What’s Going On In Judge Parker? Is Sophie Parker running away from home? October 2019 – January 2020

So first, the most astounding news about Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker: Norton has not appeared in the past three months. Almost four months, now, unless there’s a surprise coming in Sunday’s strip. Anyway, all my Judge Parker essays should be at this link, including whatever plot recaps I write after (likely) April 2020. If it’s much past mid-January 2020 when you read this, you might get a more useful plot recap there. Also, Sophie has not yet run away, and has made statements to imply she’s not. But the groundwork is there.

Judge Parker.

27 October 2019 – 19 January 2020.

Neddy Parker and Ronnie Huerta finally got a call back on their screenplay, last I checked in. It’s based on the super-hyper-ultra-duper-spy nonsense of April Parker, who helped them out, at the point of a gun. This seems harsh, but it is the most efficient way to get someone to actually write. Ellen Nielson, tech-billionaire-daughter with an indie movie studio, wants a meeting.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 1st of November, 2019. Among the traits of Marciuliano’s tenure on Judge Parker is self-awareness of his writing styles and of the assumptions built into the strip. Under Woody Wilson people were going crazy throwing money at the Parker-Spencer clan, to the point that I am not sure if it wasn’t a running joke.

Back in Cavelton, Sophie Parker finally talks some with Honey Ballinger. She’s one of the classmates and bandmates from that bizarre kidnapping by Sophie’s mother’s half-sister. Honey had escaped the kidnappers who got Sophie and the rest of the band. They’re both having trouble thinking college or anything makes any sense. But they’re able to start trying to be friends. They had not got along so well before the kidnapping and can’t think of a reason why, now.

Also in Cavelton: Abbey’s notion of running a little bed-and-breakfast has proved unworkable. A practical one involves renovating the horse barns into a small hotel. I have not been able to figure what they’re doing with the horses. (Also I have recently seen a bed-and-breakfast which was not made of someone’s oversized home, or made to look like one. So while I don’t get a bed-and-breakfast that seems like it’s just a hotel, I can’t say it’s wrong.) This forces Sam Driver out of his barn office. But he thinks it might be good for him to have an office somewhere near the people who have law work that needs doing off-panel. Rents are steep; turns out Cavelton is gentrifying out from under everyone. Anyway, the barn renovations get under way, then stop, then cost more. It’s a process that makes you wonder if Francesco Marciuliano has been dealing with home renovations himself lately. Then you remember home renovations was a storyline in Francesco Marciuliano and Jim Keefe’s Sally Forth last year. So you stop wondering. Then you remember in the Sally Forth story the work was done as scheduled and without surprise charges or anything. So you wonder again. Look, if you’re not using your creative expression to vent about stuff that bothers you, what are you doing?

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 29th of November, 2019. Thing is, Nielson is not wrong. … So, in the early 50s Isaac Asimov wrote a couple novels set in the Galactic Empire. And in each of them, there’s a moment in which the Antagonist reviews what he knows about what the Protagonists are doing and concludes, it doesn’t make sense. He goes on to construct an alternate plot, one that fits the facts, and one that does make sense by his lights. And the thing is, it makes more sense by the reader’s lights too. It’s a curious bit of self-commentary and premise deconstruction there, as here.

Sophie and Honey get together and start playing a little music. Sophie talks of Neddy’s screenwriting dream and how great that’s going. And how is it going? Ellen Nielson thinks their screenplay is a disaster, but there’s a good idea in it. Nielson sees it as a miniseries, with them as story consultants. Neddy and Ronnie see themselves getting murdered by April for straying from their directions. So that’s a downside. But, hey, it’s a sold credit. It’ll be something great for them to talk about over Christmas with the rest of the Parker-Spencer-etc family.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 14th of December, 2019. “I mean, especially since Marciuliano took over the writing but, yeah, this strip has been going on since, like, Alben Barkley was vice president so there’s a lot of backstory here.”

As the barn renovations embody the sunk-cost fallacy everyone gathers for Christmas. Neddy’s happy to introduce Ronnie to everyone. And to see everyone. Sophie is the happiest that any human being has ever been that Neddy’s back. Sophie spills her plan to skip college for a year or two and figure stuff out. Ronnie had done something similar, leaving college after a few semesters. Sophie latches onto this with an eagerness that Ronnie wisely tries to temper.

With Neddy’s support, Sophie explains to her parents that she won’t be going to college right after high school. This goes well, for soap-strip readers, because it’s a nice messy disaster. While Abbey fumes about Sophie’s irrationality, Sophie packs to run away to Los Angeles and live with Neddy. Neddy tries to talk her way, way back from this. She explains Abbey’s fears and needs, and also that Neddy’s actually only using Ronnie’s apartment so there’s not really a place for her.

Meanwhile, Judge (ret) Alan Parker is thinking of running for mayor. Being in prison has let him recognize the carceral state as the great threat to society it is. And yes, the mayor of Cavelton has limited ability to effect the prison abolition we need. But he can do something. And he’s noticed the failings in the social support network. He’s recognized how the gentrification of Cavelton is hurting the people who made their lives in the town. He’s got a flipping account on Mastodon. There’s a 35% chance the words “fully-automated luxury gay space communism” have passed his lips within the past four weeks. The plan is daft, and everyone tells Parker it is. Among other things, he was in jail to about three months ago for helping his son-in-law fake his death. He only got out because said son-in-law blackmailed-or-worse a judge. He promises to at least not run for public office without talking with his son.

Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker for the 16th of January, 2020. Alan, you were in jail for like eight days, relax a little. … Also, jeez, that line about Alben Barkley really shows why I am such a niche writer, doesn’t it? You know, Barkley was the vice-president for whom the nickname “Veep” was coined. When Nixon took his office he didn’t want to appropriate his predecessor’s nickname. Also, Nixon lived his entire life without ever having a moment of whimsy or joy. I CAN’T STOP MYSELF FROM WRITING LIKE THIS. SEND HELP.

And this is where we are. It’s been three months of developing the running stories, without any major crazy new developments. It’s been almost tranquil, compared to the cycles of blowing things up and then retrenching. It’s still daft that Alan Parker thinks running for mayor would be a good idea.

Next Week!

Has The Amazing Spider-Man “returned” with some “great new stories and art” yet?’ Well, as of today it’s still reruns of Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s stories from a couple years back, but I’ll recap that if there’s no breaking news there. Also, I’ve got comic strips to discuss on my mathematics blog. You might like that too. I do.

Statistics Saturday: Number Of Times I’ve Seen Builders Tea Since I Bought That One Box In 2015

This refers to a box of Builders Tea that I got in March of 2015.

Total

0.

In Detail

Year	Sightings of Builders Tea
2015 (March-Dec)	0
2016	0
2017	0
2018	0
2019	0

Not included: 2020 figures owing to incompleteness of the year.

Reference: The Panic Broadcast: The Whole Story of Orson Welles’ Legendary Radio Show Invasion From Mars, Howard Koch.

A Reason They Did Not Treat Me Like That In Middle School

So it’s not that I did not have problems with the premise of The Fly. I had exactly the problem anyone would think of regarding it: if the transporter pod will merge Seth Brundle with the fly that’s in there, why would it not also merge Brundle with the many microorganisms in the air and in his body? And microorganisms necessarily in his body, that couldn’t be handled by a sterile transporter pod environment? But no, the thing is that this movie came out the summer after I was done with middle school. Yes, I was as done with middle school as it is possible to be. But I escaped having this be a reason people treated me in middle school like that for the second-best of possible reasons.

Some Reasons Everybody Treated Me Like That In Middle School

I’ve had some time this week to sit in a room with no particular expectations or Wi-Fi and so that’s got me all introspective. So this is going to be hard. I’ve gotten around to thinking of my middle school experience. Here are some things that, on reflection, I think contributed to that whole scenario.

So you know there was a Pac-Man cartoon in the early 80s, where Pac-Man and Pac-Family hang around Pac-Land, occasionally eating ghosts and sometime getting chopmed by them. So, there was this episode where the Ghosts got their hands on the Pac-Space-Shuttle. Unless that was the Space-Pac-Shuttle. Honestly not sure at this remove. Anyway, they harvest all the Pac Pellets in the world from off the Pac-Trees. They flew this whole load to, I believe, the Pac-Moon. I know what you’re thinking and no, I was not bothered that the Pac-Space-Pac-Shuttle might land on the Pac-Moon. It would be a gross presumption of us to suppose that the design limits of our space shuttle necessarily apply to the Pac-Space-Pac-Shuttle-Pac in this fictional universe, however much they seem superficially similar. (Oh, this is helping me see why other bloggers treat me like that.) No, what bothered me is that in the face of this Pac-Pellet shortage caused by the world harvest being stolen, Pac-Man, in space, eats the entire contents of the Space-Shuttle-Pac, every power pellet in the world, all at once, when we’d seen in other episodes that one was enough for him to chomp ghosts. Two, if he needed to be really confident in his ghost-eating powers. And that is what bothered me: this unnecessary gluttony would make the power pellet shortage continue for at least a full growing season. And these Pac-Pellets are the fruits of Pac-Trees. This is going to screw up geenrations of trees to come. I was very cross with Pac-Man over this.

On the evening news they would always talk about what the New York Stock Exchange had done that day. And yet they never mentioned the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which I supposed had to exist, or Los Angeles or San Francisco or anywhere else. Yes, I grew up in the New York metro area so of course the local stock market might be of interest but this injustice extended to the national news, and surely there must be some days that, like, the Saint Louis Stock Exchange had the most exciting stock-related exchanging going on.

[ I would like to emphasize that I am not reading my current weirdness back into the young me. These are as best as I am able reconstructions of thoughts I had in the mid-80s. ]

According to the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons manual if exactly the right things lined up you could just be a vapor, forever, and everyone would just have to let you play like that.

So in South River, New Jersey, there was this liquor store, and its sign was this representation of beloved drunk neighbor Thirsty from the beloved comic strip Hi and Lois. And I thought it was wild and belovable that in all the world we happened to be not too far off from the world’s only Hi and Lois-themed liquor store. And wondered at how much money must have changed hands for Thirsty’s Liquor to be set up in this really very average beloved Middlesex County town.

Also every power pellet in the Pac-World fit into one Space-Pac-Shuttle Cargo-Pac-Bay? Space shuttles aren’t that big.

Sure, we all have urged the rain rain to go away and come again some other day. But why was there no chant to urge the rain to come today, when nothing particularly needing dry conditions is going on, and thereby forestall rain coming some inconvenient later date? We need a certain amount of rain per year and there’s no good reason not to rush to get that done when the day’s already all wet.

While I do not think this very incomplete list justifies the whole of my middle school experience I am forced to admit that, yeah, everybody kind of had a point there.

The Tea Wants My Attention

I may have mentioned that I like to drink tea. If I haven’t mentioned that I like to drink tea, let me mention that I like to drink tea here: I like to drink tea. So I hope we’re all caught up here. This past week I’ve been drinking tea from work, from the office. They got the tea from … somewhere … somehow. I don’t know. The tea bags, though, have these little tabs trying to be entertaining, and I’m fascinated. Oh, there’s some of mere usual ones, like the warning that minds and parachutes function only when open. But then there’s pieces like this:

Among economics, the real world is often a special case.

OK. If that doesn’t wow you, though, try this:

Pawn shops are loan-ly places.

It’s no Kabibble Kabaret, I admit, since it doesn’t openly hate women. And yet the tea just keeps on giving, for example:

Dressmakers treated customers ruff in the 16th century.

If that hasn’t got you acknowledging the existence of a joke, please consider this one:

Indolent philosopher: Mr I Can’t.

I would not dare speak for you. But for me, I wish to read all of these aloud, imitating whoever it is Saturday Night Live had in the 1980s to imitate Gene Shalit. And, at the end of each reading, saying loudly, “Wink!” while wincing half of my face in a way that suggests I know the concept of a wink but haven’t figured out how to do it myself. Anyway I don’t know how long these tea bags will hold out, but they certainly inspire in me the thought: huh.

60s Popeye goes to … Haweye? … Popeye Haweye. All right. We’ll try this.

I don’t know how many animation teams Jack Kinney had working for these many 60s Popeye cartoons. It’s clearly enough that I should be paying attention to directors, though. The cartoon for this week has Hugh Fraser listed as the animation director, and story by Raymond Jacobs. Both the animation and the story feel quite different to other Jack Kinney cartoons. This is how we work out secrets of how the cartoons were made, sixty years later. From 1960, it’s Popeye in Haweye.

This starts with a nice stylish title card. A lot of these do. The style carries into the short, though, with this enormous plane and double-deck windows. And then, uh, uh, some Hawai’ian women tossing leis onto tourist Olive Oyl. So that’s how far into the cartoon I was before feeling really uncomfortable. This lasted a second and then we were on to the next beat, introducing Popeye and Brutus as rival tour guides. There’s also a mob of other tour guides, and there’s a rare bit of overlapping dialogue. Before Olive Oyl can even see what’s going on the tour guides are all beating each other up.

It’s abrupt, and the cartoon trusts the viewer to work out why the fight even started. I didn’t expect that. I expect cheap made-for-tv cartoons of the era to be ruthlessly expository. It’s cheap, for the air time filled, for the characters to explain the setup to each other. And it avoids the audience, young kids watching on lousy sets, from being confused. It’s packed.

One thing you can say for this cartoon: it is not short of funny moments to screen grab. Olive Oyl on Brutus’s plane particularly has all sorts of peculiar head shapes to marvel at.

Popeye and Brutus are the surviving tour guides, and Olive Oyl agrees to go on both tours but pay for the better. (This cartoon would be totally different if there were a second tourist on the plane.) Brutus wins the coin toss, and it’s underplayed that he uses a two-headed coin. Olive Oyl’s first tour is a breakneck run through all the parts of Hawai’i that don’t have people in them. Then a race onto the plane to dive, among other things, through a volcano. Then to a tandem bike ride past orchids. And before you know it the tour’s over, with Brutus arguing that the tour is great because there is so much of it. I concede the logic.

Popeye’s tour is slow and gentle. It’s impossible to argue that he isn’t the better guide, if nothing else for matching the tour to what his customer wants. It makes me wonder what Brutus’s tours are like when he isn’t infatuated with the customer. There’s a fight, motivated apparently because the cartoon has to end with a fight. But Popeye’s spinach comes form eating Olive Oyl’s lei, an act so weird that she comments on it. Somehow the arbitrariness of that cuts the arbitrariness of this fight at this moment in a way that makes both better. One punch and Brutus goes buoncing off into a luau, for a moment of serious cringe. And Popeye and Olive Oyl have a moonlight date.

The story’s simple. But it moves economically. Maybe even too fast, but that serves the plot well. I’m surprised by how well the whole thing fits together. The animation is also … well, I don’t blame you if you think it’s sloppy. To me, it looks loose and active, like the characters are bouncing. It’s a good energy.

What it means to be in a city

It means watching a pedestrian in the crosswalk being honked at by an angry motorist who’s trying to turn the wrong way onto a one-way street that’s closed off for construction anyway.

What’s Going On In Gil Thorp? Did Chet Ballard get his comeuppance yet? October 2019 – January 2020

If you’re reading this after about April 2020 there’s probably a more current plot recap for Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp at this link. If you’re reading this in about January 2020, please carry on.

Gil Thorp.

21 October 2019 – 12 January 2020.

The standings at the end of last quarter, back in football season. Chet Ballard doesn’t see why his stepson Charlie Roh isn’t getting more play time. He’s also overheard Chance Macy, who is getting more play time, talk with his grandparents about whether he’s “blowtop mad”. He wants to know what the heck that means, but heck if my essay helped him much. It means uncontrollably mad, the kind of mad that makes you a danger. And why it is Coach Gil Thorp favors the guy who doesn’t fumble so much. Luckily, though, Chet Ballard is also head of the Milford school board, so he can look up Chance Macy’s Permanent Record.

Macy’s Permanent Record reveals a lot of behavior issues, and time at a “special school for problem kids”. Ballard’s wife points out, how is this his business again? Carol Other School Board Person points out there are privacy laws in this state. Ballard agrees to give it a rest. By “a rest” he means “a call to Milford Local Newspaper reporter Marjie Ducey”. Ducey doesn’t see where Macy’s history belongs in the newspaper. Local Newspaper hasn’t carried Gil Thorp since that Left Behind guy stopped writing it. But she wonders about the strange voice mail.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 2nd of November, 2019. I choose to believe Neal Rubin is making a wry and self-aware comment in a story that’s built entirely on professionals disregarding a student’s privacy.

Thorp goes to Macy’s home to share what he knows about this leak. Macy takes the news well, but worries about who would want to harass him like this. At the game against Madison, Macy steps aside with an ankle injury, giving Charlie Roh a touchdown. Gil Thorp overheard Ballard saying “all the yards, none of the baggage”, and has his idea who called in the Chance Macy story. Marjie Ducey and Education reporter Niah Peters try to figure out who made the call, but there’s few good leads to follow.

So Chet Ballard, needing to do something dumb, goes to the dumb expert, sports radio broadcaster Marty Moon. He shares his concerns about “irregularities” with one of Thorp’s players. While he does this, Marjie Ducey visits Carol Other School Board Person and learns her last name is Forsman. Also that Chet Ballard was telling people about Chance Macy’s Permanent Record. The reporters ask Superintendent Howard Elston to check this out. The Superintendant asks the IT guy to check if Ballard accessed Chance Macy’s records. The IT guy points out Ballard didn’t delete his browser history and there you are.

To Ducey, Ballard declares that he didn’t do it, and besides he had to do it. So the story comes out: a Milford school board member inappropriately accessed a Permanent Record. And left a weird throaty voice message at the paper. And this anonymized version is the hit scandal of the season. Superintendent Elston is not amused by any of this, especially when he works out that Ballard wanted his stepson more play time. Roh figures out that the unnamed board member was his stepfather. Marty Moon figures out that Ballard’s “concerns” were concern-trolling. And when Marty Moon sees through your scheme, you’re through. Ballard resigns from the school board.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 2nd of December, 2019. Ballard does listen, and apologizes to the people he’s hurt with his selfishness. So this puts a Gil Thorp character one up on four real-life people I had counted as close friends for twenty years.

Roh apologizes to Macy. And Macy accepts, because he knew nobody in high school could care about the school board. Roh offers to treat him to a celebration of the season at local teen hangout The Bucket. (This on Ballard’s credit card, which he really had no choice but to lend.) Macy points out he’s not good with loud and packed places. Roh suggests, you know, a quiet celebration at Ricozzi’s. So all ends well enough, except for Chet Ballard.

---

The new and current story started the 9th of December, with the trials of Alexa Watson. She had a perfectly good name when she was born seventeen(?) years ago. Now it’s a menace. She’d use her middle name except that’s “Siri”. And her mother’s maiden name is “OK Google” so she’s got nowhere to go.

Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp for the 20th of December, 2019. Also, like, Teddy’s harassment this time was pointing out how Chris could have averaged four points per game, like he did last season, without even showing up. So Chris probably realizes that Teddy will spend his adult life realizing he was a fantastically incompetent school bully.

Anyway, she has a sympathetic friend, Phoebe Keener, who’s outgrown that unicorn and joined the girls basketball team. Phoebe’s rebuffing the greetings of Chris Schuring, her rival for valedictorian. Schuring, a slight member of the boys basketball team, gets mocked by Teddy Demarco and his friends, but won’t take that bait. Instead he puts it all into being aggressive enough on the basketball court that Coach Thorp notices. He misses a last-second shot against Springfield, but it’s close. In parallel, Watson is playing well but not quite well enough. So both Thorps have been thinking about how to coach their players.

And that’s where the story is: Schuring and Keener are academic rivals. She takes it more seriously than he does. Demarco is mocking Schuring. Schuring’s putting his response into his practice games instead. And Alexa Watson sometimes goes half a day without getting a joke about her names. How will all this tie together? Too soon to say. Come back around April, most likely, and we’ll have a better idea.

Milford Schools Watch

Of course, Milford is not anywhere; it is every high school, everywhere, except that they say “playdowns” there. But we do know there are other schools around it. Here’s the ones that have recently been named, usually in the course of competition:

• Madison (4 November)
• Jefferson (13 – 16 November)
• Valley Tech (4 – 6 December)
• Austintown (23 December)
• Springfield (23 – 30 December)
• Harding (6 – 8 January)

Next Week!

How much of everything has happened in Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker since October? I’ll try and reveal how much next week. And if you’re just interested in comic strips mentioning mathematical topics, please try my other blog even this week. Thanks for reading.

Statistics Saturday: One Year Represented As One Year

January

1. 1st of January. Start of year.
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12. 12th of January.
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Statistics December: How The Last Month Treated My Humor Blog

I like taking some time near the start of any month to look at what my readership is like. I would have liked to get to it earlier this month but I haven’t had the time to think, much less write. I’d also like to know why I like doing this. Well, I know why I usually like it. Usually the statistics tell me that I’m quite popular with a select group of people and that’s nice to see. December 2019, though? … well, not so much.

It’s an exaggeration to say this was a plummet. But there were “only” 3,064 page views around here in December. That’s about three-quarters what there were in November. It’s a fair bit below the twelve-month running average of 3,545.7 views per month. Looking at the number of views per posting seems less dire, even though there were more posts in December than in November. There were 98.8 views per posting in December, below the running average of 116.5 views per posting. This seems less dire because there are more decimal points in it.

Boy, the end of Apartment 3-G was a long time ago, wasn’t it?

There was a roughly identical drop in the number of unique visitors. There were 1,760 logged unique visitors in December 2019, below the twelve-month running average of 2,034.3. Per post, that’s 56.8 unique visitors, below the average of 66.8. If there’s any bright spots to this it’s in the things that measure engagement. There were 104 things liked in December, a rise from November’s total of 92, and getting closer to the running average of 145.7. This is 3.4 likes per posting, still fairly below the 4.8 likes per posting average. The number of comments was up, though, with 21 received in December. That’s the greatest number since June, and is not that far below the twelve-month running average of 25.0. It’s also an average of 0.7 comments per posting, below but near the average of 0.8.

There were 420 posts, besides my home page, that got any views at all in December. That’s down from November’s 446. 159 of these pages got only a single view, which basically matches November’s 150 and October’s 162. The most popular pieces were nothing posted this December, it happens:

• S J Perelman: Insert Flap ‘A’ And Throw Away
• Statistics Saturday: The Months Of The Year In Reverse Alphabetical Order and boy I hope everyone who was looking for that knew what they were doing.
• What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? What’s The Plan To Kill Heloise Walker? July – September 2018
• What’s Going On In Mark Trail? Who Told Mark Trail ‘Fetish’ Was A Word He Could Say? May – July 2018
• What’s Going On In Mary Worth? How can you scam a Mary Worth character? January – April 2019

Those last three make me think I need to do something optimizing about my comic strip plot recap posts. My most popular long-form essay for the month was also a new one, Some Books You Can Get Me For Christmas. I’m quite happy about this because I really, really liked this piece and I’m glad other people do.

I plan to keep doing long-form essays every Thursday evening, Eastern Time, until someone likes them. I also plan to keep doing What’s Going On In Story Strips essays, normally posted Sunday evenings. My planned schedule, barring breaking news or other urgent developments, for the next few weeks is this:

• Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp
  (12th of January)
• Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker
  (19th of January)
• Roy Thomas and Alex Saviuk’s The Amazing Spider-Man
  (26th of January)
• Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop
  (Groundhog Day of February)
• Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom (Weekdays)
  (Orthodox Groundhog Day)

65 countries or country-like entities sent me views in December. That’s down from November’s 74 and October’s 76. I thought last month I had found a level, and see where that’s got me. There were 13 single-view countries, down from November’s 15 and October’s 23. Here’s the full list of them:

Yeah but seriously, is there anybody in Greenland? If you know anybody who’s going to Greenland could you ask them to send me just one page view so I know the system is working? Thank you.

Country	Readers
United States	2,206
India	118
Canada	103
European Union	98
Philippines	91
Australia	62
United Kingdom	47
Sweden	44
France	26
Germany	25
Finland	21
Spain	17
Malaysia	14
Turkey	14
Brazil	13
South Africa	12
Netherlands	11
Italy	8
Denmark	7
Poland	7
Greece	6
Singapore	6
Taiwan	6
Ukraine	6
Croatia	5
New Zealand	5
Portugal	5
Russia	5
Colombia	4
Israel	4
Japan	4
Argentina	3
Czech Republic	3
Hong Kong SAR China	3
Ireland	3
Mexico	3
Romania	3
Serbia	3
Slovenia	3
United Arab Emirates	3
Angola	2
Austria	2
Bangladesh	2
Ecuador	2
Hungary	2
Norway	2
Pakistan	2
South Korea	2
Switzerland	2
Thailand	2
Vietnam	2
Zambia	2
Belgium	1
Cayman Islands	1
Chile	1
Iceland	1
Indonesia	1
Jamaica	1
Kazakhstan	1
Kenya	1
Lebanon	1 (*)
Macedonia	1 (**)
Nigeria	1 (*)
Peru	1
Slovakia	1

Lebanon and Nigeria were single-view countries in November. Macedonia’s been a single-view country three months running now.

I figure to do a review of all 2019 sometime later, most likely in 2020. But I can share some things. In December I posted 16,820 words altogether, for an average of 542.6 words per posting. That’s below the 2019 year’s average of 563 words per post. From the start of this blog to the start of 2020 I’d had 2,526 postings, which got altogether 151,278 views from 84,297 unique visitors.

I’m happy to have you as a regular reader. You can add https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/feed/ to your RSS reader. If you don’t have an RSS reader you can create one by using the Reading/Friends page on a free Dreamwidth or Livejournal account. Or if you’d like to show up in my statistics you can use the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button that’s on this page too. And I have an account on Twitter as @Nebusj which posts announcements of new pieces, although I haven’t got around to getting back into the account. For whatever reason Safari stopped letting me read Twitter and I haven’t had energy to protest this anywhere useful. But thanks for reading this here, at a minimum.

My Question To You, And My Windshield Wiper

I haven’t shared any automotive fiascos with you in a while. So here’s one. It started with my replacing the windshield wipers on my love’s car. It was meant as the smallest surprise nice little possible. My love was kind of aware this was coming, since I’d bought the blades a week or two before and never got around to installing them. These were the Rain-X Quantum windshield wipers, so named because they come in discrete and indivisible units, as opposed to those continuous wipers you get from other makers.

So our first rainy day out my love had a good question: what was that little floppy thing coming loose on the driver-side windshield wiper? By the time I figured out what my love was pointing at, and come to guess that it was something we didn’t really need, it had flown off onto the highway. In my defense we went on through two hours of driving in mild rain before things got any worse.

We were off in the middle of nowhere after 11 pm on a Sunday night when things got worse. This worse was the wiper blade coming loose. So we figured to stop at the next thing we could stop at, which took about twenty minutes to reach. This would be the driveway of a volunteer fire department, where there was a sign not to park there, but they had an overhang and everything and I mean, who’s going to have a fire that close to midnight on a Sunday? Bear in mind, this was a small town. Folks there know their volunteer fire department and wouldn’t go having a fire at that hour. Anyway there I could swap the loose wiper on the driver’s side for the solid wiper on the passenger’s side, and I know what you’re thinking: what, doesn’t the passenger want to see through the rain too? Well, I was the passenger and I’ll tell you, this rain looked like a rerun to me.

Still, we needed a new wiper and the obvious place to get one after midnight on a Sunday was Meijer’s, which you can find in Michigan (where we were) by going 750 feet in any direction. Except in this stretch of western Michigan where, again, nothing was but us and the volunteer fire department. The satellite navigator said if we drove close enough to Grand Rapids, where Meijer’s is headquartered by the way, we’d find one on Alpine Avenue. But we were heading to Grand Rapids, on Alpine Avenue. And twenty minutes later we got to the spot where no Meijer’s existed or showed any sign of ever existing.

So I asked the satellite navigator for the next-nearest Meijer’s. This took us off Alpine Avenue, down I-96 away from home, and then into a bunch of small roads. There we found: Meijer’s Corporate Headquarters Complex. With, like, huge glass windows and a mural of old Meijer’s corporate logos and things like that. So that was great to see except that I was about 40% sure there was nowhere there we could exchange money for a product. There was another one a half-mile away, which turned out to be the regional distribution center. If I could have found the front door I’d have banged on it to ask what they have in windshield wipers. There would be no point to this.

Next search: since “places to shop named Meijer’s” wasn’t working I searched for “Meijer Pharmacy”, and this time it lead us to a Meijer’s with a pharmacy and open doors and windshield wipers for sale and everything. It’s back on Alpine Avenue again. So I marched in and got the 21-inch blade we needed. Then marched out, after paying (don’t think that won’t come back to fiasco on me), and the little plastic thing that came off on the original blade came off again, but right away this time.

So I marched back in to the Customer Service desk, which had been closed for two and a half hours. I went to the guy supervising the self-checkout lanes and he said exchanging the blade was no problem. I went back to grab a 19-inch blade, because the car took different sizes for the driver’s and passenger’s side. I can’t think of any reason why the 19-inch blade should work and the 21-inch doesn’t, but after two failures in a row? I also couldn’t think of any reason to care.

The supervisor guy noticed the blades were different sizes, though, and so he figured he needed to ring this up properly and we went to the Customer Service desk. There it turned out the new blade was cheaper than the old. This is because I didn’t get the Quantum blade, but instead a Rain-X Latitude, so named for its great scope to do things, most of them wipe-based. This was cheaper, though, so he had to refund me $3.80. Maybe it wasn’t $3.80, but whatever it was was at least as good. There wasn’t any money in the Customer Service desk, though, so he wanted to give me a gift card for the difference.

To do this he had to get the register to read the receipt, which the system said didn’t exist. He tried entering the transaction number manually, and the system agreed it didn’t exist. He figured he could ring this up as a receiptless exchange and refund and that I didn’t need to be part of figuring out the system’s problems. A good point. To do this he needed my driver’s license, to record whatever the heck it is they do. And then he swiped the gift card and the system didn’t want to do that. So he needed to take my driver’s license back and try it over again. I know what you’re thinking: no, he remembered to give me my license back before we got too far from the Customer Service Desk. Anyway this time the wiper went on, and it stayed on, lest I get out on I-96 and punch it.

A mile down the road I ask what I did with the old, defective blade when I took it off the car. We conclude I must have left it on the car hood and it’s now lost in the parking lot of a Meijer’s in Grand Rapids. It turns out the next day it’s just sitting in that space between the car hood and the windshield, protected by the wiper arms.

Grant the fiasco nature of this, or as they say in the trades is fiascosity. My question: what the heck was all this about?

A Greeting

Oh, hello there, intrusive thought about that time in US History 1945 – Present (512:335) back in 1993 when I fumbled trying to make my point and came out sounding fantastically and even fanatically naive. How long has it been since you took over all my cognitive skills? Has it been four — no, no, you’re right, it’s only been three and a half hours. Good to see you again. Thanks. You’re going to be visiting through next Thursday? Great, great, really glad for that. Thanks.

60s Popeye: Searching for the Foola-Foola Bird (it’s easy to find)

New Year, new old Popeye cartoons to watch. It’s another Larry Harmon-produced cartoon here, this one written by Charles Shows. I don’t have him on record yet, but these records are still quite young things. Going in, I don’t expect great animation — again, see the Hal Sutherland/Lou Scheimer credits — but I’d expect a couple of interesting figures at least. And a solid story makes up for a lot of animation flaws. So here from 1960, it’s Foola-Foola Bird.

We open on a picnic that certainly doesn’t look at all like it’s setting up stock footage that could frame any story. I like the way they’ve drawn grass, though. Popeye and all are tuned to KPLOT-AM radio, where Jackson Beck is doing his Jim Backus impersonation. It’s an adequate way to set up the premise, if you don’t just want to have Popeye and Olive Oyl sailing to Foola-Foola Island and explaining the plot to each other.

The National Birdwatchers Society is offering a million dollars for a Foola-Foola Bird. Nobody says what they want it for, but, given the era … I mean, this was made before Rachel Carson proposed that covering the earth eight feet deep in neurotoxins to save the cost of road crews cutting brush back from highway signage was bad, actually. I have concerns about the well-being of any animals in captivity. But that’s outside the scope of the cartoon. Popeye knows where to find a Foola-Foola Bird: they’ll be on Foola-Foola Island. You’d think more people would try looking there. But I like that Popeye knows where to go. It suggests he’s picked up sailor’s lore, and I like when he gets to be a sailor.

There’s a neat little dissolve, between Brutus and a sneaking Popeye, at about 1:40. And then we get “the last” of the Foola-Foola Birds, although I don’t know how Popeye’s so sure this is the last of them. The bird’s pretty good at taking care of himself, at least.

Popeye does this cheery little song about how “I will fool-a the Foola-Foola bird”. I don’t know why I liked this so. It seems playful, like the way Jack Mercer’s improvised mutterings in the 30s did. I’m curious whether the line was written or whether Jack Mercer just spruced up a dull moment in the recording studio. Or replaced a boring line announcing what Popeye was doing with this.

The Foola-Foola Bird passes out when Popeye “scientifically” sprinkles salt on its tail. Why? I know the legend is that you catch a bird by sprinkling salt on its tail. But, like, I’ve seen every Woody Woodpecker cartoon and he was never taken by that, except when he was going along with a gag. Is the Foola-Foola Bird going along with Popeye’s nonsense to see if this leads anywhere interesting?

So after Popeye walks through the slowest snare trap in the world and gets caught, Brutus takes the Foola-Foola Bird, then drops it to tie up Olive Oyl. The Foola-Foola Bird gives Popeye his spinach, because … why? I’d like to think the Foola-Foola Bird has figured out the moral landscape here, but I don’t see that the bird has reason to. Popeye said he was going to give the Foola-Foola Bird a nice new home, but the bird already has a home.

There’s a perfunctory fight between Popeye and Brutus. If it counts as a fight when only one person throws a punch. And then we get Popeye and Olive Oyl sailing home, deciding to leave the Foola-Foola Bird alone: why? It’s a plausible change of opinion, yes, but why did either of them make it? One line of Olive Oyl regretting the trouble they’re causing the bird would carry a lot of work here. And give Olive Oyl a use in the cartoon. We have the cute ending that the bird’s followed along, and even dragged Brutus with him. Nice enough, although I don’t know why Popeye talks about the Foola-Foola Bird being there as if it were a problem.

So a question for me: why did the cartoon make up the Foola-Foola Bird? The Popeye lore already has the legendary and rare Whiffle Hen. Your tiring friend who wants to Well Actually things will tell you how the Whiffle Hen’s lucky feathers were the original source of Popeye’s indestructibility. There are King Features cartoons that feature the Whiffle Hen, a creature from the original comic strip. So I’m curious whether Charles Shows didn’t know about the Whiffle Hen, or didn’t think he could use it, or whether there was some draft where the Whiffle Hen would have been definitely wrong and something new had to be brought in.

The story makes sense, whether you’re a Whiffle Hen partisan or not. And Brutus talking so much about “getting the bird” or “giving me the bird” sure sounds like somebody was supposed to say something to camera. The animation is all rote stuff, though. There’s some good backgrounds, such as the first look at Foola-Foola Island, but nothing that moves looks all that interesting. It’s altogether a cartoon that’s all right.

What’s Got Me Late Today

I’m sorry, I’m busy going to lyrics sites and changing ‘hand’ to ‘ham’ wherever they don’t catch me quick enough.

What’s Going On In Rex Morgan? Did Mindy give birth yet and who’s Aunt Tildy? October 2019 – January 2020

Hi, person looking to find out what’s going on in Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D.. This plot recap will get you up to speed for early 2020. If you’re reading this in or after April 2020 there’s probably a more up-to-date plot recap at this link.

Any old week, though, there’s likely fresh mathematically-themed comic strips reviewed on my other blog. Thanks for considering reading that.

Rex Morgan.

13 October 2019 – 5 January 2020.

Last time I checked in we were at the start of a new plot. Mindy Wise’s pregnancy had come to term. Also Mindy Wise was pregnant, to her and her husband’s surprise. She thought, given her polycystic ovarian syndrome, she couldn’t get pregnant. No; it was improbable is all.

The strip told Mindy’s pregnancy in flashback. There’s good reasons for this. The point of the story is that she had a difficult pregnancy, with many alarming incidents. The point was that her having a safe delivery was uncertain, and every incident made it less probable. If you suppose Terry Beatty is too kindhearted a writer to give a pleasant person like Mindy Wise (or Buck) a bad end, then none of this could work for you. If you remember he had Millie Gray die days after reconnecting with Hank Harwood, you’re less sure about how kind a world Beatty writes.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 3rd of November, 2019. So yes, this is some more of Rex Morgan not taking the lead in doing medicine in his own comic. But he is a family practitioner, after all, and is most plausibly able to explain what specialists know to a lay audience. Also I appreciate that the diagnosis is a confusing thing, with uncertain evidence. This reads as more real to me than a clear-cut case would be.

But also: why tell this in flashback? I believe because its events have to span about nine months of character time. This could be told in sequence, interspersed with other stories. But most of the recent Rex Morgan, M.D. stories have been things that span a couple of days. Maybe a few weeks for the Serena Galexia/Rene Belluso story. The incompetent coffee-shop robbery didn’t even take a day. Mister Cranky and the emergency plane landing took something like a week, from emergency to Rex Morgan getting his suitcase back.

Either Mindy’s pregnancy has to fit in incidents in-between stories for years of reader time or it has to be in flashback. Yes, it’s the same amount of character time since we last saw the Wises. If I haven’t missed something that was their Las Vegas Elvis wedding, in summer 2018. But most readers are forgiving. If you don’t force them to acknowledge an inconsistent timeline, they’re mostly not going to notice.

So, incidents. Mindy fell down stairs and had a small placental tear. With bed rest that healed up. They get back to normal, and Mindy goes back to work at the antiques shop. It doesn’t last: Mindy’s exhausted at work, and gets dizzy. There’s a battery of tests. The cardiologist believes that it’s pulmonary hypertension, but the evidence is inconclusive.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 19th of November, 2019. Actual footage of me guessing to my love that the windshield wiper probably didn’t actually need the part that just flew off while we were merging onto the Interstate. Spoiler: the windshield wiper did need that part.

Rex Morgan gives the summary. The safest course is to treat it as though it is pulmonary hypertension. Mindy is to have bed rest until the pregnancy comes to term. Also, no salt. Also, only lukewarm showers. And no standing for more than 15 minutes at a time. I could probably manage the no-salt diet but the rest of this sounds resolutely miserable to me, too. Also, it’ll be a caesarian section, as safer than a natural birth. Also, several ultrasounds a week.

Buck tries to stay positive and supportive. So does his son Corey. There’s still trouble, though. A late echocardiogram shows her heart’s swollen. The doctors recommend moving up the C-section. And that’s where we get to the start of the story’s frame. Rex Morgan isn’t part of the C-Section team, of course. He’s just there to provide moral support and exposition.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 5th of December, 2019. By the way, this is the first that the Wises know the sex of their child; it had never given a clear sonogram despite the many examinations Mindy had during her troubled pregnancy. There had been some scenes of Buck trying to avoid thinking up names for the child, and that they didn’t know whether to anticipate a boy or girl was one point he used to not think about the question.

And then? You know what? It’s all pretty easy. The child’s delivered in a few days of reader time. Mindy’s blood pressure drops to normal, and her heart returns to normal size. The cardiologist supposes this was pregnancy-induced pulmonary hypertension. It’s not liable to be a lingering problem. This sounds to me like medical stuff, so I can’t dispute its plausibility. And now they can think of baby names. Mindy proposes Angela, and that’s that.

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That, the 16th of December, wraps up Mindy’s pregnancy. The next story was Christmas with the Morgans. Young Sarah proposes getting a puppy. They have the one dog already, after all, so what’s one more? She presses this quite hard. Her parents resist for a few days, reader and character time, and then decide to adopt from the animal shelter. Sarah names the dog Candy.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 26th of December, 2019. Johnny is the Morgan’s other boy, adopted in a story in early 2018. Arnold and Helen are Johnny’s biological grandparents, who briefly contested the adoption before concluding they weren’t up to handling a new kid.

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And the 29th of December starts the new adventure, as an explosively energetic woman arrives at the door. It’s June’s Auntie Tildy, come for the visit promised in the letter they never received. She’s not “really” June’s aunt. (I grew up with a lot of friends-of-my-parents dubbed aunt and uncle. A part of me can’t believe in people who try to pin these words down to specific blood relations.) She’s just one of those vague relations who’s having a more exciting life than the rest of us, and she’s here for … who knows how long, and for what purpose? We should have some idea by March. See you then.

Next Week!

So what does it mean if Chance Ballard ever got “blowtop mad”? What has the head of the school board found out about Coach Thorp? How’s the football season turning out? All this and more next week, I expect, when I look at Neal Rubin and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp, barring surprises. And until then there’s recaps and news about all the story strips here.

Statistics Saturday: Some Fictional Municipalities

• Klein, Pennsylvania
• Braxton’s Glurge, Pennsylvania
• Cadbury, Pennsylvania
• Lansing, Pennsylvania
• Vermont, Pennsylvania
• Four Yoink, Pennsylvania
• Paddlebonk Creek, Pennsylvania
• Rowntree, Pennsylvania
• Lesser Staple, Delaware
• Josie and the Pussycats, Pennsylvania
• Tweed, Pennsylvania
• Other Hartford, Pennsylvania

Reference: European History 1648 to 1789,, R M Rayner.

Statistics 2010s: Top Words Cut From My Essays Of The Decade Just Passed

• just
• not to say it isn’t
• really
• almost
• microphone
• a sort of
• somewhat
• (really almost any 10% would improve things somewhat)
• simply
• heptic

Reference: Mind Partner and 8 Other Novelets From Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine, Editor Horace Gold.

Statistics 2010s: Ten Things Of The Decade Just Passed

• August 22. everyone who had a part in this day, give yourselves a fresh round of applause without being unseemly about it.
• Cheddar II: Cheddiest. From out of Nowhere, Connecticut, 06269, this new flavor, appearing in ouch-y sharp, dangerous in its pointedness, somewhat polyhedral, and mint, has taken over the world of cheese and opened up new avenues in being so much more than the inspirational cheddar that it’s not hard to see why old-fashioned cheddar is expected within the next two years to go the way of the original, almost forgotten ched.
• once-in-shakespeare.com Where else but this scrappy new start-up can one get a convenient listing of all the words that appear in the canonical plays of William Shakespeare one time? Anyone can produce a list of all the words, just by shaking a collected edition on its side until the pieces fall out, but who’s going to take out the duplicates and grow new authors with them?
• Raised Flooring. After years of drop-down ceilings being the cliche and overused answer to ways to make a room seem more claustrophobic we have this alternative. Unexpected bonuses include having more things to count while bored, and the improved sense of balance as people try to walk on those bar things from which the floor panels are hung. This will inspire grace in our walking like Groucho Marx if nothing else will.
• How the English language has no solitary word for the feeling of uncertainty that accompanies thinking that one’s socks are damp when there’s no chance for taking one’s shoes off to check or to change them no matter how much we need a word for exactly this sensation. This single loss has saved millions of dollars and dozens of lines of newspaper type in just the past month. And think of all the people it’s inspired to try to buy less painful shoes. Yes, yes, you can put together a bunch of words to get the same sense across. It’s not the same.
• Flatware. There is nothing which soothes the desperate need to buy flatware quite like flatware, and we should all be glad the flatware industry exists to satisfy this need. Be warned: much so-called flatware these days is not in fact flat, but extends into a third or even a fourth spatial dimension. If you have no choice but to purchase this imitation flatware do speak to the steamroller operator with whom you’re on good terms — you are on good terms with at least one steamroller operator, aren’t you? — to arrange for the appropriate enflattening.
• March 10. Nobody’s saying it’s a patch on August 22, but it’s still really good all around and everybody deserves to take a bow for that too.
• Adverbs. These sentence-stuffers had a great run and it’s a shame that we’re scheduled to lose them if the conversion to Modifiers.6 ever happens. Still, anyone who’s ever had to write to a specified word count has relied on their ability to be added to or removed from sentences and they will be missed, like when someone notices the `a’ or `an’ doesn’t match with the next word anymore.
• Sriracha Automobiles. For the past fifteen years sriracha has been slipping almost unnoticed into everything, starting with sandwiches, then cooking shows, then books, then consumer electronics, and now into the important industries of Navy ships and personal automobiles. No one may know where sriracha comes from or what it intends, but we can be sure that it’s here and it’s unavoidable, and that with the proper setup it can be used for good or at least to not be so frightening, and that earns it a place on this list.
• Simple Thermometers. Despite fears no important features of the weather developed into the imaginary and then the complex number plane. So despite the shortages in Complex Thermometers none were needed, except for that stretch in fall where the temperature became one of the principal roots of a heptic polynomial. But for the most part we got along just fine with the old-fashioned thermometers and isn’t that one of the ten things about the decade just finished?

Statistics 2010s: Top Albums of The Decade Just Passed

Because I bought more music in the period 2010 – 2019 than I did just in 2019 is why.

• Wonderlijke Efteling Muziek, ride music from De Efteling amusement park, Kaatscheuvel, North Brabant, Netherlands.
• Three Willow Park: Electronic Music from Inner Space (1961 – 1971), Raymond Scott
• Ball N’ Chain, Big Mama Thornton
• Nickelodeon Player Piano, recorded at Knoebels Amusement Park
• The Spotniks Greatest Hits, The Spotniks
• Ferrante and Teicher Greatest Hits, Ferrante and Teicher.
• Top 100 Classics: The Very Best of Frank Crumit, Frank Crumit
• The Snow Goose, Camel

Again, I’m sorry, I didn’t buy very much music overall. And yeah, again, that Frank Crumit album? It’s really 1910s through 1930s so if you like that era great but, you know, if you’re not really into Stephen Foster medleys because of how the lyric always seems to go, he’s got a couple Stephen Foster medleys.

Reference: Science from your Airplane Window, Elizabeth A Wood.

Statistics 2010s: Top Fan Theories of the 2010s

• Around the era of the Original Star Trek movies, but especially around Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the Federation and the Romulans were on good terms, possibly even allies, which is why the Vulcans and Romulans congress together in the Khitomer conference and why Ambassador Nanclus is allowed to see plans for the never-executed secret retrieval mission in the Federation President’s office.
• In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Valeris used the phaser seen in the galley to shoot that pot of mashed potatoes to kill crewmen Burke and Samno. And then Valeris staged her over-dramatic demonstation of why sensors would detect phasers so as to have an alibi for her fingerprints being on the phaser pistol in case it were discovered.
• Also in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Burke and Samno were not the two murderers who beamed over from the Enterprise to Kronos One to assassinate Chancellor Gorkon, but merely two patsies put in place to throw the investigative trail further off.
• Before the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Captain Sulu punched out every Admiral or something to get his first mission on the Excelsior to be three years of charting gaseous anomalies in the beta quadrant.
• The veridium patch, detectable by sensors from two sectors away, per Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, was deliberately left on Kirk by the Rura Penthe guards, so General Chang would know if Kirk wasn’t killed escaping the prison compound, and would be ready to intercept the Enterprise en route to the Khitomer Conference with the fugitive and thus make for an even greater scandal.

Reference: Splitting the Second: The Story of Atomic Time, Tony Jones.

Statistics 2010s: Top Movies Featuring Racing Snails of the 2010s

• Turbo II: First Snail On Mars (2014)
• Turbo (2013)
• Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010)
• Turbo 3: Crashed (2017)
• Turbo (2018 reboot)
• Turbo: New Kid (2019)
• Star Trek Beyond (2016)
• Turbo 2250: Beyond the Veil of Time (2016)
• Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 (2015)
• Epic (2013)
• Turbo: The Teen Years (2016, direct-to-video prequel)
• Turbo II ¹/₂: Chickipede’s Chance (2019, out-of-continuity sequel to the TV series)

Reference: The Kaiser’s Merchant Ships in World War I,, William Lowell Putnam.

What’s Going On In The Phantom (Sundays)? What are Ambrose Bierce and Thomas Paine doing in The Phantom? October – December 2019

Hi, folks who want to know what the Ghost Who Walks is doing with beating up these art students in tents. That’s the weekday continuity. This plot recap is for the Sunday continuity of Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays), current to December 2019. If you want the weekday story, or the Sunday stories after about March 2020, there’s probably a more relevant essay at this link.

The Phantom (Sundays).

6 October – 29 December 2019

The Phantom had just freed Clotilde, a refugee from the dictatorship of Avaria, last I checked in. She’d been taken by the Khagan, ruler of Avaria, and a squadron of her warriors. Avaria is one of these other unpleasant totalitarian states surrounding Bangalla. The Phantom had also just stopped her from killing Avari warriors that he’d bound and gagged. His reasoning’s that the liberation of Avari can’t be done through war crimes. Good goal. They take one of the horses and flee.

The Khagan discovers the escape. Also that all the Avari’s remaining saddles are broken, limiting their ability to pursue. They wait out the pursuers. Eventually, though … only two return to the Khagan’s camp. The rest just … hang around. The Phantom approaches. They explain the Khagan will execute them if Clotilde makes good her escape. So, given that, they’d just as soon not go back. The Phantom takes them to Bangallan President Lamanda. He’ll take them in, despite the risk of the Khagan seeking revenge.

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 3rd of November, 2019. “Well,” says President Lamanda, “I don’t think we can safely keep you here indefinitely. But we can give you refuge while we see if Prince Valiant can give you a permanent home.”

Good on Lamanda for standing up for liberty. There’s obviously room for a follow-up. But since the last comic strip story with Avaria ran from September 2009 through March 2010, it may be a while. (There was one made in 2015 for those Swedish comic books.)

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With the 17th of November the current Sunday story, The Spy Ship, the 189th Sunday story, started. It also ties to the weekday continuity, as Heloise Walker brings Kadia Walker to the Phantom’s Skull Cave. Well, to the Deep Woods, the vicinity of the Skull Cave. Kit Walker asks his daughter how this can be a good idea, exactly, if they don’t want her to learn the family secret? Heloise explains that Kadia was blindfolded all the way through the deep woods. They’re in the wrong place to see Skull Cave as anything beside a bit of rock. She doesn’t know that The Phantom is there. And she told Kadia that the Walkers have Bandar friends because they lived here years ago, as part of Diana Walker’s United Nations work.

Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom for the 22nd of December, 2019. Psst! Heloise! It’s a trick question! Ask about how both Ambrose Bierce and Thomas Paine teamed up with The Phantom in search of Elizabeth Island!

The Phantom invites Heloise deeper into Skull Cave, to learn secrets that even Kit Junior doesn’t know. Behind an iron door they pass the crypt of people Lost to History: Ambrose Bierce, for example, who’d met the 16th Phantom. And who disappeared in Mexico in 1913 if you believe history rather than the Phantom Chronicles. Or Thomas Paine, who died in 1809 in New York City, although his body has been lost. He’s shown with an internment date of 1824.

So this is all prelude, as you see. What it’s a prelude for I can’t guess. This Sunday’s strip has the Phantom asking Heloise whether she wants to know the story of Ambrose Bierce or Thomas Paine, and she’s not answered yet.

Next Week!

Mindy Wise’s surprise pregnancy! A dog! All this and I think more in
Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D., in about a week.

Statistics 2019: Top Albums of 2019

• Three Willow Park: Electronic Music from Inner Space (1961 – 1971), Raymond Scott
• Ball N’ Chain, Big Mama Thornton
• The Spotniks Greatest Hits, The Spotniks
• Top 100 Classics: The Very Best of Frank Crumit, Frank Crumit

I’m sorry, I didn’t buy very much music this year so I don’t really know what’s out there. Also, uh, that Frank Crumit album is a lot of songs that all sound like the background music for Betty Boop cartoons, plus 168 versions of Abdul Abulbul Amir including like 14 sequel songs to it, but the guy was recording from the 1910s to 1930s so there’s some really, uh, yeah, let’s just call it uncomfortable stuff, okay? I mean uncomfortable.

Reference: Science from your Airplane Window, Elizabeth A Wood.

Statistics 2019: Ten Months of 2019

• December
• July
• March
• February
• November
• October
• August
• January
• June
• May

Reference: Entertainment for Angels: Electricity in the Enlightenment, Patricia Fara.

Go Juice

Maybe you heard about this discovery about a way to make fuel out of coffee. If you didn’t hear about this discovery about a way to make fuel out of coffee, let me bring you up to speed. So, apparently there’s this way they discovered to make fuel out of coffee. When I put it that way it sounds like that’s all anyone is talking about.

It started out with an accident, when Dr Mano Misra at the University of Nevada, Reno, made coffee one night and didn’t drink it. Now I don’t normally feel envy at the achievements of real academics. I don’t really play that field anymore, and anyway, how many mathematicians do you know have opinions about the plots in Gil Thorp? But here, I realize, I could totally have made this discovery myself. I have a lot of experience in my life not drinking coffee. I used to be limited in discovering things in coffee I didn’t drink by how I didn’t make coffee before I didn’t drink it.

But this past decade? I’ve made a surprising lot of coffee. This is because there’s a complimentary coffee bar at this overgrowing farmer’s market on the west side of town. We go there to get our pet rabbit vegetables and to see what they’ve expanded to doing this week. It’s great. Gourmet popcorn? Sure! Fresh-pressed olive oil? Why not! Gelato? Yeah, they can do that, why not? There’s also a great wall of succulents that gets moved to a new place every time you step in, even if you only stepped out for three minutes and came back in because you’re looking for a lost hat. If you’re ever in town (Lansing) you should stop in. You can find it by looking for the massive parking lots that nobody can escape. Use the one on the west side of town.

Anyway, they have a complementary coffee bar, so for a long while there I started making coffee. What was I going to do, not get coffee just because I don’t much like coffee? Besides, they have all sorts of things to make coffee taste less like coffee. Flavored beans, for a start. Sugars, in real (sugar) and imaginary (Splenda) and complex (cinnamon maple sprinkles) versions. Creams ranging from light to dark to postmodern inquiries of the nature of whitening coffee. Whipped cream. You can put so much stuff in the coffee you don’t even need the coffee. And after seven years of going there nearly weekly I’ve realized: you know, they have some tea I could get instead. It’s boring tea, but then I have a deep, fundamental boringness to myself and so that’s right for me.

So there was this period I was making coffee, although instead of not drinking it I would drink it instead, because what was I going to do, waste coffee? And cinnamon maple sprinkles? I was raised in too big a family to do something like that. But if I had just used the coffee I was making and didn’t drink it, then this is a discovery I totally could have made, if I had noticed anything.

The story then is Dr Misra noticed a layer of oil floating on the coffee. That’s something I didn’t know coffee could do. I thought layers of oil formation were only done by fossils and peanut butter. I mean the peanut butter that’s so good you can’t use it for sandwiches because you’re always stirring the oil back into it. Misra found the oil, though, and didn’t think to stir it in. Using it for motor fuel is a breakthrough, though, and one I wouldn’t have made. I was pretty sure you only put mysterious fluids in cars if you’re in a low-effort Disney movie made between 1958 and 1982. So it’s not enough to observe a thing, you also have to have an idea what to do with it. So that’s something I wouldn’t have though to try.

What gets me is that if you can get oil out of coffee, then there must have been oil in the coffee to start with. Right? I feel like this has to be right. But then that means someone put the oil in. But who goes around injecting oil into coffee beans? I understand it happening once or twice, as a prank. But that wouldn’t stay funny forever. On the other hand, everything I know about this is a couple years old, so maybe someone was playing a nasty prank on the University of Nevada, Reno. Or maybe the oil really comes from the coffee cups, and the coffee is just a red herring. I bet they checked that possibility, though. I don’t know anybody who drinks herring.

Statistics Saturday Bonus: Best Versions of A Christmas Carol (Reevaluated)

I thought I’d see how I felt if I looked at the question again.

• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)

Reference: The March of Folly, Barbara W Tuchman.

60s Popeye: Swee’Pea Thru The Looking Glass

My plan to pay attention to the credits is paying off! In this Jack Kinney production I see the story is by Ed Nofziger. Earlier this month Hamburger Fishing had him adapt a fairy tale to the Popeye setting. The title here implies a fairy-tale-based cartoon. So here’s Sweapea Thru The Looking Glass. As you see, I disagree with the title card about how to spell Swee’Pea’s name.

The establishing shot, of Popeye’s Boring Suburban House, lowered my hopes. I was expecting another Popeye-reads-to-Swee’Pea frame for the story, and was glad to see that. The cartoon decides to have Popeye go golfing, which I wasn’t glad to see. Golfing is what comic strip artists do when they start getting boring. Olive Oyl is off to a card party, which surprised me as she’s usually sent “shopping” when they need her out of the cartoon. But these are thoughtful choices: it foreshadows what Swee’pea encounters through the looking-glass. Switching from croquet to golf is probably a good way to Mid-century-Americanize the story without losing the whole hitting-balls-with-birds motif. So, as with Hamburger Fishing, good on Ed Nofzinger for thinking out the adaptation some.

Eugene the Jeep makes a good excuse to get Swee’Pea through the looking glass, but he’s not explicitly used. Swee’Pea makes a wish, and the cuckoo clock that’s been sitting in the background all cartoon tells him to try. The cuckoo’s answer to Swee’Pea’s skepticism, “cuckoo, cuckoo, you will if you do” has a satisfying gentle comic logic to me. It has that nice Yogi Berra charm.

Inside the looking-glass the world’s upside-down, which doesn’t fit with how mirrors normally work but which at least clearly shows it’s a strange land. Eugene gets a voice once he’s through the looking-glass. It’s this high-pitched squeaky thing like every voice this cartoon, which isn’t my favorite thing. But it does at least seem consistent with his normal jeep squeak. Right through there’s a huge-eared rabbit, a kangaroo, and an elephant late for their golfing. I’d thought the rabbit and kangaroo were meant to evoke Popeye and Olive Oyl, but that seems wrong. There’s nothing Popeye in the rabbit. All the kangaroo brings to things is a red shirt and a hat that I falsely thought Olive Oyl had been wearing this cartoon. I swear she wears it other cartoons, though.

Eugene declares he’s late, as it’s “two hairs to a mole”, which is a line I’m sure I didn’t understand when I was a kid. It’s got to be the punch line to a joke about checking the time when you’ve forgotten your watch. But there’s no setup. This gives it a nice dream logic; the line makes no sense, except that you can work out a context where it would make sense, and when you have, things have moved on. And it’s bold to condense a joke just to its punch line, especially in a cartoon for kids.

Whenever a cartoon does this upside-down business outside an enclosed space I worry about how the characters can have a consistent “floor” line. Also, is that rabbit resting his golf bag on his tail? That hardly seems possible. Also his paws look like he has too-long sleeves.

There is a strong dream feeling to this short. The surreal setting, certainly. The way Eugene and other nonhuman characters repeatedly chirp short sentences, often repeating the final word until it fades out. Slightly unsettling things like the golf course flags chanting “this way out that way out no way out”. You’re taking an Alice in Wonderland/Through The Looking-Glass project seriously if it’s feeling this close to a nightmare.

The Sea Hag’s the obvious casting choice for the Queen of Hearts. Brutus gets cast as her husband, which is all right, although it leaves them short for who to cast as Jack, the guard that goes after Swee’Pea. Maybe Wimpy could have been cast as the King. Bernard the Vulture gets cast in the flamingo role. You can fault the King Features cartoons for many things, but they did bring a lot of the comic strip cast to animation.

In the end, Swee’Pea and Eugene get back to reality as Popeye and Olive Oyl return. Popeye scolds Swee’pea for telling fibs. This doesn’t seem like a wise choice on Popeye’s part, especially once Olive Oyl finds you can just step through mirrors, it’s easy. It is the odd cartoon where Popeye gets a cameo role, and spinach even goes unmentioned.

I like this cartoon. It gets nice and weird and commits to it. I could wish that the animation were better, but the storyline has a solidly bizarre flow to it, in all the good ways. Shall have to watch for this Ed Nofziger fellow in future works.

Finally, some Calming News after an Alarming Year

After such hard times I’m glad to share this.

You can tell this is definitely the same pen as last week and not a different pen from the same model line because … uh … I say it is.

What’s Going On In Mary Worth? Is Iris pregnant? Is Estelle daft? September – December 2019

No, Iris is not pregnant, according to the information we’ve been given to date. Is Estelle daft? That depends on your feelings about plunging into dating someone after you know he’s got a lot of problems. People with problems deserve the chance at dates too, though. The issue is how they cope with their problems, and what their potential partners are able to cope with.

So as that warns you, I’m getting you up to mid-December 2019 in Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth. If you’re reading this after about March 2020 I likely have a more up-to-date Mary Worth plot recap here. And I should have, this week and any week, some mathematically-themed comic strips to discuss on my other blog. Now on to Charterstone in detail.

Mary Worth.

29 September – 21 December 2019.

When I last checked in, end of September, Mary Worth was ready for a new story. It’s been on that story ever since. It’s a story about Wilbur Weston.

Wilbur’s returned home. He was interviewing Mozambique cyclone survivors for his column about people who aren’t dead. He’s glad to see Estelle again. They’d started dating after Estelle’s whole Internet-Romance-scam debacle. He didn’t stay in touch like he meant while out of the country, despite the Internet being a thing. I can’t snark here, since I’ve got e-mails dating back to 2007 that I keep telling myself I’ll answer someday.

That said, all Wilbur wants to do is stay in with Estelle. He brings over some wine coolers and they watch a boxing documentary and the news that he used to be a sports writer. I didn’t know that. Also she hates boxing, which she doesn’t bother mentioning. So she counts that a lousy date and wonders if she’s wasted her time with like three Wilbur dates. Mary Worth reassures her that Wilbur is great, you have give him a chance. They have a couple dates singing together, like they used to do.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 10th of October, 2019. “Look, you don’t become one of Santa Royale’s leading survival-and-mayonnaise bloggers without making a long string of life choices. Anyone understands that.”

Meanwhile, Iris. She used to date Wilbur. But their relationship-pause while he was off interviewing world survivors turned into a breakup. (That was in time for him to fall for a romance scam in Colombia.) She’s taken to dating Zak, and quite likes the arrangement. He’s pleasant enough, and enthusiastically supportive of Iris when she complains of exhaustion.

Iris and Wilbur run into each other at the pharmacy. Wilbur says how he’s dating Estelle, who’s great in every way and would Iris and her toy boy like to double-date at this My Thai restaurant next week? Or every single week until Iris sees how way awesome a catch he is? Three times a week until she sees it? Mmm? Iris can’t think of any way this might go wrong, somehow.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 27th of October, 2019. So, first, between this and the daily strip that it’s recapping, you get some idea how much more into the idea Wilbur is than Iris is. But also … who is it says the double date sounds cool? That is Zak, right? In which case, it’s a little embarrassing he’s not picking up on Iris’s uncertainty about whether this is a good idea. But I do like that he values being on good terms with someone who used to be important to Iris and that she’s still communicating with.

Ahead of the double date, Wilbur realizes he doesn’t know what the heck he’s doing. He has a drink, and another, and follows it with 82 more while berating himself for breaking up with Iris even though he’s lucky to be with Estelle. Estelle finds Wilbur ranting while drunk, and somehow doesn’t imagine calling off the date.

It’s the fiasco you might imagine. Wilbur starts obnoxious, mocking Zak’s order of tofu pad Thai. Then he gets offensive, asking if the Zachary he was named for wasn’t his mothers friend but actually his father. Then he gets both clumsy and creepy, knocking wine onto Iris and getting handsy cleaning it off. (And, in the tradition of dull white guys, he does it while trying to imitate Something Cool From The Matrix.) Finally he passes out. Estelle pours him into his apartment.

After this mess Estelle wonders if she and Wilbur have a future. Or much of a past, since they’ve been on like five dates total. Her nightmare includes some funny pictures of Wilbur Babies boxing. Glorious nonsense.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 20th of November, 2019. Put aside the warning sign that Wilbur — whose day job is advice columnist by the way — thinks it’s ever an acceptable idea to emulate a romantic comedy character’s behavior. The reason he’s doing The Piña Colada Song is that it’s one of the songs he and Estelle first bonded over, so that at least is paying attention his actual relationship.

Between the fiasco and the nightmares Estelle wants a break from Wilbur. He sends her apologies and begs for a fresh chance. She turns to Mary Worth for help, since she’s broken into her apartment and asked what Estelle needs to be told to do already. Estelle explains about the fiasco. Mary Worth explains how oh, yeah, you’ll get a certain amount of humiliating public drunken spectacles from a Wilbur Weston. Which you’d think Mary Worth might have dropped a warning about. I like, in principle, that Mary Worth isn’t comfortable saying bad stuff about a friend, even to protect another friend. But Mary Worth’s defining power is setting relationships right. To not have warned Estelle of a hazard this big violates her brand. I’m not saying alcoholics can’t have relationships. I am saying their potential partners have to know what they’re getting into and be able to judge whether they’re able to handle that. Mary Worth isn’t shocked that he was disastrously drunk. She says “that tends to happen”. Not communicating “that tends to happen” warnings is how your boyfriend’s friend can assault you in your home.

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 25th of November, 2019. Warning sign that you’re really screwed up: when the Mary Worth Narration Box starts mocking you. Yowza. Anyway, maybe we snarky readers were jumping implausibly to the “Is Iris pregnant?” question, given the default social mores of the Mary Worth comic universe. But then what activity is being coded here by her putting her pants on in the middle of the day?

Back to Iris and Zak. She’s not only tired. Her pants don’t fit. And every snarky reader got to asking: wait, is Iris pregnant? Outside wedlock? In Mary Worth? Awesome! Then her hair starts falling out. She checks with her doctor, Riverdale’s Archie Andrews, who explains nah, it’s menopause. Well, he doesn’t say the word “menopause” for some reason, but that’s what he’s getting at.

Iris decides she can’t bother Zak with how she’s old. It would drag him down. Zak tries to be supportive considering she won’t tell him what’s wrong. She says she needs space and that they need time apart.

Zak goes to a bar to mope. Wilbur walks in. They sit together and talk some while watching the US-Cuba soccer match. The US team wins. Their resolve inspires Zak to not give up on his relationship with Iris. It also inspires Wilbur to do give up on his drinking. And, having had a normal human interaction, the two kind of like each other.

Meanwhile Estelle’s lonely and admits missing Wilbur. Mary Worth stops in with a bowl full of fruitcake and meddle cream. Estelle says, even putting aside Wilbur’s drunken fiasco, he’s still way too hung up on Iris. Mary Worth admits yeah, he is, but he might get past that. Also past the drunkenness. You like him anyway, right? Mary Worth means, like, he’s unique. Estelle grants he is. She just doesn’t know that he’s lasting-love kind of unique. Yet she has already invested in this relationship, like, a half-dozen dates over the course of seven months now. Why give that up?

Karen Moy and June Brigman’s Mary Worth for the 17th of December, 2019. So you know I’m not taking any hack jokes here about fruitcake being bad. I want hack jokes about Wilbur being one of Santa Royale’s leading mayonnaise bloggers.

That’s brought things to this weekend, and to what’s got me annoyed this time. Estelle is having correct and reasonable doubts about Wilbur. She’s the one getting Mary Worthed, though, into not paying attention to some big warning signs. Maybe she is judging Wilbur too harshly for a particularly bad day of his. We have all had a day that would give a stranger the exactly wrong idea of who we are. But I’d like her to get reason to think the dinner date was an exceptional event.

And then here’s where the strip is going wrong. First that Mary Worth is giving advice that muddles someone’s clear thoughts about a problem. It’s that Mary Worth is overlooking Iris, who’s screwing up her own relationship. Zak’s this almost implausibly supportive, eager, understanding man. She’s running away because she doesn’t want him to find out she’s older than he is. The strip is showing some major weakness in Mary Worth’s meddling focus here. I can only hope it gets straightened out soon. We should know by March 2020, when I expect to check in here again.

Dubiously Sourced Mary Worth Sunday Panel Quotes!

I’ll fix the name of this section yet. Here’s things from Brainyquotes that it’s possible that the credited person said at some point in their lives. And yes, the auto care place is still on the same message of “You Can Make A Difference If You Try”, which they’ve been on since April. I’m starting to worry.

• “Distance means so little, when someone means so much.” — Tom McNeal, 29 September 2019
• “It’s a good place when all you have is hope and not expectations.” — Danny Boyle, 6 October 2019
• “Exploring the unknown requires tolerating uncertainty” — Brian Greene, 13 October 2019
• “Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.” — John Lennon, 20 October 2019
• “I think about you, but I don’t say it anymore.” — Marguerite Duras, 27 October 2019
• “If you always have a crutch, you don’t learn anything.” — Ben Savage, 3 November 2019
• None! I know, I was shocked too. 10 November 2019
• “Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves.” — Sammy Davis Jr, 17 November 2019
• “Life is a question and how we live it is our answer.” — Gary Keller, 24 November 2019
• “My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn’t pay the bill he gave me six months more.” — Walter Matthau, 1 December 2019
• “Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.” — Paul Tournier, 8 December 2019
• “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, 15 December 2019
• “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” — Alexander Pope, 22 December 2019

Next Week!

Did the Ghost Who Walks ever get around to freeing Avaria? Next week, barring surprises, we’ll check in on Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sunday continuity) and find out. Thanks for reading.

Statistics Saturday: Best Versions of A Christmas Carol

• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)
• A Christmas Carol
• A Christmas Carol
• Scrooge (A Christmas Carol)

Reference: The March of Folly, Barbara W Tuchman.