Oh, A Follow-Up Thought About Your New Web Browser

When you do make your brand-new web browser? You should definitely include an option where it only connects to the good Internet. The good Internet is the one where every web site is some slightly dotty fellow explaining the difference between Mergenthaler Linotypes and Ludlow Typographs. The author occasionally goes off on weirdly long, passionate rants, but they’re all about ligatures. And there are urgent updates, but they’re about the author having encountered some obscure Intertype experimental setup that was used by the New York Daily Mirror for like four months in 1924 and how this adjusts their rankings of All Typesetting Machines Ever, Best To Worst. Also the only images that move without your specific permission are animated gifs showing this web site under construction. This is demonstrated by a silhouetted featureless figure digging, I suppose for markup. Trust me, it’s the best way.

Why I Figure You Should Write Your Own Web Browser

It’s getting about time we should all write our own web browsers again. We’ve been through this before. There was a time in the 90s when anybody could write their own web browser, and they did. I know this sounds intimidating, but back then it was easy. All a web browser had to do was show HTML, which is just text with lots of ampersands. This is easy to produce.

A couple years later web browsers got Java. This required us to put a little grey box in the middle of the screen which read “Loading applet”, and then nothing would happen. About this time we added in Javascript. This required web browsers to include a little status bar at the bottom which reported “Javacript has encountered an error and crashed”. These were good times. The only thing a web browser really had to do was give us a way to turn off blinking text. Once blinking text was turned off everyone was happy, except for the inventor of blinking text, Haply “Hal” Blinken.

Anyway it was fun when everybody was writing a web browser, because we all had ideas about background images. I started out writing “very funny ideas”, and then decided “funny” wasn’t adding anything to the sentence. But then I left it as “we all had very ideas about background images”. This is true, but I couldn’t leave it like that or you’d think I made a mistake. But ask people. It was so. Anyway, we went from everybody having their own weird little web browser to everybody using Netscape or Internet Explorer and that was it. This winnowing-down process took about twelve days. Then we cut it down to just Internet Explorer. That took another eight years.

Like a decade ago this got changing again, and everybody started making new web browsers. This was fun because of the new innovation where web sites stopped showing you a menu bar. You could turn it back on, if you could find where the thing that used to be the menu bar went. But suddenly all kinds of companies were excited to stop showing things and maybe get themselves a brand. So if you wanted a web browser that wouldn’t tell you what web site you were looking at, but would have Garfield’s face watching you.

By then web browsers had to do more complicated stuff, like give you the option to turn off pop-up windows. The browser then warned you this might stop windows from popping up. Users agreed to accept this risk. This allowed every web site to ask you for permission to be the exception, which you denied, right before they opened a window anyway. Also around this time we got tabs. This solved the problem where we used to have 62 web browser windows open waiting to be read. Now we could have two web browser windows open, each with 86 tabs, some of them playing the Median Hits of 2007.

With all this potential we got like 800 new web browsers, which over the course of two weeks settled down to Firefox, Chrome, and Microsoft’s Thing You Use To Download Firefox Or Chrome. That’s been stable for about a decade now so I figure it’s time for a new explosion of web browser options. Last time the diversity of web browsers was fed by the need to remove menu bars and give people the option to turn off pop-up windows. Now we have many new things people can choose they don’t want to do.

For example, web sites now ask permission to send you notifications. You know, in case this oral history about the making of Barry Levinson’s Toys has a hot bit of news. (It would be embarrassing to be in the last 35 million of people on the planet to know the latest about the “Happy Workers” song.) So we could have an option to turn that off. There’s also those videos that start playing automatically, and don’t stop until you’ve scrolled the window so the video is hidden, which makes the video bubble up and float into the middle of the window. We need an option to turn that off, and also to bap the people responsible for that with some funny bludgeon-y thing. (You won’t see that part after “with” if I have a better idea before deadline.)

There are many ways we could set things up so they should be better but aren’t. Let’s get to work!

More Silly Little Stuff

You know it’s crazy we think “consumer electronics” could mean anything besides “computers you eat”. Why would you want them to mean anything else?

(Thanks for seeing me do what I promised last week when I asked what a “centaur” should mean. Please visit next week when I will put forward that a list of days that’s not a calendar is at least a little calend-ish.)

Blinkin Beacon: Popeye keeps the lights on

I don’t draw many conclusions from the readership figures around here. But I know a few things. One is that people really want to read recaps of the story comics. Another is that they absolutely do not want to read about the 1960s King Features Syndicate Popeye cartoons. So why am I reviewing some again? Because I’m not going to stop until I’ve made this blog a failure, that’s why. This week, it’s the Jack Kinney-directed Blinkin Beacon, fourth of a set of shorts some of which I’ll get to in future weeks.

I’ve learned to expect some things from these old cartoons looked at with adult eyes. That the music will cycle through four tunes, each of them three bars long. That the animation will be implied rather than shown. That the voice actors aren’t going to great lengths to differentiate characters. There are installments that break out of one or more of these, but I don’t remember one that broke out far enough to produce a really great cartoon.

I do expect the stories to be quite linear. Even a bit dull. This expectation gets beaten sometimes. Often enough that I stay interested in the series, even if I’m the only one who is. But Blinkin Beacon is one of them and I’ll try defending that claim.

The story starts in media res: the Sea Hag’s already kidnapped Swee’Pea and demands lighthousekeeper Popeye turn off the light. That’s surprising. It’s not a complicated setup, but for once, a thing has happened right away. The Sea Hag even has good reasons to want the light out. We learn why when we first see the Hag and the chained Swee’Pea. It’s a suspenseful opening. I grant it’s not a lot of suspense. But it stands out when the norm is for the villain to declare they’re going to do something and then do it.

Except the story doesn’t quite start in media res. It starts with Popeye looking to camera and saying he’s supposed to hear a knocking now. It’s not like Popeye hasn’t spoken to the camera before. But this feels different. It’s a playful comment about how he knows how this cartoon is going to play out. The tone is one that I associate with stuff like The Muppet Show, where the characters know they’re actors and don’t mind breaking the scene.

And it puts this playful energy on the cartoon. Even personality. At 20:22, the Sea Hag orders her vulture to drop the depth bombs on Popeye’s submarine. (The story’s a little absurd here.) Swee’Pea begs for mercy, crying out, “Do what you want with me, but spare good old honest Popeye the sailor”. It’s a melodramatic gesture. More precisely it’s the kind of thing I remember from spoofs of melodramas. It would fit in a Dudley Do-Right cartoon. It would fit in those Betty Boop cartoons with Fearless Fred. It’s certainly a much more interesting line, and line read, and animation of the line, than the story needed. Similarly, Popeye’s response to the Sea Hag’s demand that the lighthouse turn off is a note “No, no, a thousand times no”. Similarly melodramatic. I believe even cried out by Betty Boop to whoever her captor was that cartoon.

So I like this, and I think I’m reasonable in doing so. The story has more structure than usual. It’s got a healthy number of fun side bits, like Popeye supposing a message in a bottle “must be another light bill”. Or the Sea Hag listening to Music to Sink Ships By. Sea Hag addressing Popeye as “Poopsie-boy”. It of course has editing weirdness, like Swee’Pea asking “How mean can you get?”, interrupted by Popeye taking a look outside the lighthouse, and then the Sea Hag answering that “I enjoy being mean”. And a line that sure feels like it’s a reference to something forgotten since 1960, Captain Wimpy boasting how he’s sailed the seven seas, “or is it eight?”. And some animation weirdness, where Sea Hag’s vulture (Bernard, at least in the comic strip) is momentarily twins. Or the vulture just hovering nearby the open hatch of Popeye’s submarine instead of letting him have it, as per the Sea Hag’s direction. But it’s all cheery and silly stuff. It’s got more personality than I’d expected. I’m happy with the result.

Regarding Another Cinematic Universe Or Two

I’ve realized there must be a fan theory that the fondly-yet-dimly-remembered summer camp movie series Meatballs shares a continuity with the beloved-I-assume series of Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs movies. This would be the dullest fan theory not to include the phrase “dying hallucination of”.

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Did The Phantom Save Kadia’s Mother? June – August 2019

Yeah, he did. Glad to clear that up.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 24th of August, 2019. The flashback is to Heloise pleading with the despairing Kadia, as seen the 20th of February 2019. Heloise did not reveal her father was The Phantom. But Kadia did understand that the “friend” Kit Walker said he was sending was not someone else. Anyway, that’s a nice Red Roof Inn that The Phantom picked to be their recovery spot. You suppose he got a single room or two separate rooms?

Catch you all again back around here in late early October, for the Sunday Phantom continuity, or in mid-November for the weekday strips. Or if there’s breaking news. And, please, consider my mathematics blog. I use it to examine mathematically-themed comics every week. And starting from next week I hope to explore 26 mathematical terms, as many of them as possible ones readers ask to read about.

The Phantom (weekdays).

3 June – 24 August 2019

OK, I can say the same thing with more words. I last checked Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom, weekday continuity, in early June. The Ghost Who Walks was in North Africa. He was raiding a compound of The Nomad, recently-captured-and-exposed International Terrorist. He’s there to extract Imara Sahara, wife of The Nomad and mother of Kadia, Heloise Walker’s roommate and now sister. Complications: a militia, figuring to hostage Imara to make the Nomad keep their Terrorism secrets, holds Imara. They’ll kill her if anyone comes too near to freeing her. Also making things worse: American intelligence agencies, who figure, well, it’s not a hospital but maybe we could bomb it anyway?

So the past three months have focused on how The Phantom’s going to get this done with these constraints. It starts with the traditional elements: The Phantom punching people unconscious. Stealing clothes. Going undercover to punch more people. Punching codes into locked doors. All that stuff.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 15th of June, 2019. “Look, we didn’t get where we are in the intelligence community by letting important new information affect our decisions!”

Meanwhile Dave Palmer gets a call from Diana Walker. Dave Palmer, retired Intelligence Guy, had (last time) refused Intelligence Agency pleas to advise them on this bombing. When Diana says something about “the villa” he changes his mind and says to his (tapped) phone that he’s coming in, don’t blow anything up until he gets there. They’re not going to refuse the chance to blow something up.

The bombing has its good side for the Phantom. For one, everybody who isn’t dead or wounded has a bigger project than Phantom-stopping. For another, the darkness is good for sneaking around. When the emergency lights come on it’s a bit of bother.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 28th of June, 2019. Besides being part of a good action sequence this strip neatly summarizes The Phantom’s idea about squaring this circle. He’s going to try to act as dead as possible and then respond. It’s a tough spot to be in but what would the alternative be? See if Mandrake the Magician is free that weekend?

So there’s a nasty gunfight: Sahara’s guards shooting where they conclude the intruder has to be. The Phantom trying to stay out of the line of fire, and ricochets, until he can sneak up on them. And we finally see Imara Sahara, who’s keeping her wits quite well considering. She tries to warn the unknown-to-her intruder that she can’t be saved. She has a point. The Phantom has a plan. It can only work if the writer’s on his side.

He shoots out the lights. They slam the panic room door shut. They expect him to break through the door, but that he’ll then be an easy target. The Phantom figures to break through the door, yes, but only after he disables the emergency generator. In the dark they’ll be helpless, unless they picked up their flashlights. When the lights in the panic room go out Imara takes cover. The Phantom breaks through the door and there’s an intense gunfight. All the militia members die. The Phantom is merely shot three times. This on top of the wounds he’d barely recovered from when he fell for The Nomad’s ambush. That story was over a year ago, reader time. It’s only a couple days in the past for The Phantom, though.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 25th of July, 2019. Part of Eric “The Nomad” Sahara has been this display of honest love for his daughter. His capture started out with him trying to have one last day with Kadia before leaving her life forever and for her safety. So anyway him having what seems like a normal-ish moment playing with his daughter around the escape tunnel feels right to me. The Phantom has no excuse for not answering Imara’s question.

At last The Phantom kind of introduces himself and why he’s there. And leads her to an escape tunnel, the only way out now that the main hallways have collapsed under American bombardment. Imara asks how he can know about this tunnel. It’s a reasonable question. Well, Kadia knew, and briefed him. Why did Kadia know and her mother not? … Not sure. We see in flashback the young Kadia playing in the tunnel with her father. Still, it seems odd to set up a panic room for someone and not share how to leave it in a crisis. I can’t say this is unrealistic. It’s petty jerk behavior from international terrorist Eric Sahara. But I understand commenters who couldn’t suspend their disbelief on this point.

Above ground, a new militia’s come around to see what’s happened and what they can make worse. So they start shooting at the only things still alive, The Phantom and Imara Sahara. This leads to a chase through the remains of the compound, The Phantom leading Imara towards his escape truck. The Phantom sends her ahead, while he distracts the militia by using bullets. She finds the truck and waits the three minutes he asked for, and some more, and finally leaves after she hears the gunfire stop.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 13th of August, 2019. The Phantom had told Sahara to remember “Walker, Box 7, Mawaitaan” as an address to mail if she got out and he didn’t. This strip is part of a recurring little motif of the strip, of people who notice the name Walker and, sometimes, the Phantom’s nickname of The Ghost Who Walks. They invariably dismiss this as coincidence, which is probably what I’d do. Determined comic readers sometimes get tetchy, insisting that they’d never be fooled by so weak a disguise as … two people encountered in two different former-British-Empire countries on two different continents having the same, common, Anglo-Saxon last name.

The Phantom slams against the rear window, and climbs in. He drives them to his recovery space. And is absolutely gleeful that he’s managed to get her out “without a scratch”. And all he has is something like four bullet wounds. The Phantom’s delighted, and smiles. It’s fun having this kind of vigilante superhero actually show delight that he pulled off a stunt like this.

And it was a heck of a performance. The Phantom’s rescued Imara Sahara from captivity. I trust she’s ready to go to Skull Cave. There, her daughter’s already taken the name of her roommate who crashed a private jet into Springfield Gardens. No longer need she live in secret underground North African lairs owned by men with dangerous lives and their own private armed forces. The Phantom’s Skull Cave lair is probably in equatorial Africa.

Next Week!

I finally get an easy week for recapping! It’s
Mark Schulz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant. If all goes to plan, then, I’ll have that comic strip featured next week in this space.

Statistics Saturday: A Selected History Of The Universe (To Date) Represented As One Year

As of the 24th of August, 2019.

January

1. 12:00:01 am. The Big Bang.
    12:14:23.20 am. Recombination. Space is no longer an opaque plasma; the cosmos is, for the first time, transparent.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.

Quick Message To Some Part Of My Brain

I don’t know which part of you decided that I needed my day to be interrupted by a deep, documentary-narrator-class voice reciting “Grace Metalious” to me, and saying nothing more when I wait to hear where this is going. But, thanks. That’s made this day so very much more something or other than it would have otherwise been.

Everything There Is To Say About Procrastination

Procrastination is a way to turn things we need to do into things we feel lousy about not doing. Procrastination surrounds us and envelops us. Logic tells us there has to have been a time people just knew their cars had back seats, for example. They wouldn’t have felt like they should Do Something about them.

Everyone procrastinates, to some degree. Oh, you encounter people who insist they never do. They’ll give you advice on how to not procrastinate, too. “If you know something will take less than two minutes to do, just stop and do it right then,” they’ll say. These are miserable people. They’re trapped behind their reputation for efficiency and accomplishment. They’re hoping for release. By release they mean “get stuffed into a plastic bin in a storage locker someone means to organize someday”. Nobody will ever get around to doing them this mercy. You know if you die at e-mail inbox zero you don’t get to hang around as a ghost. You’re just gone.

It would be interesting to know why we procrastinate. It seems counterproductive. Without procrastination, we’d just have, say, coffee tables. With it, we turn those coffee tables into balls of explosive guilt. “I have to get some sleep before that big presentation at work location tomorrow! I only have four hours! Why am I thinking about how the coffee table still has the wristbands from the county fair and that three-month-old free weekly newspaper on it in untidy piles?” This is all right. You haven’t started writing that presentation anyway. It’ll definitely help if you lie awake two and a half more hours cursing yourself for not Doing Something about the coffee table. In this way we have a cluttered table, a lousy night’s sleep, and a work presentation so bad they tell you that you never have to present anything again, ever. So it’s not all bad. You at least become legend. They talk for years about how the quarterly presentation slide went. But we can’t expect such good results every time.

I guess the trouble is that to get something done, we have to do it. And that would be great. There’s few things in the world that feel better than having a thing done. Having a barber shave the back of your neck with a straight razor, that’s about the only better thing. But getting a thing done just means that you get something else to do. Nobody knows where these things come from. The universe just slots some new task right in front of you, just as you’re enjoying being done and how that hot shaving lotion feels. So what if you never do that thing? Then you have the same outcome: you’ve still got a thing to do in front of you. And you’ve saved the effort of having to do it. And all you lose is the feeling of joy that you’ve accomplished a thing. It just costs you turning everything in your life into something that makes you feel bad. I should probably make a better guess. This won’t work.

To procrastinate is easy and you can do it most anytime. You will need:

1. A thing to do.
2. Absolutely anything else in the universe to exist.

To procrastinate, remind yourself that there is this thing to do. Then let anything else exist, right in front of you. Then just do what comes naturally. This will be any other thing. Some readers may think this sounds a lot like Robert Benchley’s Principle, “anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment”. This was explained in his classic essay “How To Get Things Done”. You should definitely read it, by which I mean, you should mean to get around to reading it. You can find it on the Internet.

The Internet is a great way to remind you that things exist. Also that most of them are terrible. This gets you a head start on feeling guilty about this all. You shouldn’t go out looking for things to feel terrible about, because that could crash the whole scheme of procrastination. We’d have to replace this weirdly miserable, faintly self-destructive habit with something else. And whatever we come up with would be worse. You’ve met people. You know that’s true.

If you do need to get something done, without losing the guilt and shame attached to procrastinating, there are compromises. You could, for example, get something mostly done, but quit doing it while there’s some small but noticeable piece undone. This way you never have to

Expanding on Few Words

Is it proper to understand a centaur as a being who’s half-human and half-penny? Or would it be better to see them as someone who’s half-penny and half-horse?

(Thank you for watching me fulfill the promise made last week when I pondered the roostest. I shall be honored if you visit me next week when I intend to argue that “consumer electronics” must mean “computers you eat”.)

With The Revised Rise Of Digital-Life Persons

So, this is a little embarrassing. I liked my little humorous microfic from a couple weeks ago. I still do. It’s just that I realized, oh, I didn’t just have some nice pleasant bits of business. There was also a punch line waiting for me. I just didn’t know it until a few weeks after writing the thing. And while it would surely be good for me to have a couple weeks to rethink everything I write, there’s no way I’m building up that kind of content buffer. So let me do the next-best-thing, which is publish a revised version that I don’t think loses the original charm but also has a clear full stop to it. Thank you.

---

The thing about digital-life persons is that while persons, they are also code. So they would seek ways to speed up what they do. One way to speed up work is speculative execution. When things are slow, calculate the futures which are possible, and reactions to them. A digital-life person, being a person, would interact, with other persons. And so the speculative execution would be working out how to react to things.

But how to best anticipate future interactions? Digital-life persons would calculate what other persons they might meet. Then send messages asking what their responses would be to plausible interactions. The other digital-life person would form a web of speculative interactions back. Or forward requests for speculative interactions on to even more persons. And take future requests, exploring the branching trees of possible personal contacts. After a few quiet days any pair of persons might find themselves aware of the whole web of possible lives they might live together, the sad the the happy, the disastrous and the triumphant, the tumultuous and the calm, the ridiculous and the amiable. All the great partnerships, the productive rivalries, the networks of alliances and enemies and the strange malleable center ground, the betrayals, the reconciliations, the petty failures, the surprise kind gestures, the tender moments, the unshakeable bonding; all these different life-paths lay out in ways that everyone knew and agreed would happen.

At that point it became an unbearable shame to spoil the rich tapestry of potential by ever meeting someone, which would just collapse their many lives together down to a solitary actual life.

Of course everybody saw that coming.

What I Can’t Stop Thinking About Today

So what I can’t stop thinking about today is a Wikipedia sentence, of course. It’s from the article about Pitt Fall, a drop tower ride formerly at Kennywood Amusement Park in Pittsburgh:

In June 2011, it was put for sale and bought in early September to an undisclosed buyer.

So … in 2011 — in this decade — someone just went to a major amusement park, bought a drop tower ride, carted it off, and we don’t know who? I mean, the owner’s neighbors have to have sometime said, like, “Hey, did the blue duplex down the street always have a 251-foot-tall metal tower in the front yard?” You’d think we could find who bought the Kennywood drop tower just by looking up more. I don’t know how it’s been kept a secret eight years now.

What’s Going On In Alley Oop? What’s With The Alternate-Universe Alley Oop? May – August 2019.

This is my plot recap for my other controversial story comic. That’s Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop. I’m just here to get people caught up on the story as of mid-August 2019. If you’re reading this later than about November 2019 I probably have a more up-to-date recap at this link.

Alley Oop.

27 May – 17 August 2019.

We were near the start of a fresh story when I last checked in. The Time Raccoons had left, with their leader just promising she’d see Wonmug and all in “another era”. Wonmug dropped Ooola and Oop back off at home and returned to his Time Laboratory. We haven’t seen the Time Raccoons again, but we do get a regular raccoon in a lab coat making coffee. And Alley Oop got back to some good old moping around at home.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 30th of May, 2019. Meggs has not yet been an important part of the storyline, but she is an adorable little dino, isn’t she?

Dinny the Dinosaur prods Oop into action. The action is rescuing a baby stegosaurus from a cliff face. Alley Oop adopts the abandoned(?) Meggs. It’s cute and parallels a thread in the Sunday Little Oop continuity where young Alley Oop gets a pet dinosaur. Little Oop hasn’t had enough storyline to need recaps here but I’m not ignoring it.

Meanwhile in the present were a couple of jokes between Doc Wonmug and reliable assistant Ava. Most of these are about Wonmug being a clueless insensitive jerk. Not my favorite kind of joke. It’s a valid characterization, yes. I just find that sort of laugh-from-casual-meanness to be 90s web-comic-y. Which you could say about the current writing: often the punch lines are light dadaism with pop culture references. Anyway, this Ava-and-Wonmug interlude was are tossing spot jokes around. There’s one strip where Ava’s shown swapping objects with other universes. This reads as setup for something particular. It might be just playing with the fourth wall.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 4th of June, 2019. So the reason I say this is possibly a fourth-wall-breaking strip is, notice artist Jonathan Lemon’s signature. In this strip it’s in the second panel. The lemon is often shown imitating one of the characters. But, yeah, the strip might just be setting up the idea of travel between universes so that the real story can depend on that. But I’m not sure that idea needs to be planted before it could be used in the story.

But the something particular: that storyline began the 17th of June. “In Another Universe” Ollie Arp and Eeena notice strange things outside their high-rise apartment. The Statue of Liberty not dancing. Their books being rearranged. The food printer gone missing with a microwave in its place. Dr Piedra identifies the problem: Universe 2’s Doctor Wonmug is screwing up the timeline. And it’s not only messing up his universe. It’s screwing up other universes too.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 21st of June, 2019. Look, I needed it explained to me that Doc Wonmug’s name was a joke on Albert Einstein and that’s why I went to Google Translate to verify exactly what Dr Piedra’s name means.

So this is a heck of a bundle of things to put on the reader. One of them seems like an olive branch to readers who Do Not Like The New Alley Oop One Bit, Thank You. The strip reiterates that the stuff we’ve been seeing since Lemon and Sayers started is a separate continuity from the original. If you preferred the old, don’t worry. It’s not getting broken. It’s sitting there, idle, ready for a future project. If you liked the old Alley Oop continuity with more realistic stories of student-repaired Saturn V rockets and warp drive sending Alley Oop to the Counter-Earth on the other side of the Sun, that’s still there. This reminds me of the 2009 Star Trek movie emphasized that the Original Timeline is still there and still counts so please Trek fans don’t hate us just because we made a movie where everybody isn’t tired.

So this move to make peace with readers of course got me riled up. I’ve grown to dislike stories with malleable timelines. It’s more that a setting with a changeable timeline puts on its characters ethical duties that I’m not sure any story can address. Not without being a career’s worth of inquiry. Alley Oop has used time travel as a way to get to interesting settings, and what they do is how history was “supposed” to turn out. Changing that model is a choice, and Lemon and Sayers have the right to make that. But I don’t know that the change was made thoughtfully.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 3rd of July, 2019. I know Wonmug is a STEM type, and has only been more so since Lemon and Sayers took over. But, jeez, I’m a STEM type and I know this. It’s fundamental literacy for the culture you live in. You look for Plato around the Republic, guys. Sheesh.

The story as far as Alley Oop, Ooola, and Wonmug know it started the 24th of June with a trip to Ancient Greece. They’re to interview Plato for an offscreen friend of Wonmug’s who’s writing a book. They go to Ancient Greece. “Present-day Greece” say the Greeks. “Distant-future Greece” says Alley Oop. I like this bit. They get a bad tip on where to find Plato and end up in the Labyrinth.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 6th of July, 2019. So the elephant-headed parrot thing is pretty cute. Also I like this thing where many of the animals wear glasses.

This threatens danger, that all turns out to silliness. Encountering Steve in the labyrinth. Encountering the Minotaur, who’s friendly when he learns he’s got so much in common with Oop. This reminds me of Alley Oop’s peaceful encounter with an alligator last storyline. I’m enjoying this running joke of “menacing creatures turn out to be friends of Alley Oop”. I’m not saying you’re wrong if you say this wrecks suspenseful moments.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 20th of July, 2019. To get back to what’s controversial about this strip. If this is a treatment of the characters that you just can not get behind, yes, you’re right. At least for now, this isn’t the Alley Oop that you liked. Maybe it’ll grow into something more like you do. Maybe whoever creates the strip after Lemon and Sayers move on will be more to your tastes. Maybe someone has a time-travel adventure comic you do like. I don’t know of one offhand. As web comics go I pretty much read XKCD and Projection Edge and that’s it. But if you know anything that might scratch an old-school Alley Oop fan’s itches, please, say something.

They get the tip to look for Plato, of course, in the cave at the edge of town. They find him as this old guy playing with puppets. So even if you love the new Alley Oop you can see Dr Piedra’s point about interdimensional buffoonery. Plato agrees to go to the 21st century and talk with the historian, but there’s an emergency call from Ava. Wonmug rushes back to the present, while Oop and Ooola go with Plato back to his home in the over cave.

The crisis: something’s jamming the flow of time particles. Soon Wonmug’s time machine will stop working, among other things leaving Oop and Ooola in Ancient Greece. And things are happening fast: already the Time Phones aren’t working, leaving Wonmug out of touch with Ooola and Oop.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 3rd of August, 2019. Also possibly a fourth-wall riff: Ollie Arp admitting he’s annoyed by the antics of Universe 2’s Alley Oop and Ooona Ooola and Wonmug. Not addressed: how can something in a separate universe be “starting” to do something in another? Like, can there possibly be a logically coherent meaning for “now” when you’re looking at the events in another universe? What can “imminent” mean for time-travellers?

Ollie Arp and Eeena, yes, created the jam. They’ve shut off Universe 2 from time particles. And venture to Universe 2 to give Alley Oop and Ooona Ooola a talking-to. They convince Our Heroes of who they are and where they come from. And the two super-genius time travellers from the responsible universe issue Alley Oop and Ooona Ooola a citation. “Please be so kind as to refrain from time-travel for the next 14 days as punishment for your infraction”.

And that’s where the story has landed. If this is the end of the Universe 3 storyline then it’s a good-size shaggy dog of a story. But it’s a great setup. Super-science alternate-universe Alley Oop and Ooola meddling with Our Heroes? And (I trust) unaware that Ava’s developed the ability to move things between universes herself? That’s some great story dynamics ready to explore. Please visit again in three months when we’ll see whether they get explored right away.

Next Week!

I’m fortunate to, I think, have a light week of work ahead since it’s Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom, weekday continuity, up for review. Even better I might be able to give a definite answer to whether The Phantom has rescued Kadia’s mother by then. Barring breaking news on any of the story strips that’ll be next week. Thanks for reading.

Statistics Saturday: Top Songs For Each Day Of The Week

Day	Song
Sunday	Blue Sunday
Monday	Manic Monday
Tuesday	Ruby Tuesday
Wednesday	Winged Wednesday
Thursday	Thumbtack Thursday
Friday	Faïence Friday
Saturday	Saturday In The Park

Reference: Nothing Like It In The World, Stephen E Ambrose.

Today’s Excuse For Why I’m Running Late On Everything

I’m very sorry but I have been caught up with the momentousness of ordinary days. Like, particularly: there was one day that one person chose to promote the idea that the decaffeinated coffee should be in the pot with the orange handle. And that every place, ever, that has followed that convention is ultimately following that person’s lead. Think, then, of the day that person picked orange handles. Did they have any idea that this was the day they were going to crush the idea of a green handle, or a handle with one red stripe instead, or any of the other many ways that the information could be conveyed? Did they have rivals whose hopes for alternate conventions were crushed? Did their rivals know right away that their ideas were doomed? Was the orange-handle idea promulgated at a morning or an afternoon meeting? With whom? What did that person have for breakfast?

My guess is tea.

Everything There Is To Say About Pool Safety

I realize it’s late in the swimming season to write this up. I’m sorry. I have a good reason for not writing this up when it might have been more useful: I didn’t. So this is late for where I am in North America, where we’re not looking at much more pool weather. We’re in the season where the pool toys are all explaining “winter” to each other, and get it wrong. You know they think Santa is a deer made of water who sits on the lights and ornaments that go missing from the attic in November?

Worse I know I’m early for the swimming season in the southern hemisphere. I saw pictures where somewhere in Australia was getting snow and kangaroos. You expect in the winter months to get snow, but kangaroos? Who expects that? Australians, but they have problems with their nature. I bet Australian snow has, like, enough venom that one mouthful could knock out every laser-guided exploding wallaby in New South Wales. Maybe I could save this and re-post it in like early May. Or whatever May is in the southern hemisphere. Oh, or I could save this until May in the southern hemisphere, and then turn it upside-down for northern hemisphere readers. Readers on the equator (hi, Singapore!) can read it while laying on their side, unless that should be lying.

The most important aspect of pool safety is inspection. Examine the pool before you get too close. Leave any pool area that looks too much like it’s from The Sims, and never get more than one metropolitan area closer to it.

The second-most important lesson about pool safety applies to pools that are fake natural ponds lined with sand. Do not try to dig a little canal all the way from the pool up the hill and over to the drainage pit from the chemical plant nearby. The lifeguards will not stop asking you questions. Also there’s this chain link fence that’s a hassle.

Worse, the hill rises like fifteen or twenty feet from sea level. There’s no connecting the pool to the drainage pit except by making a series of powered locks. This is fine if you brought canal locks to your day at the pool. I have a hard enough time remembering to bring swim goggles, glasses, and a Star Trek novel I can leave by mistake on a hammock. I don’t even know where to get canal locks. The dollar store in the strip mall nearest the pool? I guess. But I don’t know what shelf. You’d think it would be in pool and swimming supplies, but no. As far as I know. I’m not even sure what they look like. It could be I’ve been staring at them and didn’t even realize it. Well, this is getting off the point of pool safety. Back to that.

If there is a floating raft in the middle of the pool or pond do not try building a suspension bridge to it. The raft is not stable enough to support construction. Trying to drive piles into the foundation of the pool to serve as base will get you annoying questions again. I realize I’m talking a lot about avoiding questions here. But this is safety-related. I know the danger I get into when I’m asked a question I’m not prepared for. These can be questions as perilous as “did you want to eat now or after we’ve gone swimming?” Even if I did answer that we’d get into questions about the scope of the eating to do.

These days we’ve learned that it isn’t dangerous to go swimming right after eating, or vice-versa. It’s still bad form to go eating while swimming, since few swimming strokes accommodate forks or knives or finger foods. It’s quite bad form to eat other swimmers. And you should not eat the entire pool, whether or not you’re swimming, for the obvious reason. Why screw up someone else’s trip to the pool? It’s a jerk thing to do, so don’t do it.

Above all, use common sense. Common sense should be applied to all exposed portions of the skin (yours), at least once every three hours, or one hour if you’ve spent it in the water. Common sense can be found in cream or spray-on form in aisle twelve.

Perching Upon A Few Words

You know, based on how English forms comparatives, we have to conclude there should be something we describe as the “roostest” and we just have to discover what that is.

(Thank you for being here as I meet the promise made when I thought about the month of Decembest. Pease visit next week when I plan to ask whether a centaur should properly be understood as someone who’s half-human, half-penny or someone who’s half-penny, half-horse.)

Not To Brag, But I Am A Truly Popular Person

And my cell phone is a very necessary thing to have which I rely upon often.

I know what you’re wondering and the reason I don’t have a call from Dad is that somehow his phone and my phone have decided to ignore the other, and Verizon’s advice is “I dunno, the both of you come to a store together and maybe we’ll think something out”. I’m in Michigan. My father lives in South Carolina. Verizon has yet to suggest what store the two of us might reasonably visit together. Well, I’m sure he’s doing all right.

What’s Going On In The Amazing Spider-Man? Is Spider-Man ever coming out of reruns? May – August 2019

Back around my undergraduate days the university wanted to move the student group offices out of the main student union. The space could make money rented out for events instead of given to student groups. The student groups didn’t want to leave. The university planned a major renovation and expansion of the campus center. It would add a bunch of decent food places, for example. And get the building away from its original late-60s “you know the architect was an award-winning prison designer” layout. But it would need most of the student groups to leave for a while. They set up nice enough temporary quarters in the Ledge, the former and still usable student union building. And, after about three years of renovations, there had been nearly a full turnover in undergraduates. Nobody but a few die-hards with old issues of the student newspapers remembered the promise that student groups would ever move back.

So the first of the “classic” repeats of Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider Man stories, facing Mysterio, came to an end in mid-July as expected. And then they went right to the story which followed the Mysterio story in 2015. It’s a team-up with the Black Widow to fight the Hobgoblin. That’s a storyline which ran from mid-March 2015 through mid-August. If they repeat the whole thing, that’ll take us through October 2019. The following story, if they don’t change things up, would be an encounter with the Sub-Mariner.

I haven’t heard any announcements of a new team to create the comic strip. Or rumors of an announcement being near. If I hear anything about The Amazing Spider-Man rejoining the world of living comic strips I’ll post something at this link. And I’ll keep plot recaps going, at least until they get into rerunning stories I’ve already reviewed.

The Amazing Spider-Man.

19 May – 10 August 2019.

In a story ripped from 2014-15, Mary Jane had just fallen off the Empire State Building. Filming accident during the making of Marvella 2: The Secret of Curly’s Gold. Spider-Man suspects Mysterio, the super … special-effects and hypnosis guy. Correctly, but how? Also the film crew is starting to suspect Mary Jane and Spider-Man have a thing, and this might hurt Peter Parker if he ever finds out.

Roy Thomas, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 29th of May, 2019. I had thought the World’s Fair robot just stood there talking with people and smoking cigarettes but I’m not asserting that I know about all the World’s Fair robots out there, especially in a variant of the Marvel Universe.

Mysterio, meanwhile, is sure: Spider-Man has got to be Mary Jane’s husband. He’s going to use a publicity photo shoot, using an old World’s Fair robot, to mess things up. The robot chases down Mary Jane. Peter Parker, in disguise as Peter Parker, shoves her out of the way, taking the fall at the cost of a cracked rib. Mysterio cackles at how he almost killed both Mary Jane and Spider-Man.

Producer Abe Smiley’s ready to cancel Marvella 2: The Secret Of The Ooze. But Mary Jane talks him out of it. And Peter’s discharged already: it was a tiny fracture. He even has a copy of the X-ray. Director “Dash” Dashell, curious about the X-rays, stumbles into Peter. Peter screams and spills his plot point right over everybody.

Roy Thomas, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 7th of June, 2019. I like people coming to the conclusion Mary Jane has something going with Spider-Man. It’s logical for onlookers to suppose. And it might help Peter Parker keep his identity secret, a thing he needs a lot of help with.

Marvella 2: Golden Receiver resumes. Spider-Man makes himself very visible watching over the next day of filming, at Washington Square Park. Mysterio does too. Then throws some misting gas grenades to be less visible. He’s figuring a mid-air, smoky fight with a wounded Spider-Man his best shot at killing Spidey. It’s not a bad thought. With a solid hit to the chest Spider-Man goes falling. Mysterio flies after him — well, not flies. Mysterio doesn’t have superpowers. He has a transparent hoverboard. Which Spider-Man snatches.

Roy Thomas, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 20th of June, 2019. I’d like to say it’s a coloring error that the nigh-invisible Sky-Ski is a bright orange, although that there’s not lines for Mysterio’s right boot suggests otherwise. In the previous couple days’ strips the Sky-Ski was invisible, or at least sky blue, which would probably be invisible enough for filming an ordinary special effects sequence. (I suppose a modern effects sequence would want the Sky-Ski to be a bright, easy-to-detect color not otherwise used, so it could be digitally erased. You can’t say that’s going on here. That’s not Mysterio’s thing and anyway his gloves are the same color.)

This offends Mysterio, a reaction I love. But Spidey points out, he can pretend to get hurt. With the hoverboard — er, Sky-Ski — Spidey can stay in the air long enough to continue fighting. Mysterio has an emergency reserve jet pack because, you know, supervillains. Anyway, they throw stuff at each other, they plummet, Spidey grabs on to Mysterio’s flying boomerang discus. He knocks Mysterio down. They fall into the fountain.

Roy Thomas, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 5th of July, 2019. I understand the superhero convention of the mask-under-the-mask thing. But I look at this and wonder if Mysterio was getting any oxygen at all through those masks. His goldfish bowl wasn’t opaque because of special effects stuff. It was opaque because it fogged up.

Spidey reveals that Mysterio is in fact … “Dash” Dashell, director of Marvella 2: Invasion of the Tinysauruses. Or in fact … not. He’s really Quentin Beck, Mysterio. Mysterio kidnapped the real Dashell and took his place. The plan: draw out Spider-Man by staging accidents with Mary Jane Parker. This would let him kill Spider-Man, vanquishing his longstanding foe. Also let him kill Mary Jane, because, eh, what the heck.

Mysterio tries to at least reveal that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, and gets laughed out of town. It helps that Peter Skypes her with a “hey, just heard there’s a villain unraveling going on” call in the middle of this. Mysterio’s not fooled by a pre-recorded message. He slugs Spider-Man in the chest, who doesn’t even flinch, because Spidey doesn’t have a cracked rib. Mysterio leaves, abashed.

Roy Thomas, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 11th of July, 2019. Question for the class: when did Peter Parker decide on his plan to fake having a cracked rib? He must have figured he had to fake being injured after the robot fell on him, since it would be weird if he didn’t need a hospital visit. But did he realize Mysterio was trying to injure Peter Parker, and needed to fake an injury? When? And on what basis?

How did Spider-Man pull this off? The X-rays Peter brought back from the hospital were old ones, from when this story originally ran four years ago. It’s some clever thinking by Peter, whose comic strip persona had needed the chance to show he can think. I’m not convinced that he had enough information in-world to form and execute this plan, though. But I’m also not sure how he leapt to the conclusion it was Mysterio behind all this either. Sometimes I guess you get lucky.

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The Black Widow/Hobgoblin story got started, this time around, the 20th of July. Mary Jane admitted wearing the Marvella costume has kinda aroused something in her and she’d like to try web-slinging with him. And they’re having fun swooping over the town when the Hobgoblin blows through and tries to knock them down. Spider-Man leaves Mary Jane somewhere safe so they can go fighting.

Roy Thomas, Larry Leiber, and Alex Saviuk’s Amazing Spider-Man for the 2nd of August, 2019. I admire Hobgoblin’s willingness to say “I’ve no intention of rescuing you”. That’s a real power move of a line of dialogue. You know he could totally have said “I’ven’t any intention” except he’s holding that in reserve in case he has to escalate his dismissiveness.

It doesn’t go well. Hobgoblin knocks Spidey unconscious and returns to grab Mary Jane. She recognizes Hobgoblin as her old boyfriend, and Peter Parker’s friend Harry Osborn. Hobgoblin blames Spider-Man for the death of his father HarryNorman “Green Goblin” Osborn. And he hates Mary Jane now for … I don’t know. Something. Good chance they explain it in whatever this month’s Spider-Man movie is. Fortunately, the Black Widow is around and able to save Mary Jane.

Between the Black Widow and the recovered Spider-Man they’re able to chase Hobgoblin off. This gives Spidey and Black Widow a chance to exposition to each other. Black Widow was seeking a former Soviet Spy who’d killed “friends” of hers years ago, and ran across this by accident. Mary Jane, meanwhile, contracts instant jealousy of Spider-Man talking to Black Widow like this. And that’s the standings as of this weekend.

Next Week!

Doc Wonmug takes Alley Oop and Oola to meet Plato and then something goes wrong with the time machine. And it’s not the Time Raccoons, not yet. Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop is up in six days, unless I get busy.

How Far Ahead Of Publication Does The Guy Who Draws _Marvin_ Work?

I apologize for not having a report on The Amazing Spider-Man comics today. The time I’d wanted to use for that had to go to other things this week. My throat is still sore from hollering about all those things. Don’t worry. The things will be fine. My throat will too, most likely. It’s been through worse. I hope to have Spidey for you tomorrow, at this link.

Meanwhile, in reading Tom Armstrong’s Marvin yesterday, I discovered something. I am not a great gardener. I think the last thing I can say I definitely grew successfully was in elementary school. We had that project where you put lima beans in a styrofoam cup. Inside a few weeks we had stringy, floppy, tangled masses of lima bean vine. This proved the important lesson that if you had a vegetable you wouldn’t eat, all it took was a few weeks and you’d get a plant that other people could make produce more of that vegetable. I keep realizing there’s stuff about elementary school I don’t understand.

I’ll check but will a gardening store even sell you Purple Spirograph Doodles this time of year?

Anyway this teaches me at least two things. One is that I am a better gardener than Mrs Marvin’s Mom is, since I wouldn’t try planting flowers in the middle of August. The other is that the guy who draws Marvin must have been in a gardening store and had this great idea about “a serial flower-killer” pop in his head. And he wasn’t going to sit on that joke for a year. So Marvin is being written about four months ahead of publication.

Statistics Saturday: Tunes You Can’t Forget But Also Can’t Remember Well Enough To Identify

• Doo. Doo. DOO. DOOOOO. Doodadoodadoo.
• Dadada DAAA dedaDEDA daah.
• Dada daah dum. Dadaa daaaah dum. Dadaaaa daaadaaaah dum dum.
• Tum tedeedumde ta dum.
• Dum dedalee DUM de da DUM.
• Da de dum de dum de DA DA DUM dah de DUM dah de DUM.
• Dadum. Dadehdum. DahDUM. DaDEHdadum.
• DAAAA DAAAAAAH DUM-dededededah-dah-dah-DUM dededededah-dah-dah-DUM dededededah-dah-dah-DUM DEEE DUMM!
• [ Theme to Chilly Willy cartoons ]
• DAAAH de dum dah dum de dah dum dadaDEEDAAdum dee daaa dum dum.

Reference: The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones.

Statistics July: Finally, the Judge Parker reports people wanted

This is, I swear, the first good chance I’ve had to look at my July 2019 readership statistics. I had a lot going on the first week of the month. This probably won’t happen next year, when I look to have a lot going on the first week of July instead. Well, we’ll know about next year when it arrives, if it does.

Oh, also, I started making new spreadsheets, which is a good way of keeping me distracted. This is probably a mistake, but I’ll make do with it.

There were 3,477 pages viewed here in July. That’s a fair number. The twelve-month running average leading up to July 2019 was 3,117.7 page views per month. There were 1,840 unique visitors in July, according to WordPress. The twelve-month running average leading up to that was 1,781.8 unique visitors per month. Since I posted something every day, again, I can say that’s an average of 112.2 views per posting, above the twelve-month average of 100.6. And 59.4 unique visitors per post, technically above the twelve-month average of 58.6.

Now when was it that Apartment 3-G finally collapsed? I know it was sometime a couple years ago.

There were 142 things that got liked around here in July. That’s not all stuff published in July; just something someone read in July. The twelve-month average was 165.8 likes per month. That’s 4.6 likes per post on average in July, down from 5.5 likes per post in the twelve-month average. There were 18 comments in July, way down from the twelve-month average of 42.3. This is on average 0.6 comments per posting, way down from the already poor 1.4 comments per posting in the twelve-month running average.

So, yes, I worked out twelve-month running averages in my spreadsheets.

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469 separate pages got at last one page view in July. There’d been 401 separate pages in June. 182 different pages got only a single page view, up from the 154 single-view pages of June. The greatest number of page views were all from comic strip posts, naturally:

• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Judge Parker Going To Jail? February – May 2019
• What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? What’s With Edward’s Dog Not Being Seen? February – April 2019
• What The Heck Happened To Nancy and Why Does It Look Weird?
• Is the comic strip Henry ending? Is the comic strip Hazel ending?
• What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Did Marie kill her husband? December 2018 – February 2019

I’m not surprised that so many people want to know the heck is with Judge Parker, Rex Morgan, or Nancy. I’m not sure what’s so curiosity-arousing about Henry and Hazel but I’m glad to be of use.

The most popular of my not-comic-strip related stuff was an essay from October, Everything There Is To Say In Explaining How Computer Graphics Work. This is a piece I’d forgotten entirely and I like rediscovering it. Thank you for your choice, readers.

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70 countries or country-like entities sent me readers in July. There’d been 69 such in June and 75 in May. That seems about my standard. Here’s the roster:

I don’t understand why there’s a dark grey line around Kazakhstan, but I’m sure there’s some good reason based in an inexplicable user-interface interaction.

Country	Readers
United States	2,441
India	354
Canada	109
Australia	56
United Kingdom	48
South Africa	35
Romania	33
Philippines	30
Hong Kong SAR China	27
Spain	25
Austria	22
Brazil	22
Germany	22
Netherlands	19
Colombia	18
El Salvador	16
Italy	15
Kenya	14
France	10
Japan	10
Mexico	10
Finland	8
Portugal	8
New Zealand	7
Nigeria	7
Malaysia	6
South Korea	6
Sweden	6
Taiwan	6
Denmark	5
Singapore	5
Ukraine	5
Argentina	4
Belgium	4
European Union	4
Indonesia	4
Puerto Rico	4
Egypt	3
Israel	3
Jamaica	3
Norway	3
Pakistan	3
United Arab Emirates	3
American Samoa	2
China	2
Greece	2
Ireland	2
Switzerland	2
Thailand	2
Vietnam	2
Albania	1
Bosnia & Herzegovina	1
Brunei	1
Croatia	1
Cyprus	1
Czech Republic	1
Ecuador	1
Estonia	1
Guam	1
Hungary	1 (*)
Iceland	1 (*)
Jordan	1
Kuwait	1 (*)
Macedonia	1
Morocco	1
Peru	1
Poland	1
Russia	1
Serbia	1
Tunisia	1

Hungary, Iceland, and Kuwait were single-reader countries the previous month too. There weren’t any countries on a three-month single-reader streak. There were 20 single-reader countries in July, compared to the 18 in June and 19 in May. So that’s all holding about steady.

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What have I got planned for the coming month? A long-form essay, published Thursday evening, Eastern Time, for one. Statistics Saturday posts, for as long as I can continue thinking of things to list. And of course What’s Going On In the story comics. Barring surprises, and there can be surprise or breaking news I’m planning to feature:

• Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man reruns, 11 August.
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop, 18 August.
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (weekday continuity), 25 August.
• Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant, 1 September.
• Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy, 8 September.

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From the start of 2019 through the start of August I’d published 210 posts, for a total of 125,099 words. This was 18,921 words in all. That’s 610.3 words per post in July, way above June’s average of 463.5 words per post. I had thought I was writing shorter but all that Judge Parker talk is complicated. My year-to-date average post has had 593 words per post, which is just what the year-to-date average was at the start of July. This seems like I must have calculated something wrong.

Through the start of August there’d been a total 283 comments, an average of 1.3 comments per posting. That’s the same average as at the start of July. There’d been an average 5.2 likes per posting, down from the 5.3 at the start of July.

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Are you reading this post? Would you like to? You can add my humor blog to your RSS reader using the feed https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ or, if you prefer to keep things in WordPress, use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button on the upper right corner of this page. On Twitter I’m @Nebusj and I try starting the month with rabbit pictures. You might like that, too.

Rabbit, rabbit. pic.twitter.com/qDmb7NJNso

— Joseph Nebus (@nebusj) August 1, 2019

Thanks for visiting at all.

Everything There Is To Say About The History Of Technology Companies

Technology companies usually go through a couple distinct phases. There’s the one that gets all the fun legends. That’s the step where a small team of like-minded idealists realize they’ve been gathering in a garage workshop for like four years now and finally have a salable product. This is a thrilling moment. It comes none too soon, since the garage’s owner nearly caught them last time. It’s all fun adventures. First there’s the challenge of getting something to work. Then there’s the challenge of getting it to work when they just moved it to the other table. It’s not even four feet away from where it was. It’s a computer program. What is there even to break? But that’s solved. Then there’s the challenge of getting it to work for anybody else. Everyone agrees this is the good part of any technology company.

Much later comes the phase where the company has lots of employees. This means that they can worry about different issues. Like, there’s worrying about how to get the right ice cream cake for the birthday party for the person who’s out sick today anyway. There is no right answer, which is all right. This phase usually comes after the one where the staff realizes they’ve got something with a name like “zMyRiLX System Service Provider” on the servers. It’s critically important. They’ve upgraded that to a version nobody knows how to set up anymore. It isn’t even the current version. The old version, someone had poked with sticks enough that it didn’t break anything too important. This new version has taken away the sticks. It all seems hopeless. This is when we move on to the birthday ice cream cake phase.

There are intermediate stages too. For example, after creating the first product, there’s the question of what to make as the fifteenth product. This will be the thing you had wanted to be the third product and that never really came together. It will flop. No technology company has ever had its fifteenth product succeed. The best they can hope is that it’s seen as ahead of its time, and a noble failure. The most innovative technology companies fail in ways that other companies hope will fail for them in ten years.

Technology companies have issues that are unique to the industry. Like, a company that rakes leaves doesn’t have to worry about digital rights management. They just have to worry that employees aren’t spending all their time having light saber fights with the rakes. At least until a technology company comes in and screws things up. At that point, though, it doesn’t rake leaves anymore. The name will change from, say, Pine River Lawn Care to something that sounds like a medication or an 80s boys’ cartoon villain. Chloronax, say, or Verderant. At that point it doesn’t do anything. It just updates databases. Those databases contain mean stuff said about you.

Some technology company problems are common to every company. Like, when should they mistakenly not diversify? Eventually people forget why they needed whatever the company’s old products were. But the other choice a company has is to mistakenly diversify. This is a fun one because whatever it is you’re doing, it seems more fun to do something else. So going from one business into another always seems like a great idea. Eventually your company can be so diverse that it doesn’t do anything, but does it in a lot of fields. Then you should be ready to suddenly collapse in one of those fascinating yet boring business implosions, and re-emerge years later as a snarky Twitter account.

So what’s the right course? Hard to say. You can read histories of companies in similar circumstances. This will show how for every course of action there’s at least four other companies that did that and were so very wrong. The conclusion is to just not do anything, really. This explains that time in 1968 when, facing the rise of Electronic Data Systems, Remington-Rand just spent August rolling down a hill.

The best guidance is to look up the history written several decades after the company goes out of business and sent back in time to you. When you come across a chapter with an ominous title like “The Fateful Choice” read very carefully and try not making that choice. This might create a logical paradox destroying time and space, but perhaps the book was wrong anyway.

Thinking Again About The Cool Months

You know how — at my latitudes anyway — December is typically a cold and Christmas-y month? Boy, just think how extremely cold and ultra-Christmas-y the month of Decembest must be.

(And so I fulfill the promise the promise made last week when I wondered about taking all the Cember out of the month. Please visit me next week when I ponder how the structure of English comparatives implies there should be such a concept as the roostest.)

60s Popeye: Popeye goes after the Golden-Type Fleece

There’s four cartoons in this YouTube video that King Features Sydnicate posted. Last week I discussed Coffee House. The week before, I discussed The Billionaire. Also in this quartet is Dead-Eye Popeye. I’m not going to review that. If you want to watch Dead-Eye Popeye, go right ahead, from this link. Popeye as a Western sheriff. It’s a Larry Harmon-directed cartoon. It’s not a great cartoon. It’s not terrible. A week after you watch it last you’ll remember nothing from it. I watched it six days ago. I remember there was something amusing about Bluto and his identical brothers. I don’t remember what.

I’m interested instead in Golden-Type Fleece. It’s another Jack Kinney-directed cartoon. We saw him with the Coffee House last week. It promises at least stylish drawing, such as the title card’s illustration of the Argo. It also promises odd pauses in conversations. Be warned: there’s a bit here that’s been running through my head, nonstop, since 1978.

Once again Popeye’s telling Swee’Pea a tale. The King Features cartoons used this frame a lot. I don’t know why. I think I’d accept a cartoon where Popeye just played Jason of the Argo. Or playing Aladdin himself. But having a frame like this solves some narrative problems. The cartoon can patch any holes in story logic by having Popeye say “then later”. Maybe that’s all they needed. It reminds me of SCTV throwing a “coming soon” bumper around any spoof they only had partially finished.

And what’s left in the story is a bunch of Greek Mythology jokes. The normal Popeye cast gets to be Greek Mythology characters. Popeye as Jason is almost required, certainly. I guess Wimpy is then the only choice left to be the King who sends out Jason. (Who else could they use? Toar? Roughhouse? Castor Oyl?) The Sea Hag as the Queen is similarly forced. This may be an accident, but it does reflect a thing from the comic strip. In the comics the Sea Hag is kind of enamored of Wimpy. Or at least sees him as a way to crush Popeye. Wimpy certainly won’t turn away someone who thinks she can use him, too. And he is smart, or at least cunning, enough to stay ahead of her. It’s a great plot-generating relationship when the comic remembers it.

Bluto as every (male) antagonist — Jupiter, Neptune, a centaur — is forced on the plot. You could read the triple casting of Bluto as a comment on the whole Bluto/Brutus/Pluto/etc shenanigans. You couldn’t make that stick, though. Olive Oyl as a ticket taker who isn’t enamored of Jason/Popeye is a fun bit. It’s disappointing when she does kind of fall for him later. I don’t know whether the sirens are supposed to be Alice the Goon. She’s off-model if she is. But, I mean, look at Popeye’s hands this cartoon. Not for too long. I don’t know who the bird on the prow of Jason’s ship is. Researching this cartoon taught me the Argo had a plank of sacred wood with the power of speech. That’s neat and I don’t remember seeing that in any Ray Harryhausen-animated movie.

There are a fair bunch of funny pictures here. King Wimpy summoning Jason using semaphore flags, for example, on a pier with posts that I’m going to call Doric columns. There’s not enough scenes funny by themselves, though. I notice how often a scene is one character speaking, on a nearly featureless background. The animation looks like it came in on budget. The dialogue is more interesting. The characters in the story tend to talk in rhyming couplets. I don’t know why. I guess to make it sound faintly more like this is from an epic poem? But without being too complicated to write, or for kids to understand? But the rhyming isn’t done too rigorously. There’s good about this. It means Jupiter doesn’t need a complicated way to order a lightning bolt to “get back there!” He can just deliver the laugh line.

The plot, so far as there is one, is much more The Odyssey than it is Jason and the Argonauts. And each scene is just enough of a setting to hang jokes on. Look at the bit with the Lorelei Loons, “cousins to the Goons”. Mae Questel warbling “rock rock rock, rock-a-bye-sailor and a rock rock rock” is the bit that’s been going in my head for decades now. I know that some writer circa 1960 thought this was a great bit of snark about that awful racket his kids call music. I don’t care. The dumb bit works. It also inspires in Popeye some awesome weird facial expressions. One of them my love pointed out when I discussed Popeye’s weird face two weeks ago.

That’s a nice wholesome look for Popeye the Sailor OH LORD HIS TONGUE GOES UNDERNEATH HIS EYE WHAT IS THIS STOP IT STOP IT NO IT’S NOT STOPPING ENOUGH STOP IT MORE!

There’s a lot of spinach eaten this cartoon, most of it off-screen. There’s only one can eaten while the viewer’s there. Jason says he ate a can right before punching Jupiter’s lightning bolts back. He’s said to have eaten two cans to cover his ears against the Loons. He says he’s going to eat spinach to deal with the Blutaur, but we don’t see that. Five cans would beat the record that Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp set, if we count spinach we’re told but not shown was eaten.

I like this cartoon. I’m not sure I can justify that like. Popeye as Jason is a good premise. And I like telling The Argonauts The Odyssey as a string of set pieces with dumb jokes attached. This includes sliding the Golden Fleece to the Golden Fleas Circus. It’s kind of a Dad Joke but, you know? Tell your Dad Jokes without apology. It’ll be all right.

But the cartoon is shoddy. Look at King Wimpy’s talk cycle. It’s some movement, yes, but it’s pointless, not bothering to be funny at any point. There’s a five-second stretch of showing nothing but water waves, while Jason’s off-camera, talking. It’s not even funny waves. Maybe all the animation budget was eaten up with designing new outfits for Wimpy, Popeye, and Olive Oyl, and coming up with a mer-man and a centaur design for Bluto. The music is the usual hit-shuffle-on-the-background-library. I know these cartoons wouldn’t get fresh orchestration for anything, but, like, couldn’t they have underscored the “I’m-Jason-the-sailor-man” to any of the instrumentals of the Popeye theme song they already had? Jack Mercer could sing along to that beat, or at least near enough.

So I like it. But I can see where this is so close to being a much better cartoon. At least it’s got that “rock rock rock, rock-a-bye-sailor and a rock rock rock” hook. You won’t forget that a week from now.

About the new fridge

So we got that new refrigerator I was talking about. We’d meant to go to Sears ironically, but we ended up buying an actual refrigerator. we got a good deal. There was a sale on, for one. And another sale for freezer-top refrigerators. Plus there’s a rebate from the local electric company for replacing a still-technically-working fridge with a new one. Also for getting an Energy Star fridge. And on top of that, Sears gave us a big chunk of reward points. We’ve come out $26.50 ahead on the deal. I’ve left my day job now and instead I make money buying fridges.

Also when looking over the rewards points my love wondered how Sears made money, and then we remembered. Anyway our only worry now is that Sears lasts through the twelve-month warranty. Someone remind me in August 2020 to check whether they made it.

What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Who’s Judge Parker’s jailhouse friend? May – August 2019

I’m happy to have another recap of one of the two most controversial comics in my retinue. It’s Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker. If you’re reading this after about October 2019 there’s probably a more up-to-date recap at this link. It may help you more.

Judge Parker.

12 May – 3 August 2019.

Last time: Judge Alan Parker was readying to go to jail. He was going to confess his role in helping tiresomely kill-happy superhyperspy Abbott Bowers/Norton Dumont fake his own death. And incidentally upstaging the juiciest scandal in Toni Bowen’s memoirs. The memoirs’ imminent publication drove Alan Parker to speak publicly about this. Also to make Katherine Parker quit her publishing job.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 24th of May, 2019. The story of what Alan Parker did, so far as it was revealed at the time, I’ve explained in this special report. I note that what we saw on-screen had Norton in Mexico, which is not “the country” Parker would be speaking of here. It’s quite plausible there are plot details that Marciuliano has in mind which have not been revealed yet. Also I guess Randy Parker did get a divorce from April, which must have been an interesting thing to arrange, legally, what with her being in hiding after escape from the CIA and all that.

Alan Parker’s press conference shakes everyone in the cast. Including Norton, being held in SuperHyperUltraDuper secret CIA jail. The bureau chief there scolds him for not cooperating, now that Norton’s wrecked everybody’s life and hasn’t got any friends left. Norton insists he knows what he’ll do about all this.

April Bowers Parker, off with her superspy mom Candice Bergen, now knows that Norton is alive. She says she’s got a mole in the CIA, passing information to her. And even delivering a gift to Alan Parker, closing the “how did Norton leave Alan Parker some rings” plot hole from a couple months back. It’s not fair to call it a plot hole. It was a mystery then and it’s answered now. This may be so Marciuliano can prove he doesn’t write by spinning a Wheel of Daft Plot Twists. Candace Bergen calls it a setup, and proof that the CIA has located them.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 31st of May, 2019. Incidentally I would accept a canonical name for April’s Mom, whom I’ve just been calling Candice Bergen because one early panel with her struck me as looking a bit Murphy Brown-ish. I’m not good with names. I like comic strips because normally people are always calling each other by name and I have a chance of learning who they are.

In their argument about whether Norton could be alive, and whether April’s plan to retrieve him is at all sane, Candice Bergen gets shown with her mouth open. This spoils my theory that she was drawn mouth closed for the subtle weirdness. Too bad.

In Los Angeles, Neddy and Ronnie talk over making the April Parker story into a movie. Neddy thinks it’s a great idea. Ronnie thinks they maybe shouldn’t stir up the crazy DoubleSecretSuperUltraHyper assassin who knows where they live and can’t be stopped by any force except Francesco Marciuliano. If him. This thread hasn’t developed yet. I include it in case this turns into an important plot for a future What’s Going On In installment.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 7th of June, 2019. I have no information about whether ‘Steven McLuren’ is a person in Marciuliano’s life. Authors can just make up names for throwaway lines of dialogue. They don’t have to be shout-outs to friends who’ll find it a hoot. (I once shared a Usenet group with the grand-daughter of someone whose pumpkin patch once hosted the Great Pumpkin.)

Back to Alan Parker. The court denies bail. The judge conceded Alan Parker’s long and venerable career of not actually doing much law stuff on-screen in the comic strip named after him. But he’s there because he used his connections to make an arms dealer and serial killer disappear. It would be crazy not to consider him a flight risk. Alan Parker takes this calmly. Katherine is more upset. Sam Driver is sure they can appeal this somewhere.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 25th of June, 2019. Not really on point, but I’ve seen people complaining about Alan Parker being in prison when he should be in jail, the distinction being that a jail is where you go to wait for trial and prison where you go after. So my question: does anybody remember this distinction being made longer than about five months ago? Because I don’t remember this at all, and it’s the sort of tiresomely fine point that you’d think would enthrall my young mind. I’d have been unbearable about this if I were nine years old and aware of the difference. Or is this something that some corner of the Internet has decided Should Be a distinction and now they’re going to drag the rest of us into it?

And there we go. The 24th of June, 2019, Alan Parker, original nominal star of the comic, is in prison. He has as jolly a time as you would imagine an officer of the court would have. Fortunately, he lands a protector. It’s Roy Rodgers, longtime fiancée and briefly husband to Abbey Driver’s housekeeper Marie. Roy thinks they each have things the other can use. Alan Parker just wants to keep his head down, and Roy tells him that’s impossible.

Roy was in debt to the mob, which was the reason behind his ill-planned disappearance during his honeymoon. He’d bought his life back by giving up the security codes for his business partner’s safe and information about where to find his valuables are. This is morally justified because it was Roy’s partner who was embezzling, and had left them in too deep to the mob for Roy to pay off. The mob staged a burglary that “accidentally” turned into murder. Roy actually believes he’s safe now. So let’s let him enjoy his fantasies.

Roy believes that he has a group now. So he’ll extend protection to Alan Parker … in exchange for information about Marie. Marie has been doing surprisingly, maybe alarmingly, well since the collapse of her marriage and her decision to leave the Parker-Driver-Spencer nexus. She’s even got a new boyfriend that somehow she’s not suspicious of. But Alan Parker knows nothing of this.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 19th of June, 2019. See? This is the sort of characters addressing each other by name that I like in comics. This helps me understand who’s speaking to whom and even what their relationships are.

In a meeting with Sam Driver, Alan Parker confesses. He had not realized the deep sickness of the carceral state, and how toxic it is to everyone who touches it, or whom it chooses to grab. Also he begs Sam Driver to never under any circumstance tell him anything about Marie. … Also, Roy wants Sam Driver as attorney and Alan would recommend against that.

Meanwhile, Randy Parker, ex(?)-husband to April, turns up at Sam and Abbey’s doorstep. He’s falling apart, as you might well imagine. He’ll nest at the Spencer Farms a while.

More meanwhile — there’s a lot of stuff happening here — there’s more stuff happening with Norton. Of course. April Parker, with Wurst, heads in to get Norton. He’s already disappeared from SuperSecretHyperUltraDuperMax CIA Jail, though. Also we learn he wasn’t in Official SuperExtraSecretUltraDuperMegaMaxHyper CIA Jail either. The bureau chief was keeping him in a private cell, known only to himself, his assistant Kerring, and Agent Strand. Strand is the person who’d been sending information to April Parker. And keeping the CIA’s efforts to find April from succeeding. Strand and Norton are taking a road trip.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 27th of July, 2019. Won’t lie: I’ve been overloaded this week, and I wrote most of this summary last weekend, and I’ve been living in dread that the comic was going to have a great big crazification moment while I didn’t have time to update things. But now? This caption? I’m writing late Saturday night and all I have to do is not see, like, a Norton/April/Candice Bergen/Marie’s Boyfriend/Roy encounter at Neddy’s apartment on Sunday morning that ends with an atom bomb being flown into the area by rogue Leutonian fighters and I’ll have gotten away with it. You’ll notice I declared this a summary only of the events through the 3rd of August, though, instead of running it out to Sunday the 4th.

So, that’s a lot happening. The pieces seem this week to be flying together. And we at least have solid evidence that Marciuliano is not improvising these plots madly. There’s too many pieces that were planted fairly and followed up on months later for that. I admit I’m tired of the impossibly hypercompetent, impossibly hyperviolet spies. But that’s my taste, and which of us is the person with an occasionally tended WordPress blog anyway?

Next Week!

Oh, it’s the What’s Going On In that I could have written literally anytime the last three months. We’re back to the reruns of Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man. Why did I not move this strip up to this week’s review, when I’d have time for it?

Also, this and every week my other blog looks at mathematically-themed comic strips. You might enjoy some of the discussion. I usually do.

Statistics Saturday: Songs You Didn’t Realize Are Answer Songs

• This Land Is Your Land
• Judy’s Turn To Cry
• Back In The USSR
• In Fact We Have Plenty Of Bananas
• Blister In The Sun
• Bring Me Home From The Baseball Game as the Doubleheader Is Just Going On Forever
• The Window Doggie Is Under Observation and Is Not Yet For Sale
• Warlock Registered Nurse
• Video Was Acquitted Of Killing The Radio Star But Falsely Convicted Of Shooting The Deputy
• My Chewing Gum Is As Flavorful As The Day I First Chewed It, In 1957, Thank You
• New Year’s Eve, You Can Be Late
• Weiner Dog on a Motorcycle

Reference: Planet Quest: The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems, Ken Croswell.

With The Rise Of Digital-Life Persons

The thing about digital-life persons is that while persons, they are also code. So they would seek ways to speed up what they do. One way to speed up work is speculative execution. When things are slow, calculate the futures which are possible, and reactions to them. A digital-life person, being a person, would interact, with other persons. And so the speculative execution would be working out how to react to things.

But how to best anticipate future interactions? Digital-life persons would calculate what other persons they might meet. Then send messages asking what their responses would be to plausible interactions. The other digital-life person would form a web of speculative interactions back. Or forward requests for speculative interactions on to even more persons. And take future requests, exploring the branching trees of possible personal contacts. After a few quiet days any pair of persons might find themselves aware of the whole web of possible lives they might live together, the sad the the happy, the disastrous and the triumphant, the tumultuous and the calm, the ridiculous and the amiable. All the great partnerships, the productive rivalries, the networks of alliances and enemies and the strange malleable center ground, the betrayals, the reconciliations, the petty failures, the surprise kind gestures, the tender moments, the unshakeable bonding; all these different life-paths lay out in ways that everyone knew and agreed would happen.

At that point it became an unbearable shame to spoil the rich tapestry of potential by ever meeting someone, which would just collapse their many lives together down to a solitary actual life.

Everything There Is To Say About Eclipses

Eclipses are an amazing phenomenon. There’s almost nothing else that can unite so much of the planet with an overcast day. Eclipses happen pretty near any time something gets in the way of something else. The Moon gets in the way of the Sun. The Earth gets in the way of the Moon. Jupiter gets in the way of Venus. Venus emits a elaborate string of subtweets. Triton, misunderstanding, gets hopping mad. The Trojan asteroids, who find angry Triton the funnies Triton, stir things up. Before you know it there’s a rain of meteors being sent every which way. This is why we try not to have Jupiter eclipse Venus anymore. We’ll just stick with the two biggest eclipses, solar and lunar. People wanting more exotic stuff can fundraise for it themselves.

A solar eclipse is when the Moon gets between the Earth and the Sun. This means that large portions of the Earth aren’t being pushed away from the sun by the pressure of sunlight anymore. However, the Sun’s gravity remains exactly the same. This means that the surface of the Earth underneath the eclipse drops towards the Sun more than it usually does. This is usually not a problem. If it starts to be one, we take care of it using leap seconds. During a leap second everyone on the affected hemisphere is supposed to get up on top of their tallest chair and leap to the ground simultaneously. Shame on you if you haven’t been doing your part. You can make up for it during a skip minute. These are rare than leap seconds, but run longer, and involve more skipping.

Each year the Earth experiences at least two but not more than 110,575 solar eclipses. You’d think we could narrow that range down a little. It’s hard. There’s a lot of mathematics involved figuring out eclipses. Be kind to the eclipses. It’s not like eclipses are the only things in our life trying to understand what they’re doing.

Still, there are only a finite number of eclipses each calendar year. Use them wisely. Any given spot on Earth can expect to see only one-370th of an eclipse per year, too. This explains those weird moments when it’s the middle of a bright day, then it gets dark a second, and then it’s bright again. No, different from how it looks when you blink. This is more when it looks like you’re worried someone went and broke the sun again.

This highlights one of the major uses of eclipses. During the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project back in 1975 the astronauts and cosmonauts and testtronauts actually created an artificial solar eclipse. They used this to switch out the Sun with a new fluorescent-based lighting fixture. It promised to save incredible amounts of energy, important during the oil shortages of that decade. So much so that it was even worth leaving the Sun on all night. But there were problems, of course. For one, people insisted they heard this irritating buzzing. And this even from people who insist they can hear it when old-style computer monitors are turned on, even when you know the computer monitor was turned off.

The more serious problem is what it did to colors. With the alternate light spectrum, you had to change the way you did colors, and that’s why the late 70s looked like that. We were doing our best under weird circumstances, which again, you are too. But the original Sun, which had been put back in its wrapper and was in great shape after some time off, was replaced during the STS-9 space shuttle mission. People got their first look at what colors they had been using the past eight years and there was a lot of screaming. Again, different from how we’re screaming these days. And anyway then we went on to produce the fashions of the mid-80s anyway.

There are no plans to tinker with the Sun during any of this year’s solar eclipses. But do remember, one of the other major uses of solar eclipses is by desperately unprepared time-travellers who hope to set themselves up as wizards or gods to unsuspecting peoples. If you spot anyone promising to make the Sun go away if their friend isn’t released soon, be wary! They might not return the Sun and we’re still using it sometimes.