystic East. They’d defeated the tyrant Azar Rasa and scattered his armies and detonated his Soul of Asia bomb. The grateful giants who’d created the Soul of Asia prepared a boat, with a pilot and a team of dolphins pulling their craft. So a giant alligator attacked.

This set off an earthquake that set the dolphins free and knocked the giant out of the story. It’s the groundbreaking for a new waterfall, which the gang falls down. Valiant gets knocked in the head and misses just how they make their escape. It’s pink dolphins. Prince Valiant and company are recovered on shore by (checks encounter table) some refugees from Azar Rasa’s wars.

Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant for the 26th of February, 2017. Ah, dolphins: have any animal got so good a reputation despite having such a little chainsaw in their mouths? Also, despite the Next: bubble the next installment was not about the roster of characters in Sally Forth so, be ready.

But all’s not well at refugee camp. They’re plagued by attacks from (checks encounter table) bandits on horseback who’ve been plaguing the refugee herders. Large hairy man Numair goes naked bathing. It’s in the same pond the robe-dressed Karen means to use for laundry, and they talk about how glad they are they’re not totally into each other since that would mess things up with Karen’s husband Giovanni.

Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant for the 2nd of April, 2017. I don’t see what Korsheed is worried about. We know how peaceful and tranquil a war-ravaged countryside always is once the despotic warlord that’s amassed a giant army has been knocked out and the soldiers are all dispersed.

After thinking hard about it Valiant decides to save the refugees; he, Bukota, and Giovanni work on building shelters. Karen leads a fishing class, and Numair goes off with bow and arrow to hunt for the next plot point. While hunting the small game he (checks encounter table) finds a badly wounded woman who’s killed three bandits. He recognizes her as Taloon, the excellent huntress that head refugee Korsheed had mentioned, and he ties some sticks around cloth around her leg as a show of healing.

Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant for the 30th of April, 2017. This is maybe not the most plot-heavy of the comics from this story thread, but it is the most visually exciting. I especially like Taloon’s second panel there with her hand reaching out of the panel border and her arrow reaching over into the next panel. That said, last panel, why has she got some of those Second Life sleeping bunnies? Are we supposed to believe the Prince Valiant universe crosses over with the Linden Labs virtual reality? Please. Worst. Episode. ever. Shut up, they are too just sleeping bunnies. I’m the reader. I have rank.

Numair follows the dead bandits’ footprints back to their horses and bribes them with some sweetgrass. He and Taloon set off back to the refugee camp, thinking of how swell everything is and how cute it is they met one another, but (checks the encounter table) there are three brigands lying in wait. So somebody’s going to have an unhappy next installment.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose an astounding twelve points to an all-time high as traders were buoyed by how well the new computer is generally behaving, and also by rumors that there might have been a second 80s cartoon about robot cowboys in Space Texas. Analysts are skeptical but, you know, it was the 80s. And we’re trying very hard not to suppose that since everything is going swell that everything is doomed and will never be good again.

177

Statistics Saturday: 22 Kinds Of Mongoose Or Rabbit Ordered By Center Of Mass

1. Arctic Hare
2. Common Mongoose
3. Volcano Rabbit
4. Banded Doomed-Madagascaran-Marshlands Mongoose
5. Invisibunny
6. Meerkat
7. Silver Marten Rabbit (which sounds like somebody being ironic or something)
8. False Dwarf Rabbit
9. Anglican Slender Mongoose (Reformed)
10. Flat-headed kusimanse
11. Mongoose Civique
12. Bluffing Giant Hare
13. Furtive Upper-Tailed Cape Gray Mongoose
14. Belgian Hare IPA
15. Mer-goose (properly, a fish which takes on the appearance of a mongoose in order to punch snakes)
16. Morekat
17. San Jose Brush Rabbit
18. Trans-Canada Pika
19. Robertson square-headed kusimanse
20. Antelope Jackrabbit (which is not a jackalope we swear)
21. Thumper
22. Yellow Mongoose

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose twelve points as investors’ moods were buoyed by surveys asking what they would do if they had a robot donkey friend, with factions split between whether this would be a regular four-hoofed robot donkey or if it would be a humanoid robot donkey with two hooves but able to, like, shake hands and stuff like people swear they remember from that 80s cartoon about robot cowboys in Space Texas and that wasn’t just a crazy dream. Anyway, everybody’s enthusiastic after all this robot donkey friend talk.

165

What I Hope Is Not An Omen

But I fear is: a lengthy dream in which I am trying to finish an anecdote about some very slow women carrying tiny dogs who were extraordinarily slow in getting on the bus. A small bus, the kind you use to get from the airport terminal to the car rental place. And there was something about their slowness in getting on that was leading to some real killer of a punch line, but I couldn’t get to it. My audience was, I suppose fairly enough, thinking this was a boring story and wasn’t willing to trust that I was getting somewhere. If there is a lesson from it, I suppose it’s that I must be ready to issue subpoenas to demand people wait for me to signal the end of an anecdote before judging it.

And, in fairness, I will need a way to signal the end of an anecdote. I’m considering getting a small flag reading “END OF ANECDOTE”, or perhaps a highly portable musical instrument on which I could play a distinct note. Or perhaps something in a dagger, held close to ready — but not actually pointed at anyone on purpose — and set down when my story is done. Maybe I need another opinion. How do you folks signal when you’ve reached the end of an anecdote and that the audience may now have a reaction to it? Bonus points if it’s something that can be created using only things that could be found around the house. Thank you.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose eight points today on early reports that the new computer was working all right and we figured out how to get data out of the Time Capsule backup that was supposed to be running all along and it turns out was.

153

On The New Computer

Monday was puttering along like it will. I had scheduled that Mary Worth post and was almost at the point in my workday where I’d read enough of The AV Club to do a solid hour of staring helplessly at my code. But my MacBook had enough. “No,” it declared, “it is not time for a critical reappraisal of that Next Generation episode where Captain Picard becomes a twelve-year-old boy. The critics have been right about this episode all along and we do not need to read it as sly self-satire.”

“But wait,” I protested, “Those things have the best comments about how the AV Club isn’t any good anymore!”

“Goodbye,” it said, and the video glitched out. First it split the video into little shuffled strips. Then it went to this brown background with a less-brown circular background, like the carpet at a respectable-enough hotel from 1978. The computer shop up the block identified the problem in minutes: my computer was broken. Also nobody makes the parts for it anymore anymore. But they gave me a number at Apple to call to see if they might have any. Apple blushed and explained how they were so embarrassed by their old work like that and they wished I wouldn’t talk about it, they could do so much better now.

So while waiting for the new computer’s delivery I have to do something, computer-wise. I can’t just wander around the house reading my books and holding my love and prying open the window that’s painted shut and fixing the basement stair that’s going to completely collapse and probably kill someone someday. Fortunately for computer-based mishaps like this I have a backup.

It’s my older Mac, a PowerBook G4, that I kept for emergencies like this and because I can’t throw away stuff without an elaborate, weeks-long ritual of apology to the thing. I remember it being sleek and speedy when I got it in 2006. I was wrong. What did we know from design back then? The computer is about the size of a 1988 Chevrolet Celebrity. To set it on my table required the help of a pilot boat and a team of four people wielding containerized-cargo cranes.

It’s an ancient computer, dating back to the days before we even had binary code. Internally it represents numbers as a series of zeroes and four-fifths. It looks at the modern Internet the same way my father looks on when he’s having such a good time at this noisy restaurant that he won’t spoil dinner by admitting he forgot to turn his hearing aid on. It sits there, smiling, nodding with engagement, making the right amount of eye contact, and then I click a link on Twitter and it searches for “writing” on Yahoo. Then I hit command-V and it pastes what I copied, like, eight copies ago, last night. It’s nice having time together. I just want to hug it.

The worst hassle of all this is having to pay for a new computer. But also the worst hassle of all this has been that my emergency backup computer has really mushy shift keys that work about one-fifth of the time, so I look like I’m typing everything into a search engine. But also the other worst worst hassle of all this has been telling friends about it. I have a lot of friends who love building computers and don’t see why anyone doesn’t.

I know why I don’t. I like computers that you plug in and do stuff with. My friends who build their computers never get to do stuff with it. They’re always reporting, like, “my new graphics card is incompatible with the hard drive interruptor” and “so the optical drive cables demanded the motherboard take a side and now they’ve moved to opposite corners and are spitting on each other” and “the PCI slot teamed up with irredentist Wallachian rebels to call in tactical air strikes”. But they’re always confident they’re one round of peace talks away from the best computer ever, and they’re eager to help me out.

“We could totally build something fantastic,” they’ll say. “Not on one of those awful socket 1150s either! We’ll do it on an 1151 or I bet I can hook us up with an 1151.8!”

“I live in Lansing, Michigan, and you’re in Romania,” I answer so I don’t explicitly say I think they’re making up tech specs.

“Have you ever seen the framerates on an overclocked BrixxVideo video card? And channel that through the Heisenberg compensator matrix and you can full half duplex your quads on the composite Lumpex!”

I think this sounds like when audiophiles insist they get a better sound out of their system by using green marker on their audio cables.

“I got a friend who can get you this prototype computer case that isn’t even plastic or metal. This is for high-performance enclosing of stuff! It’s the concept of containerization as manifested in a substance that must never be looked at directly with unshielded eyes.”

I feel loved by this attention, yes. But what I’m looking for most in a computer right now is a shift key that works. Also, if you know somebody who’d be willing to give me like one computer’s worth of money in exchange for whatever it is I do, could you hook us up? Or fix copy-paste so it works. Thanks kindly.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index plummeted today as market confidence was shaken by the discovery the MyCokeRewards program has ended and all those 12-pack box flaps we’d been saving to enter the codes someday were now worthless. Estimated losses are easily enough Coke Rewards points that we could have gotten a six-month subscription to a magazine we don’t like, and now it’s all too late.

145

Comic Strips I Just Don’t Have Enough Time In My Life To Spend Any Of It Reading

I know this is going to be my most controversial list ever but I must report what is true.

1. Mallard Fillmore.
2. Those Sunday Pearls Before Swine strips where it’s 40 panels of endless word balloons to set up the characters in the last panel telling the cartoonist he should get a real job instead of writing puns.
3. Any strip trying to do the “Who’s On First” routine with band names that hasn’t noticed the whole premise crashes when you remember they’re The Who, and for that matter The Guess Who.
4. Any strip doing its own version of I Am The Very Model Of The Modern Major-General. Also any non-comic-strip doing its own version of I Am The Very Model Of The Modern Major-General. We have all that we need for what we’ve been doing.
5. Zack Hill.
6. Any strip that’s zinging Modern Art and how it’s all these non-representational paintings and display fixtures that look like clutter.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped four points in trading that just went to reinforce everyone arguing that everyone and everything is doomed and will never be any good again which, remember, was set off by people noticing this is the highest the Another Blog, Meanwhile index has ever been. It’s enough to make you wonder if there’s any gratitude in the world anymore or has it always been like this? Don’t answer, those who remember whether it’s been like this.

160

Why I’ve Been Busy Smiling

So my love mentioned that one of the special Patreon-subscribers-only episodes of bad-books podcast I Don’t Even Own A Television reviewed a modern Hardy Boys book. It’s one where the Hardy Boys investigate the local hip-hop scene. And you remember the DMV sloth in Zootopia smiling? That stuff happens in real life too. My love told me about this Wednesday and I’m still only in the first half of that smile. And I think, the more you think about it, the more you’re going to start smiling and keep on smiling even through the day as it is. You’re welcome!

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

the index fell today, confirming everyone’s fears about how we can’t have good stuff and nothing ever really lasts and there’s just no sense to even caring if everything is just going to turn on you and inspire misery in you. Really seems like an overreaction to dropping, like, one point. People.

164

Quick Little Update As Mary Worth Changes *Everything*!

Before I do, though, here’s my mathematics blog, which looked at only a couple of comic strips this week because nobody gave me anything to write about from Tuesday through Saturday last week. I blame the crazy guy who writes Dilbert because, you know, why not?

Anyway. No time for a full update about the plot in Mary Worth because it’s mostly been “cruise ships are awesome” and “smokers are mostly crooks”. I just want to talk about the title panel from Sunday’s strip. Normally these include a quotation from a person too famous to have their quotes be reliably sourced and, when they turn out to be legitimate quotes, to usually mean in context the opposite of whatever they seem to say in a Mary Worth quote box. Here’s Sunday’s.

Title panel from Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 14th of May, 2017. In violation of Worth Law, this looks like it might be a legitimate quote. I found a citation that isn’t from BrainyQuote, the one web site that promises to not care whether it associates a person with anything they ever said or would ever wish to say ever. Here Mister T is, though, novelty-interviewed in February 2009 by The Grauniad and quoted as saying exactly that. Who knew? Also: is it possible to read Derek’s thought balloon aloud without sounding like you’re in The Room? I don’t think it’s worth the risk.

Mary Worth can quote Mister T now?

So I’m thinking here an Indiegogo to hire some suitable actress who’ll portray Mary Worth doing nothing but reading Mister T’s greatest lines, and a handful of his most mediocre lines for contrast. I’m accepting donations and nominations for what to have Mary Worth read but obviously I’m putting the highest priority on memorable quotes from the Ruby/Spears Mister T cartoon, if there are any. That interview mentioned in my picture caption is also a good mine of stuff to say.

If you’d like more Mary Worth updates try this link. It should have my most recent story summaries somewhere near the top of its page! Though not after this specific post today.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose another point today to what everybody’s pretty sure is an all-time high? It seems like it ought to be, anyway. Point being now everyone’s miserable because they just know there’s now way that is going to last and we’re probably going to crater to, like, sixty before the week is over.

165

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? February – May 2017

And now the Sunday continuity for Tony DePaul and Terry Beatty’s The Phantom. If you’re looking for the weekday strips that’s a separate line, most recently covered here. If you’re reading this much later than May 2017, look at the top essays at this link instead. It’ll have both the Sunday and the weekday continuities in it, and unless I change the order in which I go around the story comics, the Sunday one will more likely be at the top. So there’s that.

The Phantom (Sundays), 13 February – 13 May 2017.

When I last reported on The Ghost Who Makes Up Proverbs About Himself, Sunday pelage, he was in a Chicago mobster’s bedroom, encircled by Chinese-hired ninjas. You know, as protectors of coastal African nations will. The Phantom was drawn there when a plane crash brought to his attention Mikey D’Moda, who at age maybe fourteen is the over-promoted scion of the D’Moda crime family. After listening to the kid for about ten minutes The Phantom figured we can’t let people like this run around and flew to his great-grandfather, the only other blood relative who’s part of the story and whose first name I can’t find. Sorry.

Tony DePaul and Terry Beatty’s The Phantom for the 19th of February, 2017. Oh, yeah, and I guess The Phantom finished punching out all the Chinese ninjas. I’ll own up to losing track of how many there were and how many were left to be punched. Anyway, it’s nice to see Mikey D’Moda developing an awareness of the future.

The Elder D’Moda, bedridden since his death by old age twenty years ago, sees in The Phantom a strong man, a potential new consigliere. The Phantom won’t have any of it, and offers the deal by which Elder D’Moda makes restitution and the Younger D’Moda never speaks to anyone, ever again. Given a good hard look what his family business has come to, Elder D’Moda off and dies, and Mikey leaves for a farm upstate.

Tony DePaul and Terry Beatty’s The Phantom for the 19th of March, 2017. I do find it endearing how about one time in four that someone addresses The Phantom as Mister Walker a narrative box pops in to explain that it’s ‘For The Ghost Who Walks’. Over-explaining the stuff that’s obvious? Maybe, but it’s obvious because we see it all the time. Let the new readers have the stuff they need, so they don’t wonder how judges really feel about mysterious, eternally-masked, obviously pseudonymous figures with no legal history popping in to arrange the disposition of complex cases regarding generations-old mob families.

So this story, begun the 26th of June 2016, officially wrapped up — by the “Next: NEW ADVENTURE!” box — the 2nd of April. The new story, started the 9th of April, is titled The Phantom Is Everywhere, suggesting the surprising return of Klondike Kat’s nemesis Savoir Faire in a comic strip other than Dick Tracy. The suggestion is wholly unrelated to the actual content of the story and I apologize for wasting your time with it. Phantom Wiki reports this is the 185th Sunday story.

The story opens in a Wambesi village terrorized by a trio of “agressors” who in Lee Falk’s words “preach a hateful ideology” and loot the place now and then. But Jungle Patrol is there, hiding among the villagers and waiting for their moment. One of the Jungle Patrol blows a whistle, and the bandits are caught when they go to the free throw line. Jungle Patrol’s speculation afterwards is that it may be tied to The Python, the terrorist leader whom The Phantom broke out of Boomsby Prison to hold himself, privately, in a secret grass hut guarded by villagers.

Tony DePaul and Terry Beatty’s The Phantom for the 7th of May, 2017. Yes, I know this makes Colonel Worubu look like the kind of guy who pointed out after V-E Day that all central and western Europe was a lawless wasteland of human misery that none of the victorious allies had any sufficient plan to rebuild. But in fairness: I’m going to bet that there are many people with names for a privately-run army out of the control of any government except by the personal links the current President of Bangalla happens to have with the person he doesn’t properly know is the head of the Jungle Patrol. Just saying.

And that’s about where things stand today. The disadvantage of these Sunday strips is there aren’t so many Sundays in the week, so there’s not as much to write up. But if you the reader are curious about the stuff I’ve elided, or want permanent links to strips not featured here, please comment. I’ll try to be useful.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose six points after everyone gathered around to hear my annual rant about how the Mother’s Day Card industry somehow has cards for every possible relationship except the person who has a good relationship with their mother-in-law and wants to send a card as a person and not as the person who happens to be married to the mother-in-law’s child. It brings everyone a strange amount of joy to see me upset at the injustice of it all.

164

Statistics Saturday: My Music Library (Not By Volume)

The real news, by the way, is that I’ve learned how to make the captions appear outside the wedges with little arrows pointing to them, instead of having to make the text kind of appear more or less on top of a wedge and maybe spill over onto the next wedge and I can’t figure a way to set all the text to be uniformly any color except by fiddling with edge wedge separately, which is stupid. This is a lot nicer to produce even though it’s probably unreadable at the available sizes. Sorry. It did leave me wondering if there’s pie charts then why aren’t there, like, cake charts where you just have easy-to-arrange rectangles of sizes representing portions of stuff and labels that fit on top of those? Except that’s probably how infographics get made, and I don’t know how to do those, because for all that I try to keep intellectually and emotionally youthful what that really means is I play pinball and listen to more New Wave music of the 80s than I ever did in the 80s. Anyway, while I’d like something like that, what’s important is, I found a way to make my computer thing do a thing in a slightly less annoying way than it used to. Ice cream for everyone!

Not listed: the works of They Might Be Giants even though their albums are clearly large amounts of high-quality music since all their songs have a lot of words in them. And notes for nearly every word or syllable, too.

For those wondering: I’m not saying the Nilsson album wasn’t, just saying what the expectations were.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

After what sure looked like a big mass of busy-work traders looked up from their desks to find the Another Blog, Meanwhile index was at an all-time high. Oh, the cheering, oh, the hand-slapping, oh, the mutual congratulations about how they must be involved in a real and important bit of work that brings real value to the lives of millions. Millions, they tell each other, millions!

158

In The Aftermath Of The Power Failure

Oh, yeah, something else from the power failure the other day. Whoever owns the house across the street has been having a lot of work done on it, and the other day the workers were going on until pretty well in the night and even after dark, we guess to make up for lost time while the weather’s still good. I wouldn’t be doing stuff on the top of ladders like that after dark, not without more spotlights than our neighborhood supports.

And this has me annoyed because I wanted to describe the action, and all I had that was right was “the roofers were roofing the roof” and that makes it sound like I don’t know how to … wordificate … things and stuff. And it’s not my fault! Somehow we as a society thought of “people who build or repair roofs” and decided they’re called “roofers” and the activity they do is “roofing”, because, what, we were ambushed on camera about the subject and now we’re stuck with the first thing that popped into our heads? All right, we have bigger problems to deal with, but can we put this one on the list? This is one we ought to be able to fix.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index fell two points as someone got Matt going on the difference between the canon of a fictional world and the continuity of it and while everyone agrees there is a difference there are great differences of opinion about how important it is to be clear which you’re ever talking about, and somehow this is the argument he wants to be his legacy. All things considered we’re lucky to get out of it only losing two points.

140

Out On The Town

The power went out when I was showering yesterday morning. For a moment I thought, well gosh, what if civilization’s just come to an end. This was the sort of merry fanciful thought you could have about surprise power failures back in the 90s when we figured civilization actually had no reason to end. “What the heck, let’s keep it going another five years,” we’d say, every time the subscription notice came up, and if it was charging two bucks more a month that was all right. If we had kept the two bucks a month we probably would’ve done something stupid with it, like buying used VHS tapes of Bucky O’Hare to watch ironically or something. Bucky O’Hare is worth watching sincerely. It’s Biker Mice From Mars you have to watch with detachment.

This clouded up my day, since the ventilator fan in the bathroom stopped working. We’ve got a pretty muggy bathroom, one prone to storm fronts. We average about four tropical depressions per year just from ordinary showering, and the extra-long shower after the Poison Ivy Removal Expedition Of 2015 is credited with starting Hurricane Danny. (We were framed.) Without the fan going I have to leave the shower groping my way blindly through a steamy mass of bathroom rainforest, dodging spiders and sloths and the ooh-ooh-aah-aah birds. I also have to do that when the fan is on, but at least I’ve taken action. It’s never the results. It’s being part of the process.

And it messed up plans too. I had figured to call my Congressman’s office, like I’ve been doing once or twice a week all this year, to demand “how dare you?” It doesn’t accomplish much, although sometimes the poor staffer who has to take me admits, “I haven’t spoken with the Congressman about how dare I”, which is gratifying. Again, it’s all being part of the process. Also about discovering that turns out Congress office reps don’t have caller ID. At the least you’d think they’d ask me what I’m how-dare-youing them about. I used to have something in mind, but that took so much time. It’s just as effective if I go with whatever is in the news today. And without power, without the Internet, I wouldn’t have Twitter and they could totally call my bluff. So that was off.

The power company said the problem was an equipment malfunction. Probably could have guessed that. They couldn’t say, “sorry, we suddenly felt shy about sending stuff into your house without an explicit invitation”, not after they’ve been sending power into the house off and on for nearly ninety years now. Or “Rick forgot to renew our subscription and we let our civilization lapse,” since Rick hasn’t been at the power company in over two years now. Equipment not working right is about all they could go for.

They estimated power should be restored by 5:30 pm, which is disheartening to hear when it’s less than halfway through The Price Is Right. I know you never want to promise service is coming back before you’re absolutely sure it will be. Last time the Internet went out the company would only concede that service should be back by the end of Daylight Saving Time. I don’t know why the Internet company cares if there’s ever a Daylight Saving Time repeal and I don’t think they’re helping the issue by making threats like that. I’d have called my Congressman about that but see above.

Thing with a power failure like that is it’s the kind of snow day I get. I work from home, because I’ve kept my exact whereabouts secret from my boss and he doesn’t know where to come get me. As long as I have Internet I can connect to my office computer and delete e-mails about not leaving the fire door open, just as if I were on site. But in the circumstances, what choice do I have except to take a long lunch out at the bagel place? The only professional choice is to ponder how they have chocolate chip cream cheese these days while overhearing a table full of older white guys agreeing with each other about all these officials it’s unreasonable to hold accountable for what happens in a frat house.

When we got home the power was back. The snow day had passed, and all we had left was resetting the clocks. It could be as long as months before we have every clock in the house re-set, and we have to deal with the more popular clocks taunting those who’re so low-status they don’t get reset. House clocks have vicious, nasty social cliques.

This morning I left the shower fan off.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose seven points on the discovery of a box of salty-and-sweet candy corn from the farmers’ market that had been forgotten about after Easter.

142

Craggy Island Vacationing

Sorry, I’m still thinking about that beach that went missing from an Ireland shore thirty years ago and popped back in last month. Like, where do you imagine it went all that time? I understand if it took a vacation, especially if it had been there since the glaciers retreated and knew it might be forever until a glacier comes back. But where does a beach go on vacation? Another beach? Sure, I understand hanging out with a friend. But that’s going to be a terrible holiday. It would keep having people trod out onto it in flip-flops and lugging baskets of things and have to explain, “No no, mate, I’m here for the same thing you are,” and point to its friend that it’s standing on.

Maybe it could go the mountains? That would be fine, nobody would go out for a beach expedition to the Swiss Alps, say. It couldn’t go skiing, what with people getting all tense around avalanches and rockslides and that. But sitting around a chalet, sipping cocoa? That’s great, until the rescuers dig the chalet out from itself. I don’t know about you; I don’t think having heavy machinery clawing at my backside until a path is dug from me to the emergency exit would be fun. Different strokes, though, I must admit.

Maybe it did a museum tour. That would make sense to me. The beach was gone for thirty years, after all, and I’ve spent that much time in some museums. I’ve had — and I am not exaggerating this in the slightest — museum docents come up and sheepishly ask me if I thought I might be near the end of my examinations of things, as the museum had technically speaking closed forty-five minutes earlier.

I bet that’s it. We should ask the museums of the world if any of them had a beach come by and just stay poking around a painting or a diorama for up to 358 months past closing time.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Investors just knew the abrupt rise in the Another Blog, Meanwhile index couldn’t last and then what do you think happened but the power went out, which shows … not actually anything particular. It might just be coincidence. Anyway, it was up two points before everybody had to go around checking that the break room fridge really was closed.

135

Still, Nice To Hear Craggy Island’s On An Uptick

Reuters had this article:

Irish beach reappears 33 years after vanishing into Atlantic Ocean

A beach that was swept away more than 30 years ago from a remote island off the west coast of Ireland has reappeared after thousands of tons of sand were deposited on top of the rocky coastline.

The 300 meter beach near the tiny village of Dooagh on Achill Island vanished in 1984 when storms stripped it of its sand, leaving nothing more than a series of rock pools.

But after high spring tides last month, locals found that the Atlantic Ocean had returned the sand.

I did not realize the world was so very much the waiting cycle for a Popeye-at-the-beach cartoon from the early 50s.

Also, wow, I’m thinking first of the person who thirty years ago went down to the beach after the storm and saw it was gone. How would you go telling people about that? And then this year the person who went down to the sea side just in case and found it was back.

If it came back this year, I mean. I mean, wouldn’t it be a kicker if it turned out the beach had popped back in like two months after it was first washed away, but by then nobody was checking because everyone knew the beach was gone? Or if someone did, like, ten years ago walk along it and see the beach there but figured that must not be the beach that had gone that everyone was talking about since there it was. Or worse, the person did tell folks about it, but everyone figured that was just crazy talk and didn’t even go looking and now the whole town has to admit, “Yeah, you told us so”. There’s just so many ways this could be awkward. I’m fascinated, right up until I think about something else.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose eight points today, fueling concerns that this can’t possibly last. I mean, seriously, every time we’ve been in territory like this we were down around 85 the next week. Who needs that hassle?

133

Is The Auto Care Place Close To A Relationship Breakthrough?

If you don’t care, maybe you might look at my mathematics blog since I had a couple of activity puzzles included in the roster of comic strips there this week.

Now I know everyone’s interested in whatever drama is going on with the auto care place up the street. If you’re just joining us, I’m pretty sure the auto care place up the street is caught in an Ashleigh Brilliant-esque state of cheerful despair, and possibly communicating a nasty breakup through its signboard. Anyway, for about two months or so it was the neutral-enough “The Best Way To Predict Your Future Is To Make It”. And this past week we’ve gotten this:

No word given on whether the other reasons to quit are still good reasons to quit. For example I am so tired of writing “quite” when I meant to write “quit” and somehow found myself unable to quite.

Is the auto care place trying to send word to its ex-friend that, angry as they both are after the breakup, it is open and amenable to reconciliation and that any gesture of good will would be met kindly and without bitter, blame-casting comments? I don’t know, so here’s the rabbit statue in our garden getting ready to punch a tulip.

Fun fact: some of our tulips are from bulbs bought in Holland, Michigan, while others were bought in Holland, the Netherlands. We don’t remember which. I grant this is only slightly fun, but it is a fact, and isn’t that reassuring in these troubled times?

Thank you for reading.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose four points today just to show that it could and then went right back to where it had started from. Friends are growing concerned that it might be losing the ability to effortlessly socialize.

125

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? February – May 2017

And now I’m in The Phantom zone. This week I’ll do my best to explain the weekday continuity in Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s comic strip. Next week I’ll catch things up on the Sunday continuity. If you’re reading this much later than May 2017, you should be able to find a more recent review on this linked page. It’ll have both the Sunday and the weekday continuities in it; I’m sorry, I don’t know a good way to sort those out. Thanks for bearing with me.

The Phantom (Weekdays), 6 February – 6 May 2017.

Since the last we left The Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks punched his way into large beard entrepreneur Orson Burley’s home. The Phantom call on the aid of a pack of Bandar locals in a scene that doesn’t look at all like some racist British newspaper cartoon advocating the takeover of Bangalla to safeguard white people. And they easily kidnap the wealthy man of wealthiness. After a night spent tied to Horror Trees Burley’s dumped in the midst of The Phantom’s Cave and given his orders: no stamps! Because The Phantom is really, really horrified by the prospect that his legend might be graded in philatelist journals. We’ve all been there. Burley agrees and he swears off forever his plan to … have the nation of Bangalla depict a centuries-old legendary guardian of the people and supernatural defender of justice on its postage. That’s a win for the good guys.

Have to admit this is one of those stories where I just could not get into our protagonist’s mindset. I would get The Phantom wanting to protect his image, and using his iconography on something trivial can serve to trivialize him. But I’m just not seeing how someone who’s cultivated several dozen and often very specific Old Jungle Sayings about what The Phantom does or what you do when you meet The Phantom is doing saying this is the step too far. The case could have been made, but I didn’t see it.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 3rd of March, 2017. Also everything we write back to LinkedIn.

That wrapped up the 11th of March. From the 13th of March started a new story, The Curse Of Old Man Mozz, which Phantom Wiki says is the 247th Phantom Daily story. Lee Falk promises that in it, faithful mystic and old-guy Old Man Mozz will foretell the death of the 21st Phantom, our current purple-clad superhero.

The action opens with The Phantom raiding a Thug Factory, punching and taking names. Then he punches the names and throws them down a well. He spends a couple weeks at this, since the Thug Factory is churning out product like crazy. He grabs guy after guy eager to beg for a deal and who learn their deal is they’re being left for the police. Or, well, the Jungle Patrol, who’re totally legitimate and respectable forces for law and due process rather than a self-sustaining militia.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 24th of March, 2017. Also a masterpiece of personnel management considering that after smacking down Snitch Guy for at least the second time in his life The Phantom is sending him off with a credible-sounding claim that the guy is actually a strong and important person. He’s giving Snitch Guy reason to feel good about himself even despite his getting smashed up some.

Along the way Devil, the Phantom’s pet wolf, took a pretty nasty tumble along with one of the Thug Factory’s newest products. Ghost Who Punches finds medicine guy Guran is strangely uninterested in his medical guy work. Phantom figures to work out what his deal is, although it’s his wife, Diana Palmer-Walker, who successfully follows him. Guran’s destination: The hut of Old Man Mozz, where he’s sprawled out on the floor surrounded by mysterious vaporous mists and muscle loss. Mozz is not ill, Guran promises Palmer-Walker. He’s just having visions.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 4th of May, 2017. It’s terribly dangerous for people to go through their adolescent I’ll-just-sleep-on-my-mattress-on-the-floor phase. Also but you just know he insists on calling the band The Pink Floyd.

We haven’t heard officially what he’s envisioning, but Lee Falk may have dropped a clue when he said Old Man Mozz would foretell the death of the 21st Phantom. Misdirection? Possibly, although The Phantom has noticed how end-of-life-y things feel lately. What we’ve been given doesn’t promise the current Kit Walker’s going to die before it’s over. But I’m curious how it’s going to affect the continuity of the series. The Phantom 2040 cartoon, back in the 90s, tells stories of the 24th Phantom, after all, and while it accounts for the short career of the 23rd Phantom, there is the 22nd, who last year was sent to get himself shot in Tibet, ready to become part of the comic. Just observing.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose nine points today in response to a Reuters report that frozen orange juice concentrate was selling at 150.80 on the commodities market, which seems like a good deal for orange juice concentrate? Also it’s something there’s a thriving international commodities market in? All right, we never see that in grand strategy games where you do trades of goods with other countries but what the heck. Frozen orange juice concentrate. Business is weird.

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Statistics Saturday: The United States In Descending Order Of Thickness

Also including the District of Columbia because, heck, what does that cost me?

State Or District Of Columbia	Thickness
Alaska	20,310 ft / 6191 m
California	14,783 ft / 4506 m
Washington	14,417 ft / 4394 m
Hawaii	13,803 ft / 4207 m
Nevada	12,665 ft / 3860 m
Arizona	12,565 ft / 3830 m
Idaho	11,954 ft / 3644 m
Utah	11,354 ft / 3461 m
Oregon	11,249 ft / 3429 m
Colorado	11,123 ft / 3390 m
Montana	11,003 ft / 3354 m
Wyoming	10,709 ft / 3264 m
New Mexico	10,323 ft / 3147 m
Texas	8,751 ft / 2667 m
North Carolina	6,684 ft / 2037 m
Tennessee	6,466 ft / 1971 m
New Hampshire	6,288 ft / 1917 m
South Dakota	6,276 ft / 1913 m
Virginia	5,729 ft / 1746 m
New York	5,343 ft / 1629 m
Maine	5,270 ft / 1606 m
Georgia	4,784 ft / 1458 m
Oklahoma	4,686 ft / 1428 m
West Virginia	4,623 ft / 1409 m
Nebraska	4,587 ft / 1398 m
Vermont	4,300 ft / 1311 m
Kentucky	3,887 ft / 1185 m
South Carolina	3,560 ft / 1085 m
Massachusetts	3,489 ft / 1063 m
Kansas	3,361 ft / 1025 m
Maryland	3,360 ft / 1024 m
Pennsylvania	3,213 ft / 979 m
North Dakota	2,757 ft / 840 m
Arkansas	2,698 ft / 822 m
Alabama	2,413 ft / 736 m
Connecticut	2,379 ft / 725 m
New Jersey	1,803 ft / 550 m
Minnesota	1,700 ft / 518 m
Missouri	1,542 ft / 470 m
Michigan	1,408 ft / 429 m
Wisconsin	1,372 ft / 418 m
Iowa	1,191 ft / 363 m
Ohio	1,094 ft / 333 m
Illinois	955 ft / 291 m
Indiana	937 ft / 286 m
Rhode Island	811 ft / 247 m
Mississippi	807 ft / 246 m
Louisiana	543 ft / 165 m
Delaware	447 ft / 136 m
District of Columbia	408 ft / 124 m
Florida	345 ft / 105 m

Source: Wikipedia from which I learn there’s only two states that have spots below sea level? That’s weird. Like, I understand Colorado not having any spots below sea level, but there isn’t one rocky crag somewhere in, like, North Carolina that runs below the ocean level? And like how has someone not dug a big cement-lined pit somewhere on Long Island to set it underneath the sea level just to show they can do something pointless like that? You know? Also, I guess mines and stuff don’t count for lowest elevations, which is fair enough, but wouldn’t they start counting if the mine’s ceiling collapsed? It seems like states could totally rig their thickness rankings if they wanted. Plus, like, I know for a fact that New York State claims sovereignty over the seabed of the entire Hudson River; doesn’t that count as the lowest elevation in the state? I’m saying while I give you this list I think there’s a lot of pointless argument to have about what the lowest points of elevation in states such as New York and Delaware are and yes that is because I’m from New Jersey and angry about the implications of colonial-era borders.

You know, you never really think of Kansas as having more of an elevation change than Pennsylvania does. I feel a bit weirdly defensive about it myself.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index fell five points today when no one brought an umbrella and it got all drizzly out.

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Statistics April: What Was Popular-Ish Around Here

So, my conversion of this blog from miscellaneous humor stuff into comic strip review goes well. According to WordPress’s statistics I had some 1,765 pages viewed from 1,099 distinct readers in April. That’s down from March’s 2,085 pages from 1,308 visitors. But it’s near enough January’s 1,837 views from 1,093 visitors that I’m not going to go fretting nonstop about that. If nothing else, April’s “What’s Going On In” comics were about stuff like Gil Thorp and Alley Oop, which people don’t find as ironically fascinating as Mary Worth or Rex Morgan. Oh, I had Judge Parker, surely a perennial, but also Spider-Man which has too strong a narrative drive to really confuse people.

No, what I’ll fret about if you don’t mind is the number of pages liked. There were 147 ‘likes’ clicked around here in April. That’s not far off March’s 154 or February’s 169. But WordPress increased the range of months I can see on the chart. That’s made me realize the ‘likes’ around here have been trending downward, like some exponential decay, since about March of 2015 when there were 443 likes. I haven’t dug in to see how what I wrote differed back then from what I write now. But I wonder. Wouldn’t you? If you’re reading this far into my data moping here, you wonder at least a bit.

You can actually see me grow less likable!

Comments have a similar-looking decline. Oh, they were up in April, to 26 from March’s 12 and February’s 15. That still shows a steady decline, though. I won’t bother with a picture of that over the course of months. Sometime last year — I forget when — I shifted the way I link to old stuff. The new way doesn’t show up as a comment on the linked essay, so that I have a truer count of how many things people are saying something about. On the other hand, this does mean the page referred to doesn’t show that it’s been referred to by anything else. Maybe I should go back to the old way; that might help people archive-binging find other interesting stuff. If you know anyone who’s archive-binged my little thing … uh … thank you. I’d like to hear what makes it easier, though.

The top articles around here the past month? Mostly comic strip plot summaries. I suspected this would happen, and accepted it. I’d like to be known as a sometimes-absurdist humorist plainly in the Robert Benchley tradition, but if my ability to pay attention to Gasoline Alley is of more use to the world, fine. Nobody ever gets famous for what they want to be famous for.

• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away
• Why Does Mary Worth Look Different?
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? 1 January – 8 April 2017
• Why Do Crankshaft and Funky Winkerbean Look Different?

The most popular creative thing I wrote was my Statistics Saturday post Some Now-Obscure Professional Baseball Players Given Nicknames Anachronistically which is just the sort of slight, over-researched thing that I like. The TV installation thing was my most popular long-form original piece, which shows the power of giving a title drawn from one of the Buggles’ other songs. (They have more good songs than you realize.) And my talk about Mystery Science Theater 3000 and me (part one, and part two, and part three) placed well, which is comforting considering how hard it is sharing feelings and all.

Now on to a big old list of countries and readers! Everyone likes those, unless they go unlisted. In which case it’s something they could fix themselves, isn’t it?

Country	Views
United States	1341
Canada	78
India	78
United Kingdom	74
Romania	17
Germany	13
Australia	12
Netherlands	11
New Zealand	11
Spain	11
Italy	9
Poland	8
Sweden	8
Philippines	7
South Africa	7
Hong Kong SAR China	5
Indonesia	5
Mexico	5
Brazil	4
Finland	4
France	4
Turkey	4
Chile	3
European Union	3
Ireland	3
Singapore	3
Argentina	2
Denmark	2
El Salvador	2
Greece	2
Japan	2
Malaysia	2
Qatar	2
Russia	2
Switzerland	2
Thailand	2
Trinidad & Tobago	2
Uruguay	2
Bolivia	1
Czech Republic	1
Egypt	1 (*)
Kenya	1
Madagascar	1
Norway	1 (*)
Pakistan	1
South Korea	1
Sri Lanka	1
Taiwan	1 (*)
Turks & Caicos Islands	1
Ukraine	1
United Arab Emirates	1

I make that out to be visitors from 51 countries, down from March’s 55 and April’s 61. There were 13 single-viewer countries, down from March’s 14 and February’s 22. Egypt, Ukraine, and Taiwan are the only three countries that were single-reader countries in March also, and March was a complete single-reader turnover from February.

I start May with 52,737 page views from 28,546 distinct visitors, I’m told. WordPress says the most popular day, with 16 percent of views, is Wednesday, just as it was in March. It says the most popular hour, with 13 percent of views, is once again 12 am. That’s down from 15 percent the previous month.

WordPress figures I start the month with 729 readers here, up from 725. I’m flattered to see any follower that hasn’t two days later had their blog closed or made private or whatnot. You bloggers who follow your statistics obsessively know what I’m talking about. If you’d like to join them there should be the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button off on the right side of the screen. Or you can follow by e-mail, joining a group of elites such as my dad. And I’m also @nebusj on Twitter, where I supposedly have 237 followers, and won’t try to scare any of them off. Thank you, won’t you?

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index gained a point when investors were sweeping out the corners like they’ve been promising to all week and saw one had rolled under there, raising hopes for what might happen if they ever do that proper whole-floor mopping they’ve been talking about since March.

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From The April 2017 Scraps File

Free to good home. Please be gentle. Many of these sentence fragments had hopes of being put to a useful purpose.

I’m not saying the world should work like all 70s Hanna-Barbera cartoons. It’s too heavy a load on the continuity of the world to have one in which we have cyborg Three Stooges, slice-of-life football players, and space-cop Casper the Friendly Ghost coexisting.
— cut from that bit yesterday where some bands were listed playing in two venues at once because if I start letting my brain vent genially dumb cartoons I used to watch obsessively I will never stop and that’s some dangerous stuff to let out.

Baseball had trouble in its early days because it was hard to think of good team names. They started with teams like the Troy Trojans, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Providence Providentials, the Chicago Illinoisians, the Detroit Michiganders, and so. — cut from my ramblings about baseball because that bit was getting long enough already and because I couldn’t find a good resolution. Some more obvious-place-name spots, like, “the Dover Delawarians”? Some fanciful like “the Sea Girt Grit”? Something that’s over-researched and a little bit off like, “the Queens County Superbas”? I don’t know. Maybe this just needs to be let to brew longer.

[ A bulk lot of about 650 words regarding the controversial plan by the International Flipper Pinball Association, one of the organizing bodies for competitive pinball, to charge one dollar per player per event for certifying rated events; serious inquiries only. ] — a whole presentation which would have been good for some pinball forum about the hotly debated “IFPA Tariff” which I realized I don’t have a use for because (a) “tariff”, like “sheriff” and “sergent”, belongs to the class of words that always look to me like I’m spelling them wrong no matter how many times my spell-checker and DuckDuckGo tell me I’m doing fine; and (b) because while I’m not an expert I’m pretty sure this is an “excise” and not a “tariff”. Actually that’s what has me most riled up. It makes me realize that yeah, actually, everyone treating me like that in middle school had a point. You don’t want to do things that make you learn that about yourself. But I’m right, right, about this being more nearly an excise than a tariff?

There’s stuff about a teenaged boy body that are beyond anyone’s control. After a couple hours trying to get through the unformed judgement centers and the free-floating resentment even the teenaged boy himself stops trying to deal with him. So — I’m just giving up trying to follow up that thing about antiperspirant with some more of my mild body-dissatisfation and I can’t get that stuff to go anywhere. If you have a body or know someone who does, give it a try.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrugated_galvanised_iron — a particularly haunting scrap. I’ve had it in my notes as something I could do something with just forever and I can not think of any reason why. There’s some pleasant words in the Wikipedia article, like “roll forming”, but that can’t possibly be enough. If you see whatever it was I saw when I made that note, just let me know. I can’t just be thinking to mock the claim that corrugated galvanized iron is occasionally abbreviated “CGI”.

Not that I mean to blow your mind but you do realize there’s not a word in the canon to suggest Romulans even had deflector shields in the era of the Original Series. — cut from a TrekBBS discussion because whether there’s any word depends on whether you accept some logical inferences from Star Trek: Enterprise or whether you’re considering merely the canon of the Original Series as it existed when the show wrapped in 1969 (or whether you include the cartoon, 1973-74, which I’m inclined to). But if you are willing to consider this it considerably reduces some of the plot holes in the episode where Kirk goes undercover as a crazy guy to steal a cloaking device and oh there I go with understanding middle school again.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index fell a point today as investors ran out of singles for the change machine.

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Something Else I Discovered In The Local Alt-Weekly

I didn’t discover this part, but my mathematics blog did a couple more comic strips yesterday. I would have posted that tomorrow, but I had other stuff that I wanted to take up that space. I might even post it yet.

Anyway, while last week’s issue of the local alt-weekly didn’t have a New In Town article to let me know what bars are opening, it did have the list of what bands are performing nearby. So now I know that whoever’s been booking acts for The Loft got sloppy about covering up how they’re also working for Moriarty’s Pub. Or else we had three musical acts lived that sitcom premise of having to cover two gigs at the same time in places that aren’t even next to each other. I hope they figured out where they should be and when. Also I hope they foiled international spies or something along the way because part of me still thinks the world should work like 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

Idle curiosity: how many bands do you figure named themselves ‘Karaoke’ in a fit of giddy joy and mutual hand-slapping before discovering why that isn’t actually a good idea?

Also if it seems like we have a lot of Reno’s in town yeah, it kind of does. We also have a lot of Tin Can Bars, it seems like, but they don’t have shows I guess. Nothing like we have Biggby Coffee shops, mind you. But nobody has as many of those as we have, not even us.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped another four points owing to investor confidence being shaken by this incredibly long line to get out of the parking lot. And yeah, the line got so long and so slow they just raised the barrier and waved people out without charging but, still, what was going on? That isn’t right.

121

In Which I’m Briefly Written By Paul Rhymer

In August of 1817 President James Monroe, as part of a tour of the several states, visited Detroit. But he did not visit the nearby, newly-created Monroe County. It would have been easy enough for him to visit, since it was only about a day’s travel away. But he didn’t. According to the article, nobody from Monroe County invited the President over. President Monroe might have expected Monroe County residents to come to Detroit to see him, but nobody did. You can forgive them this, because nobody told any Monroe County officials that President Monroe was going to visit the area. Anyway, they probably didn’t care, since nobody lived there except some French-Canadians who’d been ruined in the War of 1812 and didn’t much care about the American government, the Canadian government, or any of that. And Monroe probably didn’t care since there were already four other counties named for him. I mean, I’d be thrilled to have a fifth county named for me, but James Monroe lived a way more fascinating life than I have. He had other stuff on his mind.

I know anything about this because of an article in the March/April 2017 issue of Michigan History. And I couldn’t help reading choice quotes from this to my love. I have a habit of doing this. My love appreciates my reading stuff from the books and magazines I’m going through. I assume, anyway, based on how much time my love spends not punching me in the kidneys.

Anyway where this gets really fascinating is that nobody in Monroe County much cared about how President Monroe didn’t come visit them. It had been a long trip and he just wanted to go home. Until 1937, anyway, when one local historian declared that President Monroe had so visited the county, and even found a log cabin where he allegedly spent the night. This set off a little flurry of local historian claims that Monroe might have set foot in Monroe County. But, the article goes on to explain, historians do not regard this as credible, and they have their reasons.

And as I sat there, reading quotes to my love about this time 200 years ago that President Monroe did not visit Monroe County, and while there were people who thought he did, here are the reasons we think there was no such visit and why nobody much cared, I realized: I am living my Vic and Sade spec script. It’s every bit as wonderful as I imagined.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped two points as investor confidence was shaken by Matt looking up the lyrics to the J Geils Band’s Angel In the Centerfold and learning that yeah, everyone did remember the lyrics right.

125

Sorry For The Late Notice

Really am sorry, folks, but I only noticed this in the classifieds of our local alt-weekly and it’s an exciting opportunity. The City of Lansing, Michigan, is looking for someone who can supply it with bituminous material. You have to have your offer of the stuff turned in by Tuesday afternoon, so there probably isn’t time to go checking everything in your storage locker for signs of bituminosity. But if you have some on hand, this is your chance! Don’t miss it. You never know when fair-sized mid-Michigan cities will need material that’s got even one tuminous to it again. Bituminous is a special treat.

Yes, of course I wonder why the City of Lansing finds itself in need of bituminous materials in such an all-fired hurry, but they didn’t offer an explanation and I don’t feel our relationship is such that I can just barge in and ask. I mean, goodness, I’ve never even been introduced to Stephanie Robinson, I can’t go saying, “Hey! What are you up to with all the bituminous material already?” Heck, I live down the street from the alt-weekly’s offices and I don’t feel like I can ask them how they managed to spell it “untåil” in the eleventh line there. The City of Lansing Purchasing Office is way beyond me.

Also there was something about blueberry pies on Friday but we both missed that.

Finally over on my mathematics blog I just went crazy solving a puzzle from a FoxTrot Sunday strip and believe me, you want to see that. Someone does.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index was slightly up today as traders found all kinds of material in their junk drawers and had expectations that at least some of it will be bituminous. What are the odds that none of it would be? Exactly. It just can’t happen.

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