Godzilla
The Case For: Deft, seamless artistic blend of gods and Nilla wafers.
The Case Against: Too whiny anymore to stomp on the pointy skyscrapers around the financial district.
The Yukawa Potential
The Case For: Is so, so good at describing pairwise particle interactions mediated by either a massless or a massed particle.
The Case Against: Is not the name of any noteworthy prog rock band or album.
Part of the current story in Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail was a family reunion. The Trails, and the Rogers family, got together. Reptiliannaire, the eco-rapper Mark Trail visited two storylines ago, visited after the launch of his new album. Reptiliannaire’s one of Rusty’s favorite singers.
Mark Trail said something about his father hiring Reptiliannaire. This is plausible. His father, Mark “Happy” Trail, runs a granola concern big enough to be a local environmental hazard and bully, though not so big as to be bought out by a real bastard company like Nestle. But this means Reptiliannaire went from his album launch to working a private event. That’s a lot of work. But it could be that the reptile-themed rap star world is small enough that you have to do that much work. Nobody confirms that Happy Trail hired him, though. As Mark Trail had a successful heist with Reptiliannaire that time, it’s plausible Happy Trail invited him and he came to see a quasi-friend and a fan. Take the interpretation you find most credible.
So this should catch you up on Mark Trail for the end of March, 2022. If you’re reading this after about June 2022 a more up-to-date plot recap should be here. I’ll also post news about the comic strip at this link. Thanks for reading and now let’s explore what all is going on with environmental villains who need punching.
Mark Trail, Diana Daggers, and the veterans on the De-Bait Team had a plan to fight Duck Duck Goose shipping. The plan: make a public spectacle of themselves. Our Heroes got as many small ships as they could together to blockade the Lost Forest-area waterway the zebra-mussel-contaminated ships used. It’s a popular protest, because we all want that thrill of that stuck boat again. Duck Duck Goose makes the concession of declaring they’re totally going to make things better. And have Mark Trail, Diana Daggers, and Cliff (who probably has a last name) arrested.
![[ Mark and Cliff both post bail in the Lost Forest county jail, but Diana is left behind. ] Daggers, from behind bars; 'Go on, Mark! Tell my story! I will carry on, an envronmental rebel! And let my sacrifice show --- ' Sheriff: 'Okay, Miss Daggers. You're free to go.' As she takes the box of her things she asks, 'Eh? Who bailed me out? I burned all my bridges in California.' [ As Cliff called it, an old friend showed up when she least expected it. ] Her phone's getting a call; 'Aw, Bee Sharp?'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/mark-trail_jules-rivera_2020-01-26.jpg)
A minor plot resolved: the Sunny Soleil society has some tiny aquariums with Marimo balls. These can also spread zebra mussels. They give the readers instructions on how to dispose of them safely (freeze them for a day or more and throw them in the trash). And explain to Violet Cheshire how to handle it: let Cherry Trail handle it, for free. (This is also a good way to handle the poison ivy or the knotweed growing in from your neighbor’s yard.)
The 7th of February starts the current batch of storylines. One is about Rusty Trail and his natural love of cryptids. He shares one about the Seaside Specter, a onetime human covered in seaweed and coral with eyes like a puffy-eyed fish. (Looking at him curses your eyeballs.) He would bond with Cherry Trail’s sister Olive at the family reunion, the big setting for the start of this story.
![[ Rusty discovers his Aunt Olive knows a lot about cryptids. ] Olive: 'So you're going to the West Coast to get footage of the Seaside Specter?' Rusty: 'It's a lifetime opportunity! I may not get another chance!' Olive: 'Kiddo, I have hunted cryptids. It's dangerous out there. Take this.' Rusty: 'Is taht a face shield?' She holds one, offering face, nose, and mouth protection: 'Yeah. This will protect you from looking directly at the Seaside Specter.' Rusty: 'Cool! Thanks, Auntie Olive.' [ And that's how Rusty learned the importance of masking up! ]](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/mark-trail_jules-rivera_2020-03-04.jpg)
The happiness screeches to a halt when Happy Trail and Jolly Roger mention they’re doing new TV commercials. The young Mark Trail was traumatized by being the semi-willing child star of those ages ago. (Other kids, such as Rob Bettancourt, teased him for his natural on-camera squareness.) Now he’s traumatized because the new spokescreature is a monkey. That part’s survivable, but Monk Trail is also being turned into an NFT. Happy Trail’s startled to learn there’s anything about NFTs to concern an environmentalist, or a non-fool. His surprise that his new business partner didn’t bring up this big problem invites the question of how Happy Trail has built a successful business. You’d expect he would have been phished into sending the company to an e-mail claiming to be the county IRS inspector. Perhaps his really good Chief Operating Officer retired two weeks ago.
His NFT partner, in Portland, is Jadsen Sterling. Happy Trail asserts that Sterling and his brother are friends of Mark Trail’s. Turns out Sterling’s (step)brother is Rob “Cricket Bro” Bettancourt. Mark Trail spends the flight to Oregon (where they’d been planning to go for reasons that escape me; maybe it was a vacation?) trying to work out Sterling’s deal. He runs a tech firm committed to NFT scams, but makes his real money logging.
![[ Mark discussees his concerns with Cherry on the way to Portland. ] Mark Trail: 'I know my dad means wel, but sometimes his choices really BUG me!' (The word 'Bug' is highlighted; the panel shows a close-up on a pandora pinemoth while Mark's plane is in the background sky.) 'The dad I remember would've never done business with other companies that hurt the environment like NFTs do.' Cherry: 'Mark, your dad isn't the man you remember anymore. He's older and he's looking to connect. Try to be kind.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/mark-trail_jules-rivera_2020-03-16.jpg)
That’s how the Bros and Happy Trail turned into a big business-family partnership mess. And also explains why Happy Trail might not have asked them questions about the downsides of NFTs. And that’s where we stand at the end of March. Also going on: a bunch of first panels with animals in the foreground looking at the camera. That’s a welcome feature to return to the strip.
What parts of nature got attention in Sunday strips the past three months? And how badly off are they? Let’s review.
Wilbur Weston is not dead. I’ll go into the unhappy story of why not when I recap Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. That’s my plan for what to do next week.
Conventions
The Case For: Allow fans to live the dream of spending several days happy surrounded by people whose names are printed clearly on badges they can glance at quickly so they always know who they’re talking to.
The Case Against: Might also be for work.
Pop Philosophy
The Case For: Helps the lay public discover what’s hard about questions like “how do we know a thing is true” or “what does it mean to say something is a good action” or “is this a well-defined question”.
The Case Against: Which nerds plunder for source material to make tabletop roleplaying games about trolley-based murder engines.
Today’s is a Paramount Cartoon Studios cartoon. The story’s credited to Carl Meyer and Jack Mercer. Directing and producing we credit Seymour Kneitel for. From 1961 here’s Boardering On Trouble.
A strength in how Popeye adapted to animated cartoons is in the flexibility of setting. The characters are like figures of the Commedia dell’arte. They’re types you can put into any setting with whatever backstory makes the premise make sense. So you can set Popeye and Brutus as co-owners of an Old West hotel/boarding house and you don’t need to explain more than that.
And yet this cartoon doesn’t work. The basic conflict — another rivals-fight-for-Olive-Oyl story — is one Paramount Cartoon Studios had done a million times before. This may have worked against them. They’re so busy with the mechanics of the story that they forgot to justify it. Like, Popeye and Brutus are fighting; that’s what they do. Only here, Popeye throws the first (metaphorical) punch, pulling a gun on Brutus over whether their hotel should specialize in fine dining or quality entertainment. It’s a water pistol, yes, as we know because we overheard Popeye talking to himself about it. But it’s still a jerk move, and it’s a mistake for Popeye to be the lead jerk.
Still that Paramount steady basic competence shows through. The water pistol gets set up early so that Brutus can suppose the next pistol drawn on him is also a toy. The cartoon would not make less sense if Brutus just assumed Olive Oyl had a water pistol, but they can’t help giving him a logical reason to expect it. It’s weird to explain that but not, like, why this is set in the Old West rather than the modern day. (Maybe it’s so that there’s a reason the hotel can’t do both fine food and quality entertainment? Why Popeye has to be the chef and Brutus the performer?)
I talk a bunch about cartoons that Paramount could have animated in their sleep. This sure feels like one. It gets the mechanics of Popeye and Brutus’s duel — each does their thing and the other sabotages it — well. It even tosses in a nice bit where Olive Oyl defends herself from the Masked Bandit (Brutus, pursuing a logic I don’t follow). But it’s so busy doing that that it fails to motivate the duel, or to avoid making Popeye the person who causes the trouble.
Reference: 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History Of The Promised Land, Daniel Wolff.
Hair
The Case For: Combines the traits of being dead, growing, and generally considered attractive.
The Case Against: I know I’ve seen the musical on TCM like twice and the only scenes I remember from it are, I believe, actually dim recollections of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
UCLA
The Case For: Generously donated name to Thundarr the Barbarian’s friend, the Mok.
The Case Against: Selfishly refused to grant honorary degree to Ted Knight’s character on Too Close For Comfort even though he drew comic books about a space cow? Was that it? Maybe it was a comic strip? He had a puppet he used to draw, I know that, even though that doesn’t seem like a good way to draw except in a publicity photo.
For my next Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction let me share another decade-old piece. It’s another Modern Mechanix blog entry. I think this was a vintage article, but it might have been an advertisement. Raymond Yates wrote a book of a couple thousand needed inventions, which I found and read and was delighted by. I don’t know whether Yates condensed his book into this essay or whether this essay inspired the book.
This was a fun piece to write. Yates was right in this, and in his book, about things that would be good things to have invented. Yet something in all this inspired a lot of deep silliness on my part and I’ve come to think my MiSTings go better when I’m being silly.
I regret that I didn’t write host sketches for it. The piece seemed too slight to support that much overhead. If anything would justify an Invention Exchange festival, though … Well, many riffs name silly inventions and you can imagine the Brains showing those off, if you want to imagine the same jokes done with more words and staging.
The riff about why is there France and why is there Spain references the Sparks song “Those Mysteries”. I recommend a listen.
[ Into the Theater. ALL file in. ]
> http://blog.modernmechanix.com/what-to-invent-4/
TOM: What to invent for? Why not just the giddy fun of it?
>
> WHAT TO INVENT
CROW: I dunno, *stuff*? Don’t pick on me, man.
>
> The author will be glad to answer questions
TOM: Why is there France?
MIKE: And why is there Spain?
CROW: And why am I here and why is there rain?
> relating to these and to other types of inventions.
ALL: Oh.
> However, no letter will be answered unless a properly
> stamped and self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Do not
> send any models.
MIKE: You have been warned!
>
> By Raymond Francis Yates
TOM: Esq, J.D., LL.D., M.Sc, M.Eng, ASC, LLC.
>
> HOW is your ingenuity today?
CROW: And if not, WHY not?
> It is to be hoped
> that it is alert and productive,
MIKE: If it knows what’s good for it.
> because this month we
> present a number of rather engaging problems.
TOM: Like, when you lose sleep, where does it go?
> They are
> the everyday sort that one meets from time to time; but
CROW: A simple kind of problem, something found around the house every day.
> the right solutions to them would prove to be money
> makers.
TOM: First problem, a useful counterfeiting engine.
> After all, a new mouse trap clever enough to win
> the approval of five million customers
CROW: Sounds kinda needy, actually.
TOM: Low self-esteem.
> would make as much
> for its inventor as would a new Diesel engine or a new
> television receiver.
MIKE: Among mice looking to buy Diesel engines, traps, or television receivers.
> Complication never was a criterion
> for the production of wealth in inventing — and never
> will be.
TOM: But if your invention isn’t complicated everybody’s going to point at you and laugh.
>
> The successful inventor is often a mere
> opportunist. He has to be.
MIKE: He lives in the wild, untamed world of patent attorneys.
> He watches the public, tries
> to find out in what it is interested and what it is doing
> at the moment.
TOM: Man, inventors are *creeps*.
> At the present time the public has “gone
> hobby.”
CROW: Yeah, everybody with their … uh … the heck?
> There never was a time when hobbies of various
> kinds were more popular than they are today.
MIKE: Well, except that one week back in April, but that was a crazy time.
> Among the
> current hobbies that are enjoying a new and robust
> stimulation, photography stands out prominently.
TOM: I’m not sure I’m allowed more stimulated photographs after Mike caught me.
> What
> can the inventor do for these people who have turned to
> the camera for relaxation?
CROW: Point out they have cell phones?
> Many things; but chief among
> them is a recording camera for the more careful and
> exacting men and women who have embraced this most
> absorbing work.
MIKE: For all those people whose cameras run out of cord.
>
> CAN YOU INVENT THESE THINGS?
TOM: IF NOT, DON’T WORRY, THERE’S SOME OTHER THINGS TO INVENT TOO!
>
> Millions Being Made with New Inventions; America
> Needs New Gadgets.
MIKE: Also doohickeys, gewgaws, thingamajigs, and extruded lumps of drop-forged metal.
TOM: Can you give me something in a piece of bent wood?
>
> The careful worker likes to keep a record of his
> exposures in his effort to master the art
CROW: Well, isn’t that what the Police Blotter’s for?
> and would buy
> any good camera that automatically recorded the time of
> exposure, the time of the day
TOM: The time of the moon.
CROW: The time our lives.
MIKE: The time of the apes.
CROW: The time of tea.
TOM: Huh?
CROW: I dunno, it was a Google autocomplete.
MIKE: I don’t believe you.
> and the stop that was used
> when each picture was taken. All of this could be done
> on the edge of the film and it would make a most useful
> reference.
TOM: Ah, I’d just throw that information in the junk drawer and never look at it again anyway.
> Naturally, such a mechanism could be applied
> only to the more expensive cameras.
CROW: Lest any ideas of good photography get in the heads of the poor.
>
> No other field of human activity is as broad as
> the field of invention, hence it becomes possible to
> speak of the need of recording cameras and shoe polish in
> the same breath.
TOM: And cabbages and kings.
> But what is wrong with shoe polish?
MIKE: Well, that we all wear sneakers anymore?
> The first objection to ordinary polish is that it does
> not stay put;
TOM: It … sneaks up and attacks you at the wrists?
> it is far too perishable once it has been
> placed on shoes.
CROW: It screams in agony every moment of its living death!
> A walk through dew-covered grass will
> ruin the best shine.
TOM: Spoiling the accounting department’s whole morning frolic.
>
> No doubt there is a chemical, or a substance,
MIKE: Maybe a tonic or an ointment?
CROW: Perhaps something in an unguent or an excretion?
> which someday will be added to shoe polish to make it
> really waterproof. The man who discovers this
> combination will become wealthy within a year’s time.
TOM: I’ve got it! Itty-bitty toe umbrellas!
[ to continue … ]
Carols
The Case For: Really nailed a kind of music for Christmas.
The Case Against: Hasn’t been a good April Fool’s Day Carol in, like, forever.
Rural Free Delivery
The Case For: Greatly reduced the cost of delivering rural areas to one other.
The Case Against: Sending cities to one another remains a money pit.
The current Gasoline Alley story is built on some Hollywood types coming in make a movie about the town. While the town’s residents are interesting to the comic strip readers, one might ask why anyone in-universe would care about this town? Longtime readers enjoy the more-or-less plausible lives of interesting characters. But why pick this place, other than that Walt Wallet is a generation older than Betty White?
While searching for something else, I ran across this timeline of events in Gasoline Alley. It’s a list of some of the big story events including when Skeezix turned up on the doorstep. and seems to be pretty solid for events up to about 1950, that is, the era when the comic strip made its reputation. It may not convince you — I mean, breach of promise stories? Everyone did them back then and that’s such an alien idea today, like suing somebody for not wearing a hat — but it gives some idea what all happened.
Over on my mathematics blog, I just looked at the comic strips which observed Pi Day. How many of them were about mathematics? The answer may surprise you!
This essay should catch you up to mid-March 2022 in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley. If you’re reading this after about June 2022, there’s likely a more up-to-date plot recap at this link. And now, action!
The current story had just been called when I last checked in. Some Hollywood types are descending on Gasoline Alley to make a movie. Rufus and Joel try to clean City Hall up to the point that it shines. The movie makers slip and fall on the wet floor. The comic relief pair suppose that the movie makers want to sue them for damages. After their attempts at disguising themselves fail completely, they run off to hide in a cave.
The movie folks turn their attention to Walt Wallet. They turn over some kind of prospectus for a movie based on his life. It’s a big, bold work, not bound tightly to the facts. He calls Skeezix over to describe some of them. And to recount a story that … actually, he’s told before, back in January and February of 2014. But he claims that when exploring in Egypt ages ago he and his party, desperately short on water, fell into the tomb of the Pharaoh Do-Ra-Mi. They found an urn on the shelf, with ancient, stale water that they drank happily. And then found the hieroglyphics proclaimed it the “Energy Shot – For Youth”. Which, well, he is a pretty spry fellow for being six years older than the SOS distress signal. But back in 2014 when he told this story he was making up that it was the Fountain of Youth. He was spinning yarns back then, which, fine. But when why his shock in 2022 when someone believed him?
After sharing this and some other, lesser tall tales with Skeezix, the movie folks call to say never mind. They’re not doing Walt Wallet’s life, which is a shame, since this was an excuse for Scancarelli to draw a young-looking Walt Wallet doing a lot of fun action. (One of the stories shows him hopping a train, which seems mundane enough to have happened.) But the movie folks have decided to do a science fiction piece, Teenage Thing Meets The Creature From Gasoline Alley. Scancarelli’s heart is in doing a 1950s radio sitcom and I like him for that.
The movie producers still want to get hold of Rufus and Joel. The pair emerge from hiding, when the bear they were hiding with kicks them out. And that’s where we stand. Will it turn out they’ve made a bad assumption about what the movie folks wanted them for, so that their winter hiding in a cave was foolish? There’s no way of knowing except reading, or remembering the rules of the 1950s radio sitcoms that the comic strip wants to be. We’ll check back by June, anyway.
The only question worth asking right now is when is Mark Trail going to punch an NFT? And the answer is, always, not soon or often enough. But if we’re lucky by next week I’ll be able to tell you just when Mark Trail does. That’s Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail next Tuesday, if things go to plan.
The Gregorian Calendar
The Case For: Makes every kid named “Greg” feel very special when they’re five or six years old and learn about it.
The Case Against: Not only did not have a year 0, also did not have a year 1, 2, 6, 28, or 118.
Traditions
The Case For: Brings to the confusing modern world the sense that when you were a kid, you did this thins you didn’t know why because that’s what everyone said you were supposed to do.
The Case Against: Were invented in 1893 to sell more nationalism.
Jack Kinney’s our producer again, and the director also. Animation direction is credited to Volus Jones and Ed Friedman, while the story is by our old friend Ed Nofziger. With us here now from 1960 is Popeye’s Hypnotic Glance.
This essay is going to be me trying to rationalize why I like this cartoon. Not sure I can. This is a solid premise with which the cartoon does one thing and then stops. Somehow that hangs together for me. I think Olive Oyl’s unending repetition of how “I love Brutus”, joined eventually by Alice the Goon’s vocoded “I love Popeye”, might be hypnotizing me.
The plot’s coherent, especially for the often dreamlike progressions of Jack Kinney studios work. A jealous Brutus discovers he has a “How To Hypnotize” book, and figures that’s the way to get Olive Oyl to love him. We get a nice zoom-in on Brutus planning his villainy here. It’s a rare camera move with some dramatic purpose. That’s mirrored later by a camera not moving to good dramatic effect. As he starts hypnotizing Olive Oyl the camera sticks to the view of her fireplace. I expect that was a budget-driven choice. But it’s also dramatically effective, the sort of thing that a live-action director might focus on if this scene were played serious. Olive Oyl also goes out of focus, as the hypnosis takes effect, and that’s a good bit of camera work.
There’s some more off-camera action to decent comic effect, even if the scene shouldn’t make logical sense. Brutus goes into the kitchen and we hear him hypnotizing “You loves Popeye, get it? You loves Popeye”. Yes, he’s hypnotizing Alice the Goon instead of Olive Oyl. Popeye should be able to see this, but it’s more important the audience be surprised. Also I’m always happy seeing Alice the Goon, who never gets enough to do.
It’s curious that about all Brutus wants to do with a hypnotized Olive Oyl is have her repeat “I love Brutus”. It’s amusing that he starts waving his finger like an orchestra conductor to lead her. Also that her head tips to the side and she gets stuck on “I love – I love – I love”. It barely makes logical sense as a record player joke and I wonder what a kid of today would make of it.
Credit Brutus with his cleverness in figuring to set Alice in love with Popeye. She’s one of the few characters who can plausibly overpower him and that he can’t hit back. Also credit Popeye for seeing the way out of that, by demanding she cook him spinach. I don’t know how to read the bit where Popeye cries out, “That’s it, Alice, more spinach!”. Alice responds with stony silence and no more spinach. It’s funny, but I feel like I’m laughing at an animation error.
It’s an interesting choice that Popeye only uses his spinach power-up to break the ropes tying him down and clobber Brutus out of his sofa. His reading the hypnotism book seems to be regular old reading. Or they didn’t have enough of the Popeye-the-Sailor-Man fanfare to make that clear.
As I say, I like this. I can point to good bits in it. (Olive Oyl laughing off Brutus’s first several hypnosis attempts without throwing him out of the house, for example.) But, boy, not a lot happens and what does is more funny-weird than funny-ha-ha. And it fumbles what should be easy bits, like having the background music louder than Alice the Goon’s dialogue. Not going to fault anyone who says this is an example of a lousy King Features short. I’m still delighted by it.
Reference: Steel Pier, Atlantic City: Showplace of the Nation, Steve Liebowitz.
Throw Pillows
The Case For: Imperative case sets clear expectations for how to interact with pillows.
The Case Against: You run out of pillows unless someone’s throwing them back at you.
Hair Dryers
The Case For: Fits the sweet spot between Hair Drys and Hair Dryests.
The Case Against: Dries one fingernail’s width of your hair per minute.
And now I close out this Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment of the sci.math rant JSH: War of Attrition. I never did get around to other Harris rants; he was prolific in the mathematics newsgroup for years, arguing that he had great amazing new breakthroughs. The last and oddest that I remember is his bragging about his facility in describing what a tweet was in exactly 140 characters, this back when Twitter was limited to 140 characters. I don’t get it either.
The riff about donor type AB-elian puns on the blood type and on Abelian groups. Abelian groups are sets of things on which you can define an addition that commutes, just like regular arithmetic does. It’s possible to have additions that don’t commute, which is why it’s worth having a name for these. The closing sketch puts Professor Bobo in an example of the Infinite Monkey Theorem. It’s funny, yes, but it also challenges our intuitions about what probability means.
>
> Yeah only to use you in the Math Wars.
TOM: I need reserves in case a Tom Lehrer song breaks out.
> I want mathematicians around
> the world to keep thinking about what you are thinking.
CROW: I think that’s what I want to think I want you thinking about.
> I want them
> working hard to figure out how well they have you in hand.
MIKE: Touching and caressing you with loving grace.
>
> I want them working to keep you.
TOM: Make sure they call you daily to see how you’re doing.
>
> I want them to demean themselves, crawl on their hands and knees to
> keep you believing in them.
MIKE: To sit up on their nests and keep a bundle of chicken eggs warm.
>
> And they are doing it.
CROW: They’re the *best*, guys.
>
> While the war of attrition continues and it is all about inertia and
> momentum as I have always needed time.
MIKE: Time, and a bit of money, and — don’t ask why — my own Phillies Phanatic costume.
>
> If the world knew too quickly what my discoveries really are, then the
> true targets could have escaped,
CROW: Spooking the herd and causing a stampede from the watering hole.
> but now the net closes, and you are
> the fish that were always part of the trap.
TOM: I … don’t put fish in traps.
CROW: It’s for when you want to capture herring-eating mice.
>
> You were always the bait.
TOM: And I was the naughty sporting goods cashier … heh-heh-*heh*.
>
> They care so [ beep ] much about what you people think of them that they
> are willing to lose everything, grasping for what they cannot hold.
MIKE: Why don’t they just kiss you instead of talking you to death?
>
> Public opinion is such a great thing. I love it. Public opinion is
> all about perception.
CROW: Remember always to judge people by how you think your neighbors judge them.
>
> People like Andrew Wiles are nothing without the applause or the
> dreams of it.
TOM: Groupies gathered outside his door, women throwing panties
onto his Fermat’s Last Theorem galley sheets …
> They’ll hold on, and hold on, and hold on,
CROW: His needle’s stuck.
[ MIKE reaches up and “shoves” Mr Harris. ]
> and give
> their energy, their very life blood to hold on to it,
CROW: They’re donor type AB-elian positive.
> even if that is
> the means that is used to build the energy to end the wars.
MIKE: And with it RULE the WORLD!
>
> They give their life’s blood for you to believe in them.
TOM: So everyone in the audience, clap, clap as loud and as hard as you can and just maybe if we all believe enough we can save Dracula!
> And that is
> the energy that drives this forward.
>
> That is the hope of the world.
CROW: That hope, and a cuddly little bunny.
>
> It was always about time. I have always needed time.
MIKE: Time and my new … *LETTERS*!
TOM: He thought up an acronym and that’s enough for us?
>
>
> James Harris
TOM: Thank you, thank you, you’ve been a great crowd. Remember to tip your cows.
CROW: Waitresses.
TOM: Tip your waitresses’s cows.
>
>
MIKE: Let’s blow this popsicle stand.
[ ALL exit, as appropriate. ]
[ 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6.. ]
[ SATELLITE OF LOVE. TOM, MIKE, and CROW shake out their heads. ]
MIKE: I think after that we’ve all learned an important lesson.
TOM: And if you don’t want me to put you on the spot by asking what it was you’d better give me a quarter.
MIKE: What are you, Charlie McCarthy? I’m not afraid to explain it.
CROW: Ooh, ooh, ooh, I know, I know what that was all about, can I tell?
MIKE: Yes, yes, you may, Master Crow.
TOM: Fink.
CROW: [ Standing tall ] Ahem. Thank you and thank *you*.
[ TOM snorts. ] That was all about … *cats*. Thank you.
MIKE: [ Touching his shoulder. ] That was elegantly wrong, thank you.
[ AIRLOCK opens and closes. GYPSY enters. ]
MIKE: GYPSY! Hey, good to see you.
TOM: [ Simultaneously ] Gypsy’s back! Yay!
CROW: [ A second later ] Why not cats?
GYPSY: What is … likewise?
TOM: Um …
CROW: It’s been a madhouse without you.
GYPSY: What is … I’d imagined so?
[ MIKE buries his head in his hands. ]
TOM: Don’t say it … you’re suffering from the heartbreak of …
ALL: What is Trebekiasis?
[ MADS sign flashes; MIKE sticks out a hand enough to hit it. ]
[ CASTLE FORRESTER. BOBO is still in his bed, with a portable typewriter precariously perched on his stomach. The teddy bear is by the typewriter. Occasionally BOBO taps a key. PEARL FORRESTER watches over with blue pencil. OBSERVER is up front. ]
OBSERVER: And welcome back. As long as Professor Bobo’s incapacitated Pearl and I thought it would be a real kick to test out that bit about monkeys at typewriters producing the complete works of Shakespeare, so there you have it.
BOBO: You know, I’m fairly sure I am recovered.
PEARL: Type.
[ BOBO whimpers and then with a single finger hits one key, then another, then gets his fingers jammed between two keys, and whimpers again. ]
PEARL: This just … this isn’t working.
OBSERVER: No, not in the slightest.
PEARL: We need to throw more monkeys at the problem.
[ BOBO grunts while looking up? ]
OBSERVER: I’ll materialize the catapult. [ He walks off. ]
PEARL: [ Surprised, following ] Now that’s the kind of thinking
I want around here.
BOBO: [ Looking at the camera ] Uh-oh.
[ BOBO hides under the blanket, and after a pause, reaches his hand out to grab the teddy bear and pull it under. ]
|
\ | /
\ | /
\|/
----O----
/|\
/ | \
/ | \
|
This Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment of the James S Harris post “War of Attrition” is done without the explicit permission of any of the many parties who should probably have given it, among them James S Harris, renowned citizen of sci.math; Best Brains Incorportated, renowned production company for Mystery Science Theater 3000; the fine legacy of game shows the world over; and in some unexplained but important fashion, Major League Baseball. No infringement on or challenge to any copyrights, trademarks, service marks, or anything else is intended nor should be inferred. This MiSTing as a whole is the creation of Joseph Nebus, who probably had more useful things to do with his time, but who is beginning to despair of Dr Mike Neylon ever returning. Thank you.
> The Math Wars are to me all about how some people with position and
> power forget the power of the pen, and sit letting the pot slowly come
> to a boil.
[ The End ]
Shampoo
The Case For: One of the few substances that comes in aquamarine that society encourages you to touch.
The Case Against: Lather does not behave as animated cartoons have encouraged us to believe.
Vowel Mergers
The Case For: Teaches you which of your friends don’t know how to pronounce “Mary” correctly.
The Case Against: They get all huffy however many times you explain this to them.
In the recently concluded story in Dick Tracy the villainous Mr Bones’s purloined Wrist Wizard exploded. This was hard on him. It seemed like an arbitrary and unexplained resolution to Mr Bones’s murder plan.
It was remarkable good luck for Dick Tracy. It wasn’t unexplained, but the explanation was given back in December of 2016. The old model of Wrist Wizard — the evolution of the famous two-way wrist-radio — had a defect that could cause it to explode. I expect it was inspired by that time those real-world phones kept catching fire. Still, it’s not like they all caught fire. Anyway, this is the second time one of them exploding has saved Dick Tracy.
![[ Diet Smith Enterprises ] Tracy: 'We got your safety recall for our wrist wizards. Have you fixed the problem?' Smith: 'Not yet, but I have a replacement for you.' Tracy: 'Say, this looks like the original 2-way wrist radio you issued us! Does it have the same functions as the wrist wizard?' Smith: 'All the critical functions are the same, Tracy, but the most power-draining features have been cut to prolong battery life. This battery is less powerful but very stable, and it fit the high-profile body of the wrist radio perfectly. Will it do in the interim while my team overhauls the wrist wizard?' Tracy: 'I think so, Diet. It's like visiting an old friend!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/dick-tracy_joe-staton-mike-curtis-shelly-pleger-shane-fisher_11-december-2016.jpeg)
So this should catch you up to mid-March, 2022, in Joe Staton, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If you’re reading this after about June 2022 a more up-to-date plot summary should be here.
On my other blog, I finally finished my A-to-Z, explaining Zorn’s Lemma. I’ve also, often, used the mathematics blog as a chance to talk about comic strips with mathematics themes. Pi Day, of course, encourages comic strips to mention mathematics. Or pie. So I linked to old Pi Day comics roundups there. I’ll have this year’s roundup soon, don’t worry. They talk a good bit about pie.
Mr Bones, hired by the remains of The Apparatus crime syndicate, had a decent plan for killing Dick Tracy. It was to shoot him. To get Tracy in shooting range, Mr Bones stole the Dick Tracy memorabilia collection of Blackjack, who’s a criminal, yeah, but a superman. Blackjack broke out of jail to recover his collection. Mr Bones hooked up with Blackjack, only to abduct him.
The plan: Mr Bones would, as Blackjack, text Dick Tracy promising to turn himself in. And once Tracy was near enough, shoot him. Blackjack he tied up, dropped a fake suicide note beside, and set the gas going to blow up the hideout. So this would make it look like Blackjack had shot Dick Tracy and then killed himself.
This goes wrong a couple ways. First, Dick Tracy turns out to be hard to shoot at close range. Second, Mr Bones did not expect the Wrist Wizard from Blackjack’s collection(?) was getting ready to explode. (He used the Wrist Wizard to contact Dick Tracy as Blackjack.) Third, nobody expected that when the Wrist Wizard exploded Mr Bones would fall over the ravine to his death. Also, Blackjack was able to escape his bonds enough to call the cops. I don’t know how he escaped his hideout exploding around him, though. His bonds were rolls of plastic wrap tied around him while he slept, which I can believe as a cost-effective way of holding someone. I would think it would mess up making his death look by suicide, though.
And with that, the 15th of January, Mr Bones’s story closes. We follow with two weeks of a Minit Mystery. And a repeat, which so far as I know Dick Tracy hadn’t done before. (Could barely do before.) This repeated a two-week mystery, solving the murder of Mr H K Krispies, based on parlor-room mystery rules. Seems fine enough, if you like that sort of mystery.
The new, current story started the 30th of January. For it, Mark Barnard gets a guest writer credit. It stars Yeti, last seen in December 2020, I thought killed by his own poison spider after a spectacularly failed meteorite heist. Yeti’s gimmick is selling poisons, and business is bad enough without someone killing his customers. He sends his underlings Ferret (sister to Rabbit, underling killed last story around) and Ape to check on his clients. They get to Hiram “Boss” Moran’s place to find Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem there, investigating Boss Moran’s murder.
Tracy and crew notice the poisons Hiram had. Also rose petals on the grounds. They suspect could maybe be Yeti doing the killing? Yeti, meanwhile, hears of this on the radio and is livid, suspecting Ape and Ferret have betrayed him. Ape and Ferret, meanwhile, don’t know where to go given that Yeti won’t care that there is no conceivable way they could have prevented Moran’s killing. And along their way to not knowing where to go, they sideswipe a patrol car.
Tracy, for the heck of it, checks the owner of the sideswiping car and finds it’s Constance, sister of Thomas “Rabbit” Dooley. They know Rabbit as a poisoned body found outside city limits. So they conclude Yeti’s probably alive and selling poisons again. And Catchem keeps thinking of those rose petals. It reminds him of the flowers Daisy Dugan kept on his lapel, except for not being daisies.
Ape and Ferret, at least, confirm that seven of Yeti’s ten clients are still alive. But who could be targeting Yeti’ clients? They drive back to the sewer entrance to Yeti’s lair, unaware Tracy and Catchem trail them. Also that ahead of them is … Daisy Dugan. He’s angry, with reason, at being left for dead in the failed meteorite heist. With him is his sister Rose. Their revenge: first killing his market, then here, to leave Yeti to die in agony.
(I get either leg of this plan: killing Yeti’s clients so his business collapses, or shooting Yeti so he bleeds to death in the sewers. Doing both seems like they couldn’t decide on a revenge. Possibly Rose and Daisy couldn’t agree and finally went with both.)
Foiling them is the arrival of Ape and Ferret, who draw their guns. And coming up behind them are Dick Tracy and Sam Catchem, bringing more guns to a four-way armed standoff. Yeti starts shooting his poison darts at everybody, Ape and Ferret included. Rose starts shooting her bullets at everybody. Tracy and Catchem duck out of the way until Daisy Dugan surrenders.
Ape, Ferret, Daisy Dugan, and Rose Dugan they’re able to capture alive. Yeti disappears into the tunnels, but Tracy is confident there’s no way he can escape this time. And that, the 12th of March, seems to end this part of the Yeti’s story.
Sunday the 13th sees the start of a new plot, one lead off by Vitamin Flintheart and a celebrity impersonator he’s found. I have no idea where this might go. But that’s what the next plot recap is for, eleven weeks from now.
So how about a goofy, silly representation of the movie business? No, I’m not putting Funky Winkerbean in my rotation. We head on down to Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley and maybe see what’s become of Rufus and Joel. If all goes to plan, anyway. See you then.
Third
The Case For: Is the second place of second place.
The Case Against: Is the zeroth place of fourth place.
Balls
The Case For: Are the most egg-like of sports equipment.
The Case Against: There exist minimum and maximum sizes of balls for any regulation sports.
Before I start, folks who remember the Talkartoon Twenty Legs Under The Sea, starring Bimbo and with a cameo from a proto-Betty-Boop, might like to know something. The Max Fleischer Cartoons channel on YouTube has a cleaned-up version of that cartoon just published. Theirs is a channel worth watching. They’re doing a lot of cleaning-up and posting obscure shorts. If I ever turn to reviewing the Fleischer Color Classics series I’ll likely depend on their versions of the cartoons.
And a spot of trivia. One episode of Let’s Make A Deal this week closed with a Quickie Deal with an audience member dressed as Popeye. The challenge: if he could name when the Popeye series started (to within a decade) he’d get a hundred dollars. 1933, right? Well, he guessed wrong. And they answered wrong, offering 1960 as the start! Have to guess whoever was pulling up trivia for the Quickie Deals didn’t realize how ambiguous asking when “the Popeye series” started was.
Back to the King Features Syndicate Popeye shorts, though. Today’s is another Popeye cartoon from the Paramount Cartoon Studios group. The story’s credited to I Klein. Direction and production are credited to Seymour Kneitel.
The cartoon is set in India. I’m relieved to report that it has no racist or even questionable depictions of Indian persons. This because the budget was too tight to represent any Indian persons at all. It does depict India as a place with strange statues bearing curses, though. If you don’t want that sort of exoticizing South Asia in your recreational reading, you’re right and just skip this piece. You aren’t going to miss anything important in understanding the Popeye canon. This never quite tripped over the line to get me angry. I think because it interacts with the setting so little. The story wouldn’t change if the Sea Hag were trying to get Merlin’s Macguffin from an English castle.
For those who are venturing on, here is 1969’s Gem Jam.
I mean, there’s this episode of Dave the Barbarian where the lead villain has to trick one of Our Heroes into swiping this cursed magic item for him. You could watch that, if you want this premise done with more fun and energy. Dave the Barbarian was a mid-2000s goofy cartoon set in a fantasy magic kingdom, so a cursed item has a subtler set of issues behind it. It also has a more specific curse. The first person to take it will turn into cheese. Dave the Barbarian had that 90s-web-comic style of wacky wacky zany and oddly angry humor. But I’m sure there’s nothing we now notice as regrettable in the series at all.
But this short, mm. Popeye and Olive Oyl are in India, while every Indian person is out of town visiting friends. The Sea Hag is, too, hoping to swipe a gem from a statue. But the gem puts a curse on whoever steals it, so, she whips up a perfume potion to make Olive Oyl steal it for her. I’m sure the Sea Hag would have preferred anybody besides Popeye’s girlfriend to do this, but again, there’s not even people in the distance in background paintings here. She had no choice. Also, apparently, in this cartoon’s continuity Olive Oyl hasn’t met the Sea Hag yet. I suppose this justifies the Sea Hag relying on Olive Oyl instead of, like, training a squirrel. But it’s going to mess up any kids trying to put all the Sea Hag/Popeye/Olive Oyl interactions in a consistent order. Good luck.
Olive Oyl’s tricked into stealing the gem, but the Sea Hag can’t get it from her because the characters are explaining what just happened to each other. And the statue decides its ill-defined curse is going to mess with Popeye more than Olive Oyl. Well, he leaps in to take hole-in-the-earth meant for her. She feeds his spinach into the crack in the Earth, and Popeye remembers he can’t hit a woman even if she is the Sea Hag. So Olive Oyl eats the spinach and beats up the Sea Hag instead, off-screen. This is a rare cartoon where Olive Oyl eats spinach. The others I can think of are the Fleischer Studios Never Kick A Woman and the Famous Studios Some Hillbilly Cartoon, Right? This is because I have no memory of the Famous Studios Firemen’s Brawl. Anyway, Our Heroes return the emerald and we get out of the cartoon.
I always talk about how these Paramount-made cartoons at least always have basic competence, even if they’re dull. This one leans more on the boring side than usual, though. The repetition of explaining how the Sea Hag tricked Olive Oyl sure filled time. The curse wasn’t that interesting. We didn’t even get a good fight cloud between Olive Oyl and the Sea Hag. This would be a story to launch your existentialist fanfic about these characters going through the motions of protagonist and antagonist, except it’s not even an interesting enough routine plot to sustain that. Really, if you like the “trick the hero into stealing the cursed item” premise, try that Dave the Barbarian episode instead. That’s got jokes at least.
Reference: The Pine Barrens, John McPhee.
Contrast
The Case For: Is an elegant, simple expression originally meaning “with [ con ] trast [ trast ]”.
The Case Against: The word blocks the formation of the word “contrest”, which would describe something being the most contr.
Feet
The Case For: Invaluable to poets both as a way to describe meter and also a familiar body part to rhyme with “Pete”.
The Case Against: In science-fiction or archaeology thriller movies are always setting off ancient traps that cause loud action sequences.
Thanks for joining me for the second part of JSH: War of Attrition, a Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfic based on James S Harris’s long-forgotten rant on Usenet group sci.math.
The riff about “Frishtory” references a recurring minor villain on Dave The Barbarian, a fun mid-2000s cartoon that like four people remember even counting people who were on its production staff. And I think that’s all that’s particularly baffling in this set of riffs. Other than that nobody remembers Dave The Barbarian.
>
> When I feel a bit down
MIKE: The clerk tells me to stop fondling pillows.
> –like if insulting posters start getting to me–
CROW: Sneaking in under the door while I whap with my flyswatter …
> I can do things like do Google searches on my open source project
> "Class Viewer" which took the number one spot for that search string,
> years ago.
TOM: After the original first-place holder was disqualified for steroid use.
>
> It is all over the world.
CROW: Did you see it waving at you?
> I especially feel honored looking at the
> Chinese page,
MIKE: Which was all Greek to me.
> where words I typed years ago to describe my project
> have been translated.
CROW: If I had typed the words on time they would have been transpunctualled.
>
> That is an odd feeling.
TOM: Like when you think your socks are inside-out.
> And that is just one thing.
MIKE: I have many odd feelings and look forward to sharing every one of them.
>
> Just a few days ago I started talking about a "managed copy" idea of
> mine
CROW: Copies include a full Dilbert’s boss.
> and just typing up a post on my blog I found myself talking about
> it as digital media equipment self-encryption and of course went to
> the initials to designate it DMESE.
MIKE: [ Starting dramatically ] DUN DUN … d … huh?
TOM: He’s … made an acronym? Who cares?
MIKE: Maybe he’s bragging he’s had the idea of initials?
CROW: Or he’s found a flaw in our whole system of letters?
TOM: [ Narrating ] With my new *letters*, words and even *acronyms* can be created even by the likes of foolish unworthy peasants such as *yourself*!
>
> That is just one more thing.
CROW: Funny feelings *and* he has a blog — can nothing stop this man?
>
> Archimedes said that with a level long enough and a place to stand he
> could move the world
MIKE: Sheesh, my dad can barely use the level and a place to stand
to hang pictures straight.
> because he could conceive of greatness on a scale
> that most people cannot.
TOM: Ah, but could he imagine greatness with *letters*?
MIKE: It’s got to be more than making an acronym.
>
> I can move the world.
>
> Not one of you can say the same.
CROW: Not without my *letters*!
TOM: Guy puts initials together, wants world to know. We can play
that game, I guess.
>
> My posts get translated to languages across the planet. I watch ideas
> of mine travel around the world.
MIKE: I see whole civilizations transmitting my messages back in time
to change the course of history!
TOM: Frishtory!
>
> Yet I am still stopped by academics who are dead-set on fighting the
> Math Wars to the bitter end, and mostly they just wait.
CROW: Plus his freshman Calc TA has lousy office hours.
>
> Yes, Princeton academics can stop me today.
MIKE: Yes, they can wrap me head to toe in duct tape and leave me
in the back room. I’ll bring the tape.
> Yes, Harvard academics
> can hold the line today.
TOM: I won’t need the line until the weekend anyway.
>
> But they burn everything their universities have built up over the
> years in the process and I let them.
CROW: To be honest, I’m not sure why I did that. I hope I left myself a note about it.
MIKE: A note made almost entirely of *letters*!
>
> I emailed the University of California at Berkeley to note some
> unethical behavior by Arturo Magidin,
MIKE: Who was clearly abusing the “take all you want” rule at the Golden Prawn Chinese Buffet.
> and noticed at that point that
> Ralph McKenzie is listed as faculty,
TOM: And not as a Decepticon underling.
> where it notes he is at my alma
> mater Vanderbilt University.
CROW: Case closed.
>
> Yup, I know that as I visited him there years ago,
MIKE: But don’t be jealous. Many people can visit professors at Vanderbilt University if they learn my invention of *letters*.
> before my paper was
> published,
TOM: When there were concerts in the park.
> retracted after sci.math’ers including Magidin trumped the
> formal peer review system with some emails,
CROW: Before they sent a squad of highly physically developed
“Mathletes” to do a pole vault over an obelus.
> and the freaking math
> journal died.
TOM: That’s _The Journal of Freaking Math_.
MIKE: The official mathematics journal of Freakazoid.
>
> Academics can only sit and wait, while I move forward over time.
CROW: Occasionally I move too far forward, and bump into the railing overlooking the balcony. I move to the side a little, and start moving forward again.
> Knowing that at the end, I go for the entire system to reform it.
>
> And I will change their world.
MIKE: I will infuse it with drawn butter baked right in.
>
> I send papers to math journals and I [ beep ] well get a reply.
CROW: Like “No” and “Who are you again, exactly?”
> Sure,
> they’re polite rejections but they had better reply to me.
TOM: Or else I may visit people at *more* universities and withhold from them my vitally needed *letters*!
>
> You people don’t get it because I post among you, and you think that
> because I post I must be at your level.
MIKE: I’m actually posting things that are nine-dimensional and subject to rotation in fourteen dimensions at once.
[ To conclude … ]
Mauve
The Case For: One of the most nearly remembered hues in the -AU-E color group.
The Case Against: We gave mauve a whole decade and it gave us the Panic of 1893, the Lattimer Massacre, and the death of Vice President Garret A Hobart.
Commercial Passenger Air Travel
The Case For: Makes possible the dream of a person having breakfast from a Wawa in Bordentown, New Jersey, and lunch at a Hot Head Burritos in Groveport, Ohio.
The Case Against: Entire industry was created as a gimmick to teach people what to do when their ears pop and all side benefits were coincidence.
I don’t know! A casual mention in part of the current storyline was that King Arthur had retired, and some time ago. I had just thought they dropped the “In The Time Of King Arthur” subtitle on the title page for graphic design reasons or something. If someone actually knows the strip better than I do, please, let me know.
Nevertheless, this should get you up to speed on Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant for early March, 2022. If you’re reading this after about June 2022 there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap at this link.
Also, maybe of interest, on my other blog I hope to finish my 2021 Mathematics A-to-Z. This is to be with an essay for the letter Z. Yes, it’s run a bit longer than I wanted but please understand: 2021 was a lousy year.
Prince Valiant has fallen into an escort mission. Morgan Le Fay, abandoned — and threatened — by the dark forces she had done witchcraft with, needs his protection to get home. They enter Londinium ahead of a Saxon raiding party. The small, forgotten garrison can’t hope to hold out. He declares that King Arthur has ordered the outpost abandoned. And they accept Morgan Le Fay, as the king’s sister, as representing the King’s word.
So they like this “escape” plan. The trick is getting past the Saxons. There are a couple ancient pieces of Roman war machinery, that might be put together for one shot. And Valiant enlists Morgan Le Fay: if she could do something impressive with flame and smoke, they might have something worth shooting. The plan works: they put together a night of impressive fireworks that panic the Saxons.
Briefly. Wassa, the Saxon leader, recognizes this as a diversion for a retreat. The garrison tries to withdraw across the London Bridge. The garrison’s leader, Cafalt, has an accident when his horse steps through a rotted plank. It breaks his leg, and Valiant stands up to protect him against the pursuing Saxons. But it is one fighter, however much he is the protagonist, against the whole war party …
Since I last checked in on Joe Staton, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy we’ve seen Blackjack versus Mr Bones. We’ve seen The Apparatus make a fresh attempt at killing Dick Tracy. We’ve seen mysterious deaths marked by flower petals. And we’ve even seen reruns. I’ll try to summarize it all next week, if things go to plan.
Walls
The Case For: Are the best vertical surface available to 1990s college students to hang their posters of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Blues Brothers, or a Mandelbrot set.
The Case Against: Somehow increase the noise of the people in the hotel room next to you by 12 to 18 decibels.
Spider-Man
The Case For: Has the superhuman power to take good action pictures on a timer.
The Case Against: In one of his adventures on The Electric Company, Spider-Man was beaten by a Wall at Shea Stadium.
This week’s cartoon, in which Popeye does not eat spinach, is from the Jack Kinney studios. Ken Hultgren gets the story credit. Ken Hultgren gets animation direction. Producer credit goes to some guy name of Jack Kinney. Must be a relative. From 1960 here’s Ballet de Spinach.
I discussed Moby Hick last week as a strongly plot-driven cartoon with not much humor. Here we’ve got an almost plotless cartoon that’s relying on its humor. Olive Oyl has a new obsession, ballet dancing, and she nags Popeye into it. Nagging your friend into your hobby is real enough, and it’s potentially good comedic fodder. I don’t usually care for it myself, but please remember that left to my own devices, I would not actually go out or do anything. I’d sit in a comfortable chair playing on my own devices.
Olive Oyl’s dancing, and she’s going to be on the stage tonight, and she wants Popeye as her partner. This seems to be short notice. She nags Popeye into wearing a tutu and tries to coach him through a scene. Popeye’s outfit isn’t the sure laugh for me that the cartoon acts as it should be. Olive Oyl’s outfit works for me, though. We almost never see her in blue and it looks good on her, even though for some reason the outfit leaves her like two heads shorter than normal. Popeye mosty grumbles and stomps around like Fred Flintstone. It was close enough I wondered if there might have been any animators crossing over between Jack Kinney’s and Hanna-Barbera’s studios. But it’s also very likely there’s just a natural pose for an aggressive male character to stop across the room.
Brutus, looking in through the window in what I think is stock footage, laughs at Popeye. So we can add ‘toxic masculinity’ to Brutus’s rap sheet. (It was probably on there already.) Brutus comes in, somehow, to escalate the torment, and Popeye has enough pretty fast. Olive Oyl decides Popeye mustn’t do things out of character for an angel. So he gets clever, asking if angels will smack people in their breadbasket, like this, or clonk them on their head, like this. It gets the punching done.
Characters roped into things they don’t care for is often good for comedy. So is characters forced to follow some rule that conflicts with their natural impulses. So even without a plot this is a sound enough base for the cartoon. It doesn’t work for me, as I don’t find it inherently funny enough that Popeye should be in a tutu. Popeye’s in a fowl enough mood that I don’t have fun watching him. I suspect if there were more sotto voce jokes, Popeye quipping about his embarrassment or awkwardness or inability to dance, it might work.
(I couldn’t work a way to mention The Green Dancin’ Shoes into this, but if you like Jack Kinney-made cartoons about Olive Oyl’s dancing, you might want to know about that one too.)
Reference: The First Tycoon: The Epic Life Of Cornelius Vanderbilt, T J Stiles.
So, I’m aware that this is the season for putting things up against other things. And heck, I can think of things. So, here’s my first-ever March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing. I panicked when I was filling out the forms for bracket contest names. Sorry.
Bruce Springsteen
The Case For: All-time classic songs like Born in the USA and Born to Run, plus other non-birth-related songs.
The Case Against: Though he was born in the USA, his strengths are singing and songwriting. His running is nothing of note.
Sandwiches
The Case For: For over 25 years now the most convenient way to keep hot meatballs in your hand.
The Case Against: Hasn’t been a good sandwich song in the Top 40 in months.
Now may I share the second and I think last James S Harris post I turned into Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction. It’s not that Harris stopped writing (at least back then), or even stopped being a wonder to behold. But a lot of his posts tried to argue for his astounding mathematical discoveries everyone else understood wrongly. But that can be hard reading, especially when his error is a big unproven assumption in the middle of a lot of dense reasoning. And just railing against the conspiracy to suppress him gets repetitious. (And, where it got personal, uncomfortable to root on.) So maybe this is as much as I needed to do.
The game-show-themed-diseases thing grew out of like one night where for like half an hour my friends and I were adding “… and a new car!” to the ends of references to things. I think it shows. The segue between “the 23rd of May” and Allan Sherman is the “Don’t Buy The Liverwurst” segment in his medley Shticks Of One And Half A Dozen Of The Other. Fun song. Crow’s line setting it up has the meter of Sherman’s tune. Other cryptic riffs: Hm. Something about the specificity of saying “G4.872” in a riff makes me think I was referencing something, but I don’t remember what. Maybe it was my Mac’s model number or something. Baudot Code was a telegraphic alphabet where each symbol had a five-bit code. It was invented by Émile Baudot, who’s the person referenced in the unit “baud”.
[ OPENING CREDITS. As per season ten. ]
[ 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… 6… ]
[ SATELLITE OF LOVE. DESK. DAY. DENNIS. Behind the desk are a harried CROW and MIKE, accompanied by TOM, in a bathrobe, who’s in the middle of enunciating in his best overblown style. ]
TOM: … and you’ll love the view of the Satellite of Love you get from behind the wheel of … *your new car*!
[ CROW barely suppresses a frustrated cry. ]
MIKE: Hi, everyone. If Crow and I seem to be on the edge of losing all moral judgement it’s because our own Tom Servo here has contracted a nagging case of The Price Is Right Announcer Showcase Segue Syndrome, or Johnny Olson’s Disease …
TOM: … and you’ll recover from your bout with The Price Is Right Announcer Showcase Segue Syndrome by taking a ride to the hospital in … *your new car*!
CROW: [ Staring, jaw-dropped, at CAMBOT. ] He’s gone on just this way on almost everything we say ever since the 23rd of May.
TOM: … and you’ll love listening to your Allan Sherman CD collection on the deluxe collectible sound system in … *your new car*!
MIKE: Gypsy ejected herself into space on Memorial Day.
TOM: … when you can take the season’s first trip to the Shore in —
[ MIKE, screaming, grabs TOM’s dome and tosses it away. ]
TOM: Well, now, *that’s* just overreacting.
[ MADS sign flashes. ]
CROW: Hey, uh, Kitty Carlisle, Mark Goodson, and Bill Todman are calling.
MIKE: Yello?
[ MIKE taps the sign. ]
[ CASTLE FORRESTER. PROFESSOR BOBO is laying in bed, clutching a teddy bear and his sheets; OBSERVER is his nurse. PEARL is nibbling from a box of get-well chocolates. ]
BOBO: C … M …
OBSERVER: One more.
BOBO: K … and an I.
PEARL: Oh, stop whining. Bobo’s had Acute Wheel of Fortune Bonus Round Condition for a week and you don’t see Brain Guy about to smack him silly, do you?
BOBO: Licorice tabernacle?
OBSERVER: Actually, Pearl, if you’re asking —
[ PEARL turns around and glares at him. ]
OBSERVER: — Right, then. Three consonants and a vowel, Professor.
BOBO: V … F … H …
OBSERVER: And a vowel?
BOBO: A.
PEARL: Say, you know what’s good for your brain being fried by the incomprehensible ravings of others?
BOBO: Marzipan doorknob?
OBSERVER: You have R, S, T, L, N, E.
BOBO: G … P … W …
PEARL: Why don’t you scurry on into the theater and fry your brains on the incomprehensible ravings of James Harris?
BOBO: U?
PEARL: Scurry along, little ones. Servo. *Now*.
[ PEARL waits confidently while nothing happens. ]
BOBO: Ticonderoga gumdrop?
PEARL: [ Less confident ] Now?
OBSERVER: Giving you R, S, T, L, N, and for a change, E.
BOBO: J … D … R …
OBSERVER: Ooooh. You already had R, sorry.
[ PEARL swats OBSERVER with the candy box, sending some chocolates in the air, which BOBO scoops up eagerly. ]
BRAIN: Oh, yes, right, Mike, sorry. War of Attrition, you know?
[ He does the mind-sending thingy with the sound effect thing. ]
[ SATELLITE OF LOVE. As above; TOM hasn’t got his dome back yet. ]
TOM: Boy, glad I don’t have an annoying disease like that.
CROW: [ Restrained single-handed by MIKE. ] Lemme at him! Lemme at him! I’ll splat him!
[ MOVIE SIGN ]
MIKE: Save it —
ALL: WE GOT MOVIE SIGN!
[ 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… 1… ]
[ THEATER. ALL enter, TOM still dome-less. ]
> Path: rpi!news.usc.edu!
TOM: Your USC news feeders coming to you by way of *your new car*!
CROW: Hit him!
[ MIKE puts a fresh dome on TOM. ]
TOM: I’ll be good.
> newsfeed.news.ucla.edu!
CROW: I understand “Newsucla” is a dirty word in some places.
> newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews.google.com!
MIKE: Post-News-Herald-Dispatch-Tribune-Chronicle-Times-Journal.
> a26g2000pre.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail
TOM: Not for chain mail.
> From: jst…@gmail.com
> Newsgroups: alt.math.undergrad,alt.math,alt.math.recreational,sci.math
CROW: And the sci.math all-number-theory cheerleaders!
> Subject: JSH: War of attrition
MIKE: Isn’t that a Gwar album?
> Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 22:>37:09 -0700
TOM: So it’s … negative 678:37:09?
> Organization: http://groups.google.com
> Lines: 104
CROW: Straight Lines: 75.
> Message-ID: <1180676229.3…@a26g2000pre.googlegroups.com>
MIKE: Remember to pre-Google. You don’t want to search for ‘lentil bathtub’ without warming up.
> NNTP-Posting-Host: 67.164.117.60
> Mime-Version: 1.0
CROW: Nine-Version: 0.1.
> Content-Type: text/plain;
MIKE: But you can decorate it with maybe a cheery scarf or a smiling button?
> charset="iso-8859-1"
> X-Trace: posting.google.com 1180676229 31488 127.0.0.1
TOM: Aren’t those our orbital elements?
> (1 Jun 2007 05:37:09 GMT)
CROW: Grover Meridian Time — the time zone of Grover everywhere!
> X-Complaints-To: groups…@google.com
> NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2007 05:37:09 +0000 (UTC)
MIKE: The Universal Tickle Company has nothing to add to the time!
> User-Agent: G2/1.0
TOM: G2, G1.0, give or take.
CROW: It’s really G4.872.
> X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0
MIKE: A fifth of Mozilla?
TOM: With a spot of gin.
> (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4)
CROW: It’s like when the thunderstorm messes up the closed captioning.
> Gecko/20070515 Firefox/2.0.0.4,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe)
MIKE: [ As Tigger ] G-zip G-zoo, woo hoo hoo hoo!
> Complaints-To: groups…@google.com
> Injection-Info: a26g2000pre.googlegroups.com; posting-host=67.164.117.60;
TOM: But no carbohydrates, so it’s Atkins-friendly.
> posting-account=Q2zO6wwAAABSLuGzZIjG0efOtB9n8fUY
CROW: When computers curse in Baudot code!
> Xref: rpi sci.math:396490
MIKE: I was never good at these analogy questions.
>
> The Math Wars
[ TOM hums the opening to ‘Star Wars’, as in, dum-dum-dum-DAAAA-DUM! ]
> are to me all about how some people with position and
> power forget the power of the pen,
MIKE: To the brew that is true.
CROW: Don’t say a line like that when you’ve just had garlic.
> and sit letting the pot slowly come
> to a boil.
CROW: This week on baffling metaphor theater!
TOM: Then add three cups of sliced carrots and a dash of mustard.
[ To continue … ]
There is no getting around it: people really, really want to follow Wilbur Weston dying. Since my last Mary Worth plot recap, he has not died. He didn’t even get a round of people to start slapping him and never stop, the way he deserved. And with that, my readership has dropped again. So let’s take a look at the specifics.
January 2022 was my most popular month in almost a year. February 2022 was almost suspicious in its averageness. WordPress recorded 5,411 page views here. For the twelve months from February 2021 through January 2022, the mean was 5,206.3 page views and the median 4,585. There were 3,012 unique visitors, down from January again. But the twelve-month running mean was 3,067.9 unique visitors. The median was 2,616.5 visitors. So really this suggests a month with more readers than average, and looking at the graph suggests that.
The number of likes continued its ongoing decline, to a mere 151 over the month. But the twelve-month running average was 149.7 likes, and the median 149, so, what more could I want? Comments I don’t answer? I got 52 of them (counting my answers), below the running mean of 59.1 and running median of 56.5.
What were the popular things from February? Comic strip talk, obviously. What people wanted to see was Wilbur Weston die, fairly enough. Or to hear whether it’s just them or has Comics Kingdom screwed up its web site. It’s not you. Just go ahead and assume, for all time, that Comics Kingdom has messed something up. So here’s the five most popular things from February and see if you can work out what the readers want to see:
My most popular piece that was not based on comic strips? That would be In Which I Am Looking for a Peer Reviewer and reveal that I’m spending my days watching Buzzr instead of doing anything else. I’m sorry, but Celebrity Whew! is a crackling good watch. Also, I believe I have worked out a scenario in which a contestant on Card Sharks could run out of cards, but I want to confirm my reasoning before publishing my results.
My schedule for the story comic plot recaps, for the coming month, is this:
All of that is subject to breaking news, of course. But all the story strip plot recaps are at this link, if you want to be sure you miss none of them.
There were fully 90 countries sending me readers in February, up from January’s figure. 24 of them were single-view countries, a substantial jump percentage-wise from January’s 17. Here’s the roster of those figures:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 4,219 |
| India | 195 |
| Canada | 144 |
| United Kingdom | 123 |
| Australia | 78 |
| Germany | 62 |
| Philippines | 56 |
| Brazil | 49 |
| Sweden | 41 |
| Italy | 28 |
| Spain | 26 |
| Finland | 25 |
| Mexico | 24 |
| Japan | 21 |
| Ireland | 18 |
| Turkey | 18 |
| Colombia | 15 |
| France | 15 |
| Russia | 15 |
| Egypt | 13 |
| Nigeria | 13 |
| Belgium | 10 |
| Poland | 10 |
| Saudi Arabia | 9 |
| Argentina | 8 |
| Norway | 7 |
| Vietnam | 7 |
| Costa Rica | 6 |
| Singapore | 6 |
| Switzerland | 6 |
| Uruguay | 6 |
| Bulgaria | 5 |
| Ecuador | 5 |
| Greece | 5 |
| Malaysia | 5 |
| New Zealand | 5 |
| Thailand | 5 |
| Barbados | 4 |
| Cyprus | 4 |
| Czech Republic | 4 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 4 |
| Indonesia | 4 |
| Netherlands | 4 |
| Pakistan | 4 |
| Peru | 4 |
| Puerto Rico | 4 |
| South Africa | 4 |
| Guatemala | 3 |
| Portugal | 3 |
| Romania | 3 |
| Slovakia | 3 |
| U.S. Virgin Islands | 3 |
| United Arab Emirates | 3 |
| Austria | 2 |
| Azerbaijan | 2 |
| Denmark | 2 |
| Israel | 2 |
| Kenya | 2 |
| Kuwait | 2 |
| Luxembourg | 2 |
| Macedonia | 2 |
| Malta | 2 |
| Mongolia | 2 |
| South Korea | 2 |
| Taiwan | 2 |
| Venezuela | 2 |
| Albania | 1 |
| American Samoa | 1 |
| Anguilla | 1 |
| Bangladesh | 1 |
| Belize | 1 |
| Bolivia | 1 |
| Bosnia & Herzegovina | 1 |
| Brunei | 1 |
| Cambodia | 1 |
| Cameroon | 1 |
| Cuba | 1 |
| Estonia | 1 (*) |
| Ethiopia | 1 |
| European Union | 1 |
| Ghana | 1 |
| Hungary | 1 |
| Lebanon | 1 |
| Libya | 1 |
| Myanmar (Burma) | 1 |
| Oman | 1 |
| Papua New Guinea | 1 |
| Paraguay | 1 |
| Slovenia | 1 |
| Ukraine | 1 |
Estonia was the only country to send me a single page view in January also. There’s no countries on a three-month streak of reading me as slightly as possible.
WordPress figures that I published 16,171 words in February. That’s an average of 577.5 words per posting, both figures down from January but not by much. The average to date this year dropped from 587 words per post to 583.
Between the launch of Voyager 2 in 1977 and the start of March there were 3,315 posts in this blog, which drew a total of 200,487 views from 160,436 unique visitors. And they drew 5,026 comments altogether. I don’t know which one was the 5,000th. I also don’t know if that counts the ‘Pending’ ones that I’m pretty sure are spam but can’t bring myself to delete. Also a couple from people who wanted to give me a not-for-publication comment or correction.
If you’d like to be a commenter, please say something. If you’d like to be a reader, please read. The RSS feed for my essays is this link. Or you can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button at the upper-right corner of this page, and get it in your WordPress reader. You can also use the subscription box to get posts e-mailed to you in that narrow window between my scheduled post and my first round of typo corrections. I don’t do anything with your e-mails besides have WordPress send out posts, but I can’t say anything about what WordPress does with them. Sorry.
She’s not. It would never occur to her to try. But once you start the avalanche you can’t tell — you know, I mentioned how of course Terry Beatty, of Rex Morgan M.D., was not trying to upstage me. This in providing a good succinct plot recap right as my plot recap was ready to post. While Beatty might be aware of my existence, there is a story comics creator who I know does know I’m around. Tony DePaul himself posted a good, clear recap of the current daily storyline for The Phantom.
It’s worth the read, first for understanding the writer’s intentions. Also for learning bits about the specific mechanics of writing these stories. Like, what does the script look like? How far ahead are stories written? (As DePaul and his collaborators do things, at least; I imagine every writing team develops their own workflow.) How does a story like this, meant to stretch into a third calendar year, get made?
So that and this should catch you up on Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom, weekday continuity, through the end of February 2022. If you’re interested in the Sunday continuity, or are reading this after about May 2022, a more useful recap is likely at this link. And, if you’re interested in my explanations of mathematics terms, my glossary project’s resumed over on my other blog. Should have a fresh post up tomorrow, too. Now, let’s talk comics.
I’m not sure what I can add to Tony DePaul’s own summary. My perspective and misunderstandings, I suppose. Still, here goes. In the prophecy of Old Man Mozz, The Phantom successfully breaks Savarna Devi out of death row in Gravelines Prison. But he’s badly wounded, and while the veterinarian they find is able to stitch him together, it’s not over. The Phantom gets a fever, one lasting for days, and in his delusional state he says something catastrophic, that sends Savarna away.
This may all seem like it’s taking a while to get done. Fair enough. But we are seeing what’s meant to be a plausible way that The Phantom — a legacy of five centuries — crashes apart. It’s something that’s survived twenty generations of changing world. Of Phantoms (mostly) dying in action. It’s grown supportive structures, like the Jungle Patrol, that would carry on of their own inertia as long as possible. I quipped in my previous recap of the Sunday strips that The Phantom has to spend about 412 days a year keeping up with ceremonial tasks. He spends a lot of time gluing these structures together. But in exchange, those structures glue The Phantom, the institution, together. It will need a lot to wreck all that. So it has to be something that’s big and complicated and messy.
Savarna’s headed for the Himalayas, and the monastery where Kit Junior, the presumptive 22nd Phantom, is studying. He’s very much not ready yet; he’s not even trying to conceal his face from people. And he’s been thinking how happy he is nobody like Guran, from his pre-monastery life, has appeared, as they would have the news his father died. Then Savarna, from his pre-monastery life, appears, and he’s happy to see her. (I saw some snarking about this inconsistency. Granted it may be inconsistent, but it’s inconsistent in a way normal people are.)
She arrives the week of the 17th of January. That’s when we begin the story/chapter titled Death in the Himalayas. They meet over tea. She explains she’s there for something that needs doing, and something she thought she was finished with. Before The Phantom broke her out of Gravelines he had her swear to be done with revenge. While The Phantom healed, she thought how she was done with killing. And now …
Chief Constable Jampa enters the teahouse. She confronts him. That’s too soft a phrasing. She shoots him. She knows him. Nineteen years ago pirates killed her father, master of the original India Voyager. And her brother. It set her on her campaign of vigilante anti-piracy and anti-fascism. Leading the pirates? That same Jampa. As a girl she was able to scald him, and escape, almost drowning as she does. It makes her life story — and her relentlessness in this point — much clearer.
You may ask how it is Jampa ended up a chief constable in a remote Himalayan village. Well, how is it Kit Junior ended up in the same place? And, if you’ll let me build a castle on some sky, it might not be coincidence. Years ago we got a line that Kit Junior perceived his tutor Kyabje Dorje to be a Phantom-like superhero. Why might Chief Constable Jampa not be that superhero’s nemesis? It might even say why Kit Senior sent his son there rather than, say, to understudy with The Locust or somebody. (Probably not. Kit Senior was sending Chief Constable Jampa money for reports about his son. Diana Walker called Jampa a good man, a blow to her ability to judge character on slender evidence. On the other hand, I thought that mention of Jampa was just Kit Senior distracting Diana and Guran from Mozz’s prophecy. Now, I see DePaul introducing Jampa to this story before his big death scene.)
But this is where we’ve gotten. Savarna, in an understandable fury, has found Kit Junior and shot the chief constable of this Indian village. The Phantom, unaware of this, is returning home. … Or so foresees Old Man Mozz.
Where does The Phantom, who’s learning all this as we are, go from here? Not my place to say. DePaul was good enough to share that this chapter, Death In The Himalayas, is to end the 16th of April. The next chapter, Phantom’s End, is to run 23 weeks. I calculate that to be the 18th of April through to the 24th of September. And then … three more chapters, he estimates, before this is all done. Quite the project.
Saxon invaders besiege Londinium, and all Prince Valiant has to defend himself is whatever he and Morgan Le Fay can whip up! Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant gets a couple hundred words of explanation, again, if things go to plan. We’ll see.
Another Blog, Meanwhile 