Joseph Nebus's Sense Of Humor
Me, last week when I reviewed a 1960s cartoon so I could build a little buffer time:
Next week I should get back to Popeye’s Island Adventures with a fresh essay at this link. Now watch as King Features double-crosses me and doesn’t post a new cartoon this week.
King Features:
(Goes two weeks without posting a new cartoon.)
I was ready for it and yet I feel betrayed.
I’m happy to be one source of plot summaries for Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley. If you’re reading this after about September 2019 I may have a more up-to-date summary at this link. I also have a good number of older essays at that link. If you want to know the last couple years’ story developments. Thanks for using them.
On my other blog I look for mathematics topics as discussed in the syndicated comics. You might enjoy that too. I enjoy it all. But for now, back to the story strips.
The story seemed over last time I looked in on Gasoline Alley. Major “Buy-Buy” Bertie’s career of real estate fraud had collapsed. So had his relationship with Mayor Melba Rose. Rufus was now free to try getting his feelings requited.
Rufus takes Melba to Corky’s Diner. It goes well. Rufus is walking on air as he heads home. He’s also walking through the woods, which gets him chased by a wolf. The wolf gets stopped and scared off by Toro, a small dog. Toro’s there with Willow, a young woman wandering the woods. Toro’s hungry. Willow claims that she isn’t, right before passing out.
Rufus feeds both of them, and offers Willow a place to sleep. He sleeps on the porch, in the rain. By morning, when Joel picks him up to go in to work, he’s a mess. And please consider how bad he has to look for Joel to think he’s a mess. They go to the thrift store for some better clothes and run into Frank Nelson. It’s a rare non-Skeezix-connected appearance for Frank Nelson in these pages. They get a fresh coat and head on.
At the end of the day Rufus returns home. Willow’s sleeping, but she offers to make dinner. If Rufus has brought any more food, since she finished what was there. And Toro is still a growling, angry little dog. This after being fed several times and getting to see that Rufus is a good guy. I mean, you may find the comic tradition he comes from annoying. But he’s been consistently kind and generous this story.
Come bedtime Rufus heads out to Joel’s. He doesn’t want to sleep on the porch in the rain again. He doesn’t like how Toro’s chased out his own cats. Joel has harsh advice on this: stop feeding Willow and Toro. If she’s sick, take her to the emergency room. If she’s not, then — what’s she doing?
And it’s a fair question. Rufus spends the night sleeping with Joel’s mule. He stinks of it when he gets to work. He covers this up with the free perfume samples at the department store. This is too much in a different direction. But he’s able to tone his odor down to “existing” by lunchtime. He and Melba walk the streets downtown. And then he sees …
Well, he’s sure he saw Willow’s reflection. Why would she be in town despite her fatigue and dizziness? We’ll see in the next few weeks what her deal is. The strip has gone to some length to paint her as a mooch and even an unpleasant person. But I notice it hasn’t committed to anything that couldn’t be rationalized. I don’t say there is a plot twist coming. I think it’s plausible there will be, is all.
Before writing a What’s Going On In … essay I try to remember the highpoints of the last three months’ of a comic. I go on to re-read the whole comic run, yes. But I like to think of what my impressions were. It helps me figure whether I need to schedule time for another 2,000-word doorstop of an essay. This time around I realized I couldn’t think what had happened exactly. Rufus and Melba Rose … were on a date back in early April, and then this last week … they still were? Something like that? With an odd week of Frank Nelson in the middle?
Mind, there’s nothing wrong with a story strip not being that plot-dense. Jim Scancarelli writes a casual comic, with low stakes. I’m surprised that it has been this little. I suppose this is why I expect Willow not to be what she obviously is. I’m also surprised by Rufus getting two stories in a row. Also that there’s a mention to the unresolved story of his courting The Widow Emma Sue and Scruffy’s Mom. I’d assumed that story was dropped in favor of Rufus courting the Mayor. So, even if not much is happening there’s still surprises coming around.
We’ve got desert. We’ve got a gold mine that might exist. We’ve got a guy with facial hair. We’ve got obscure raccoon-like mammals in the foreground. If there’s not some major breaking news we’ll have James Allen’s Mark Trail featured in a week. Thanks.
Reference: The Zimmermann Telegram, Barbara W Tuchman.
My love read over that my Everything There Is To Say About Mnemonics essay and found something I had failed to say. I hate when it turns out I missed a thing to say. But it is important to note to call them “mnemonics” and not “pneumonics”. “Mnemonics” is the thing about remembering stuff. “Pneumnonics” if that were anything would be something about vapor-propelled actions. Or possibly a New Wave band with two hits, one of them about romance during nuclear war and one of them about radio. I’d love to help people keep this straight but I don’t know a way to make it easy to remember.
There’s little question about whether gas prices are rising. You can check whether the gas station signs are getting taller. But are the prices increasing as well as rising? Those varied collections of digits don’t grow on trees, not anymore. The last grove of wild price-berry trees grew in Maine’s upper peninsula until 1914, when spoilsport geographers pointed out Maine hasn’t got any upper peninsula. An effort to transplant them to the New Hampshire panhandle failed for similar reasons.
The history of gas prices traces back to the Babylonians. One fragmentary parchment a scant three cubits by five reads “DXXXIX OCTANE .XIXIX”. This shows how thousands of years ago, before not only the invention of unleaded but before leaded was a thing, it was cheaper to get 89-octane regular. The meaning was unclear to the Babylonians, because they hadn’t invented Roman Numerals yet. (Roman Numerals were invented by early Renaissance mathematicians to make their early work look more classy.) The Babylonians were pretty hazy on the concept of Rome and whether it would go anywhere too. It’s more sort of sprawled than gone anywhere.
Even once they found out what Roman Numerals were there was still confusion . For example, everyone was pretty sure that “D” is how the Romans wrote “500”. “Fifty” should be something else, like a letter φ. The sad thing is there’s no way to find out. We have to stumble through and tell ourselves if we’re confused it’s probably because we missed something. Maybe it’s a letter ‘T’. That seems like it ought to be a Roman Numeral for something.
Today, gas prices are generally obtained through mining. Most 9’s come from three former mountains in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Even digits, most often, are taken from Kentucky or the Ozark Mountains when the owners aren’t looking. The odd numbers 1, 3, and most 7’s are dug from former silver veins in Nevada. Other 7’s come from the lower Mississippi region, the onetime “breadbasket of numbers that look random-ish”. The mighty 5 is produced by the one remaining open plant at Washington state’s Hanford Nuclear Plant. This is a highly industrial process. It creates 5’s by fissioning off either a 2 from existing 7’s, or a 3 from an existing 8. A project in the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in early 1994 fused a 2 and a 3. But the operation wasn’t practical, just pretty. There’s still sometimes talk about reviving the project and hoping it works out better. It’s nice to hope for, but don’t count on anything.
As long as gas prices have been for sale people have been trying to find ways around paying them. One one approach is to use prices that are not actually written down but are on electronic signs instead. These are easy to change, so gas station owners can respond to things like the crisis in vanadium. I’m assuming there’s a crisis in vanadium. It seems like the kind of element that’s always having crises. But there are disadvantages. A physically written price needs to be paid for once and then used however long the gas station owner wants. With electronic prices you keep owing typeface royalties to either the Caslon family or the Mergenthaler heirs. Cross them at your peril.
What of the quirk of ending gas prices with a 9/10? The United States has not minted a 9/10-cent coin except briefly in 1831. This was when the Second Bank of the United States was feeling all sarcastic towards President Andrew Johnson. It was a great moment of pettiness, but they looked foolish when they remembered Johnson wasn’t in office and they meant to snipe at Andrew Jackson. The modern uses of 9/10 traces to the Second World War. A War Production Board order of January 1943 restricted the use of the fractions between 91/100 and 99/100. For the duration prices went from ending in 99/100 down to 9/10. Then people got so comfortable with that they didn’t feel like changing back when fraction rationing ended in March 1945.
Many non-United States countries sell gas by the liter, rather than the gallon. Thus they use the same prices but at different times. This inspires curious feelings of nostalgia or a sense of peeking into the future, depending on when one happens to be overseas, and when one should be otherwise.
You say it’s World Simile Day? What is that like?
(Thank you for watching me fulfill last week’s stupid word promise. Please visit next week when I try to match all of my various keyboards with their appropriate lockboards.)
I’m taking this week to build myself some margin in the Popeye’s Island Adventure series. I’m doing that by filling in a week with an older cartoon. This one, Plumber’s Pipe Dream, is part of the notorious 1960s series. In that, King Features made over two hundred short cartoons over the course of about three years to fill television with a heap of content. Doing this required hiring, like, everybody who could hold a pencil. This is a short that I thought King Features had on their official YouTube channel. They have a couple dozen of that run. So I’m posting a copy I can find. If you find it’s been removed, please let me know. I’ll try to find a replacement. It could be King Features will have added it to their official channel by that time.
This cartoon, at least, I can give credits for. It was made by Jack Kinney Productions. Jack Kinney worked for Disney in the Golden Age — he directed sequences in Pinocchio and Dumbo. And he worked for UPA Studios at its peak too. You could get that idea from the stylish title card. By 1960 he had his own studio doing television work, King Features cartoons among it.
This is not a good cartoon. It is one I enjoy watching. It’s weird that those go together. A strain in pop culture, especially on the Internet, celebrates bad stuff. It’s been celebrated so long that we can forget that this is a strange choice to make. What’s fun about a bad cartoon, or movie, or book, or story?
I think it’s something you have to grow into. You start out taking in stories (cartoons, movies, whatever) and accepting them as stories. Then you get to knowing stories well enough. You can tell good from bad, and maybe why some are good and some bad. Most of us then stick to the good stories, and live a happy life with our entertainment choices. But some of us, in what feels like a nerdy thing to do, break that. I think some of us get so obsessed with studying stories, and why they work and why they don’t, that we overthink it. Like, we notice that most good stories follow (sensible) rules. A genuinely bad story, though? That won’t follow rules. Or it follows a weird distorted idea of the rules. It surprises in a way that a well-made story can’t. The surprise and novelty is great if you’ve consumed so much of a particular kind of story that normal ones are boring. And it’s great for showing by its mistakes how good stories come together. And, yes, a good story that defies rules and breaks expectations is also cherished. But there’s probably more ways to make a bad story than a good one.
So how does this hypothesis matter to this cartoon?
We start with Olive Oyl having a leaky faucet. Good premise. Plumbing cartoons are usually fun. Leaking water gives things a sense of urgency, and that often builds comic energy well. Swee’Pea suggests having it fixed, something Olive Oyl never thought of, even though they have the same voice actor. Olive Oyl insisting she wouldn’t have thought of that, and looking up “plumbers” under “P as in Plop”, are a couple cute throwaway dialogue jokes. They’re not quite laugh lines, but at least they’re cheery.
Popeye’s the designated plumber, and mentions how this call roused him from a snooze. There’s a weird momentary fade to black at about 1:31, before we see Popeye’s face making some weird expressions. This turns out to be plot-important, but you only know that in retrospect. Popeye’s first attempt only makes the leak worse and he rushes to the basement to turn the water off. This by the way takes about as long as a whole Popeye’s Island Adventure does. So I appreciate how much story compression has to go into those shorts.
Popeye can’t remember which apartment he needs to turn off, so he breaks that pipe too. So he figures now he has to go to the water main and runs out to the city sewer. Here, given the direction to turn the wheel right he turns it back and forth until it breaks off, sending even more water loose. You have get to wondering whether Popeye was always this incompetent. Boring Suburban Popeye, the character he mutated into in cartoons of the 50s, had a lot of problems. (And yes, this is Popeye in the city. But it’s the way he acts when the cartoon makes him the owner of a boring home in a boring suburb.)
Now the apartment is flooding to the point it looks lost at sea. Popeye needs to get to the city mains before a J G Ballard novel can break out. He hails a taxi, that gets there on distinctly dry streets, and calls out, “The City Water Works!” The shocked driver asks, “It does?” and so help me that makes me laugh every time. This is because I am a nerd. That a phrase might have more than one meaning is always funny to both nerds and four-year-olds. Four-year-olds it makes sense. They’re delighting in the discovery of how language works. Nerds, I don’t know. Might be we so like having things explained and sensible that a sentence which resists mono-meaning is delightful.
Now the water comes, with the city streets flooding or flooding more. Popeye swims toward the water works, only to find the water’s risen so high that it threatens to extinguish the Statue of Liberty’s torch. You know, the torch that has never been a literal fire.
There’s some spinach floating by, that Popeye grabs happily and eats. He gets his power-up fanfare and … water squirts out of his muscle bulges. Well, he puddles to the drowned shutoff valve, which opens a drain, threatening to suck him down. And then what do you know but it’s all a dream, and he’s still getting another call from Olive Oyl. He rushes to Olive Oyl’s apartment and once again forgets to turn off the water. The end.
Lay out the storyline like that and it seems workable. Making a small problem ever-worse is a standard comic method. It’s standard because it works so well. And there are a bunch of funny little drawings. Popeye asleep in his chair looks weird, but in a funny way. The taxi driver has some nice bugged-out eyes when he sees the flood coming. There’s more nice casual jokes than I remembered were in this short. It isn’t quotable, but that’s because all the jokes depend on their context to be anything. And a cartoon doesn’t have to be quotable to be good.
But what’s bad. Mm. Well, little things. Every scene takes a few seconds longer than it needs. The music was done by hitting shuffle on the King Features 1960s Background Themes playlist. I’ll give them a pass on how much animation gets reused within this short. They had like $20 and a heap of Green Stamps for an animation budget, and as many as twelve minutes to draw the thing. But did a third of all the dialogue have to be Olive Oyl crying out “Heellllp” in an endless repeated chant? (I likely find this more annoying than other people because the same chant gets used in many of the 60s cartoons. I recognize it like I recognize the exact same gunshot sound effect in half of all the M-G-M Tom and Jerry cartoons.)
For the most part, this cartoon is boring. Or it’s annoying, when Olive Oyl is crying out “Heellllp” in a sound clip they used in every King Features Popeye. It’s going a bit loopy, with the speed and magnitude of the flooding. But it’s not until 3:55, it changes. This is when Popeye notices the Statue of Liberty is almost drowned. Now the cartoon is not only bad, but great bad. Making the flooding worse by fixing it? That’s a normal line of action. That’s the plot thread that you could make a good cartoon around. Making the flooding “Oh, and it’s going to extinguish the flame in the Statue of Liberty’s Torch”? That’s not a logical thought. The cartoon leaps into some surreal, dream-logic territory. It’s surprising and weird. The rules of plot logic that we’re used to fail and that’s thrilling. Plus there’s a nice alarmed look on the statue’s face.
That it’s all a dream is … eh. The cartoon could as easily have had the big drain open up and let the city dry. Making it all a dream retroactively excuses Popeye making dumb mistakes, at least. And it sets up the here-we-go-again punch line. The cartoon manages, at least for a while, to be a great bad cartoon.
Next week I should get back to Popeye’s Island Adventures with a fresh essay at this link. Now watch as King Features double-crosses me and doesn’t post a new cartoon this week. Well, I have 219 other 1960s cartoons to look at. Plus they’ve posted episodes from Popeye And Son. I can wait them out.
Check my work on this. The reason every web site nowadays, including the ones that just show you what the Linotype keyboard layout looked like and reprint old tips for how to get proficient at mechanical typesetting, ask for permission to send you notifications is because they’re run by vampires, right? And they need you to say they’re allowed in before they can come and vampire out all over you? Because I can’t think of another answer that fits the available facts.
Thanks for wondering about Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy. If it’s later than about September 2019, there should be a more up-to-date plot recap at this link. This should get you up to date on what’s happening as of mid-June 2019.
There was a special guest star in Dick Tracy last time around. Not from another comic strip. Joe Samson, who’d been a character in the late 70s, was back. He’s pursuing a Tacoma serial killer who’s murdering schoolteachers. Schoolteachers who are also basketball coaches and maybe sportswriters. We readers know who it is, and why he changed towns. It’s Barnabas Tar, hit new sports columnist for The Daily. He’s moved because his brother Reggie “Rocks” Tar thought this might stop his brother’s murdering.
Tar’s newest killing makes the papers. And gets him a Serial Killer Headline Name, “Teacher’s Pet”. The Tacoma newspapers called him that too. This outrages the killer. He confronts Wendy Wichel, star crime reporter for The Daily. And threatens death if he calls her anything but The Professor. She writes up the encounter for The Daily. And hasn’t got much more to share with Tracy. The Professor had a disguise. Also one of those voice altering devices that exists in this kind of story.
![[ The SBN Parking Lot - As Dark As It Gets ] Wendy Wichel, to a masked assaulter: 'W-What do you want?' Professor: 'Your story about the murder was an INSULT! Do I look like a 'Teacher's Pet' to you?' Wichel: 'No!' Professor: 'I don't pander to anybody! I teach the teachers about death! You will call me 'The Professor'! Understand? Use 'Teacher's Pet' again and you'll be victim number eight!'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/dick-tracy_joe-staton-mike-curtis_31-march-2019.jpeg)
The investigation’s short on leads, so the subplots have to pick up the slack. Bonnie Tracy, who turns out to be a schoolteacher, takes the class on a tour of The Daily newsroom. Barnabas Tar is smitten with Bonnie Tracy, and they set a date at Coletta’s Restaurant. And just in time, as Reggie Tar has thought hard about his brother’s serial-killing and decided to call the cops on him. One might complain that once again Tracy gets the solution handed to him, no super-detective work needed. And I admit I’m not the crime podcast listener in the household. But my understanding is “family member turned them in” is one of the top ways serial killers get caught. It’s that and “gets stopped for an expired license plate and somebody checks”. Tracy catches up with Barnabas Tar at the date with Bonnie. Barnabas flees, out the kitchen and into the alley. Cornered in an alley, he tries to shoot Tracy and misses. Tracy tries to shoot Tar and succeeds.
So that covers the Teacher’s Pet killings. The only big loose end is that Bonnie Tracy still has ambiguous feelings for Joe Samson, who’s been less a part of this story than you’d expect. But Samson doesn’t have to leave the strip just yet.
And some other busienss. The 26th and 27th of April, Vitamin and Kandikane Flintheart’s son is born. He’s named Kane Flintheart. Seems cute as kids go, so far as I can tell.
The 28th of April started another Minit Mystery, a two-week diversion written by Jim Doherty. The framing device is Dick Tracy recounting his time as police chief of Homewood. This for the benefit of Patrick Culhane and Austin Black, history writers. The story’s illustrated in a different style to the modern Dick Tracy usual. And it’s soaked in bits I love from old-time-radio detective stories. Wide-open cities run by gangsters, mayors being elected on a reform slate, protection rackets, insurance fraud.
The mystery featured a lot of text, though, and a lot of plot. When I read this as it came out I felt lost. I trusted that if I read the whole two weeks’ worth of strips at once, it would make better sense. It does. The solution is — well, it’s sensible. I’m not positive that it’s adequately planted by the narrative. But the puzzle would not have taken Dick Tracy so long without all the heavy plotting and heaps of information piled on the reader either. So was it fair? … Yes, I’ll say it was. I hope not only because I can imagine, say, Gerald Mohr reeling off Dick Tracy’s lines here.
Back to the main continuity. The current story started, more or less, the 13th of May. (There was one day’s strip previewing it before the Minute Mystery.) It features a special guest star. B-B Eyes’s trial for murder has hit a snag, from the prosecutor’s point of view. Its main evidence, the sworn statement of Trixie Tinkle, is missing. So is Tinkle. She was last seen on a cruise with her husband, Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks. Yes, the story is a chance to check in on Dick Tracy‘s foster comic, the orphaned Annie.
Trixie Tinkle’s been missing for twenty years. I have no idea whether this is something from the actual Annie. I’m sorry. GoComics has Annie comics going back to spring of 2001, but I don’t have the kind of research time for that. Tracy’s sent to ask Warbucks about the disappearance of his wife.
Warbucks doesn’t want to talk about his wives, and being rich and white, doesn’t see much reason he should answer fool questions from a public servant. But he’ll admit eternal gratitude to his first wife for taking in Annie. His second … he calls a golddigger with whom he couldn’t make things work. Like, how could Annie know someone who disappeared twenty years ago? Also, wait, how can B-B Eyes have been waiting twenty years for a trial? (B-B Eyes was thought dead during that time which, yeah, would delay his being brought to trial.) Also wait, Oliver Warbucks hadn’t adopted Annie before … recently? Really? That seems weird, but … I mean, I’m not going to challenge Joe Staton and Mike Curtis on story strip continuity.
It’s not just you, though. Emphasizing that Tinkle’s disappearance was twenty years ago, instead of a vague “years ago”, is weird. I think most comics readers accept this sort of floating timeline continuity. You know, where we don’t bring up that Tracy’s been about the same age since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. Maybe it is going to be important that this was twenty years ago, but as of now, I don’t know why “years ago” wouldn’t suffice.
Meanwhile B-B Eyes thinks he might be able to do something, now that the key evidence against him has vanished. He visits lawyer Tim Jackel, who’d tried years ago to get Tinkle a separation from Oliver Warbucks. Jackel actually says he got “a beating”. I’m not clear if he means in court or with a diamond-crusted mace. You don’t want to think that Oliver Warbucks, one of the protagonists of a long-running story comic, would be a violent and malevolent person. Then you remember he’s not just a billionaire, he’s a munitions manufacturer.
![[ B-B Eyes's Apartment ] B-B: 'Tim Jackel! Long time no see!' Jackel: 'Same here! What can I do for you, B-B Eyes?' B-B: 'I've got to find someone, Tim. A showgirl named Trixie Tinkle.' Jackel: 'Trixie? You can have her as far as I'm concerned . I tried to get her a trial separation from her husband, Oliver Warbucks. What a beating I got! It wasn't long after that she and Warbucks took a world cruise. Trixie never came back.'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/dick-tracy_joe-staton-mike-curtis_2-june-2019.jpeg)
Anyway, B-B Eyes knows that Tinkle spoke often with a woman named Gypsy Gay. She might know something that might be admissible. He hires Jackel to track her down. Also searching for Gay: Dick Tracy. All they have to go on is her employer from when Tinkle vanished. And the hopes that that employer maybe knows where she’s gone. Really I would’ve checked Facebook first.
Gypsy Gay turns out to be in the other plot thread. Honeymoon Tracy, Ugly Crystal, and Annie are hanging out at the hotel Siam. It’s Annie and Warbucks’s home for the summer. Annie realizes she doesn’t have a toothbrush so stops in the gift shop where, what do you know, but Gypsy Gay is working. Ugly Crystal makes a note of her name. Why? She says “I collect unusual names,” or as they are known in the Dick Tracy universe, “names”. Jackel, reading the comics as they come out, passes news of Gay’s location on to B-B. But will Honeymoon Tracy ever pass on to her grandfather what she just learned? Guess what happened today, then. I’ll let you know if you’re right in, oh, let’s say September.
With “Buy-Buy” Bertie’s land swindle foiled, what more could be happening in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley? I should reveal all in seven days.
Revealed today: what syndicated comic strips discussed something mathematical in the past week. I hope you enjoy my blend of pop-mathematics discussion and acknowledging that students don’t like story problems.
Reference: Look, I’m just a little chilly is all, okay?
I’ve discovered it’s really nice to have the subtle change in lighting serve as a visual cue for when I can switch from saying “I don’t have to do these four simple little tasks that have been on my list for months now because there’s plenty of time left in the day to start them” to saying “It’s too late in the day for me to start any of these four simple little tasks that have been on my list for months now”. I would do this anyway, yes. But I like having the little difference in how white looks to make my excuse seem all the more technological and therefore correct.
Ooh, and hey, now I can publish an Everything There Is To Say About Going In Doors essay by taking this and running it backwards. This is great, I’ll finally be ahead of deadline a little, only to mess it up!
[OK, I know what you’re thinking and believe me, this is better.]
If you find that exiting doors until you get out of doors doesn’t work for you? Try opening a home-repair store and holding a good sale on doors and door frames. It’s a bit more work, but that’s what it takes.
[It’s not like I couldn’t reverse every word in every sentence like I said I could do last week.]
[It’s just not pretty is all.]
[I’m not being lazy in this. ]
[I tried reversing all the words and it just made me seasick.]
[I know, you’d think it would just make things sound like Yoda but that just seems like it’s hacky in a way I don’t like.]
[And I tried just reversing the sentences within each paragraph and that left me a bit queasy too.]
[It isn’t as if I can’t commit to a bit.]
What is there to do when you’re outdoors? There’s a world of things. Some options include:
[I mean, “baffling experiment in formalism passed off as humor” is almost my signature mode.]
If you find yourself indoors, you can get out of doors. Think hard of the last time you were outdoors, and exit at least as many doors as you entered to get where you are now. If you see a shortcut — some path that would skip some door or other — well, it’s your business. I wouldn’t risk it. You might overshoot the outdoors and get to the out-outdoors and that’s some weird space.
[But believe me there’s no way to make, like, “Detection outdoors in course advanced an need you’ll” readable at length never mind funny. ]
Thing about going out of doors is you can only do it if you start indoors. Thus, are you indoors? The way to know for sure is to apply a three-dimensional analog to the Jordan Curve Theorem. This is one of the foundational elements of multivariable geometry. So there’s no way to know. We have to infer from evidence. Check around you. If you find around yourself a fireplace, a cuckoo clock that is not oversized and does not feature comical figures poking out on the quarter-hour, a game show taping, or pictures on the wall of beloved yet vaguely identifiable relatives, there’s a good chance you’re indoors. If you find a herd of zebras or a ukulele festival or a golfatorium? These often indicate being outdoors. A giant cuckoo clock with comical figures poking out on the quarter-hour is often a sign you’re at an amusement park, and it might be indoors or outdoors. You’ll need an advanced course in outdoors detection.
[Anyway I won’t do this again unless it turns out that it worked brilliantly and everybody loves my weird mix of trying a thing that didn’t actually work.]
The outdoors is very like the indoors, with one fewer set of doors to go through. Also the outdoors offers weather. This is an exciting feature in which, instead of being comfortable, it’s too hot. Or it’s too cold. Sometimes you’ll be in a devious place and it’ll be too medium instead. There’s no guessing what the temperature will be like, except by checking a forecast. Plus weather offers the prospect of rain or snow or clouds of ladybugs or some other daft thing. There are places where you can say, “if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes”. This is everywhere except Singapore. In Singapore it’s always 92 degrees Fahrenheit and muggy outside monsoon season, which is 1:30 to 3:30 pm every day.
[I feel like such a fool except this easily took me like four minutes less to write than a wholly original piece would have taken.]
Going out of doors is very like going in doors, except it works the other way around. Now if I had written Everything There Is To Say About Going In Doors, I wouldn’t be behind deadline. I could just print that whole essay with the words in reverse order. Too bad.
You know, the word “thing” is a gerund. Its root verb is “the”.
(I’m glad you were good enough to see whether I lived up to last week’s promise. Please check back in next week as I think about how World Simile Day is upon us and I wonder what it’s like.)
There were two minutes, seventeen seconds for this week’s cartoon. It’s hard telling any kind of story with so little time. This week, they impressed me with a story that’s densely plotted and interesting, without getting confusing. The 25th of these little animations is Drone Drama. It’s not an inspiring title. I can imagine it fitting into the King Features Syndicate cartoon run of the 60s. But do you remember the subject line I picked for this essay? No, and I say that before I’ve even written it. So I can give them a break.
We start with eleven seconds in Bluto’s Swamp. He’s making something sinister: one of those drones like you’d fly at the beach, only evil. Then we go to Popeye’s ship home. He and Olive Oyl are tending the spinach gardens. Swee’Pea is doing magic tricks with Eugene the Jeep. Routine enough.
Bluto sneaks up on Popeye’s ship home. He camouflages a can of bait as spinach and leaves it for Popeye as … bait. Despite Olive’s misgivings, Popeye takes the … bait. Bluto’s drone drops a cage on Popeye and Olive Oyl. Popeye opens the false spinach can and swallows the bait. This doesn’t get him any particular superpowers. It leaves me feeling queasy too.
Bluto flies, on is drone, up to the spinach garden. And at this point I realized how much I was liking this story. There’s some fun in the Young Bluto as a rival more than a villain, yes. But him doing actually villainous things is fun. And he’s got a good scheme here, one that’s using this drone invention well. Bluto uses the drone to drop a trap on Popeye and Olive Oyl, to get to the spinach garden, and even to scoop up the garden all around Swee’Pea and Eugene. And then to flee back to the swamp.
Swee’Pea and Eugene take action. Eugene vanishes, lest he spoil the plot by fixing the problem right away. Swee’Pea uses his saw to cut open Popeye’s cage. And this is something else I liked here. Swee’Pea can saw open the cage, but there needs to be a reason why he’d have a saw. So he’s practicing magic. And now this is all set up so it’s surprising but justified.
(Yes, yes, as illustrated Popeye and Olive Oyl would be able to get out of the cage if they stepped through the wide bars. I’m an easy audience. I’m willing to pretend the cage mesh is “really” too narrow to let them pass. It may not be more work to have the computer draw a fine-mesh cage rather than a sparse one. But it’s still hard to have a fine mesh cage and have the cartoon still read cleanly, especially to people watching on a phone. Give the animators a break.)
Popeye breaks out the emergency spinach reserve. Which was in a compartment covered by Swee’Pea and Eugene, by the way. In case you needed a reason why Bluto’s drone didn’t do anything about the hidden spinach reserve, there’s one. I’m not sure this is answering a potential objection to the storyline. It might have just been that “on top of the secret compartment” was the only good background available for Swee’Pea’s scenes. But it feels like it explains a problem someone overthinking the cartoon might have.
Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Swee’Pea catch up with Bluto and the stolen spinach. Bluto urges them to bring it on, and I like his smug confidence. It seems odd when you realize he’s seen they have spinach with them. Olive eats her can, and does a Plastic Man-style arm-reach to grab the bag of spinach. It turns out Bluto’s hidden his drone in the spinach bag. It pops out with big spinny whirly blades of death. Once again I like this. Bluto’s anticipating Popeye and his bunch. It makes him a tougher menace, and so a stronger climax.
Swee’Pea eats his spinach and flies into the air as a … something that flies, anyway. He tears up the drone, and the spinach falls toward the swamp. Popeye doesn’t eat a can; he grabs some loose spinach when the bag spills open. He makes a giant fan of himself, and blows Bluto into the swap. Olive Oyl and Swee’Pea grab the spinach bag. And Eugene finally reappears, to slap cucumber slices on Bluto’s mud-covered face. Happy ending all around.
This is a lot of plot for 137 seconds. I’m impressed with how well it all works. Bluto’s got a good scheme in mind. And he even anticipates Popeye’s responses and figures what to do about them. I like this. It gives the plot a more complicated and interesting shape than the last few weeks have shown. And for as much as happens here it’s never confusing. I followed what characters were doing and why they were doing it. And even stuff that didn’t seem relevant, like Swee’Pea and Eugene’s hanging out, mattered to the story. It’s all well-crafted. Again I’m sorry we don’t get credits for these shorts. I’m curious to know. Has one of the writing teams figured out how to work within the constraints this series uses? Or do things sometimes just all fit together well?
I’m doing my best to review all these Popeye’s Island Adventures. Essays about them should be at this link. Next week, though, I plan to finally build myself a bit of buffer and review a much older cartoon. I hope you enjoy the change.
You … want to keep running in the background, Garmin Express application? In case I need a day-zero update on the roads? Really?
Look, I appreciate your hustle. Really. It’s just, like, you notice I’m only this week downloading a map from after 2014, right? I’m just saying, I’m pretty sure I can improvise around any problems until I specifically need you to update. Just, like, go to sleep about 2023 or so.
If you’re looking for the latest plot events from Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant please try this link. If it’s not later than about September 2019, this particular essay is probably my most up-to-date recap. Thanks for reading.
Madeka, Queen of Ab’sabam, was kidnapped. Her kidnapper was Fewesi the Healer, taking a break from his “healing” to deal out “mind control potions” instead. The pursuit was lead by Bukota, whose exile to the Misty Isles Madeka had lifted in a moment of clarity.
Fewesi brings the drugged Queen to her ship, telling of treachery from the Misty Isles. They flee the harbor. Bukota and Prince Valiant hop onto another Ab’sabam ship and give chase. In the long chase, Bukota considers what he now knows about Fewesi, and identifies him as one of “a nomadic people who know the secrets of poisoning the mind”. Well, you’ll get a certain amount of that in the time of King Arthur and all. Meanwhile Queen Aleta has pieced together enough of the story, and of Bukota’s poisoned guard Ambelu, to understand things. She sends her fastest war galley to chase Fewesi to Africa.
It’s a close chase. Fewesi has a lead and the ability to control his galley’s slaves’ minds. But he doesn’t quite know what he’s doing, and Bukota’s ship’s captain does. They catch Fewesi’s galley, in time for a dust storm to confuse everything. In the storm Fewesi’s galley meet another ship — not Bukota’s. An innocent fishing vessel. He takes the Queen and leaves on that ship. He escapes while Bukota and Valiant swim up to Fewesi’s galley, abandoned except for the slaves worked to near-death. Bukota and Valiant tend to the galley’s crew, at least.
And they get a break: a raven drops a piece of torn cloth to them. Bukota recognizes the raven as Aleta’s familiar. The cloth is a hint to look in the harbor of Paraetonium. They find in the bazaar the sign from which the cloth was torn. And it’s a good clue: there’s 1d6+3 first-level spell-controlled minions who rush out of the building for a quick fight. That’s easy enough to handle. But Fewesi’s also left spell-controlled melee attackers all through the building, the better to give him time to escape.
Still, they get through all this. They chase Fewesi and Makeda through the rooftops of Paraetonium. Finally one roof has had enough of this, and the pair fall through and startle the old couple who’d just offered Raul some empanadas. They rush out of the mess, reasonably, and get to the street just in time for Fewesi, riding a camel, to nearly trample them. They run over to the merchants and toss a bag of 25 gold pieces. It’s too much for two camels, but it lets them get on the chase into the desert nice and fast.
What are Daddy Warbucks and Annie doing in Joe Staton, Mike Curtis, Shelley Pleger, and Shane Fisher’s Dick Tracy? My recap of the last three months of that strip should be at this link, barring some surprising development.
Meanwhile, each week I read comic strips for mathematical content too, and share the thoughts they inspire here. Thanks for considering reading it.
Reference: X-15 Research Results, Wendell H Stillwell.
Me: “That’s funny. Why isn’t the garage door opening?”
[ I re-enter the PIN for my library card from 18 years ago. ]
Me: “Did the circuit breaker trip or something? No, the waterfall pump is still going. So there’s no possible way to explain this.”
[ I enter the library PIN again. ]
Going out of doors is very like going in doors, except it works the other way around. Now if I had written Everything There Is To Say About Going In Doors, I wouldn’t be behind deadline. I could just print that whole essay with the words in reverse order. Too bad.
The outdoors is very like the indoors, with one fewer set of doors to go through. Also the outdoors offers weather. This is an exciting feature in which, instead of being comfortable, it’s too hot. Or it’s too cold. Sometimes you’ll be in a devious place and it’ll be too medium instead. There’s no guessing what the temperature will be like, except by checking a forecast. Plus weather offers the prospect of rain or snow or clouds of ladybugs or some other daft thing. There are places where you can say, “if you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes”. This is everywhere except Singapore. In Singapore it’s always 92 degrees Fahrenheit and muggy outside monsoon season, which is 1:30 to 3:30 pm every day.
Thing about going out of doors is you can only do it if you start indoors. Thus, are you indoors? The way to know for sure is to apply a three-dimensional analog to the Jordan Curve Theorem. This is one of the foundational elements of multivariable geometry. So there’s no way to know. We have to infer from evidence. Check around you. If you find around yourself a fireplace, a cuckoo clock that is not oversized and does not feature comical figures poking out on the quarter-hour, a game show taping, or pictures on the wall of beloved yet vaguely identifiable relatives, there’s a good chance you’re indoors. If you find a herd of zebras or a ukulele festival or a golfatorium? These often indicate being outdoors. A giant cuckoo clock with comical figures poking out on the quarter-hour is often a sign you’re at an amusement park, and it might be indoors or outdoors. You’ll need an advanced course in outdoors detection.
If you find yourself indoors, you can get out of doors. Think hard of the last time you were outdoors, and exit at least as many doors as you entered to get where you are now. If you see a shortcut — some path that would skip some door or other — well, it’s your business. I wouldn’t risk it. You might overshoot the outdoors and get to the out-outdoors and that’s some weird space.
What is there to do when you’re outdoors? There’s a world of things. Some options include:
If you find that exiting doors until you get out of doors doesn’t work for you? Try opening a home-repair store and holding a good sale on doors and door frames. It’s a bit more work, but that’s what it takes.
Ooh, and hey, now I can publish an Everything There Is To Say About Going In Doors essay by taking this and running it backwards. This is great, I’ll finally be ahead of deadline a little, only to mess it up!
Would the past tense of ‘mango’ be ‘mangone’ or ‘mangwent’, and how much should it be so? Thank you for your thoughts.
(Thanks for being here to see me fulfill the promise I made last week to ponder this. I’d be glad if you stopped in next time when I try to start another fight with grammarians by insisting that “thing” is the gerund of the root verb “the”.)
While this, the 24th of the Popeye’s Island Adventures series, is titled Beach Ball Bonanza, readers should know there is no actual bonanza depicted, nor is there reason to expect one. There is a beach ball. I have no responsibility for these facts and so will not apologize for them.
The short faked me out some. I’m glad for that. From the start I thought it would be another one where Eugene sets up a contest to get Popeye and Bluto out of his hair. Or at least Popeye and Olive Oyl, which would be a change. So we start with Olive Oyl accidentally hitting their beach ball over to the cactus Eugene’s just planted. Popeye makes a good saving catch. When the relieved Eugene dusts some sand around the cactus’s base, it makes Popeye sneeze and burst the beachball on the cactus anyway. Basic but reliable setup. Usually the more times the story reverses whether the catastrophe will happen the better the joke.
Bluto sees his chance to swipe Popeye’s spinach. So he dresses up in a cactus costume, the better to sneak past them all undetected. This confused me the first time around, as, well, why sneak up to them just to sneak away to Popeye’s house? This shows how bad I am at spatial relations: Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Eugene’s cactus were between Bluto’s boat and Popeye’s house. So he has reason to sneak past them. Not answered: can’t Bluto just sail nearer to Popeye’s house? Maybe the reefs are too treacherous.
Bluto sneaks past the halfway point in the cartoon. He finally jumps up into Popeye’s garden, landing on a rake, which is one of those dumb laughs you certainly want. And now, finally, as Olive Oyl finishes repairing and re-inflating their beach ball, Popeye notices Bluto. The unexpected beach ball hit sends Popeye’s spinach flying loose, and Olive races to eat it before … I guess … it hits the ground and loses its potency? Spinach has always been a magic food, in the Popeye settings. This series has made it more explicitly so. If an opened can just has to be eaten right away that’s probably a good plot constraint to put on the series. Could add for some nice action. Or it may have just made for a better flow of action this short.
So, spinached up, Olive Oyl .. manifests the properties of a hang glider. A couple times now we’ve seen Popeye notice, say, a sponge and use the spinach powers to take on sponge properties. This was completely Olive acting on impulse. She carries Popeye over to his house in a scene that asks the question: was this really better than them just running over? It’s like a hundred feet away from where they started.
Popeye hasn’t got a can of spinach, but that’s all right, since the surprise gets Bluto stuck in a barrel. Like the rake, it’s a simple but reliable joke. Popeye attaches the air pump to the barrel’s tap, and setting up the beach ball explosion and repair pays off another plot dividend. The barrel explosion sends Bluto sailing into Eugene’s cactus, and we don’t need to wonder what happened to the spinach cans which were in the barrel. And, two minutes nine seconds in, we’re done.
It’s a fair enough short. It’s made me realize there are some stock situations, unique to this series, that I expect. And that the shorts can go against my expectations. That’s a good development.
Be with me next week as I try to review another of these Popeye’s Island Adventures. Essays about them should be at this link.
Deep down, I knew I wouldn’t repeat April’s four-thousand-plus page views. Not that my readership doesn’t seem to have risen to a new plateau since Roy Kassinger discovered me. (I don’t see a reason they should be connected, but the correlation is there.) Just that April saw a couple weird spikes of readership that I think were freak events.
There were 3,414 page views in May 2019. That’s down from the 4,033 of April and 3,565 of March. It’s still a bit above the twelve-month running average, though. (That was 3128.2 page views, for the curious, which will be ‘me in one month’.) There were 2,058 unique visitors, down from April’s 2,418 and March’s 2,165. It’s above the twelve-month running average of 1781.6, anyway.
The number of likes resumed its dwindle; there were 133 things liked around here in all of May. There’d been 233 likes in April, and 176 likes in march. And that’s certainly below the twelve-month running average, which I won’t name here because every other month had more likes. It was 172.8. Which sees odd since I had at least one piece that really hit a nostalgic sweet spot, according to the comments I got about it. Comments were a bit more common, 24 in May. There were 10 in April and 24 in March. The twelve-month running average (this is going to become a new obsession, isn’t it?) was 47.7.
In all, 377 of my posts got some view in May. (The Home Page also drew views, but that’s not counted as any specific post.) The most popular posts were about what I would have guessed:
I expect comic strip plot recaps to be my most popular thing. And something posted near the kalends of a month has the best chance to get readership counts. But I am surprised people didn’t just get the joke with Edward’s Dog of un-depictable ugliness. Maybe I’ve been better-primed to expect that joke.
And while it wouldn’t make the top five, one of my long-form essays was finally reached the top ten. Everything There Is To Say About Programming A Computer In The 80s was really well-liked, and I’m glad. It may not actually have a specific big laugh, but I think it has got that sort of humor that comes from knowing someone actually thinks like this.
75 countries, or country-like polities, sent me readers at all in May. That’s up from April’s 66 and March’s 69. That feels nice to see. 18 of them were single-reader countries. That’s more than April’s 16 and March’s 14. Here’s the full roster:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 2,607 |
| Canada | 119 |
| India | 103 |
| United Kingdom | 90 |
| Sweden | 55 |
| Brazil | 46 |
| Australia | 43 |
| Japan | 35 |
| Hong Kong SAR China | 24 |
| Netherlands | 19 |
| Malaysia | 18 |
| France | 17 |
| Germany | 17 |
| Mexico | 15 |
| Philippines | 13 |
| Romania | 9 |
| Denmark | 8 |
| Indonesia | 8 |
| Ireland | 7 |
| Finland | 6 |
| Hungary | 6 |
| Italy | 6 |
| Peru | 6 |
| Spain | 6 |
| Turkey | 6 |
| Colombia | 5 |
| New Zealand | 5 |
| Nigeria | 5 |
| Portugal | 5 |
| Singapore | 5 |
| United Arab Emirates | 5 |
| Uruguay | 5 |
| American Samoa | 4 |
| Argentina | 4 |
| Kenya | 4 |
| Russia | 4 |
| South Africa | 4 |
| South Korea | 4 |
| Switzerland | 4 |
| Taiwan | 4 |
| Bangladesh | 3 |
| El Salvador | 3 |
| Kuwait | 3 |
| Norway | 3 |
| Serbia | 3 |
| Thailand | 3 |
| Venezuela | 3 |
| Austria | 2 |
| Israel | 2 |
| Jordan | 2 |
| Kazakhstan | 2 |
| Liberia | 2 |
| Nepal | 2 |
| Poland | 2 |
| Sri Lanka | 2 |
| Ukraine | 2 |
| Albania | 1 |
| Belgium | 1 |
| British Virgin Islands | 1 |
| Bulgaria | 1 |
| China | 1 |
| Ecuador | 1 |
| Greece | 1 |
| Guam | 1 |
| Iraq | 1 |
| Jamaica | 1 |
| Macedonia | 1 |
| Mauritania | 1 |
| Moldova | 1 |
| Myanmar (Burma) | 1 |
| Paraguay | 1 |
| Puerto Rico | 1 |
| Qatar | 1 |
| Réunion | 1 |
| Uganda | 1 |
This is a complete turnover in single-reader countries: none of those sent me exactly one reader in April. This is my first complete single-reader turnover in a long while. Possibly since I started paying attention to these things. And, of course, I am happy that anyone might read and, I dearly hope, enjoy what I write. I’m just curious why I should have so many readers in Sweden, Brazil, or India. Again, I’m happy to have you. I just feel like … really? I say anything relevant to you? I’d like to know what it is.
So my story strip recaps. All the story strip recaps should appear at this link. I do have a plan for the next several Sundays, if nothing happens that shakes up the orderly world of the twelve threads I follow. My plans are for:
Between the start of 2019 and the start of June 2019 I’ve published 149 pieces for a total of 92,272 words. 19,030 of these words were published in May. So, that’s 614 words per post on average in May — April had been 644 — and, year to date, an average of 619 words per post. At the start of May it had been 610 words. I told you those Wednesday little things weren’t working.
There’ve been 204 comments overall on the year, for an average of 1.4 comments per posting. That’s the same average as at the start of May, at least. 820 total likes, for an average of 5.5 likes per posting in 2019. At the start of May this average had been 5.7. But at the start of April the average was 5.5 again. Hm.
June began with my having made 2,311 posts. They’ve gathered 125,314 views from 69,657 unique visitors. And as mentioned, 377 posts got at least one view in May. 565 posts got some view in April, and 420 in March. I have no idea what these fluctuations signify. Most likely nothing. If I’m actually interested in how much of my archive is being read any month, I should probably look at, say, the number of posts that get at least five page views. Or some threshold that suggests it wasn’t just a mistake.
If you don’t think reading me is a mistake, thank you. You can be a regular reader by adding the Another Blog, Meanwhile feed to your RSS reader. Or you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the upper right corner of the WordPress page. I’m on Twitter as @Nebusj, but I won’t feel jealous if you follow other people too.
And if it helps you decide whether to follow me, I try to start each month with a pair of rabbit pictures.
This is my snapshot of the March-through-June 2019 storyline in Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom, weekday continuity. If you’re looking for the plot of the separate Sunday-continuity Phantom, or are reading this after about September 2019 and want something more up-to-date you’ll want another essay at this link. If you’re looking for the latest mathematically-themed comic strips, that’s at this link. Thank you.
It’s too soon, as I publish this, to say whether Kadia’s mother is alive. The past three months of story were built on The Phantom assuming she’s alive and well. But she’s not been seen on-camera. Nor has anyone with authority to know said she’s dead. This may change in the coming week.
The Ghost Who Walks was riding a weird ship last time I checked in. He and Bangallan President Luaga had gotten Heloise Walker and Kadia Walker, née Sahara, out of New York City. Kadia was still reeling from the discovery her father was the international terrorist The Nomad. She’s coaxed Kit Walker into rescuing her mother. At least to arranging the rescue; he claims to know someone who could do it. One of the Nomad’s militias holds her at one of his estates, hostage to secure his silence about their activities.
Kadia draws the best map of the compound she can for her newly-adopting father. Kit Walker promises this will be a big help to him, and by him he means the person who’s going to rescue Imara and, uh. You know, at some point they’ll need to have a talk about the Walker family business but that can wait. Well, Kadia’s doing quite well with this whole learning-your-father-has-a-secret-life thing.
In Mawitaan, Diana Walker’s found a new school and apartment for Heloise and Kadia. They set off for that. Kit Walker sets out for North Africa, by himself.
And we set out for somewhere in New York. Secret Service guys are visiting David Palmer and his sister Lily. David Palmer’s the uncle of Diana Walker. He’s been in the strip, off and on, since 1940, and been an intelligence agent at least some of that while. The Secret Service people want help. They’ve confiscated the video of the unknown party who crashed The Nomad’s plane and made a cop arrest him. They know who the party is. They want to know what Heloise Walker was doing for the Bangallan President. He doesn’t know she was doing any such thing. They want to know what he’s been saying about Imara Sahara. He denies having ever said such a name. They want his advice on blowing up The Nomad’s North African compound. He has none to give them.
It seems like a curious detour. Men come to bring David Palmer into the story, and he refuses to be part of it. It does serve to re-establish what role Heloise Walker has had in all this, and why this North African expedition might matter to anyone. One of the many hardest parts of any serial story is helping casual readers not lose the plot without annoying the dedicated readers. And then also …
Well, on to North Africa. The Phantom readies to infiltrate the Nomad’s compound. Last time he tried something like this he got suckered by a decoy, and quite badly wounded. He’s better-armed, better-shielded, and ready to do one of his classic one-man infiltrations.
The complication: oh yes, American military forces are figuring to bomb the compound like it’s a wedding party. Their drones detect The Phantom moving in. So the drone warriors pause. They can’t figure what his deal is, and they’re not eager to wait for early June for me to explain it all to them. They couldn’t even get David Palmer to explain things to them, no matter how much they invited him into this story. They hold off on the bombing a bit, though.
The Phantom finds some useful cues. A pile of ammunition he can use to blow stuff up. A crate containing a chunk of ham on a bone that’s good for 20 health points. People he can beat up for intelligence. Some cute chances to call back to things other characters said.
![Terrorist minion: 'Already we have won! No matter what you do! We don't need her alive to compel the Nomad to guard our secrets!' The Phantom: 'You just need him to *believe* she's alive. [ Slugging the minion. ] We're assuming he *cares*, aren't we?'](https://nebushumor.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/the-phantom_tony-depaul-mike-manley_1-june-2019.gif)
He’s not going undetected in the compound, though. He’s already knocked out a bunch of low-level minions, and they’re starting to be discovered. He collects a not-unconscious minion. The minion reports Imara Sahara is in the safe room, as The Phantom expected. There’s four guards holding her. Two of them have orders to kill her rather than let her be freed. It’s going to make an already bad situation worse.
And that’s where the situation is. The Phantom, alone, trying to rescue Imara Sahara. She’ll have have no idea who he is or what he’s doing. She’s held by a militia ready to kill her in case The Phantom gets too close. That’s if she is still alive. The interrogation this week made clear the militia has limited reasons not to kill her. And American armed forces are ready to blow up everything. Bit of a fix. Well, I suppose he knows his business.
I finally get what should be my easy week. Scheduled in seven days is Mark Schulz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant. Oh, wait, I have to read it through Comics Kingdom’s really quite bad redesign. Hm.
Reference: The New York Public Library Desk Reference, Paul Fargis, Sheree Bykofsky.
Boy, do you ever look at a box of machine-extruded rotini and think about all the generations of pasta-carvers plying their trade? Rotating this thick noodle base and chiseling away a long and deep enough groove to make that spiral? Learning how to have a steady enough hand as to not chop the rotini up into too-short a length, or making the spiral tread too shallow or the vanes too thick? And doing it fast enough that they could carve away a whole dinner’s worth of pasta in the time it takes to make a meal? And then all those centuries of accumulated experience being wiped away in favor of pasta-making machines that don’t need any humanity to them.
Hey, totally unrelated yet fun fact: my sister-in-law won’t let me tell her kids anything without a responsible grownup supervising.
Remembering things used to be a great pastime. It’s obsolete these days. We only need to remember things anymore while we’re recording special “live” episodes of our podcasts. And that just if we feel rude checking our phones in front of the audience except to check our notes. For the rest of us it’s an affectation, like learning how long division works or how to spell “carburetor”. But it can be a fun one. Please remember I think there’s a swell video game to be made out of drawing time zone boundaries. I’m not trustworthy in judgements of “fun”. I could be coaxed into stopping at a roadside attraction promising the state’s third-most-average ball of twine. That even before finding out whether they have miniature golf.
There is only one sure way to remember a thing. That’s for it to be the lyrics you’re pretty sure you heard wrong from a song you can’t get out of your head. And you’re not sure you have the melody right either. It’s great and reliable but there’s almost no way to pick what you remember. It’ll never help you remember, like, what model your car’s engine is long enough to get something from the auto parts store. It’ll just leave you asking your musically inclined friends, “what’s that song I heard in the 80s or early 90s that’s like, `dahdah dah dah dah, chipmunks and kangaroos dahdah’?” while they back away, through the wall if need be. You can try hooking some phrase you want to remember up to a song you like, but that just ruins the song for you. You’ll be in the middle of humming this book title about the French and Indian War you wanted from the library and realize that you’re Ray Davies and you’ve gone way off script performing “Waterloo Sunset” on live TV. It’s humiliating.
Which comes to the next great way to remember a thing: feel humiliated by it. You can have many things to ponder in life, but the last will be that weird, involuntary, somehow squeaking-bark laugh that your second-grade teacher emitted when you said “molecule” like that. Again, great reliability, lousy selection. Who needs to remember wrong ways to say words, anyway? Again, only podcasters doing the part of the show where they respond defensively to their e-mails. Many of us got to be this many years old without ever having to say “unguent” out loud and that’s not evidence of a mis-spent life, all right?
Next to humiliation is stories, though. The average person can remember over twelve stories, which gives us plenty to talk about again while on a long car ride. We can make up stories about stuff we want to remember and then we’ll never get it out of our heads again, so make sure you get this right. Here, it helps if the stories are dumb. This way every time it works you feel humiliated something that stupid helped you, strengthening the memory.
For example, the highway near me is flanked by a one-way northbound service road and a one-way southbound service road. One of these is Homer. One of these is Hosmer. This is a mistake. Hosmer is a road several blocks away from all this. The other of the service roads is Howard. Which one goes north and which one goes south? It would be great if Hosmer went south, since it’s got that ‘s’ in there, but Hosmer has no part in this. Stop remembering Hosmer already.
But then I had a great idea: that prominent ‘m’ in Homer is the clue. If I can just remember “it’s called Homer because it runs morth” I would never get that stupid idea out of my head. And now good luck you getting it out either. There’s only two problems. One is, isn’t Morth the name of Jonathan Winters’s character on the last season of Mork and Mindy? Second, why am I trying to remember which one is Homer and which is Hosmer anyway? What problem in my life will that ever solve?
So if anyone has an idea how I can remember that I’m not responsible for Homer or Hosmer streets and don’t need to know which one runs which way, please write in care of this address. Thank you.
So has making the type- face in my text editor larger helped me any in my quest to maybe write not quite so excess- ively long? It’s early to say, but I think it’s not any notice- ably shorter. It’s just got my words hyphenated weirdly and in ways that won’t make the slight- est sense when copied over to a WordPress post. Too bad!
(But thanks for watching me carry out last week’s promise to try. Be with me next week when I ponder whether the past tense of the noun ‘mango’ should be ‘mangone’ or ‘mangwent’.)
I need to invest less energy in coming up with subject lines for these little cartoon reviews. The urge is to come up with subject lines that invite the reader in. But for most of a post’s life I need it to be easy to figure out which cartoon a particular essay is about. Cartoon title and maybe a distinctive element is all that’s needed.
This week’s is the 23rd of the series, Gone Fishing. It starts that way at least.
I’ve always loved Popeye. That’s involved a lot of defending the cartoons against the complaint that they’re all the same formula. They’re quite diverse in structure, even if they nearly all share the Popeye-eats-spinach climax. Still, there is a formula. And it’s always thrilling when a cartoon breaks from that. The commonest break, it seems to me: someone else eats the can of spinach to save the day. Like, say, in this one.
The cartoon starts with Popeye and Bluto fishing. More, with actually catching fish. This felt anachronistic. It seems, to my uninformed eyes, that cartoons are likely enough to show characters fishing. But actually catching anything? As in, ripping animals out of their homes and suffocating them? That’s gotten perceived as too openly cruel to show. Our characters will still eat fish, of course. They’ll just leave the killing off-screen. Well, they’re all ones and zeroes imitating ink and paint anyway. They can’t feel it.
This builds into a natural little rivalry, Bluto and Popeye trying to out-catch the other, and I figured this would be the plot for the cartoon. It’s got some nice sound and, at about 0:32, even a rare screen split. I’m an easy touch for that sort of action-across-several-screens shot. They end up tied together in the water and from there stop being active parts of the plot, to my surprise.
So over to Olive Oyl, who’s made one of those Newton’s Cradles things of snail shells. One still has a snail, who reasonably takes her leave. The snail grabs a couple spinach leaves and scurries to the water, while Olive follows along. I’m not sure why Olive would. I get her accidentally bothering a live snail, but why chase after it? To apologize?
Our hero spots the stranded Bluto and Popeye, just in time for them to be menaced by a giant snail kraken. To let you in on how unperceptive I am: I wasn’t sure at first this was the spinach-transformed snail from seconds before. The snail seems to be overreacting to the offense. Still, Olive paddles into action, with a pretty cute “I’m watching you” finger-point. She surfs skillfully enough to tie up the snail-kraken’s tentacles, but there’s still the snail’s claws and screaming.
So Popeye opens his spinach and shoots the can at her. She gets your nice classic muscle bulge, flexy-long arms, and tosses the snail-kraken out of the cartoon. Then spins Popeye and Bluto free and tosses them into Popeye’s hammock, sending them each to their respective boats. Happy ending for everybody but, I’m going to guess, the episode of Shimmer and Shine that’s now about a snail-kraken somehow.
I like that Olive Oyl got something to do this cartoon. She’s always gotten the occasional chance to play the Popeye role, and I think this is her first turn in the Island Adventures cartoons. I think the music’s a bit better this week, too. I’ve never been really happy with the music on this cartoon series. It’s seemed a little too generic, like they had a stock library of tunes that are never really wrong for a short, but also never really right or distinctive. Or tied particularly to the action. This time, the music as we first saw Olive Oyl felt like a good change. I like having a different audio feeling for being on a different plot thread. Olive Oyl on the surfboard also gets more distinctive, with some brass instruments adding new energy.
It’s a bit surprising to notice how passive Popeye and Bluto are. But that is a danger of being the person-to-be-rescued. I get Popeye being reactive; even in the Fleischer cartoons he was mostly inclined to go about his business until bothered. Bluto going inert seems surprising. But cartoon fishing wire can be pretty tough stuff.
I’m doing my best to review all these Popeye’s Island Adventures. Essays about them should be at this link.
So. Reader. Look. I regard us as friends. Maybe not great friends, not, help-you-move-to-a-new-apartment level friends. But friends. Out meaning well for each other, even if we sometimes screw it up. Giving a heads up when we see a comic strip we’re sure the other is going to love. Warning when you see we’re marching unprepared into at least a Category Two Drama Storm. That kind of friend. OK? So that’s why I have to ask about this thing from the sidebar of a YouTube video I just watched.
Exactly which one of you is telling Google, “You know what Joseph needs? The suggestion he line up three rolls of toilet paper only to trowel cement over them. Plus 34 other things to do with cement, each explained in an average of 26 seconds. But he’ll be so fascinated by that he won’t even notice this Five-Minute Crafts video is fifteen minutes long”? What is it you think you know about me? What are you drawing these conclusions from?
