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

Hi, readers of Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s weekday-continuity The Phantom. This is an essay meant to help you catch up on what’s happened in the strip through to late July, 2017. If it’s not close to late July, 2017, for you, the story might have progressed or a new story begun. I’ll try to have more recent essays that bring you up to date at this link. There’s also a separate, independent, Sunday continuity for the comic strip. That one’s written by Tony DePaul also, but is drawn by Terry Beatty. I’ll also have updates on that continuity, sometime soon.

And if you’re interested in comic strips plucked entirely out of continuity, my mathematics blog discusses comics with mathematical themes, and had a fresh post about that mere hours ago. Please read and enjoy, if you think that’s plausible.

The Phantom

8 May – 29 July 2017

Our last check on Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom, weekday continuity, was about six weeks into The Curse Of Old Man Mozz. The Phantom, 21st Ghost Who Walks, had been so busy clobbering low-level thugs that he barely noticed Old Man Mozz was on the brink of death. His wife, Diana Walker Phantom, investigates. Mozz has been in a series of physically and mentally taxing trances, forseeing …

She’s coy about it, but it’s the death of the current Phantom. In a factory that’s by a charming scenic water wheel, a “weak man” with one of the most punchable faces in the comics will “strike from hiding”, killing the 21st Phantom, shooting him from behind. Mozz promises that this is destiny and no one can save The Phantom. Diana figures she can maybe do something about that. If there’s one thing that’s always avertible, after all, it’s destiny, because we don’t know what the word means.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 24th of May, 2017. So, my Rosencranz-and-Guildenstern fanfic for this: one of the other villagers has a vision where Mozz, Guran, and Diana Walker get into an irresolvable squabble about whether Mozz’s vision is a result of warning the Phantom or not warning him, and they have to debate whether to tell Mozz what will happen if he lets his vision be known to anybody else. And then they have to go back in time and prevent the vision from ever being assimilated by the Borg.

But Mozz goes along with it. He decrees that maybe the vision of The Phantom being ambushed was caused by some well-meaning member of his support team warning him. So in a critical moment he would be thinking “is this the critical moment” instead of reacting. Diana is unimpressed by whatever the heck the rules of prophecy are in this story, but chickens out of telling him. Nevertheless, she’s plagued with doubts, and goes to the Whispering Grove, home of Bangalla’s largest forest of demon-haunted trees that seem to be crying out the Phantom’s name. There she reflects how much would get screwed up if the 21st Phantom dies: not least, he’s the only person who knows exactly what strange school in the Far East Kit Walker Junior is in.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 12th of June, 2017. Most of The Phantom’s legend seems like the kind of stuff that would naturally grow if we allow the existence of a long-running small-family project based on heroically saving a patch of what turned out to be Africa. The forest full of jack-o-lantern trees whispering The Phantom, though, that’s hard to explain. Also not explained: are they whispering The Phantom in English or in the Bandar tongue?

She can’t stand it, and fetches The Phantom back from his mission of riding his big white horse around the jungle. And she makes Mozz tell him of the vision and his doom at the Waterwheel Factory. His team encourages him to take a pass for a couple weeks, wait out the current crisis and then get back to his world-saving duties. Mozz paints a solidly egotistical picture of this, arguing that The Phantom ought to be killed by some great monster like Chatu. Not by some drip who wears an orange shirt with green stars on it and a vest that looks like it ought to be a Home Depot apron but somehow isn’t. Walker thinks it over and decides no thinking necessary. Ghosts Who Walk just don’t ditch their job that way.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 6th of July, 2017. The great unasked follow-up question: “wait, so, Mozz, in your visions you can read my mind? Or are you just taking a fair guess based on what you know about me? Because, have to say, there are some serious privacy concerns here, even putting aside the whole death-at-a-coward’s-hand thing. For one, how far before the moment of my death does your mind-reading ability extend? Do you know what I’m thinking of when I think about Jamie?!”

The Phantom rides his horse to Destiny Date Road, where he finds a truck hauling guns to the Waterwheel Factory. He sends his hose off, riderless, to stop the truck. One of the thugs has always wanted a horsey just like this and Phantom Horse is happy to play along enough for The Phantom to clobber them and take the truck. It’ll be a way into the Waterwheel Factory.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 20th of July, 2017. There is something comforting in knowing that however close The Ghost Who Walks might be to his death, low-level minions at the Thug Factory are still going to be in completely over their heads.

The envisioned killer’s scouted out the waterwheel and figured it’d be a great spot to ambush somebody from, just in case. He’s thinking how awesome it will be to kill The Phantom and can’t imagine any way that any of this could go wrong in the slightest, so that’s good for him.

The summary sounds sparse, but that’s because this is a plot summary. Much of what’s gone on has been atmosphere or self-inquiry. Particularly, Diana spent a good while tormented by the question of what she could do to prevent her husband’s getting killed. This included a couple gripping sequences, including her sitting in the Whispering Grove, or enduring nightmares based on her knowledge. That all condenses out of a couple paragraphs about the events of the story, though.

As I’d said recently, I won’t be making guesses about whether The Current Phantom dies this story. Either outcome is properly foreshadowed and set up. Either would be a logical outcome, and it’s doing pretty well to have such a believable ambiguity this far into a story.

Next Week: I change up the order of these strip recaps a bit and return to the time of King Arthur, with a check on Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose three points today to make its third day out of the last four spent at 331, which is a little weird. Also nobody’s seen Lisa since she said she was putting together that Tiny McMansions pilot episode. These are unrelated problems.

331

Statistics Saturday: Some Answers

• North Dakota in the year 1822.
• Myoglobin.
• It has none.
• The square root of two raised to the square root of two power.
• Cuckoo clocks.
• Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann.
• The Hartford Whalers.
• SS Ideal-X.
• Hexagons.
• Polymerization.
• The pathetic fallacy.
• Saw the board into two halves; combine the two halves to make a whole, and then climb out through the [w]hole.
• Pointillism.
• 95 percent.
• Dormer windows.
• Walk The Moon.
• James Irwin.
• Violincello.
• Doyenne, D-o-y-e-n-n-e. Doyenne.
• Had you considered the village barber might be a woman?

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped three points today, owing to traders getting all sulky when I told them that while I appreciated their idea about an imaginary HGTV show talled Tiny McMansions, there was no way I could build that up to one of my big-size weekly essays and I wasn’t going to try. Lisa went off fuming and saying she was going to put together a pilot episode.

328

Vic and Sade: When The Building Falls In

Do you remember being bored? I mean, boredom is still with us. But it’s attenuated now, chopped up into small bits of boredom between something exciting happening on Facebook or watching the spectacle of the Future Disgraced Former President’s self-immolation or the like. And a lot of that is still an expression of boredom, since boredom is the state in which anything is sufficient to hold our attention. A video of a bird putting a cover on a cat isn’t actually interesting, but compared to nothing going on, it’s interesting enough.

But back in the days, we could be bored in quantity. Just have days, especially summer ones, when time stretched out and there wasn’t any prospect of something asking for attention. I’m not saying those were better days. They weren’t. By nearly all measures we are so much better off today that we have cell phones and abundant Internet and are never that far from someone we want to communicate with or something we find entertaining to watch or do.

In this Vic and Sade episode, from the 13th of June, 1939, it’s the boring part of summer. And the best of all possible things happens: something exciting comes up. A good part of an old building collapses. Rush gets to see it. And one of his friends is inspired. He turns something already exciting into a performance. Maybe it’s the sort of thing that could happen today. But I do wonder if it takes being bored, and knowing what the face of long stretches of quiet, inactive summer evenings imply, to see a chance like this and make it something even more.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index held steady today, not changing at all, as more cautious traders worried they were under surveillance by a cheetah and didn’t want to make a move lest they get caught in a rundown between second and third base.

331

Where The Time Went

Over twelve of you have noticed this phenomenon. It’s actually over twelve percent of you, but I’m supposing there’s more than a cent of you out there. There will be anyway. But you’ve seen this. You look at a clock. It’s got seconds on it. That second just doesn’t change. It sticks to whatever time it currently is (let’s say … 8:49:46) for a good long while. More than a second, as you figure it. Maybe five seconds. Maybe as long as fourth grade took. Finally as you’re about to get up and give the thing a good nudge it moves again, going back to about one second per second. Even then, though, look away and snap your eyes back and you might get the second frozen there again. What’s going on here, and why are clocks messing with us to see if we’re watching? Well, wouldn’t you mess with people like that, if you were a clock? What else would you have to do?

What’s important her is a fundamental principle of time. We only know time passes because we see something happen. Like, we see the time that a clock shows changing. This is a good one because we’ve put all our time sense into clocks. If we need to rely on ourselves we just guess that the time feels like three-ish, maybe, or that it might be a Thursday but it sure feels like when you’re at the zoo and get some hay or something stuck in your shoe just outside the camel enclosure. We use the clock to let us know that time is even moving.

Think back to childhood, if you have one. Remember how experiments like lying on your back seeing if you could breathe just right to make a tennis ball roll into and out of your belly button before a sibling came over and sat on your face? And you had to turn to biting? Remember how you could spend as much as four days straight at that between the last cartoon of the morning and the start of Password Plus on channel 4 and still have time to punch another sibling? Well, the last cartoon finished at 9 am, and Password Plus came on at 10. All that time was squeezed into under a single hour.

I use this picture to represent the concept of “time” because I had a fun day at Story Book Land amusement park and because people like it when there are pictures.

As kids we didn’t need clocks. We could just have experiences. The most we needed was the clock in school, and the clock in our parents’ car’s dashboard that was set to the wrong time. We would only feel time accumulating during social studies and while being driven somewhere you don’t want to go, probably in another state on a trip that would be fun if you weren’t stopping at educational spots and scenic overlooks where the picnic tables are all like two inches two high for where the bench seats are.

As adults we fill our lives with more clocks. Clocks on the nightstand, on your watch, on your phone, on your computer, on your other phone, on the wall, on the TV, the thing on the DVR that looks like it’s the time but actually is the channel number, on the toaster oven, on the other end of your computer’s screen, on a web page, on your Internet-connected Smart Towels, and on the car dashboard where it’s satellite-tuned to the right time. Every single one of these things is ticking off seconds and of course they add up. These days you can’t have one second of time pass without it being at least twelve seconds all at once.

If you’ve got a proper modern lifestyle you can get all your clock-ready things going and then notice that as best you can tell, 2010 was at most forty minutes ago. This is a sign that you have too many clocks in your life, multiply-counting all your time and slurping it up before you can tell it’s gone. Try de-clocking your surroundings; see how well you do if you get back to the basics of time, the way you did as a child. Then you had the inaccurate car dashboard clock, and a calendar to make sure you didn’t miss Christmas or your birthday, neither of which could ever happen. Maybe it won’t work, but if you do want to give it a try, I recommend you hurry.

Password Plus was never scheduled to air earlier than 11:30 Eastern/Pacific. You were thinking, believe it or not, of Card Sharks.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

And after getting a much-needed hushing yesterday the trading floor went and rose the Another Blog, Meanwhile index by twenty points, bringing it to another all-time high. At this point I think they’re just trying to cross me up. Why do I not get behavior like this from my money-making investments, like those ten shares of the Tootsie Roll company I own? Schwab.com tells me this is a D-grade investment, but all I can say is, it’s the thing in my portfolio that actually returns something, and if all else fails I can eat forty of them and then remember that’s maybe too many Tootsie Rolls to eat at once.

331

Vic and Sade: Meet The Parade Community

I don’t know when this episode of Vic and Sade first aired. It’s dated 1941, but it includes Rishigan Fishigan (of Sishigan, Michigan) as a major off-screen player. And he doesn’t seem to have been introduced before the 12th of December, 1941. The show aired five days a week, but that isn’t a lot of time for Rishigan Fishigan to get promoted from a name on the boss’s Christmas list to a telephoned friend of Vic’s. But they did have as many as thirteen chances to get him kind-of on-stage. (I don’t know whether the show aired Christmas Day, 1941. Nor how many times it might have been preempted for news.)

It’s got to be from early in Rishigan Fishigan (of Sishigan, Michigan)’s tenure, given how exasperated Sade is by the length of his name. So maybe it’s a 1942 episode. No matter. I am delighted by the main conversation’s proposition that one could get a weekly list of all the parades going on in the country. It’s the sort of thing that surely exists today. My love and I schedule our December around a listing of when Rankin/Bass specials are going to air and on what channel. And I find Vic’s proclaiming that he’s a fan of parades likely. It doesn’t seem just a defensive reaction to Sade’s skepticism about the parade list. Remember that Vic was happy to join the All-Star Marching Team for his lodge, and that went off on its own weird little way.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index fell thirteen points over the trading day, providing a much-needed hushing to all the Another Blog, Meanwhile analysts talking about when we’re going to need to buy an index board that handles four digits instead of just three. Honestly. I get your enthusiasm and all that but really, go play outside.

311

Vic and Sade: Meet Rishigan Fishigan

Sometimes a throwaway gag is too good to dispense with. In this installment, from the 12th of December, 1941, Vic’s boss has given him a list of people to buy Christmas presents for and twenty dollars to do it with. Sade expects she’ll have to do all the bother and that it will be an incredible bother. She’s right, as she makes Vic read the list and consider the complete lack of guidance into what sort of thing any of these people might want or how much they should spend on it.

The last name introduced is that of Rishigan Fishigan, of Sishigan, Michigan. It’s such a catchy name. It’s a catchy town name. It seems like it always attaches to the end of his name, so he’s spoken of as “Rishigan Fishigan of Sishigan, Michigan”. And I am sad that there is no such place as Sishigan, Michigan. We should rename something to be it.

The name must have caught Paul Rhymer’s imagination. Rishigan Fishigan would reappear, in mentions, and eventually as a friend of Vic’s. In later incarnations of the show he would even be a regular character, with dialogue on-microphone and everything. Given how many catchy names Rhymer created I wonder why Rishigan Fishigan (of Sishigan, Michigan) took such hold, although I suppose to say aloud it is to answer the question.

There are a lot of amusingly scrambled place names in the Christmas gift list — I can feel Sade’s righteous anxiety that none of this can be right, even if she allowed that she could buy anything for people she doesn’t know anything about — but I like to think that the choice of “Seattle, Iowa” was retaliation for the existence of “Des Moines, Washington”. I have a friend who lives in Des Moines, Washington, and it nags at me every time I need to send him a card or something. We need some thought put into our Des Moines requirements.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Repeated heavy waves of selling struck the trading floor at Another Blog, Meanwhile over the course of the day, so of course the index went up eighteen points. At this point we have to suspect some of these traders don’t actually know what they’re doing and they’re just making numbers go up and down without thinking about the long-term implications.

324

Vic and Sade: Meet Five Men From Maine

I’ve got a couple reasons to feature this bit of old-time radio. First is that my friend from Maine isn’t on the Internet this week so it’s safe to talk about the state. Second is that I haven’t really featured Vic and Sade lately, so I’d like to give it some attention. It’s the kind of show that isn’t everyone’s taste. But if it is your taste, it’s a powerfully strong taste. So please consider taking ten minutes and listening to it. (The show has a sponsor, as most did back in 1941, and goes on and on. You can zip ahead to about 2:45 into the show before missing anything that isn’t about Crisco, and you can bail out again at about 12:30 in the recording.) So here’s the Vic and Sade for the 30th of May, 1941.

Something I love in the world is that so much of it doesn’t quite make sense. We’re surrounded by weird little incidents and connections and coincidences. Here, Vic gets, by way of a phone call, an invitation to do something perfectly daft: travel — at his own expense — from the middle of Indiana off to Maine to meet five people he’s never heard of for no reason other than that they’d like to meet him. How does this make sense? Hard to say. But I particularly love how Rush comes to ponder how phony-sounding the five men in Maine are. Series creator and author Paul Rhymer had a love for creating names off exactly peculiar that they’re amusing without ever feeling like deliberately funny names. If you live with people named Edson Box, Fred and Ruthie Stembottom, Y Y Flirch, Hank Gutstop, or Rishigan Fishigan from Sishigan, Michigan, how do you call anyone out on having a suspicious name? But what other explanation makes sense?

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped 21 points and it’s still over 300 and if you think that’s normal you don’t know what normal is, and I know none of us have had any idea what normal is, not since, like, what? When David Bowie died? The day before that was about the last normal day, wasn’t it? Please communicate in care of this office if you have information one way or another.

306

What’s Going On In Alley Oop? May 2017 – July 2017

Thanks for trying to work out what’s going on in Jack Bender and Carole Bender’s Alley Oop. I’m writing this in mid-July 2017. If it’s a lot later than July 2017, the story might have moved on, although I admit right now that’s not looking very likely. There might have been enough story development that this stuff isn’t useful anymore. If I’ve written a fresh follow-up since this essay, it should be at or near the top of this page. Let me know if you don’t see something and if the story has got so baffling you need an update.

And before I continue may I point out that on my other blog, I talk about whatever comic strips the past week touched on some mathematics subject. These are almost never story strips, but that’s all right. There’s interesting stuff brought up by them. Also, this week it features bunnies wearing eyeglasses, although not as well as they could.

Alley Oop

1 May – 22 July 2017

The current storyline in Jack Bender and Carole Bender’s Alley Oop started sometime in October of last year. The end of April and my last update of the strip coincided with what looked like the end of the story. Volzon, an alien plant-frog-guy with a mind-control ray gun, had been foiled in his attempts to colonize prehistoric Earth. It turns out dinosaurs, like Dinny the brontosaurus, aren’t subject to alien mind-control rays and don’t see any reason they couldn’t eat invading alien spaceships. Good stuff to know.

Alley Oop, knowing a loose end when he sees it, tosses the remains of Volzon’s mind-control gun out of Moo, and rejoins the quest for food and whatnot. King Guz, reasonably annoyed at yet another attempt to overthrow Moo, starts talking crazy about building a dome that will keep invading aliens out. Alley Oop reminds him that just because someone has an idea doesn’t mean that idea isn’t incredibly stupid. And he soothes the mind-control-wary Moovians. Even if Volzon or another Jantrullian return, it’s not like dinosaurs are going to vanish from the face of the Earth.

Jack Bender and Carole Bender’s Alley Oop for the 21st of May, 2017. A couple notes about the art. First, I like the composition of the first panel, bottom row, close-up on the mind-control ray gun and with the characters receding behind it. It’s the sort of composition I’d use for a dramatic picture. Second: I really like Queen Loola’s ‘Hmmmm’ drifting into smaller and smaller characters. These days the use of computer-typeset letters seems common, and I understand why. But that does seem to discourage cartoonists using varied sizes to emphasize tone and pacing of dialogue and that is a loss. I’m glad to see size used.

This fine example of dramatic irony gets a little bit weirder when you remember the premise of the comic strip. Alley Oop is a time traveller. He’s been, repeatedly, to the present day and knows that dinosaurs do vanish. On the other hand, he also knows the Jantrullians don’t manage to conquer the Earth, not before about 2016 anyway. (I don’t know if he’s ever been to our future.) I’m not sure how wry this is all supposed to be.

Meanwhile in the loose end, it turns out Alley Oop threw the remains of Volzon’s mind-control gun all the way into Lem, where King Tunk found it. As he only just got in the story he doesn’t know what it is or what it should do, but he can tell these are a bunch of sparky wires that got ripped apart. He figures he could twist the wires back together, cover them with tar, and wrap the whole remains of the gun in a palm leaf and maybe then it’ll work again. I admire his ingenuity and his success. I mean, I’ve needed the help of the car care place down the street just to take off my license plate holder. Twice. He’s fixing up an alien mind-control gun using sticks and leaves.

Jack Bender and Carole Bender’s Alley Oop for the 4th of June, 2017. Seriously, folks, give it up to King Tunk and his hacking skills. This is a great bit of problem-solving and thinking outside of the box by someone who lives tens of thousands of years before boxes were invented. Think what this guy could do at your town’s Maker Faire.

At least he’s trying to. He tromps into Moo with the repaired gadget, accusing King Guz of designing a weapon to attack Lem. His attempt to use it backfires, leaving him in a dazed and suggestive state. King Guz sees an opportunity, figuring “I think it’s high time Tunk did something good with his life”. This serves as a reminder that there are people who can’t be trusted with mind-control technology, and that would be pretty much “people who’d use it on the unsuspecting”. And I’m not sure it should be trusted to people who’d volunteer to have it be used on either. I get the idea, but there’s such major issues about consent and the respect of personal autonomy that I can’t see a way around it.

Jack Bender and Carole Bender’s Alley Oop for the 9th of July, 2017. I didn’t realize until this point that all the plot-representative strips were from King Tunk’s storyline, with nothing about Alley Oop trying to talk King Guz out of building a stupid dome and promising that nothing bad can happen to Earth as long as there are dinosaurs. Well, all right. Again, have to give it up for King Tunk that the mind-control ray gun is working at all he repaired its dinosaur-chewing damage using tar and leaves. Also have to give it up for Jantrullian technology that the thing can be repaired in the field so easily. I bet Volzon would feel the right fool that it ran off so fast.

Anyway, this storyline keeps puttering on at the lethargic pace of a strip that makes sure the Sunday strip contains all the plot of the six weekdays around it. I would have bet the mind-control ray story was over with the end of April, so I’m not going to make guesses about when this story will end. There’ve been some teases that King Tunk needs to learn about working with people, and maybe that’s where the mind-control gun is going. We shall see, I assume.

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Next week: News about Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom. The weekdays storyline, not the production of the comic strip.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index rose — wait, this can’t be right. OK, it’s what everybody is saying, anyway. All right. The index rose 36 freaking points during the day, blasting way past the 300 margin and raising questions about whether the whole project is properly ballasted or what. I’m skeptical. Not looking to cause trouble but I’m not one of those people cranky about how they didn’t buy when it was at 80 or that did sell when it was at 256 because whatever this is, it’s not right.

327

Statistics Saturday: What The Days This Week Have Felt Like

Day	Felt Like
Sunday	Sunday
Monday	Monday
Tuesday	Weeping
Wednesday	Thursday
Thursday	Friday
Friday	A Pillow Full Of Bunny Kisses
Saturday	Take-Out From The Chinese Place With The Fake Vegetarian Chicken So Good You Kind Of Don’t Want To Check If It’s Real Chicken And They’re Just Lying

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose another sixteen points as investors decided that the week has just gone that well, what with having the gridiron thing explained and how the water bill turned out to be just exactly what everyone figured so they don’t have to worry about it being too high or suspiciously low.

291

In Which I Apologize For Messing Up All of Time

Yeah, so, it’s my fault. I’m sorry. That thing where we all went around all day Wednesday thinking it was Thursday? And a whole bunch of Thursday thinking it was Friday? That was me. I messed up somehow and took two days off my Peanuts page-a-day calendar. I don’t know how. I’m usually good about this, taking one day off per day lived. I haven’t got any excuse and I apologize for having everyone’s sense of what day it is messed up. I’d like to make it up to everyone by leaving it on Saturday/Sunday for an extra couple days but I know deep down that would just make everything worse. Best I can do is spread the word, let people know why all this is going on, and we’ll get back to normal as we can manage. I mean normal for us.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

So one of the traders asked why football fields don’t draw the cross lines, the way they used to in really, really old photographs, back when you could understand why they called it a “gridiron”. And I said it because of wartime paint rationing the cross lines were dropped, and everyone liked that so well they stuck with it even when peace returned and anybody could get as much white paint as they wanted. And that’s satisfied everybody so much that the index rose thirteen points and the trading floor is in a great mood. And now I’m worried about, like, what if I was right and that’s why they don’t draw the grid lines in anymore?

275

In An Imperfect World

So you don’t live in a utopian future. You don’t have anything to be embarrassed by there. Over eight percent fewer of us do than you’d imagined. There are many ways that the world is pretty good, despite everything we’ve been through. The world has capybaras, for example. And if that weren’t enough, we keep inventing new social media by which other people will send us pictures of capybaras. So that’s the baseline; as long as we have that, the world isn’t beyond hope.

But any of us can see ways the world might be better. It might be a little harder to spill things on shirts, for example. Or we might think of some quasi-verbal utterance other than “uh” and “uhm” to mark time while we’re speaking. For the variety. Maybe we could arrange for the first coffee mugs we drop and break to be the ugly ones with only-ever-funny-once jokes on them, instead of the souvenir ones from places that are gone. There are probably other things that would make life better, but those would see the most dramatic improvements.

It’s natural then to want to make the world a better place. It’s a dangerous pastime. You should think hard before you continue on in it. Consider: to make the world better, there has to be something wrong with it. If it would make the world better to have a more interesting variety of cupcakes available, that implies there aren’t enough interesting cupcakes already. Don’t go telling me there’s already plenty of interesting variety in vegan cookies, because while there may be, they’re still not cupcakes. And even if we have got the best imaginable state of one thing that doesn’t say anything about other things. Again, imagine we had our full complement of capybara photo access, but we never got to hear the theme to Secret Agent Man on the radio at the bagel shop ever again. Even happiness would be forever tainted by the thought of what was lost.

So fine if you figure something can be made better. The danger is there’s something already around that keeps it from being as good as it could be. Maybe that thing is already someone’s responsibility. Then trying to fix it means you’re telling that person they’ve screwed up so badly that someone has to come in and try fixing their mistakes. I don’t blame them wanting to slug you for that. How would you feel if someone pulled that on you? Exactly. Having to get within slugging range of someone to fix them has historically tempered the activity of people trying to fix up stuff, and made people think hard about what’s really worth improving. Advances in stick and other long-range poking and hitting technologies would have moved the balance of power to the status quo advocates. Or they would have, if the poking-and-hitting technologists didn’t see why they needed to make any advances in their product line, thank you. Internet activism makes it possible to try doing something about stuff that’s wholly outside of slugging range, which is why it’s so controversial and the results so mixed. On the one hand, people can be made instantly aware of what their state legislature is planning to do. On the other hand, what we mostly react to is a sassy put-down by the Instagram account of Jo-Ann’s Fabric.

And then there are things that could be better but that nobody’s actually responsible for. This is even more dangerous to try improving. If a particular person’s responsible for a thing, at least trying to improve it is only an attack on that person. If nobody’s responsible, then trying to improve it is an implicit declaration that everybody has failed to address the shortcoming. Everybody has reason to feel attacked by you. And you can’t stay outside of slugging range of everybody forever. They can catch you when you try to pick up your mail at least.

If you enjoy the life of danger, then, go ahead. It can be thrilling stuff and maybe you will make something better. But it’s going to cost you some happiness too. And this is the great thing about living in a non-utopian society. You can be sad about the thing that’s not right, or be sad about trying to make it right. It’s up to you how you break your heart.

Now that I’ve explained it, do I hope that’s made anything better?

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose another ten points today as analysts missed that now there’s somehow two houses on the block throwing out sofas now and how do they get all these sofas to put out on the street? Whatever’s going on can’t be any good and yet somehow they’re not worried about this. Yet.

262

In Which The Retirement Community Billboard Baffles Me

No photograph, because I was driving and I’m not that reckless just yet. But if I didn’t read it wrong, the retirement community billboard said you didn’t have to be a Mason to live here. And I’m glad to know that, I guess, what with it not being like enough people have homes. And I’ve only had two encounters with Masons that I’m aware of, one when I donated blood at the Masonic Hall in grad school and then like fifteen years later a Red Cross flyer suggested I might make it to a donation drive they were having there again. The other was a guy I was chatting with online who mentioned he was off to a lodge meeting and I was surprised because I knew he was under the age of Like 80. Also I guess it’s nice to know this retirement community has gotten past the hot social struggles of 1856? Well, I’m glad at least someone has.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Uncertainty gripped the markets today and drove the Another Blog, Meanwhile index down seventeen points when a letter arrived from the bank that bought out the accounts of the bank that bought out the accounts of the bank that bought the bank we originally started the account with. The letter explained that they were extending indefinitely some fee waivers that were due to lapse in September. That there wasn’t any explanation of why they were doing this stoked fears that they’re trying to build customer goodwill ahead of doing something awful or being caught in something awful they already did and nobody wants to deal with that.

252

Phantom Enjoys Daring Last-Minute Escape From Certain Doom

Tony DePaul, writer for The Phantom, was kind enough to stop in and give news about his strip.

The news is that he and King Features Syndicate have reached an agreement about the rights to the stories he’d produced for the comic since 1999. And they have an agreement to have him keep writing as long as both sides are happy with the way things are working. The breakthrough apparently grew over June, after he’d announced the intention to leave. King Features’ general manager for syndication, who hadn’t been directly involved in negotiations, asked for an informal meeting to see what could be done, and after — well, suppose it can’t have been more than a month of talks, yes, something could be done. And just in time, too; DePaul says Jeff Weigel, the Sunday artist, had just run out of story to draw. Mike Manley, the weekdays artist, had about six weeks of story yet.

I’m glad, certainly. The Phantom‘s been reliably interesting and who would want that messed up? Also the hint about how long the current Sunday storyline has to run confirms my resolve to change some of my “What’s Going On In” schedule. I’d been thinking to separate the weekday and the Sunday summaries for better pacing. Moving the next Sundays recap to closer to the end of the current storyline suits me. I was also thinking to move around some of the other strip recaps. I’d set the order without any plan, and I’d like to break up what seem like blocks of too-similar comics.

DePaul teases the idea that the current daily storyline will end in the death of the current Phantom, especially in saying how the story “would have been a superb sign-off to my Phantom career” and describes just how screwed up things would be if the 21st Phantom were to die just now. Me, I’m not making guesses. While the narrative would fully justify the current Phantom’s death this year, escaping certain death is just what superheroes are all about.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose an astounding fourteen points after looking up the lyrics and finding that the karaoke machine had it right. There is a bit in “I Just Called To Say I Love You” that goes “no Libra sun”, and hey, there’s this whole stanza that just goes through the months, one at a time, and counts Libra for September which is fair enough, although is there really anything distinctive about September’s sun? Granted that April is the cruelest month, what is September? The snarkiest month? When it’s up against November? No, that doesn’t make sense.

269

In Which I Question Santa’s Staffing Decisions

Recently I got to visit Story Book Land, a small nursery-rhyme-forest and amusement park in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey. Also there’s a place called Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey. Yes, it has that name for the reason you’d expect: it’s a township. Story Book Land is a grand place, lots of displays of fairy tales. So this Santa Claus’s Workshop scene caught my eye:

A lot of Story Book Land’s displays have moving parts and buttons along the walls that kids can press. The buttons here make the deer up front move the pencil back and forth, and I think the reindeer in back pats at the adding machine. (I just grew uncertain as I wrote this.) If you need to keep a kid amused, put lots of buttons in walls they can push. The Roadside America model railroad in Shartlesville, Pennsylvania, learned this years and was why as kids we insisted on going to it like forty times a month.

Clearly I’m not in a position to tell Santa how he should run his business, and I shouldn’t disparage anybody’s qualifications before I know what they’re good at and what they like doing. It just seems a little cruel to give a lot of writing duties to a species that hasn’t got fingers. And I’m not too sure it’s considerate to put a reindeer on adding machine duty either, given, again, the whole hoof issue. Maybe Santa knows something I don’t. I just expect there’s all kinds of dropped … things, and probably shouting, involved.

Also I wish I had the courage to go to work wearing outfits like these reindeer do. And I work from home.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index rose four points in trading, and then fell right back again. Then it dropped four points, and rose the four points to right where it started. Analysts credit this movement to the purchase of a new swingset. Surely someone has purchased a swingset, somewhere, at some time, right? Sure.

256

What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? April – July 2017

Thanks for finding my little attempt to explain the goings-on in Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man comic strip. All this explains what’s been going on through to about the middle of July, 2017. If it isn’t a little bit after the middle of July, 2017, this probably won’t help you much figuring out where we’ve got to. If I’ve written a new update on the stories, they should be at or near the top of this page. Good luck.

The Amazing Spider-Man

24 April – 15 July 2017

I left Spider-Man in Los Angeles, at the end of Rocket Raccoon suggesting that maybe Newspaper Spidey would get to meet the Guardians of the Galaxy sometime. It’s possible. The newspaper Spider-Man is its own continuity, separate from the mainstream Marvel Univers and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it is a continuity: guest characters sometimes come back after getting into new fixes that they need Peter Parker to not really do a lot about. The current story is such a case.

At their hotel Peter Parker and Mary Jane run into Aunt May, who’s taking a vacation from her work back home of being over forty thousand years old. Also Mary Jane’s Aunt Anna, who I didn’t know existed. I think she vanishes after the first week or two anyway, to my regrets. I’m going to assume a talent scout spotted her and realized she’s perfect for the lead in the dark, gritty, action-packed Mary Worth Cinematic Universe kickoff movie.

As Mary Jane spins out three anecdotes and two improvised gags on a chat show a mysterious eggplant wearing sunglasses starts hitting studio security with a stick. It’s the Mole Man, familiar to Amazing Spider-Man as the ruler of the subterranean world of … Subterranea. They were caught by surprise when someone asked the name of their land. Mole Man is also, per a story from a couple years back, a would-be suitor to Aunt May. See what I mean about continuity?

Aunt May had rejected his proposal, since as fun a date as he was they lived in separate worlds and barely knew one another and I think he met Aunt May when he was busy kidnapping her. I forget. Anyway, the separate-worlds thing might no longer be an issue because he’s been deposed. Tyrannus the Conquerer, fresh from thinking of the first name he could for who he was and what he would do, has taken over. And now Tyrannus is coming for the surface world.

Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 4th of June, 2017. I am trusting this Augustulus thing is from the main comic book history and had no idea. I’ll suppose the Fountain of Youth being in Subterranea is also from the comic books, but that leaves me wondering, like, is the Mole Man also hundreds, maybe thousands of years old? Or was the fountain just hanging around waiting for a spunky young failed Roman Emperor to put it to use? Also, does this mean we should add the newspaper comic to Augustulus’s Wikipedia page as part of his Legacy?

Before anyone can ask serious questions (“Wait, so Tyrannus was the Western Roman Emperor Augustulus, deposed in 476 AD, and kept alive by the Fountain of Youth that’s in Subterranea? Is this a thing in the real comics or … the heck?”) a giant rampaging armadillo-beast breaks through the Los Angeles streets and starts rampaging, giantly. Also Mole Man says the beast’s named Lenny. Mole Man can’t bear to hurt Lenny, but Spider-Man shames him into doing something, since giant rampaging armadillo beasts seem like they’re too hard a problem for Spidey to handle. Mole Man knows how to handle Lenny: chop off some of his scale, then toss the scales down the pit he’d just dug, and Lenny follows. This works because … I’m not sure, exactly. Giant rampaging armadillo monsters can’t resist following their own scent, I guess is what they say.

Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 17th of June, 2017. It’s difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t read the newspaper Spidey regularly just how humiliating it has to be for Newspaper Spider-Man to have to nudge you into action.

Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 19th of June, 2017. Now that’s more the Newspaper Spider-Man we know and love: fobbing off his job on other people and thinking about when he can get back to sitting in a dark room, moping and watching Press Your Luck reruns. Also, while I suppose Spider-Man’s paid more attention to this than I have it seems like if anteaters do eat spiders for breakfast then they’re suffering some mission creep. Just saying.

Mole Man recognizes that Lenny was sent to bring him back to Tyrannus. And while Lenny failed, Tyrannus will send more, possibly harder-to-foil monsters. He resolves to surrender himself to spare the surface world, which underscores how complete a heel-face turn he’s done in the face of Aunt May’s affections. And nothing is going to talk him out of this except if Aunt May asks him to stay and what do you know happens but? She accepts his hastily renewed marriage proposal. The gang retreats to discuss options and how Mole Man can afford to support Aunt May in the style to which she’s become accustomed and maybe next week they’ll talk about stopping Tyrannus or something.

Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 2nd of July, 2017. I realize that Mole Man hasn’t got the highest self-esteem, what with his being a pop culture character with the name ‘Melvin’, it seems premature to say there’s no place for him in the Outer World just because the tyrant of the inner world sends monsters out to drag him back. He’s got a lot of drama surrounding himself, yes, but that’s due to other things.

Next week: Jack Binder and Carole Binder’s Alley Oop and the aftermath of the pantsless alien’s mind-control gun. And one final note for this week: if you like more talk about comic strips but would like them to be more about word problems, please consider my mathematics blog, which reviewed the past week’s syndicated comic strips with mathematics themes on Sunday. It also does this most Sundays and sometimes the odd extra day of the week, such as “Thworbsday”.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

And now the index jumped up thirty points to what’s got to be an all-time high as traders realized they’re not Belgian and don’t have to eat crickets if they don’t want to. This is just proving my point, guys, and I don’t see why you think this is anything else.

256

Statistics Saturday: Books Making The Case Against

To give some balance. You know.

• The Case Against Sugar, Gary Taubes.
• The Case Against William, Mark Gimenez.
• The Case Against the Supreme Court, Erwin Chemerinsky.
• The Case Against Satan, Ray Russell.
• The Case Against DynCorp, Ryan Zimmerman.
• The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, Michael J Sandel.
• The Case Against Tongues: Weighing up the Evidence, Gordon L Swanepoel.
• The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do about It, Sara Bennett, Nancy Kalish.
• The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools, Alfie Kohn.
• The Case against Sugar: Your guide to quitting Sugar and Breakfast and Baby Recipes with Zero or Low Sugar Content, Stacy Kennedy.
• The Case Against Happiness, Jean-Paul Pecqueur.
• The Case Against the Modern World: A Crash Course in Traditionalist Thought, Daniel Schwindt.
• The case against railway nationalisation, Edwin A Pratt.
• The Case Against Spirit Photographs, C Vincent Patrick.
• The Case against Origen and Reincarnation, Eric Liberatos.
• The Case Against Paul Raeburn, John Creasey.
• The Case against Joining the Common Market, Paul Einzig.
• The Case Against Socrates, Earl Jay Perel.
• The Case Against Diodore and Theodore, John Behr.
• The Case Against Consequentialism Reconsidered, Nikil Mukerji.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped three points and we’ve maybe beaten the whole Belgian cricket diet bubble by asking the Another Blog, Meanwhile trading floor to try eating some. It’s a small measure but hey, every little bit helps.

226

MiSTed: Galactic Federation Update, Part 4/4

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

OK, so, MOS Burgers: at the time I was living in Singapore and they had the Japanese(?) chain there and I really got into their whole style. Not just a good variety of burger and burger-like patties, and the choice to have a rice bun instead of a bread-based one, but also, like, advertising copy about being in touch with nature and all that. The reference to someday getting to be Head Beagle is from Peanuts, of course, and a storyline that they reran earlier this year that made Charles Schulz seem impossibly timely. Seriously. Scarily timely.

I suppose it’s inconsistent with my opening-sketch claim that Professor Bobo was good with forms that he misreads one in the closing sketch. The idea that he would be good with forms was ripped off of The Mary Tyler Moore Show where Ted Baxter had some weirdly specific moments of supreme competence. (Knowing who had won every local-TV award ever, for example, or being able to do arithmetic instantly as long as he imagined it was about money.) I like idiot characters with narrowly-defined fields of competence.

The closing line about Heidi Klum refers to a cranky person who used to haunt the late-night talk show newsgroups on Usenet. He had the idea that the aliens guiding human destiny left clues to their plans in the news about Heidi Klum. Sounds ridiculous? All right. He was incredibly happy to answer any and all questions you had, indefatigably. He eventually promised his wife and therapist he’d stop promoting his Heidi Klum theory, and as far as I know he did. But boy did he leave a deep impression on everyone who saw his work.

---

>

> Today, we have discussed segments of our shared history that

> explain your origins and the basis of your present condition of

> consciousness.

MIKE: Next week, remember, we’re doing the Polish-Lithuanian monarchy,
so read up chapter eight and be ready with questions, people.

> We ask you to use this awareness to examine how far you

> actually have come!

CROW: I’m suddenly more aware of my tongue.

TOM: You don’t have a tongue.

CROW: Then I’m suddenly confused and distressed.

> Your liberation and new world service are truly

> within reach!

TOM: As soon as you pay up your library fines!

> We now take our leave.

MIKE: [ As Groucho ] I’ve had a wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.

> Blessings, dear Ones! Know, in

> your Heart of Hearts,

CROW: In your Diamond of Diamonds,

MIKE: In your Spade of Spades,

TOM: In your Club of Clubs..

> that the eternal Supply and perpetual Prosperity

> of Heaven is yours!

MIKE: This reads like the advertising materials for MOS Burgers.

> So Be It! Selamat Gajun! Selamat Kasijaram!

CROW: They’re either Malay or the Klindesteron beademungen.

> (Sirian

> for Be One! Blessed in Love and in Joy!)

TOM: And there’s some fine print where you sign up to buy two CDs
each month for a year.

>

> Planetary Activation Organization

MIKE: Somebody check the Earth’s batteries. Venus was dead
three months before we noticed.

> http://www.paoweb.com

>

> This copy was reposted by Robert E. McElwaine

TOM: The `E’ stands for `Extra.’

CROW: Robert E. McExtralwaine?

> PAO Member

> Eckankar Initiate

MIKE: And a good friend.

> B.S., Physics and Astronomy, UW-EC

CROW: Hah … Mike?

MIKE: Not my fault, guys.

> http://members.aol.com/rem547 PLUS

> http://members.aol.com/rem460

TOM: That adds up to rem 1007.

>

> See also http://www.paoweb.com/sn122600.htm ,

CROW: A URL actually created by a snore.

> http://www.disclosureproject.org .

>

> P.S.: PASS IT ON !

MIKE: You’ll never guess which of your close friends is waiting
for this very message!

>

> ok

TOM: OK? Is that all you have to say for yourself?

[ 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… ]

[ SATELLITE OF LOVE DESK. GYPSY, TOM SERVO, and CROW are there, with
many papers scattered on the desk. A pencil is wedged into
CROW’s hand. ]

GYPSY: You need line 17 from form 8-E.

CROW: I know, I’m just — look, how many amiable characters from the
movies and shorts we watch have visited us on the Hex Field View
Screen this year?

TOM: 28, including four visits from Marrissa Picard.

GYPSY: You have to tell them how you made Jay Gordon cry.

TOM: Tell them 35.

CROW: I’m not cheating on these forms!

TOM: Oh, like they’ll check?

GYPSY: It kind of goes against the spirit —

[ MIKE enters. They all hush up for a few seconds. ]

MIKE: So. Who wants to —

[ Simultaneously: ]

GYPSY: Crow.

CROW: Tom.

TOM: Crow.

MIKE: Well?

CROW: We realized we haven’t filled in our reports for the
Galactic Federation of Light this year yet.

TOM: You wouldn’t believe how many forms it is, either,
but it’s worth doing.

GYPSY: It’s an important part of bringing light to the universe.

MIKE: [ Playing along ] Plus you might get to be Head Beagle.

GYPSY: So we’re listing all this year’s light-bringing.

CROW: You got anything you want reported?

MIKE: I, uh, cleaned the burnt pizza stuff out of the toaster oven.

CROW: That’s good! What else do we have?

TOM: We played keep-away with Observer’s brain for like ten minutes.

MIKE: That didn’t really uplift anyone’s soul.

CROW: Well … what about that fun we had playing backgammon? That had
to bring something good into the world.

GYPSY: We just moved the checkers around randomly for five minutes,
got bored, then you threw them like ninja stars until
you broke the McVote McDLT glasses.

CROW: Oh yeah.

TOM: Well … we had to have done something, right?

GYPSY: We didn’t stop anyone from bringing light.

TOM: Yeah!

CROW: OK, I’m writing that in — Mike, you have any stamps? We
need to mail this to the Galactic Federation of Light Central
Processing Bureau in Menominee, Michigan.

MIKE: Oh, fresh out. Let’s check in on Pittney-Bowes, shall we?

TOM: Four, five — hey, does Sonic the Hedgehog still exist?

[ CASTLE FORRESTER. The stage is filled by shipping cartons of all
sizes, marked “LIGHT BULBS” and stacked precariously high.
BOBO, PEARL, and OBSERVER are squeezed in front, reading
papers on a business envelope. ]

OBSERVER: Dahdahdaaah … appreciate your filing early … blah de
blah … having reviewed your Federation of Light returns this
year … yeah, uh-huh … computed against withholding reported
in form 671-X …

PEARL: So how much of a light-bringing refund did we *get*?

BOBO: [ Pointing at a line ] Fifty-five thousand, three hundred
forty three!

[ A pause, as PEARL simmers. ]

PEARL: That’s our Zip code, you — [ She pinches his nose. ]

[ BOBO barks, Curly style; his left arm windmills around and hits
OBSERVER’s brain, which he drops, apparently onto PEARL’s
foot as she grabs her foot and hops. She trips into BOBO, who
bounces against one pile of boxes, sending it crashing. He
rebounds to knock PEARL and OBSERVER into their own huge stacks,
which sends off volleys of crashing and imploding light bulb
sounds through the credits … ]

                              \  |  / 
                               \ | /  
                                \|/   
                              ---O--- 
                                /|\  
                               / | \  
                              /  |  \ 

Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the characters and situations
therein are the property of Best Brains, Inc. The essay “GALACTIC FEDERATION Update: August 5, 2003” comes to us from Robert McElwaine
and Sheldan Nidle. This MiSTing as a whole is the creation of Joseph
Nebus, who intends no particular ill-will towards Robert McElwaine,
Sheldan Nidle, or any nigh-omnipotent beings guiding humanity towards
a glorious new destiny in the stars, but does enjoy following Kansan’s
reports of how they signal their intents through the life and career
of Heidi Klum. Come back, Dr. Mike Neylon!

> Greetings, dear Hearts! We return with more interesting topics to

> share with you.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

With a rise of eight more points it’s starting to look like we’re never going to get traders off of this Belgian cricket diet bubble. We may have to resort to drastic measures.

229

Explaining Vacuum Cleaners

If I were to ask what you thought vacuum cleaners were I expect your first response would be to wonder if you’d heard the question right. It seems like a strange thing to ask. You probably can’t figure why I would need to know this about you. Let’s suppose it was someone else who asked you the question. You’d want to know who it asked you. For convenient let’s suppose it was Frederick J Lawton, Harry Truman’s director of the Bureau of the Budget from 1950 to 1953, and that the question was issued in 1952. It’s your business what you’re doing in 1952 and falls outside the scope of my article.

We forget that vaccuum cleaners used to be people, not machines. The first vacuum cleaner was a now-anonymous assistant to Evangelista Torricelli. His name was removed in 1964 as proof emerged he had bet on baseball games. The great physicist (Torricelli) had in 1643 poured mercury into a tube sealed at one end and then turned the tube upside-down. This produced a perfect vacuum at the top of the tube and a perfect mess at the bottom of the tube and all over the table. Naturally Torricelli ordered the cleaning of the table, the tube, and as long as he was at it, the vacuum, which just looked perfectly adroit. I say “adroit” to tease science-major types who were waiting for me to use a different word beginning with ‘a’ there. I’ve got some self-awareness. The word was “adiabatic”. But with a few quick sweeps of a damp cloth the assistant had created a new profession.

Vacuum cleaning, done then by people, was regarded for ages as an affectation for the scholarly classes, who needed the affection. For much of the 17th century it was nearly as popular as making up grammatical rules or wearing caps and gowns everywhere. Scholars didn’t need a passport even when travelling between nations at war; a well-tidied and dust-free vacuum was their standing invitation to the world of letters that existed beyond mere mortal politics. It was not until the reign of France’s King Louis XV (there was no Louis XV, but he was hastily inserted when the French realized they had gone right from Louis XIV to Louis XVI and once you learned enough Roman numerals it looked funny to have the number laying about there un-Louised) that it made the social jump from the laboratory to the royal court. While doing so it slipped on the windowsill and suffered a sore ankle for months, with relapses when a cold front was moving in.

The post of Royal Vacuum Cleaner was soon established. With that, they needed assistants, keepers, letters-go, attendants, absentias, abstainers, the follow who owned the mop, the keeper of the mop, the fetcher of the mop, the keeper of the fetcher, the fetcher of the keeper, the assistant fetcher of the keeper, the keeper of the assistant fetcher, and so on, and that’s even before getting into the buckets issue or who would provide water for the cleaning of the vacuum and assistants thereof. Within a generation, vacuum cleaning at Versailles involved over 52,006 people. You can understand the scandal when in 1722 someone noticed they didn’t have any vacuums.

But then scholars argued the absence of any vacuums was itself a vacuum, this in the property of vacuum-ness. Therefore the vacuum which should be cleaned was the vacuum of vacuums to be cleaned. This argument may not be logically sound, but they were good at going on about it at such length that any disputants would have to sit down until their heads stopped spinning. If you don’t sympathize I have another 150 words that I cut from this paragraph because they made my sinuses hurt.

This all being a lot of good fun it had to come to an end, of course. So it did in 1867 thanks to one Ives W McGaffney of Chicago, Illinois, as there were not two of him. With dedication and ingenuity he put together a hand-cranked vacuum cleaner which all the people who’d had respectable enough lives cleaning vacuums professionally naturally hated. But he persisted and with the coming of power to private homes, mechanical vacuum cleaners would take over the public’s imagination for this sort of thing in fewer than 82 years. Today we just assume that a “vacuum cleaner” is a machine and not a profession, or even an aspiration. Is that not always the way? Yes, unless I mean no.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

All right, so the Belgian-cricket-eating bubble is apparently just going to carry on, with the index rising another six points on this thing that will not happen and everybody should stop pretending that it would. No, we don’t care what documentation you have proving that it’s so a thing. It is not a thing.

221

MiSTed: Galactic Federation Update, Part 3/4

Part 1.

Part 2.

Write enough MiSTings and you pick up your own little habits and recurring jokes. One of mine was “if [someone] had gone straight to the police, this would never have happened”. Recognize the origin? You’re fine if you don’t. It’s from one of the very many very minor Woody Woodpecker cartoons of the 50s, Bronco Busters. I was really into Woody Woodpecker when I was a kid. Of all the not-actually-good cartoons I watched obsessively back then it was probably the best of the lot. Apparently in the cartoon the line is actually “if Woody had gone right to the police, this would never have happened” but please understand: I wrote this before YouTube was a thing. I had to remember what the line was from decades earlier.

Gurmit Singh’s a Singaporean actor and comedian whom I saw a lot when I was living in Singapore, as I was back when I wrote this. I had come to figure, why not make local references that refer to my locality, rather than to the Minneapolis-local references the actual MST3K crew knew and made? What do I know about Minneapolis-local references apart from what was actually on the show? Exactly. I don’t remember that anyone ever was baffled or curious enough about this to ask, ever.

---

> At times, these wars seemed endless.

CROW: It was like watching the History Channel.

> The

> devastation’s intensity was inconceivable. We were always astonished at

> the extent to which the star-nations of Anchara would go in order to

> ‘win’ these wars.

MIKE: Star-nations of Anchara? There’s galactic warfare about whether
to accept Captain Archer and Team Bland on `Enterprise’?

> Their fierce stockpile of weapons and unspeakably

> brutal military forces sparked a reign of terror across this galaxy.

CROW: Yet still they can’t explain John Ashcroft.

>

> Eventually, our growing alliances led to the Galactic Federation

> of Light.

TOM: And that’ll have to be enough for you.

> The Galactic Federation was one of a number of organizations

> – neutral, dark or one with the Light – operating in this galaxy.

MIKE: And all striving to become the Master of Orion.

> At

> any rate, the wars produced a vast number of ‘wandering’ star-nations

> that moved about according to the circumstances caused by the wars.

CROW: If the Galactic Federation of Light had gone straight
to the police, this would never have happened.

> From them, we learned a great deal about the hate and the needless

> actions and divisions caused by limited consciousness

MIKE: You know, like when you overdo the Robitussin.

> and its constant

> train of fear and wrongly-derived assumptions. We found this quite an

> eye-opener.

TOM: It was zesty, and it had a great minty taste!

> We also learned the extent of the Ancharites’ deception.

CROW: The Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Dionne Warwick — none of them
ever really existed!

TOM: What?

> Although we were shocked, initially, at how dark this galaxy had

> become, we realized, deep in our Hearts, that this insanity would

> definitely end.

MIKE: Oh, yeah. Superadvanced cosmic being and I bet they just
whip out the Ritalin.

> Until that divine moment, we had to do whatever we

> could to stalemate the continuous wars.

TOM: But the Galactic League of Nations proved to be a disappointment.

> Thus, we created technologies

> and strategies that would bring about the required results.

CROW: That seemed too hard, so we started playing Europa Universalis II
for a couple millennia to kill time.

>

> Ultimately, just over two million years ago, these wars produced

> conditions that allowed us to colonize your solar system.

MIKE: And we’ve still got half our stuff in cardboard boxes.

> A new set of

> broad-based attacks by the Ancharites, nearly one million years ago,

> destroyed these first human colonies.

TOM: A million years these Federation of Light creeps float about
the planet and none of them remembers to not leave sitting ducks
all around.

> Later, a counter-attack by

> Galactic Federation forces culminated in the second Earth colony of

> Lemuria

CROW: So Joey the Lemur was a space alien?

TOM: Actually, yeah.

> and the destruction of the Ancharites’ main planetary world.

MIKE: The genocide was necessary, as otherwise some of the Ancharites
might have lived.

> Its explosive end produced the asteroid belt that now revolves between

> Mars and Jupiter.

CROW: Explosive ending! No one will be admitted during the
last five minutes of the Ancharites’ home world.

> Moreover, many of the smaller moons of Mars, Jupiter

> and the solar system’s other outer planets are the result of the

> carnage from these explosions.

TOM: A couple of them were just tchochkes we picked up at garage sales.

> Indeed, your solar system is a curious

> monument to the violence that was part of these wars.

CROW: Please observe silence while visiting the Solar System.

> It even extends

> to the outer layers of cosmic dust and larger particles that form the

> edge of your solar system.

MIKE: This is all related to Blue Kryptonite, isn’t it?

> Because these clouds were unduly charged,

> the outcome was a constant barrage of comets and asteroids.

TOM: But they do all look really festive come Christmas time.

>

> Even your Sun was not spared the degrees of violence of which the

> Ancharites were capable.

MIKE: And with our powers and a million years to try it was
too much work to fix it up again.

> They attempted to permanently disrupt your

> Sun’s interaction with her planetary daughters,

TOM: By being vicious gossips.

> resulting in the highly

> elliptical orbits that still characterize the way your solar system’s

> planets circle your Sun.

MIKE: The tragic result of putting unbalanced loads in the washer.

> Initially, these orbits were almost circular.

> For that reason, a circle has a 360-degree arc.

CROW: Bake your circle at that 360 degree arc for fifteen to
twenty minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center
comes out clean.

> In your world, this

> commemorates the original solar year of 360 days, each lasting 24

> hours.

TOM: Is that mean solar or sidereal time?

> The first colonists of ancient Lemuria decided not to alter this

> situation,

CROW: This reminds me of a story that happened once in … Zobooland.

> and kept this anomaly as a sign to future generations of

> what had actually occurred in this once splendid and beautiful solar

> system.

MIKE: Nice of them to leave us such a hint.

> These wars also caused the conditions needed to plunge you into

> the morass that we know as limited consciousness.

CROW: So, the Federation of Light wants to bring Light to the universe
and does it by leaving a broken-down solar system and dropping
colonists on it who’ll be too stupid to do any Light-bringing?

TOM: It’s the Galactic Federation of Durrr.

>

> Clearly, the dispersion of humanity into your solar system – even

> your fall into limited consciousness – are by-products of these galaxy-

> wide wars.

TOM: As soon as you leave the solar system, though, you’ll figure out
how to travel interstellar distances.

> Furthermore, the Galactic Federation’s acceptance of a

> nearly ‘hands-off’ policy was the result of circumstances brought about

> by these same wars.

MIKE: That hands-off policy that did so well to avoid the war
in the first place.

> This policy allowed the Anunnaki to become your

> overlords, and their earthly minions to secretly control you for the

> past 13 millennia.

TOM: Oh, *good* one, Galactic Federation of Light.

> However, this situation was dramatically changed by

> your rise in consciousness and by the Anunnaki’s recent turn to the

> Light.

CROW: And, what the heck, nothing good on TV this week anyway.

> These events have made possible the Galactic Federation’s direct

> intervention in your affairs.

MIKE: The protection money we demand will be reasonable
and collected infrequently.

> It has also given us an opportunity to

> assist those forces of Light that are laboring to transform your world.

TOM: Unfortunately, the only agents they have on the scene are
Judge Reinhold and Gurmit Singh, so it’s taking a while.

> This has resulted in the agreements that are about to be revealed.

CROW: I’m betting they call for people to wear less black, though.

>

> Heaven and your collective self are co-creating your reality.

MIKE: You put it that way, I feel so *naked*.

> You

> are interconnected Beings who are sharing the same destiny. That

> destiny is to be returned to fully conscious Beings of Light.

CROW: Just two weekends a month, and two millennia a geologic age.

> The

> concluding phase, before this divine transition can be fully revealed

> to you, has taken much too long for our liking.

TOM: Frankly, you’re on the verge of failing this class!

> Finally, the last

> vestiges of the dark have begun to see that their continuing battle is

> truly in vain.

CROW: The movies of Jerry Bruckheimer will get more desperate.

> This acknowledgement has allowed a new energy of

> positive intention to envelop your beautiful, blue orb.

MIKE: Clean it every other weekend with a damp cloth, and keep it
out of direct sunlight.

CROW: This is what the Mirror Universe had instead of “Highlander 2.”

> This energy has

> provided additional courage to those who are enforcing the agreements,

TOM: This is all going to end up at the World Trade Organization somehow.

> which guarantee that a new reality can be manifested, now, upon your

> world.

CROW: Watch your doorknobs for signs of opening blue eyes.

> We thank all who have helped and, especially, convey our deepest

> gratitude to all Light workers. Your victory is approaching!

TOM: No, really. Going to be here soon. Can’t see it taking more
than another 375,000 years at the *latest*.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose thirteen points in trading excited by word of a Brussels startup trying to sell crickets as food to Belgians, even though we’ve been through this before and we’re just not doing the insect-eating thing, thank you. Not as anything but a novelty, and no it does not help if you’re going to make them garlic flavored. If they were garlic-flavored we’d be eating them for the garlic, not the cricket, and we can get garlic flavor from non-insect-based sources. Anyway, this can’t last.

215

MiSTed: Galactic Federation Update, Part 2/4

Part 1.

So, a lot of MiSTings inspire a certain crankiness. Yes, we, the writers, choose to read these things and write jokes about it and immerse ourselves in the whole thing. And it’s mostly fun. But there is still a slog to it because when you look at every line of a post you realize there’s a lot of lines to it. And so many of them are boring. Not this time, though. This was a giddy, playful piece to write. I had fun and I think you can tell from the silliness of a lot of my riffs.

“The Swan” was a short-lived reality-TV show about taking people who were Hollywood Ugly and dressing them up until they could attract A MAN. This sort of thing seemed important to denounce back then.

---

>"Robt McElwain" <rmcelwaine@visto.com
> wrote in message

news:87befcb5.0308151233.2e7aa480@posting.google.com…

CROW: It’s the 21st century and we’re *still* getting Robert McElwaine.
Could we get some new cranks in here?

>

>

> Update from the REAL Galactic Federation

MIKE: The other Galactic Federation is just full of phonies.

> and The Spiritual Hierarchy

> August 5, 2003

TOM: They’re masters of space, time, and dimension, but their Usenet
servers are kept up by turtles.

> Communicated thru Sheldan Nidle of The Planetary Activation Organization

MIKE: So stop teasing him.

CROW: Shel-*dan*?

> http://www.paoweb.com/updates.htm

>

> Greetings, dear Hearts!

TOM: Howdy, lovey-kins.

> We return with more interesting topics to

> share with you.

MIKE: And we’ll give you six of them for four easy monthly payments
of $24.99 each.

> One of the things that we find most interesting is how

> your concepts of cosmology have distorted the origins of this physical

> universe.

CROW: Why, thank you. I think one of my most endearing features
is how my concepts of cosmology distort the origins of the
physical universe.

> Its genesis lies not in a ‘big bang’, but rather in a simple

> series of multiple creations.

TOM: This `Big Bang Burrito’ theory we expect will be slow to catch on.

> These creations produce many different

> dimensions and an abundance of realities. The crucial element is

MIKE: Erbium.

> divine

> consciousness. All of us dwell in a living, conscious universe.

TOM: Except for the audience of “The Swan.”

> That

> universe is composed of inter-dimensional Light and Time, which

> combine, in infinite ways, to form space.

CROW: Is this gonna be on the final?

> It, in turn, creates

> realities and shapes physicality’s countless dimensions. The physical

> universe is a magical place.

MIKE: So that’s why everyone’s after me Lucky Charms.

> The only limitations that exist in any

> reality are those that its inhabitants and its heavenly guardians,

> together, permit.

CROW: I already saw “Free To Be You And Me.” Can I go?

> Your laws of physics are a true misnomer.

TOM: They’re more nagging suggestions of physics instead.

> Your growth

> in awareness or new collective perceptions can instantly alter these

> so-called ‘laws’.

MIKE: One morning I took too much Sudafed and the Rydburg constant?
Pfft. Out like a light.

> Now, this important process has begun.

TOM: No, no, no, don’t go rushing into anything right now.

> It promises to

> create an entirely new reality for you and indeed for the rest of

> physicality.

CROW: You know, I can’t get “2000 Flushes” to work right.
Should I be part of creating a new reality for everybody?

>

> Creation is a continuously unfolding phenomenon. The divine plan

> has dealt out to us all a multiplicity of sudden twists and turns.

TOM: You are in a maze of twisty divine plans, all alike.

> Now,

> as a direct result, countless sentient species live in the physical

> universe.

MIKE: The Asian short-clawed otter alone occupies four galaxies.

> Their many different languages, cultures and rituals create

> an immensely wide range of traditions and perceptions that center upon

> the origins of their realities.

TOM: Yet they cannot tell a cabbage from a lettuce.

> They have inspired us to closely study

> the residences of this nearly infinite universe. In our galaxy, it gave

> rise to the creation of

CROW: Kickapoo Joy Juice.

> numerous spiritual sciences, dedicated to

> developing a full understanding of this knowledge, and to discovering

> its precise part in the whole.

TOM: In order to make more efficient ABC Afterschool Specials.

> Eventually, this study laid the first

> foundations for a spiritual anthropology and, later, a spiritual

> sociology.

MIKE: And later still, spiritual philately.

TOM: Spiritual geology was a big hit.

CROW: People say spiritual ichtyology is an easy major, but there’s
a lot to it you don’t see.

> These sciences gave us a wealth of information about our

> common origins,

CROW: For example, origins turn out to be common.

> which are far greater than the processes that brought

> about human evolution on the third planet of the Vega solar system more

> than six million years ago.

TOM: As of next Thursday.

> Actually, our beginnings filled a physical

> and spiritual niche foreseen by the divine plan.

MIKE: I mean, it’s like they had God or something setting things out.

> Prior to that event,

> we were all spiritual Beings hanging tenaciously to the vast Life-

> streams of Heaven.

TOM: Oh, here it comes.

CROW: Yup. This is the hard sell. How much, McElwaine?

>

> As humanity advanced through this galaxy,

TOM: We started shooting everything we didn’t understand.

> we encountered physical

> Beings quite unlike us in form, culture and language.

CROW: We would have given them the chance to surrender,
but we didn’t want to look weak.

> If we did not

> succeed in bridging these huge differences, war often resulted.

MIKE: And, really, we went out with the best of intentions.

> At

> first, those who aggressively followed the dark principles of their

> creator-Being, Anchara,

CROW: Leader of the Imperium Sweaters.

> distressed us greatly. Suddenly, we were

> involved in an enormous galactic war that had woven itself across the

> breadth of our galaxy for many tens of millions of years.

TOM: A most savage alien race, they were. When we shot them
they fought back.

> This struggle

> created a need for many alliances to form with thousands of other like-

> minded star-nations.

MIKE: We had to shoot first. We had them surrounded.

> It also introduced us to the continuing strange

> and violent process that is destined to transform this galaxy from the

> darkness that has engulfed it.

TOM: They’re using the F-U-N-D cheat, aren’t they?

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose a dozen points today as the radio had a bunch of great songs all in a row. Um. Also there was a commodity listing for Rough Rice that totally dominated their thinking about long-term fiduciary potentiometers or something.

202

MiSTed: Galactic Federation Update, Part 1/4

So, I was digging around and found some Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction I had completely and utterly forgotten I’d written. Since some of this goes back over a decade I hope you can forgive me that. But I felt like sharing so, here goes. This is from the “riffing on someone’s rant” mode, although in this case the original text is less a rant than a … well, bit of crank literature, let’s say.

The reference here to “Commodore Schmidlapp” is steeped in rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc folklore, such as it is. Something like a year before this MiSTing was posted, Doctor Mike Neylon had taken down his Web Site Number Nine, the center of the MiSTing community, for a weekend for some kind of upgrades or whatnot and he hadn’t been seen since. So I thought it would be a merry little joke that the right people would get if I snuck in a bit suggesting he had been kidnapped by Pearl Forrester and her crew. Thus you now understand why this is a correctly-formed joke construct and shall laugh.

As I remember it, I was right, folks did like the joke. Still haven’t seen Mike Neylon. I suppose if he ever does reappear I’ll have to resolve the joke in a new MiSTing.

Please, enjoy?

Oh yeah, before you do: comic strips in my mathematics blog. You might like that too. I do.

---

[ OPENING CREDITS ]

[ 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… ]

[ SATELLITE OF LOVE BRIDGE. TOM SERVO is behind the desk. MIKE is
sitting up front, near the camera, facing TOM. ]

TOM: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Satellite of Love. I’m Tom
Servo, your host. Today we’ve got wonderful news for all of our
loving and devoted fans. Starting Tuesday you’ll be able to find
our new Special Collectible Crow T. Robot Gold Edition.

[ CROW, looking as he always does, enters from the left. ]

CROW: Hi, everyone. The gold edition me comes complete with netting,
fresh-polished nose module, top-of-the-line sarcasm resequencer
and an array of opinions on Peter Potamus. But there’s more —

MIKE: [ Raising his hand ] Does that come with director’s commentary?

TOM: Uhm —

CROW: Sure! Lots of commentary.

TOM: Won’t be able to shut him up!

[ GYPSY enters from the right. ]

GYPSY: And with the Ruby Edition collectible Tom Servo —

MIKE: Hold it; does the Crow come with trailers?

CROW: I — uh —

GYPSY: A trailer hitch.

MIKE: Is he in 5.1?

TOM: He’s … in … 8.3. I think.

MIKE: Anamorphic?

CROW: I’ve heard of that.

TOM: Is it good?

GYPSY: I think so.

CROW: Yes! Any further questions?

[ MADS SIGN flashes. MIKE walks back to the table to get it. ]

MIKE: Hang on, the deleted scenes are calling.

[ MIKE taps the sign. ]

[ CASTLE FORRESTER. PEARL and BOBO are at a desk working on a great
many forms; BOBO is dressed as accountant. OBSERVER watches the
camera, curious. Calculators, notepads, and slide rules complete
the table clutter. ]

OBSERVER: Does Crow come with animated chapter breaks?

BOBO: Deducting form 8-E, line 17 …

PEARL: Hello, Mike. Peculiar doll-thingies.

[ SATELLITE OF LOVE. ]

CROW: Hey, we’re action figures!

GYPSY: Yeah!

TOM: I’m comfortable being a doll.

MIKE: Ah, what’re you doing, Pearl?

[ CASTLE FORRESTER. BOBO is muttering to PEARL. A bell rings
from off-camera. ]

PEARL: [ To BOBO ] Oh, what, *again*? We’ve had him in the dungeon
a *year* now and we’re not getting through.

BOBO: For the capital invested in keeping Doctor Mike — you can’t
argue the return-on-evil. Look at the figures.

PEARL: Brain Guy, can’t you do this?

OBSERVER: Oh, Pearl, you know Bobo does forms better than I.

PEARL: [ To MIKE ] What are we doing? Oh, wouldn’t YOU like to know?

[ SATELLITE OF LOVE. CROW, TOM, MIKE, and GYPSY are there. ]

MIKE: Well … yeah.

GYPSY: [ To TOM ] I just never saw you as a doll before.

[ CASTLE FORRESTER. BOBO is fiddling with a slide rule. ]

OBSERVER: Sorry up there, Mike; we’ve got some reports to fill in.

PEARL: Something *you* will understand perfectly after you get through
this week’s experiment — if you DARE!

[ PEARL begins to cackle; OBSERVER pats her shoulder. ]

OBSERVER: [ Low-key ] It’s not all that evil.

PEARL: [ Similarly ] No? I thought we were picking these —

OBSERVER: You have to give them a change-up, something odd and then you
let go with the force-ten brain-imploder. It works better.

PEARL: You’re the brain guy, but I want them to suffer more —

[ The bell rings again. ]

PEARL: Oh, somebody get Commodore Schmidlapp his tea already.

[ BOBO hits his palm against the slide rule, launching it to stage right.
There follow several crashing glass noises, and then the hissing and
bubbling of horrid liquids seeping places. BOBO whimpers. ]

PEARL: Brainy?

[ SATELLITE OF LOVE. As before. ]

GYPSY: They’re getting stranger.

CROW: I just never saw you as a doll.

TOM: You should try accepting an expanded self-image.

[ MOVIE SIGN flashes. General alarm. ]

MIKE: Oh, great, save it — guys, we got movie sign!

[ Screaming and such continues. ]

[ 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… ]

[ ALL enter theater. ]

MIKE: Wait, she’s torturing other Mikes?

>Path: rpi!uwm.edu!newsfeed.cs.utexas.edu!in.100proofnews.com!in.100

>proofnews.com!news-out.visi.com!petbe.visi.com!feed.news.qwest.net!

>news.uswest.net.POSTED!not-for-mail

>Reply-To: "Baron Maximillian von Schwartzmeinoppenhause"

CROW: Zany? You’re soaking in it!

><schwartz@baronville.com
>

>From: "Baron Maximillian von Schwartzmeinoppenhause"

><schwartz@baronville.com
>

TOM: That’s for everyone who missed the zany before.

>Newsgroups: 24hoursupport.helpdesk,alt.alien.research,alt.alien.visitors,

>alt.revisionism,sci.astro,soc.history.what-if

MIKE: The gang.

>References: <20030814025106.21510.00001411@mb-m07.aol.com
>

><87befcb5.0308151233.2e7aa480@posting.google.com
>

>Subject: Re: GALACTIC FEDERATION Update: August 5, 2003

CROW: Attention Mister and Missus Galaxy and all the ships at sea!
Flash!

>Lines: 159

>X-Priority: 3

TOM: Better tell Wolverine and Professor Xaiver.

>X-MSMail-Priority: Normal

>X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158

>X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165

MIKE: [ Clapping his hands ] Ole’!

>Message-ID: <hqX5b.733$Qa.55492@news.uswest.net
>

>Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2003 02:02:48 -0600

TOM: We get the August update in September?

CROW: They’re pretty laid back in this part of the federation.

>NNTP-Posting-Host: 67.1.139.151

>X-Trace: news.uswest.net 1062748941 67.1.139.151 (Fri, 05 Sep 2003

>03:02:21 CDT)

>NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 05 Sep 2003 03:02:21 CDT

MIKE: There, see? Told you it was Central Daylight Time.

>Xref: rpi alt.alien.visitors:516492 alt.revisionism:1566553

>sci.astro:445867 soc.history.what-if:738420

TOM: Inside The GPS Signal.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index plummeted nineteen points as traders considered that story about the guy who tried to get rid of some bees by setting a firecracker on their hive and ended up destroying his own garage and while that’s kind of funny it also feels really bad to laugh about that, plus, you know, there’s the bees to consider. Nobody feels really proud about the whole situation.

190

---

Tue/Wed 11/12
MiSTed: Galactic Federation Update, Part 2/4

Part 1.

So, a lot of MiSTings inspire a certain crankiness. Yes, we, the writers, choose to read these things and write jokes about it and immerse ourselves in the whole thing. And it’s mostly fun. But there is still a slog to it because when you look at every line of a post you realize there’s a lot of lines to it. And so many of them are boring. Not this time, though. This was a giddy, playful piece to write. I had fun and I think you can tell from the silliness of a lot of my riffs.

“The Swan” was a short-lived reality-TV show about taking people who were Hollywood Ugly and dressing them up until they could attract A MAN. This sort of thing seemed important to denounce back then.

---

>"Robt McElwain" <rmcelwaine@visto.com
> wrote in message

news:87befcb5.0308151233.2e7aa480@posting.google.com…

CROW: It’s the 21st century and we’re *still* getting Robert McElwaine.
Could we get some new cranks in here?

>

>

> Update from the REAL Galactic Federation

MIKE: The other Galactic Federation is just full of phonies.

> and The Spiritual Hierarchy

> August 5, 2003

TOM: They’re masters of space, time, and dimension, but their Usenet
servers are kept up by turtles.

> Communicated thru Sheldan Nidle of The Planetary Activation Organization

MIKE: So stop teasing him.

CROW: Shel-*dan*?

> http://www.paoweb.com/updates.htm

>

> Greetings, dear Hearts!

TOM: Howdy, lovey-kins.

> We return with more interesting topics to

> share with you.

MIKE: And we’ll give you six of them for four easy monthly payments
of $24.99 each.

> One of the things that we find most interesting is how

> your concepts of cosmology have distorted the origins of this physical

> universe.

CROW: Why, thank you. I think one of my most endearing features
is how my concepts of cosmology distort the origins of the
physical universe.

> Its genesis lies not in a ‘big bang’, but rather in a simple

> series of multiple creations.

TOM: This `Big Bang Burrito’ theory we expect will be slow to catch on.

> These creations produce many different

> dimensions and an abundance of realities. The crucial element is

MIKE: Erbium.

> divine

> consciousness. All of us dwell in a living, conscious universe.

TOM: Except for the audience of “The Swan.”

> That

> universe is composed of inter-dimensional Light and Time, which

> combine, in infinite ways, to form space.

CROW: Is this gonna be on the final?

> It, in turn, creates

> realities and shapes physicality’s countless dimensions. The physical

> universe is a magical place.

MIKE: So that’s why everyone’s after me Lucky Charms.

> The only limitations that exist in any

> reality are those that its inhabitants and its heavenly guardians,

> together, permit.

CROW: I already saw “Free To Be You And Me.” Can I go?

> Your laws of physics are a true misnomer.

TOM: They’re more nagging suggestions of physics instead.

> Your growth

> in awareness or new collective perceptions can instantly alter these

> so-called ‘laws’.

MIKE: One morning I took too much Sudafed and the Rydburg constant?
Pfft. Out like a light.

> Now, this important process has begun.

TOM: No, no, no, don’t go rushing into anything right now.

> It promises to

> create an entirely new reality for you and indeed for the rest of

> physicality.

CROW: You know, I can’t get “2000 Flushes” to work right.
Should I be part of creating a new reality for everybody?

>

> Creation is a continuously unfolding phenomenon. The divine plan

> has dealt out to us all a multiplicity of sudden twists and turns.

TOM: You are in a maze of twisty divine plans, all alike.

> Now,

> as a direct result, countless sentient species live in the physical

> universe.

MIKE: The Asian short-clawed otter alone occupies four galaxies.

> Their many different languages, cultures and rituals create

> an immensely wide range of traditions and perceptions that center upon

> the origins of their realities.

TOM: Yet they cannot tell a cabbage from a lettuce.

> They have inspired us to closely study

> the residences of this nearly infinite universe. In our galaxy, it gave

> rise to the creation of

CROW: Kickapoo Joy Juice.

> numerous spiritual sciences, dedicated to

> developing a full understanding of this knowledge, and to discovering

> its precise part in the whole.

TOM: In order to make more efficient ABC Afterschool Specials.

> Eventually, this study laid the first

> foundations for a spiritual anthropology and, later, a spiritual

> sociology.

MIKE: And later still, spiritual philately.

TOM: Spiritual geology was a big hit.

CROW: People say spiritual ichtyology is an easy major, but there’s
a lot to it you don’t see.

> These sciences gave us a wealth of information about our

> common origins,

CROW: For example, origins turn out to be common.

> which are far greater than the processes that brought

> about human evolution on the third planet of the Vega solar system more

> than six million years ago.

TOM: As of next Thursday.

> Actually, our beginnings filled a physical

> and spiritual niche foreseen by the divine plan.

MIKE: I mean, it’s like they had God or something setting things out.

> Prior to that event,

> we were all spiritual Beings hanging tenaciously to the vast Life-

> streams of Heaven.

TOM: Oh, here it comes.

CROW: Yup. This is the hard sell. How much, McElwaine?

>

> As humanity advanced through this galaxy,

TOM: We started shooting everything we didn’t understand.

> we encountered physical

> Beings quite unlike us in form, culture and language.

CROW: We would have given them the chance to surrender,
but we didn’t want to look weak.

> If we did not

> succeed in bridging these huge differences, war often resulted.

MIKE: And, really, we went out with the best of intentions.

> At

> first, those who aggressively followed the dark principles of their

> creator-Being, Anchara,

CROW: Leader of the Imperium Sweaters.

> distressed us greatly. Suddenly, we were

> involved in an enormous galactic war that had woven itself across the

> breadth of our galaxy for many tens of millions of years.

TOM: A most savage alien race, they were. When we shot them
they fought back.

> This struggle

> created a need for many alliances to form with thousands of other like-

> minded star-nations.

MIKE: We had to shoot first. We had them surrounded.

> It also introduced us to the continuing strange

> and violent process that is destined to transform this galaxy from the

> darkness that has engulfed it.

TOM: They’re using the F-U-N-D cheat, aren’t they?

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose a dozen points today as the radio had a bunch of great songs all in a row. Um. Also there was a commodity listing for Rough Rice that totally dominated their thinking about long-term fiduciary potentiometers or something.

202

What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? April – July 2017

Greetings, high school-ish sports-like fans. If you’re looking for a recap of what’s happening in Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp good news! You’re in a reasonably right spot. If you’re reading this much later than July 2017, then there’s a good chance they’re on to a new story and one that I might have recapped yet. The most recent essay describing plot developments should be at or near the top of this page. Thanks for reading and we’ll see you not in the playdowns.

Gil Thorp

17 April – 8 July 2017

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp typically runs in seasons, matching the major sports seasons. In April it began the softball-season storyline. This featured two plot threads: transfer student Ryan van Auken, who’s overcome his anger issues and large face to pitch rather well, and Dafne, reporter at the school’s Milford Trumpet, uncovering a school board official padding his expense accounts. Now on to the action.

Ryan pitches pretty well, closing out one win. Guys from the track and field team meet up with girls from Central High, who after some trash-talking their sport get into some light dating. And then action heats up when Dafne gets the anonymous tip to ask why it was Ryan transferred from a private high school to the public Milford.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 28th of April, 2017. While I don’t think it’s a funny line, I agree it’s the sort of line that high schoolers will think is funny, so I give it a pass. I will say the comic does, to me, a credible job in making high schoolers sound like high schoolers. Or at least people who could be high schoolers.

She finds the answer: he hit a girl, during an argument, and by the time the scandal shook out he had to transfer. Her editor is interested, but doesn’t think it’s a story they can run, what with Ryan being a high-profile athlete and his victim only being a girl or something. Well, her editor puts it in a better-sounding way: there’s no police report, there’s no charges, their whole idea of what happened comes from social media gossip at his old high school, and that’s not a lot to hang a story that could trash Ryan’s life on. I’m skeptical of the “won’t someone please think of the star athlete’s career prospects?” line of reasoning. I am open to the argument that it’s not obvious that whatever did happen between two underage people should necessarily be broadcast to the world.

Word of the story leaks out when she leaks the story out to friends who promise not to spread gossip. Protesters start popping up with banners showing the girl he’d hit and signs like “Remember Me?” When this rattles Ryan into completely blowing a game Gil Thorp sighs mightily and decides he has to ask what the heck’s going on and why it should involve him. Ryan’s parents explain: the pictured girl, Alyssa, was Ryan’s girlfriend at the private school. In a fight, according to his parents, Ryan tried to push her out of the way and caught her cheek instead. Ryan admitted he shouldn’t have done that; Alyssa agreed it wasn’t hitting, but by the time the story got around school it was battery.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 9th of June, 2017. I have never been in a situation anything remotely like Gil Thorp’s here. So how is it that I know exactly the tone of Auken Dad’s voice here? … Also, I note that we the readers only know the story from Auken Dad and Auken Mom’s summary of it here. Ryan doesn’t say anything on-camera, and Alyssa hasn’t appeared in the story except as a picture on a protest sign. So far, anyway.

So, they moved to a new neighborhood, new school, and Ryan went to anger management classes and to counseling. Meanwhile, Dafne argues that the protests make Ryan’s past a legitimate story. When the editor quashes the story, Dafne quits the paper, which is the sort of principled stand I’m sorry I didn’t take when the editor of my middle-school newspaper wouldn’t run my detailed report of the student walkout that year. Well, it was the last month of eighth grade anyway; quitting wouldn’t even have had a symbolic effect. Still …

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 22nd of May, 2017. I do appreciate that Mrs Student Newspaper Editor is asking serious, good questions that teach journalism even as she’s warning Dafne off the story. Dafne may not realize how slender the evidence is for what she knows, and doesn’t seem to have an answer to whether something being salacious (and maybe true) necessarily makes it news.

Anyway, Gil Thorp calls on Central High School’s Coach Skip Farrow to figure out who the protest ringleaders are, and since they’re all seniors they can rest assured the problem will cure itself and Ryan can have at least one trouble-free year. And then he calls the protest leaders to explain that they’re all quite sure Ryan made a mistake and is incredibly sorry about it, which is sure to clear up the whole sorry mess.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 4th of July, 2017. Jimmy comes in later with a black eye and from this panel I don’t really know how he got it. Maybe he really did happen to run into a door like he says and all of this is just coincidence.

Or perhaps dramatic irony will: while hanging out Milford’s Gary Meola admits to Central’s Carrie Hobson that he’s only there so Jimmy can get some time with Dafne. Dafne’s furious that Gary was putting her on, and shoves Jimmy out of the way in order to comfort her best friend. This … somehow … results in Jimmy getting a black eye, which he excuses as “I ran into a door and shut up”. He passes along as many apologies as he can to Dafne and now we understand why the track-and-field guys are even in this story. And that’s about where events rest today.

Next week: Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man in its first post-Rocket-Raccoon review.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose a point as trading spirits were raised by a series of videos of hamsters putting things in their mouths successfully.

209

Statistics Saturday: Books Making The Case For

• The Case For Impeachment, Allan J Lichtman.
• The Case For Jamie, Brittany Cavallaro.
• The Case For Loving: The Fight For Interracial Marriage, Selina Alko, Sean Qualls.
• The Case For Heaven: Near-Death Experiences As Evidence of the Afterlife, Mally Cox-Chapman.
• The Case For Israel, Alan Dershowitz.
• The Case For The UFO, M K Jessup.
• The Case For Anthroposophy, Owen Barfield.
• The Case For US Nuclear Weapons In The 21st Century, Brad Roberts.
• The Case For Socialism (Second Edition), Alan Maass, Howard Zinn.
• The Case For The Cruising Trimaran, Jim Brown.
• The Case For The King James Bible, D A Waite.
• The Case For Polytheism, Steven Dillon.
• The Case For Animal Rights, Tom Regan.
• The Case For A Basic Income, Robert Jameson.
• The Case For Mars: The Plan To Settle The Red Planet And Why We Must, Robert Zubrin, Richard Wagner.
• The Case For Bureaucracy: A Public Administration Polemic, Charles T Goodsell.
• The Case For The Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law And Order On Wall Street, Mary Kreiner Ramirez, Steven A Ramirez.
• The Case For Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W Bush From Office, Dave Lindorff, Barbara Olshansky.
• The Case For Greatness: Honorable Ambition and its Critics, Robert Faulkner.
• The Case for The Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760, John Robertson.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped sixteen points today in trading that could be called “lower”, or also “dramatically lower”, but to be honest who can focus on something like that anymore?

208

Statistics June: Or What Was Popular Around Here

Now, finally, I’ve run out of excuses and will talk about my popularity around here as measured by WordPress’s statistics page. June was my second-most-popular month this year, based on readers. There were 2,118 page views, up from May’s 1,944 and April’s 1,765. I credit this to people wanting to understand what was going on in Judge Parker, which has seen a lot of stuff going on the past couple weeks worth keeping track of. There were 1,501 unique visitors in June, my second-best count of unique visitors ever. That’s the highest it’s been since the Apartment 3-Gocalypse, when The Onion A.V. Club casually mentioned my existence and people checked to see that I do indeed exist.

This surge in popularity did nothing about the long-term decline in the number of likes: there were only 122 of them in June, the lowest total in years. Comments were up to 19 from May’s 10, but that’s still below April’s 26 and it’s meager in any case. I need to find somebody I can banter with and force them to say something every post, I think is the problem. I am a little surprised the story comic review posts don’t inspire more responses. Maybe I’m giving off vibes that I have said everything I can imagine ever saying about Gasoline Alley so nobody feels the desire to see if I could maybe say a little more.

The most popular postings in June were all comic strip stuff:

• What’s Going On With Judge Parker?
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? April – June 2017
• What’s Going On With Rex Morgan, M.D.?
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? March – June 2017
• Writer Tony DePaul Quits The Phantom

You have no idea how much it bugs me that I took so long to decide between “What’s Going On In” and “What’s Going On With” the various story strips. I’d go back and change the inconsistent ones but I feel somehow like making a change like that now would be falsifying my historical record, unless I put in a note saying what I had changed and why, in which case I’d still see it every time. And the URLs would have the old, inconsistent titles anyway.

And as you can see, I could probably shut down everything I do around here besides the comic strip story summaries and not lose that much readership. The only original-writing piece of mine to crack the top ten was a couple words about how impractical an idea for a supervillain I had. The most popular long-form piece I wrote came in 11th, How To Program (Computers). Perhaps I do need to yield gracefully to what people are telling me they like.

So where am I getting readers from? According to WordPress my page views for June came from:

Country	Views
United States	1669
India	73
Canada	53
United Kingdom	44
France	27
Australia	23
Brazil	18
Germany	14
Philippines	12
Romania	12
Russia	12
Sweden	12
Mexico	10
New Zealand	10
Austria	9
Poland	9
Kenya	7
Bangladesh	6
European Union	6
Norway	6
South Africa	6
Argentina	4
Japan	4
Portugal	4
Denmark	3
Hungary	3
Italy	3
Netherlands	3
Pakistan	3
South Korea	3
Spain	3
Thailand	3
Afghanistan	2
Chile	2
Colombia	2
Georgia	2
Indonesia	2
Jamaica	2
Nepal	2
Puerto Rico	2
Ukraine	2
Armenia	1
Belgium	1 (*)
Bosnia and Herzegovina	1
Bulgaria	1
Cambodia	1 (*)
China	1
Croatia	1
Curaçao	1
Egypt	1
Finland	1
Ghana	1
Greece	1
Iceland	1
Laos	1
Lebanon	1
Malawi	1
Malaysia	1
Mozambique	1
Nicaragua	1
Panama	1
St. Kitts and Nevis	1
Taiwan	1 (***)
Turkey	1 (*)
US Virgin Islands	1
Vietnam	1 (*)
Zambia	1

I honestly believe that to be 67 countries, up from May’s 58 and April’s 51. I also make out 26 single-reader countries, up from May’s 17 and April’s 13. Belgium, Cambodia, Turkey, and Vietnam were single-reader countries in May, also. Taiwan is on a four-month single-reader streak.

The month started at 56,793 page views, from something like 31,335 unique viewers. Sundays were the most popular day for reading around here, with 16 percent of page views coming that day. In May it was Fridays that got 16 percent of page views. That’s so close to one-seventh of the readership that I suppose it shows no date is particularly tredy around here. The most popular hour was that from 12 to 1 am, which is also the hour I set most things to post. That got in 12 percent of page view, just like in May.

I failed to check how many people were subscribed via WordPress at the start of the month. There are 744 right now, and two of them have been around fewer than eight days, but that doesn’t tell me anything about who might have unsubscribed between the 1st of July and today. It’s somewhere around 742 readers that I started the month with, anyway, up from 736 at the start of June.

If you’d like to be a subscriber, please use the blue “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” strip on the upper right of the page here. If you’d rather get this delivered by e-mail, there’s a “Follow Blog Via Email” box just underneath that. And I’m on Twitter as @nebusj if you’d find that more fun.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose nine points today when the adoptable pet of the day turned out to be two puppies even if they only had a picture of one. Traders are willing to suppose in the existence of puppies they haven’t seen. Aren’t so many of us like that?

224

Setting The Styles

Is there an easier way to attract readers and get engagement than to prepare a set of Usage Guidelines and insist everyone follow them? No, probably not. Although everybody likes to make Usage Guidelines, the United States is the world’s undisputed leader in this trade. The average American will make over 14 Usage Guidelines per year. We’ll generate policies to cover everything from how many spaces should follow the end of a sentence to under what circumstances one may double up the use of those little paper cups when gathering Horsey Sauce at Arby’s. And under what circumstances these can be substituted for one another. Compliance with these policies will rise, some years, to as high as 0.4 people per year. This gives us all the chance to seethe at how people are messing up what would be a neat orderly life.

So I’m leaping in to this racket. I want to express my idealistic hopes about how the world can be easily made much better. Plus if I can get enough people feeling like they should pay attention to me I can start selling guidebooks and retire on the profits from How To Do Stuff So It’s Not Wrong Already or whatever I end up titling it. Let me give you a tease of some of the first couple good ideas.

First: we’ll need a policy about acronyms. Acronyms were introduced to English during the First World War, as war planners feared the Germans might overhear what we were saying about them as if they couldn’t guess already. This way, if they did overhear they wouldn’t know what the subject was. The fears proved unfounded, as postwar analysis indicated the Germans spent most of their time in Germany and/or Belgium, out of earshot. Still, they’ve remained as popular linguistic roadblocks to comprehension. My guideline: on first use, expand the acronym into full words. For example, “NASA, the National Acrobatics and Slurry Accordion, announced today it is not sending anybody to Mars, as investigation showed we had enough in the pantry to last until the weekend”. Exceptions: ISBN, GIS, HONClBrIF, MRxL, NJIT.

Second: we should clear up dangled participles. I admit I’m fuzzy on just what makes a participle or how one dangles it. But I hear it’s a thing people keep doing. Since I don’t feel qualified to judge whether the dangling is correct I say let’s set a rule that people submit a clear plan to dangle participles to a specially appointed participle coordinator. This will be a small office staff in Syracuse, New York, whom we will be able to catch completely by surprise with our subissions. The statements of intent should be sent by postcard, rather than letters in envelopes, as an economy measure; we can put the time that would have gone into opening envelopes to something more urgent. Put a strip of clear plastic tape over the proposed participle so that it will not get smeared in transit.

Third: alarm clocks should refrain from being so alarming. We have frayed enough nerves these days, what with how everything is alarming and most of it is terrible and about the only good things left anymore are anecdotes about small pets that had problems that looked serious but were actually funny. They should phase down to being responsible-concern clocks and maybe we could go without them altogether.

Fourth: we need to identify the people responsible for iTunes and hold them accountable.

Fifth: we need to better organize scheduling of the city’s summer concert festival series. There’s always the trouble of deciding whether to support the community’s summer concert series or to save ourselves the hassle of going out and finding parking and pushing through the crowds and does it look like rain? Shouldn’t it? If we squint can we make it look like rain? Also, are they going to search our bags? Are they going to search the camera bag even though it’s just big enough to hold a camera? It always feels so good to have gone somewhere, but it’s so much hard work to go there. We could make our lives better if we just had the summer concert series scheduled for the week we were going to be out of town anyway.

I should have some more later on, but if we could get on this we’ll have a world that’s better in easily two, maybe three ways.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose three points today on rumors that while it was going to rain over the weekend it wasn’t going to rain anytime we needed to be outside and it probably wasn’t going to rain hard enough to mess up the satellite TV reception.

215

In Which I’m Afraid I Just Let You All Down, But Argue It’s The Local News’s Fault

I’m going to get my review of what was popular and why around here in June soon. I’m just thrown off my game yet again, this time by the local noon news. Yesterday during the weather reports they tossed in mentions of the ultraviolet index and then some reports about what to expect for people “going to mid-Michigan beaches” and now I’m stuck pondering that. I mean, there are some right fine beaches, fully equipped with large bodies of water and sand that’s too hot to actually be comfortable on and, in select cases, carousels to ride that are accessible from mid-Michigan. But they’re, like, on Lake Michigan, which is mid-Michigan in about the same way that Ocean City, Maryland, is in South Jersey. At least so it seems to me. But after the multi-part fiasco that was my just talking about Michigan’s Secretary of State offices when I got my license plate tags last year maybe I shouldn’t say anything with too much certainty. I could end up looking quite the fool again.

Here’s some more comic strips talked about on my mathematics blog. That’s the last of that until next week, or should be.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose eleven points despite investor anger at seeing a DVD of Bambi in the store with a note on it that Rotten Tomatoes certifies the movie Fresh. “What the flipping heck,” they would cry out, not in unison. “Bambi gets a Rotten Tomatoes sticker like it’s flipping Monster Trucks or something? What is wrong with the world like this?!” It’s hard to know what to say.

212

In Which I’m Afraid I Just Let You All Down, But Argue It’s Captain Janeway’s Fault

We got back and were just settling in after the amusement park stuff, but then my love turned on the TV and what do you know but Star Trek: Voyager was on? And not just any moment of its, like, 850,000 hours of talking about chronometric isofluctuations, but the scene that made My Love finally decide to hate Captain Janeway with the white-hot intensity of a thousand burning transwarp macrophases? So we’ve been busy watching that instead and trying to remember stuff about Voyager without looking it up. Remembering stuff is a fun old pastime, something done today mostly by podcasters recording a live episode while on stage when they’re away from their cell phones. We do it recreationally. Anyway, we’ve been trying to remember exactly what the deal with B’elanna was. Our best estimate right now is that she’s half-Klingon and half- … smart? That seems right but that can’t be everything, right? Research continues, at least until we hit that episode where Janeway and whats-his-name get turned into space lizards. That one happened, right? Actually I’d watch that again. It was awful but in the good ways.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index was not traded today as everyone wanted to get to a Lansing Lugnuts ball game while the weather was nice. Was the weather nice? We’ll tell you when they get back.

UNCH

In Which I’m Afraid I Just Let You All Down

I don’t mean to disappoint. It’s just that my love and I have been busy the whole last week, visiting small amusement parks and giggling at mistakes in their signs. I should say we’re not doing this maliciously. We go in expecting we’re going to have a great time, wearing the T-shirts for other small, obscure amusement parks, sometimes on other continents. And we do have a great time, because there is a real delight in a small park where they’re still going on about how they put in a frog jumper ride in 2011, and at any moment you might blink and be in the middle of a swarm of up to forty kids, some of them reaching up to the lower end of your knee, in a screaming birthday-cake riot. But the point is I haven’t had the time to write anything amusing and I apologize for that. Here’s my mathematics blog writing about comic strips yesterday. Thanks and I’ll be back to normal not tomorrow because that’s going to look at the June statistics. But sometime or other. You’ll know it when you see it.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile index rose above 200 which is being treated as a great triumph for the long investors what with this being index territory nobody has seen in two days. Well, if it makes them happy, good. They can deal with it.

201

What’s Going On In Judge Parker? 8 April – 2 July 2017

Greetings, fans of Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker who aren’t just reading Marciuliano’s blog in the first place. If you’re interested in my working out the last couple months of plots, and it’s around July 2017 when you read this, good. Otherwise, the stories probably will have developed some. At or near the top of this link I hope to have my most recent Judge Parker recaps. Thanks, reader in the future. Good luck finding what you need.

Judge Parker.

8 April – 2 July 2017.

When I last checked in on the Parker/Spencer/Davis clan, Marciuliano had not just gotten the kidnapped Sophie Spencer back home, but her bandmates had been rescued too. They told a harrowing tale of kidnappers, a mysterious woman who sounded like Abbey, and a lot of gunshots and violent endings that would leave anyone pretty well-traumatized.

Sam Driver, having got nowhere with his Crazy Evidence Wall, chose to meet up with Totally Legitimate Non-Suspended Non-Crazy Not-An-Ex-Cop Sean Ballenger. He’s the father of one of the other kidnapped teens and wants Sam’s help finding any booby traps and remaining homicidal gunmen at the kidnappers’ hideout. On the way there Ballenger mentions that, oh yeah, he’s been suspended from the force and isn’t handling a really severe trauma any better than Sam is and oh yeah, here’s the booby traps, right where the homicidal Woman Who Sounds Like Abbey left her webcam pointed. Sam starts to suspect a trap, but Ballenger’s so enthusiastic about it he gets himself severely wounded even before the Woman Who Sounds Like Abbey can shoot them.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 16th of April, 2017. I have to say I understand why the police put Ballenger on indefinite leave from this. Also, I like the little artistic touch of the Woman Who Sounds Like Abbey not having finished her soda in the title panel there.

While Ballenger distracts the Woman Who Sounds Like Abbey by bleeding profusely, Sam discovers her wall of Off-Model Spencer Family Photos, plus her time bomb. He grabs Ballenger and runs him right out into waiting police with drawn guns ordering them not to move. Sam’s not even able to explain that he’s both rich and white before the bomb explodes, destroying the compound and what’s left of Sean Ballenger’s career. With this mess on their hands the police give the whole kidnapping investigation a serious escalation, moving it into the hands of some guy with a much darker suit jacket.

Back home, Sam shares with Abbey some evidence he’d been withholding from the police. The Off-Model Spencer Family Photo he’d taken just before the bombing leads to the discovery Abbey’s father had a whole second family. It’s a good juicy bit of gossip, and a nice proper soap-opera development. It does make me wonder, though, like, was Abbey’s father already an established character back in the day? What would Nicholas P Dallis, or whatever later author introduced Abbey’s father, think of this wrinkle being added to his life? I suppose they don’t really have a say, what with being dead or retired from the strip or whatnot, and maybe they’d like having something juicy and exciting like that added to the character’s story.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 16th of May, 2017. By the way, has Sam got around to showing this to the police yet? I’m not sure and it’s too late in the day for me to go double-checking. Just curious. Also, belatedly but: ‘Kabrash’? Is that a Rip Haywire reference?

It makes me realize among the reasons I shouldn’t write a story comic is that I’d be afraid of breaking someone else’s universe by doing something like that. That’s not to say I think Marciuliano is breaking anything; the development’s a fine enough one. It’s about my worries about how ineptly I’d do something like this. I mean, ask me to write about the week Captain Kirk spent falsely accused of a jewel heist on Rocket Raccoon’s planet? I could probably whip that one out. Ask me to write something that changes our ideas of what drives Captain Kirk as a person? No way. Something mentioned a good deal in how-to-write texts is that there’s a certain arrogance in writing. The writer has to assume that she has something worth reading. It seems like it requires a certain greater arrogance to do your writing with someone else’s work. At least it takes self-confidence.

Sam shaves off his Crazy Beard and takes down his Crazy Evidence Wall, to restart it with a perfectly rational and appropriate thumbtacking up of the Off-Model Spencer Family Photo. And Sophie Spencer, released from full-time psychiatric care, goes to her (biological; she was adopted by Sam and Abbey) grandfather’s grave in search of reassurance. Abbey follows, and can give a hug, in a scene that is touching.

So with that done Sophie offers some more information about the Woman Who Sounds Like Abbey. The Woman — named Senna Lewiston, it transpires — believed Abbey’s father was going to leave her mother and marry Senna’s mother. In revenge for the “stolen” life Senna had Sophie kidnapped and was trying to gain her sympathy and support in destroying Abbey’s life and place in life.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 21st of June, 2017. Part of the family-healing moments that make for the resolution, at least for now, of this broad and dangerous kidnapping scheme that marked the complete upending of the strip when Marciuliano took over writing. You know, I’m cool with Rip Haywire references. It’s a pretty fun comic even if the mandatory pop culture reference each panel get tiring and I honestly can’t tell if they’re rerunning comics or doing a variation on the Catpocalypse story. I’m just curious is all.

Meanwhile, one can’t help but notice we haven’t actually seen the body of the Woman Who Sounds Like Abbey. So, you know, soap opera rules. Plus, Senna Lewiston, the police had worked out, somehow bought the kidnapping compound in cash, despite the lack of visible means of supporting massively complicated, expensive revenge schemes. How to explain this? Good question and possibly related to a plot thread that’s been dormant for months, possibly since Marciuliano took over the strip last fall. April Parker, wife of the current Judge Randy Parker, and sometime CIA … person, was sent off on a mission to one of those foreign countries the CIA is always sending people off to in soap opera stories like this. She hasn’t been head from since. And Randy suspects his wife “may have betrayed this country, and she certainly betrayed our marriage with secrets upon secrets”, since she’s gone missing and the CIA won’t stop asking him where she went. So he’s been letting the house get disarrayed enough that the Judge (ret) Alan Parker has noticed, and he’s thinking about putting together his own Crazy Evidence Wall.

Caught up? Good. The strange thing to me about all this is how much there’s been both a lot happening and yet it’s only been one story. And, for that matter, only a couple of days of action within that story. It’s not so breathtaking and baffling as immediately after Marciuliano took over. And basically all the crazy stuff has been explained in ways that pass an initial reading. There may be implications that don’t make sense, but the emotional tone and course of stuff has been believable enough. And with the April Parker storyline heating up I’m looking forward to this fictional CIA fiasco almost as much as I’m looking forward to our next real-life CIA fiasco. Can’t wait.

Next week: a hopefully fiasco-free look into the life of Gil Thorp. See you then, I hope.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

In its third straight day of sliding the Another Blog, Meanwhile index dropped below two hundred bringing it to territory it hasn’t seen since the 9th of June and that’s somehow the worst thing these people can imagine happening even though that was like three and a half weeks ago. I mean, they sound a little whiny to me, too.

196

Statistics Saturday: Some Minor Hassles Made More Exciting By Labelling Them “The Great ___ Fiasco”

• The Great Dead-Battery-In-The-Radio-Set-Clock Fiasco
• The Great Trying-To-Put-My-Ancient-iPad-Back-On-A-Data-Plan-That-Somehow-Requires-A-Lengthy-Discussion-Among-The-Sales-Staff-And-The-Manager-Apologizing-And-Offering-Me-An-Amazon-Firestick-Whatever-That-Is Fiasco
• The Great Trimming-The-Branch-That-Keeps-Dropping-In-Front-Of-The-Satellite-TV-Dish Fiasco
• The Great Breakfast-Nook-Light-Fixture-Falling-Off-Hitting-My-Love-On-The-Head Fiasco
• The Great Can’t-Buy-An-HD-Antenna-That-Adequately-Picks-Up-Local-Channels Fiasco
• The Great Tried-To-Use-iTunes-To-Listen-To-A-Thing Fiasco
• The Great Struggling-To-Take-A-Photo-At-The-Amusement-Park-Where-I-Look-Neither-Asleep-Nor-Bug-Eyed Fiasco
• The Great How-Do-We-Get-Our-Saw-Out-Of-The-Weed-Tree-Trunk-That’s-Heavier-Than-We-Thought Fiasco
• The Great Me-Trying-To-Get-A-Large-Pop-With-That-In-The-Midwest Fiasco

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index continued its slide today, falling another 22 points despite attempts to rally traders behind the news that the 1st of July is less likely to be a Saturday (or Thursday) than it is any other day of the week and therefore shouldn’t they feel special that they got to see one like this? There won’t be another one like it until 2023, after all. This did nothing to help.

220