Rainy day, giving way to a pleasant evening. A tint of autumn in the sunset breeze, if you were inclined to look for it. I have an Ivan Drago attitude towards summer at this point. Oh, but the Fair’s coming up, right? Weeks away, but still - there’s Fair to come, with the best days of summer. Somehow there’s always one or two days that are as hot as anything July can offer, and everything’s green and humid and the summer seems eternal.
Eh. Not going this year.
Had coffee this morning with a colleague and an intern; was invited because she was a fan. Well, that’ll get me out of my chair. Just an intern? I’ve seen them come and go by the dozens and have the thousand-yard-stare of someone who’s been in-country for years, watching the raw recruits get off the plane, but a fan? Be right there. She was stunned to learn that the column is ending. ’Tis true. I did not outlast Garfield. Garfield won.
Not that I expected to outlast Garfield. Or Blondie.
I wonder what Garfield was doing 20 years ago.
(Pokes around newspapers.com)
He was being lazy and self-aggrandizing. Okay. Thirty years ago . . . he was tangled up in some yarn. I gather that was a story arc that spanned a decade or two. Every month, a lasagna joke. Followed by a yarn gag.
There’s nothing on the comics page that is funny, at all. They exist in that strange netherworld of UnHumor, guarded by a three-headed Fred Bassett. It has the performative trappings of humor, but no laughter is produced; no one has ever laughed; no one expects to laugh. A particular sensibility with three or four defining manifestations is produced and displayed, the reader absorbs them with a sense of indifferent familiarity, and that is that.
If any of them are cancelled people go mad.
When I was at the Pioneer Press we used to run Zippy the Pinhead. One of those things that set us apart from the staid paper across the river. We’re scrappy and quirky! Zippy was brought from the underground comics to dailies by the descendent of William Randolph Hearst, which must have appealed to Bill Griffith, who of course did the strip. When we started running Zippy he came to town, and we had lunch once I gave him a box of Little Debbie Cakes, which seemed like something Zippy would eat, waxing long and loud about delicious polysorbate 80. Bill liked them - well, the idea of them - and I think they appeared in a strip somewhere.
newspapers.com has no reference but there is a page in which there’s an ad for LDC, and the crossword has a Zippy question.
Maybe that’s as close as the two concepts ever got. And we would have never known if I hadn’t entered a particular search term. It makes you wonder how many other connections await to be revealed, doesn’t it?
Meaningless connections, I grant.
Now, the end of the month round-up of Web Detritus, or, just . . . I don't know, stuff. Yes, it's the start of the month, but in the organizational scheme of this site it's a 55.html day, and that means it's the end.
It did not.
Happyinshape.com? I don't know. There is a happyinshape.com, part of "WeBlog Media," in the Netherlands. (Located here.) All of the stories are dated Nov. 23, 2023.
No, she doesn't. She is nowhere on the page and searching for "Minnesota" returns nothing.
I had particular trouble with this.
I guess AI thinks the ship sunk in the daytime, and the survivors were what Europeans today call "Migrants."
As a student of chum and webshite, I was curious to see how they lied about this one. Alas, it's bait:
The top pane bounces up and down to indicate the severity of your problem. Gosh I'd better call, this looks serious
Every single ad for the Titanic photos - and there are several - does this. I'm stunned to think that a site called "DIGIMEDIAVIE" is not a long-standing upright collection of interesting, unique pieces written and presented by people who enjoy making the internet a better place.
Scottish Souvenir Wood ware is known as Mauchline Ware because the vast majority of these small wooden items bearing pictures designed to appeal to 19th Century tourists were made in the Ayrshire town of Mauchline. The industry flourished in Scotland for 160 years and during that period hundreds of thousands of high quality wood ware souvenirs were despatched to all parts of the British Isles, Europe, North and South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
Where was the town? How's it doing now? Four thousand people, not a lot of charm.
I was interviewing a man about Tintin, although I was unsure whether he was interviewing me or how this had begun. I snowily know that when I started talking about Tintin he brightened and sat me down and was particularly interested in my take o the strips’s post-war mid-century aesthetic. There was also someone coming around to participate in an illegal lottery, a criminal organization known as “The Green Hand.”
And now, a related feature that will provide some Friday amusements:
This week I wanted all-American ice cream socials. The AI tended to over-populate the celebrations.
I'm going to miss the days when the AI couldn't do words very well.
Oh come on now, get the little girl a proper chair.
Towards the end of the run, it reverted to its default: hasty deformity.
Again, they look like people from the Twilight Zone episode where the beautiful woman is ugly.
Last year I cut out the tunes, but heck, why not bring them back. We'll be counting down the bottom 50 songs as listed by Whitburn. It'll be fun! Stuff you've never heard. A grab-bag of styles.
Lenny O'Henry.
His manager and producer had died just a few weeks before. This seems to have been his most influential, or at least popular, song. He died ten years ago.
There. Week's done. See you Monday with a new Diner and more of the low-level, affectless depression.
