2010: The Year We Make Contact (in the epilogue, with the two suns setting over Washington, D.C.)
Parks and Recreation: The Motion Picture
Thunderbird 6
One Million B.C. (1940)
Back To The Future 2 1/2 (the direct-to-DVD ‘sidequel’ doing the Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern bit for the guys in 1955 Biff’s gang, not the fan-made one about the future of Alternate 1985)
Space: 1999: The Next Generation (1982)
The Fly II
Avengers: Infinity War
Transformers: The Movie (1985)
Spaceballs (the story’s framing device scenes, cut after the first theatrical run)
One Million B.C. (1966)
Reference: Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, Lutz D Schmadel.
Oh yeah, also we have The Leprechauns’ Christmas Gold even though I’m like 85% sure we’ve already watched it this year and thought we’d deleted it? I don’t know. We live in complicated times. Sammy Davis Jr is appealing even though he’s like seven years old and playing the black kid who eats a record so almost all the time he’s on-screen it feels uncomfortable. Anyway, the important thing is if you haven’t seen Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle you’ve been wrong, but you still have time to fix that. Also other Jacques Tati movies.
Not included: Arthur Christmas, because we have it on DVD but our DVD player just broke. Also not included: Robert Rossellini’s 1971 Blaise Pascal because that’s really not a Christmasy movie, right?
Reference: Wind Tunnels of NASA, Donald D Baals, William R Corliss.
Refusing to read any more essays that want you to have an opinion on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”.
December 18
Trying to insist the problem is they just don’t write good Christmas songs anymore and it’s not that you imprinted on the songs of your childhood and aren’t taking in new ones.
December 19
Minor-key acoustic cover of “Wonderful Christmastime” makes you exit for the kitchen, open the freezer door, stick your head in, and scream into a bag of frozen peas-and-corn.
December 20
Wishing you still had the emotional baseline that allowed you to be genuinely upset about “Santa Baby”.
December 21
Karaoke night has a group that starts out singing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” but ends up making a fair fraction of the bar actually weepy.
December 22
Entire afternoon spent reading the lyrics to Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Jingle-o The Brownie” and pondering dumb mysteries like why Jingle-o has such a broad and, honestly, unfocused portfolio
December 23
Attempt to fuse an argument about “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to the question of whether pigs-in-blankets count as sandwiches somehow backfires and gets you stuck among people trying so hard to insist that Back To The Future II is somehow a “Christmas Movie” that you can’t tell exactly where the put-on is. You scream into a bag of frozen peas-and-corn-and-carrots, the extra carrots doing much to absorb the sonic blast.
December 25
Watch about 65 minutes of the movie Auntie Mame before working out that oh, the version with songs in it is just called Mame and it stars different people, it’s not just that they did some weird and very wrong edit that missed out on songs like “We Need A Little Christmas”.
December 27
Entire day lost to trying to convince people you heard a song titled “Captain Santa Claus And His Reindeer Space Patrol”. You are imagining things.
January 3
Hey, they snubbed “Father Christmas” again, didn’t they? Ray Davies is not going to be happy.
[ That cryptic alien squiggle thing from that one Doctor Who episode a couple years ago. ]
ATT_sucks
FBI Surveillance Van #69
home-1138
. – – .. ..-. ..
thegoodplace
Aphid Kruschev
Bill Wi The Science Fi
internet-of-thingamajigs
bobby tables privat wifi
outernet
Verison_suuucksssssS5SS5fiveSss
xfinity
Hipster-coffee-shop-Wifi
Hipster-coffee-shop-Wifi-5G
Buy_you_own_Wifi
Comcast_really_sucks
xfinity-wifi
memory-gamma
HOME-518
Paul Blart, Mall Jeb!
xfinity-wifi-sucks
Why-Fhy
landline
[ something incomprehensible that just feels like it’s probably a Rick and Morty reference but you can’t imagine ever being the sort of person who could possibly work up the energy to figure out whether it is ]
NSA Surveillance Van 420
computers-were-a-mistake-5G
THE CLOUD
Reference: Skyscraper: The Search for an American Style, 1891-1941, Roger Shepherd.
They had Wayne and Garth impersonators at the thing?
The 90s, huh?
All right but how can Wayne’s World be part of a whole Kings’ Dominion? Are we to believe the dominion encompasses more than a single world? Given the difficulties in establishing a functioning imperial bureaucracy over even a single planet?
Is this a bit?
The heck?
OK, but the “Mid-No-Way” is worth a chuckle at least the first time you hear it.
Reference: Functional Analysis: A Short Course, Edward W Packel.
Comic Strip I’ve Wanted To Punch Harder Than I’ve Wanted To Punch Anything Else In My Life Today
Sunday
Funky Winkerbean
Monday
Luann
Tuesday
Funky Winkerbean
Wednesday
Luann
Thursday
Mary Worth
Friday
Mary Worth
Saturday
Mary Worth [1]
[1] With the footnote that if you did not know the context then Saturday’s Mary Worth would be hilarious. Any comic strip where someone barks out “Bah!” is 90% of the way to hilarious. But trust me. In context? You’re going to want to punch this comic strip harder than you’ve wanted to punch anything in your life. Promise.
Reference: The Sputniks Crisis and Early United States Space Policy: A Critique of the Historiography of Space (Studies in Military and Strategic History), Rip Bulkeley.
This is a special Statistics post, commemorating the event of Another Blog, Meanwhile finally reaching its 100,000th page view, sometime during the 6th of October, 2018!
I had hoped people would enjoy getting to look back at how the number of page views has grown, over time, until it’s finally reached a number literally higher than it has ever reached before.
My thanks as ever to all the readers who looked at one or more of my pages, concluded that this was a strange lot of talk about mid-19th-century cabinet secretaries, and then went on to some other, popular blog.
Now, the view-per-view ratio has stayed a pretty constant 1.00 throughout this blog’s history.
Reference: Lilo and Stitch: Collected Stories from the Film’s Creators, Editor H Clark Wakabayashi.
Time again for my monthly review of how many people come around this blog, and what they seem to be coming for. I’m not sure what I expected. A decline, I suppose. I always feel like I’m fighting a battle against popularity. But now that Jim Scancarelli is back and producing new Gasoline Alley comics, there’s no reason for people to come around trying to understand what’s going on with the comic. People are curious about Alley Oop, but not as intently. People might come to miss Hazel and Henry, but … like … really? And Henry hasn’t quite stopped running yet. Anyway, here’s the big picture and it’s about as I expected:
I mean, it’s not all a steady little decline. The views-per-visitor was 1.84, up from 1.76 in August. But it was 1.90 in July, so, yeah, maybe let’s not talk about that either. Anyway it’s always in the range from 1.75 to about 2.00 page views for each visitor.
So I didn’t earn another two hundred or so page views last month. 2,644 views in September, down from 2,848 in August and 2,984 in July. Lost nearly two hundred unique visitors, too. 1,436 visitors in September, down from 1,619 in August and 1,569 in July. I had expected that going from cartoons — in the Betty Boop and Popeye two-reelers — to half-hour-long radio — the Stan Freberg Show — would hurt readership. A half-hour densely-written radio show seems harder to skim than a cartoon short. But there’s evidence I’m wrong about that, too.
For all that I’ve got fewer readers, they’re staying involved, at least per capita. 174 things were liked around here in September. That’s basically the same number as were liked every month going back to April. It’s March since there was last a like-total outside the 165-to-180 range. There were 50 comments total in September, up from August’s 39 and July’s 36. It’s nice to have any month where there’s more than one and a half comments per day, anyway.
OK. So which of the comic strip explanation posts were most popular in September?
I’m really happy people are finding that Phantom Weekdays update, since for once they’re finding the most current update. And stuff is happening pretty fast and big right now.
My schedule — subject to change to respect breaking news — for comics updates in October is:
My most popular non-comic-strip thing was the recap of The Stan Freberg Show‘s second episode. The first episode was rather popular too. I’m wondering if I’m filling one of those gaps in Internet Knowledge by providing an episode guide for these. My most popular long-form piece was Yes, I Am Aware Of The Historical Irony. This makes sense. What’s more universally communicable than me geeking out over some tiny bit of local history?
In August there were 60 countries sending me any readers at all. 16 of them were single-reader countries. How does this compare to September?
Country
Readers
United States
2,039
Canada
80
India
74
Australia
71
United Kingdom
58
Italy
34
Germany
22
European Union
19
Romania
18
Hong Kong SAR China
14
Philippines
14
Singapore
14
Norway
13
Brazil
12
Austria
11
Malaysia
10
Spain
10
France
9
Japan
9
Sweden
9
Netherlands
8
Mexico
7
South Africa
7
Russia
6
South Korea
6
Czech Republic
5
Egypt
5
Croatia
4
Denmark
4
Indonesia
4
Uruguay
4
Switzerland
3
Taiwan
3
Belgium
2
Finland
2
Greece
2
Jamaica
2
Peru
2
Qatar
2
Saudi Arabia
2
Sri Lanka
2
Thailand
2
Trinidad & Tobago
2
United Arab Emirates
2
Bangladesh
1
Belize
1
Bulgaria
1
Chile
1
Colombia
1 (*)
Fiji
1
Honduras
1
Iceland
1
Iraq
1
Israel
1
Kenya
1
Kuwait
1
Macedonia
1
New Zealand
1 (*)
Poland
1
Turkey
1 (*)
Once again 60 countries sent me readers. Yes, I double-checked that I didn’t look at the wrong month’s data. 16 of them were single-reader countries. Yes, I checked again that I was looking at the correct month. Colombia, New Zealand, and Turkey were the only single-reader countries two months in a row. See? I have to be looking at the correct month. And yeah, 2,039 readers from the United States. Yes, I checked that I didn’t hit the Chuckletrousers number. Still weird. Looking at month-to-month totals it seems like half my readership decline was just people in India and Canada not coming around. Maybe I need to comment more about Australian politics to get them back?
October started with my blog having reached 99,519 viewers, from 54,713 unique visitors. Yes, I’m excited by the idea of reaching 100,000 viewers too. When I do reach that I can start the countdown to the Fibonacci number of viewers, 112358. Won’t that be exciting? It will too.
As of the start of October I’ve posted 273 things on this blog for 2018. There’ve been 177,181 words published total. That’s 18,197 total words published over the month, down from August’s 20,725. I’m averaging 641 words per post this year, down from 654 at the start of the month. There’ve been 641 comments total, for an average 2.3 comments per post this year. That’s the same average as at the start of September. There’ve been 1,671 total likes this year so far. That’s an average of 6.1 likes per posting, down from the start of September’s 6.2.
You can follow Another Blog, Meanwhile by RSS, using whatever reading tool you like. If you’d rather put it in your WordPress Reader, use the button that says something about adding the blog to your reader. It should be at the upper right corner of the page. You can find me as @nebusj on Twitter. All my postings should be announced there as they happen. Thanks for reading.
(Goes outside, breathes the fresh air some. Comes back in and looks again to see what it looks like.)
Huh
(Rubs his head, walks over to see if there’s some engagingly crazypants movie on Turner Classic Movies. And then comes right back to see this all again.)
Really would have expected these lines to have crossed again years ago, you know? Anyway. Huh, I say, and I stand by that.
From the Google Books N-Gram Viewer and not something I just made up. Also, really, didn’t the last person you ever heard say ‘yuppie’ say it in 1992 at the latest? Even granting it takes time to write books and longer to publish them and all that’s all pretty weird.
Reference: Safer C: Developing Software for High-Integrity and Safety-Critical Systems. Les Hatton.
Really looking forward to next week, gotta tell you.
And so you understand where I’m coming from, I read the comic strip back in the mid-90s during Les Moore’s Summertime Lisa Near-Missapalooza European Tour, where every day for about 12 years straight we saw in panel one, Dead Lisa Who Would Die Of Death departing some great European tourist attraction, in panel two nobody we know, and then in panel three, Les running into the scene crying out for Dead Lisa Who Would Die Of Death.
(This past week, Mopey Pete and Boy Lisa were told by their boss at the comics company that they needed a new flagship character. Mopey Pete’s girlfriend who inexplicably hasn’t shoved him over a cliff yet suggested “Atomic Ape” and the boss loved it. Then since the boss figured Atomic Ape needed a sidekick, she suggested “Charger Chimp” and the boss loved it too. Then Mopey Pete spent half the week yelling at his alleged girlfriend about how they were trying to do SERIOUS stuff here and he always hated kid sidekick characters and I guess somehow a chimpanzee has to be an annoying kid sidekick? Anyway, his alleged girlfriend was gone from the strip Saturday and if she has any sense, she’s put in for a transfer to some three-generations-and-a-dog strip like Ben or One Big Happy where they avoid focusing on the hateful characters quite so much.)
Reference: The Frozen-Water Trade, Gavin Weightman.
Not counted: two instances of pies shown on display in the window fronts of bakeries. My reasons for this are that pies are appropriate items to have on display in the window fronts of bakeries, even in real life; that said windows are not shown open and so the pies cannot be considered even loosely to be on a sill; and that there is no way to know the temperature of said pies on display and therefore whether to ascertain whether they are cooling relative to the general decline of the universe.
I know, I’m shocked too. And you know what else is shocking?
Oh yeah, also? A big gee, thanks to the Apple imagineers behind the spreadsheet Numbers who made it impossible to make this as the bar chart I wanted, with bars that started out in the indefinite foggy mists below and rose to zero and stopped there. I’m not as annoyed with you as I am with the Google Maps imagineers so your pit of wolverines is actually just a closet I’m going to lock you in with them, and they’ve been convincingly told you routinely insist Firefly is crazy overrated.
(T-shirt bought in a tragic incident where it was the last full day of the only honest-to-goodness vacation they’re getting all year and the bar had a kind of funny-ish name and it seemed like it made sense to get something as some kind of souvenir and they only had the one shirt left and who even knows what size it is because now, with perceptions un-tainted by the desperate need to have a year’s worth of fun in under 144 hours, they could never, ever wear it, and feel too embarrassed to throw it out or to donate to some needy person, who would also refuse to wear it, so there it sits, taking up the only space in the drawer next to the three pieces of good underwear.)
…
…
L
Reference: A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara W Tuchman.
Not a thing. Nothing at all. Yeah, sorry folks, this one caught me by surprise. Shall pass on word if I get any, but I guess we’ll see what gets printed Monday and whether Olivia Jaimes takes over the strip or something. When I have more I’ll post it at this link.
It’s bizarre that they would have introduced M T Mentis as this major new character if they were only going to use him for two stories. Also that if they expected a farewell that they’d go out on a story quite as mundane as Wizer and Alley Oop getting confounded by Alexa and having pizza. (I’ll get around to that shortly.) But I hadn’t even heard rumors of the strip ending, or of the Benders considering retirement, before this.
Called tails, coin bounced out of control and rolled under Dig-Dug
Called heads, came up heads
Called tails, coin flopped onto shoe and got lost in the laces
Came up heads before anyone could finish calling
Called heads, came up tails, swore they called heads instead
Called tails, cool friend snatched coin out of the air
Got into argument about who gets to call and who gets to toss, get into heated round of rock-paper-scissors to decide tossing and calling order.
Called tails, came up heads, agreed to extend this to three-out-of-five
Called heads, two-tailed fox emerges from video game to ask what your problem with him is
Called heads, came up tails, swore they called heads instead; a brawl ensues
Called heads, landed sideways when it got caught in a crack in the floorboards, had temporarily the power to be Dick York and also read minds
Called heads, power blipped out mid-toss and couldn’t see the coin
Called tails, came up heads, agreed to extend this to four-out-of-seven
Called tails, noticed was two-headed coin, causing accusations of cheating; a brawl ensues
Called heads, tossed coin, never came down because you forgot you were on top-secret spaceship flying to Mars
Called tails, tossed coin, never came down because you forgot you were on top-secret spaceship flying to Mars
Called heads, came up it was the Mount Rushmore national-parks quarter so arguably both sides are heads and it isn’t even a cheating coin; a brawl ensues
Called heads, came up tails
Reference: Computers In Spaceflight: the NASA Experience, James E Tomayko.
Source: This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury, Loyd S Swenson Jr, James M Grimwood, Charles C Alexander.
Bonus: six of these are also titles of upcoming Doctor Who episodes.
Also bonus: I am way too proud of “The Bois are Barque En Têt” considering it only works to the tiny extent it does if you know that the Têt is the largest river in southwestern France and even then it isn’t actually “funny” so much as it is “adequately researched”.
Source: Who’s Who In Mythology: A Classic Guide to the Ancient World, Alexander S Murray.
Well, the thing is, sometimes you know you have a good solid premise on the board, and you put it through the full development process and you see that it isn’t there yet, and you go back and you give it another two weeks of work, and you know the idea hasn’t blossomed to what it should. So you can either go with what you have, or write off the whole project as a loss, or toss it back into the scraps for use in a future piece. But what else could this be used for? A joke about not being able to remember the names of states? When is that going to come up? I mean, two-thirds of my jokes are based on remembering some impossibly petty bit of nonsense, like who was the Secretary of the Treasury in 1853 or something. Not being able to think of Arkansas? Impossible. Switch over to indifferently named states? You have to throw away all of these, really. Maybe not Kansish. But all you get back from it is “Mehvada”. Possibly “Alabamnah”. Not getting any closer done. Anyway I still believe in this premise.
Note: Mooseapopalis is not named as it is, of course, a fictional city in Nova Carolus and not a fake province or territory of Canada. We weren’t born yesterday.
Fun Fact: I did not call this “Faux Canada” because the wordplay never crossed my mind, and don’t think I’m not all burnt up about that. I may never forgive myself. Well, it’s too late now. Too bad.
Another Fun Fact: I am completely incapable of telling whether a fact is, in fact, fun.
Source: History of the Space Shuttle, Volume 1: The Space Shuttle Decision, 1965 – 1972, T A Heppenheimer.
