“Update” is Not a Calendar Joke but Sounds Like it Should Be

And in what is going to be my very last calendar update until the next one I would just like to say …

Triumph.

This is not where I actually keep my calendars when they’re in service because I also rely on their bulk to keep a couple of mathematics books that I never use standing up.

So what happened is after Amazon cancelled my order on the grounds they didn’t know how to get me the calendar they ordered, I followed the link they provided to the page on Amazon for ordering calendars. And that, through I think the company that sets up those kiosks in the malls from like October through the 26th of December selling calendars, got me this inside a week. Not clear why Amazon couldn’t think of that. But then my understanding is that in the earliest days of the English East India Company, each successive voyage to India was organized as its own venture, and because of the travel times there’d be overlapping periods when one year’s ship hadn’t yet left and the next year’s ship had arrived, and they’d be rivals for trade prospects, sometimes getting so heated that rival trading crews would open fire on one another despite theoretically all working for the same company. I assume Amazon is like this still, and the “ordering calendars” division and the “delivering calendars” division are particularly fierce rivals and routinely launching raids on one another, taking hostages, and holding them for ransom, and between that and the miasma, scurvy, and the Horse Latitudes there’s nobody left who can actually do anything calendar-related.

So anyway I’m glad to have this and to have everything back in order and not have to worry about …

If they just want the comic to be larger so it’s easier to read, why don’t they just stack the comic strip, which was always four identically-sized panels back then, in two rows of two comics each? And maybe print the stock art of the characters in the lower right corner smaller so there’s still space if someone wants to make a note?

You know, there’s no way the aspect ratio on that comic is right. I know the classic four-panel era of Peanuts and those panels look wrong. But if they cropped the panels then the word balloons wouldn’t fit. Unless they completely rejiggered the word balloons, cutting and pasting text around so that … what, they could make the panels a little bit taller but also completely wrong? But who would do that?

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts for the 27th of February, 1968, and the 27th of February was the last Tuesday of the month, so why are they printing that as the comic for the last Friday of the month in 2018? February 1968 had the same days of the week through to Leap Day; why are they changing this too? They haven’t had to avoid any Ash Wednesday or Leap Day jokes in Peanuts that year, and the only Easter joke is the one that actually ran on Easter 1968.

Hm.

This is the most baffling comics-related bit of reworking stuff since earlier this week in the Bud Sagendorf Popeye rerun.

In Which I Ask You To Check My Love’s And My Conclusions

If you’re like my wife and I you respond to a pretty snappy troll about the movie Blank Check by thinking of mid-90s monkey-based movie product Dunston Checks In. Naturally we looked it up on Wikipedia and found this under the “Reception” section:

The film had received overwhelming negative reviews from critics, and holds a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Despite this, the film received positive reviews from several professional film reviewers, Desson Howe and Rita Kempley of The Washington Post referred to the film by saying “It ain’t half bad,” and “Plucky, prank-filled family farce” respectively.^[1] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times stated that ‘Dunston Checks In’ “is a delightful and funny family film of exceptional high style.”, “as light as a souffle and just as delicious.”, and “plays like a tribute to the resourceful, unpretentious studio productions of the past.” giving the film five out of five stars.^[2] According to an article published in the Chicago Tribune, “The cast is talented, the hide-and-seek action is silly, and the bond between a sweet little boy and the adorable ape is touching.”^[3] Faye Dunaway’s performance in the film and in The Chamber earned her a Stinkers Bad Movie Award nomination and a Razzie Award nomination for Worst Supporting Actress. The film was also nominated at the 18th Youth in Film Awards (Young Artist Awards) for Best Family Feature Film: Musical or Comedy, and Eric Lloyd for Best Performance in a Feature Film – Actor Age Ten or Under. The film was successful at the box office in India, where it was dubbed as Ek Bandar Hotel Ke Andar.^[4]

Are we correct to read this, especially that copy-editing mess that is the Kevin Thomas statement, as the syntactically-scarred battleground of an edit war between factions who insist Dunston Checks In was critically acclaimed and ones who insist Dunston Checks In was not? Also, either Wikipedia doesn’t mention it or else Dunston Checks In has somehow not spawned a complicated cinematic universe of like twelve direct-to-DVD sequels you never heard of but get tangled up with the universes of Air Bud or Alpha and Omega or something like that. Is that a relief or somehow a weird shame? Didn’t The Land Before Time get so many sequels the last one was about the dinosaurs at the Battle of Manzikert or something? Please show your work.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The Another Blog, Meanwhile slid sideways four points today, but since we haven’t any way of measuring that it remains at the same old 116 as last time.

116

What I Couldn’t Write In March 2016

Pieces from March’s scraps file. All text free to a needy author that can use it. Better luck with it than I had.

seeming like it might be — cut from like ten essays this past month because it doesn’t mean anything. It just slows down moving from the start to the end of the sentence. I don’t ever have any reason to put that in somewhere. I just type a while and look up and there it is and I have to eradicate it. This is some kind of grammatical zebra mussel. I would just leave it in a trash bin, on fire, but if you really want it go wild. Sorry. The rest of the scraps are more promising. Don’t take this one.

So I admit to being torn about National Haiku Pedantry Month coming up this April. We need to get some discipline back into the art form. Right now it’s just what people use for comic verse when they aren’t up to writing a limerick. But then we have thirty whole days of having to pretend we approve of haiku pedants. Some of these people are fine, pointing out that there are actual syllable counts and it’s not just a short-long-short line thing. But then there’s the guy you know who’s going to leap up on a desk, shaking a yardstick around, and hollering, “It’s not just syllable count! You need nature imagery and a cutting word! Where is the cutting word in this? Well?” And you just know he goes home to sulk that all he can find are yardsticks around when it would just make his day to get a meter stick. A haiku pedant like that isn’t going to pass up a good fight with the Pun Control Squad. You know them. They admit there might be such a thing as a pretty good, amusing pun, but they haven’t seen one. And they’re going to take action. — Cut because, of course, National Haiku Pedantry Month is November.

very — cut from about forty posts this past month because I don’t even like having it there. It’s just too easy to make my minimum word count. Also I guess I have a minimum word count even though all my popular posts are two paragraphs long and comment on a picture from the store.

So we trust that we have commutivity and that there’s a multiplicative identity within the collection of elements. And that if the product of two things is zero then at least one is zero. I know that sounds crazy, like specifying that a triangle has to also not be a square. But this can happen, and let me show you how. — Cut from my essay about Dedekind Domains because I realized I wasn’t even halfway toward saying all the rules one of these things had to meet and oh good grief this is why people hate mathematics.

You in your spectacle of arrogance, incapable of imagining that someone other than you might ever need something that isn’t “the chance to gaze in adoration at your alleged magnificence” — Cut from a draft letter to an estranged friend I’ve been trying to reconcile with even though it’s seeming like it might be hard to figure out why, exactly.

I perused the closed-captioning transcript of this episode so that I can say with confidence — cut from a TrekBBS post about Star Trek: Voyager because we were debating a Kes episode and who’s got enough time in their lives for that? Not Kes, obviously. Ha ha! I’ll explain why that’s funny in a footnote [1].

This hoodie makes me feel pretty, oh soooo pretty. — Cut from the back of an index card we were using to keep track of scores at a pinball tournament yesterday. Not sure who wrote it. It’s seeming like it might be one of our friends who had some hard luck on the game Jack-Bot. But he has got a hoodie that’s become a merry in-joke ever since the state championships back in February.

Go off and be happy, insofar as you think that’s wise. — Cut from waving bye to a friend because it does sound kind of Ashleigh Brilliant-ish.

[1] It’s funny because I was trolling for the chance to show off that I know what “peruse” means. The chance never came, and never does.