Thunder in the evening, dog under the desk. One or two big peals, a Brobdignagian apparition knocking on the door, then stomping away, muttering oaths. There are never enough thunderstorms in a summer. Every time you get one, you think it’s been a while, and you suspect it will be a while until the next.

Could’ve been more productive, this weekend. Could’ve done more. But I did the basics, and enjoyed them. Caught up on obligation TV. Sampled some scotches, shall we say. Scanned things that needed to be scanned, as you’ll see below. Sorted and ordered, spent time with family, made a great hamburger which, for some reason, sat in my stomach like an anvil for four hours.

Speaking of dinner: Sunday is usually take-out night, and I went to Lunzenbyerly’s for Big Bowl, an Asian take-out place in the store. Daughter loves it. I love it. Wife loves it. Shopped a bit to see if they had any BOGO(f)s of note; they did. 2-for-1 on Coke Zero. You have to check the original price; if it says BOGO ALL COKE PRODUCTS, and the fine print says “You save $143.95,” then it’s really not a deal. In this case it worked out to $4.00 per 12-pack, which is in the acceptable range. Checked out, wandered over to Big Bowl . . .

CLOSED ON SUNDAYS

Huh? Why? Since when? Not enough demands or not enough workers? Suddenly dinner was up in the air, and I wandered around the grocery store for five minutes, unable to find a suitable replacement. We had all calibrated our palates ahead of time for this, and take-out Chinese Glop would not do. Ah: Thai. It’s the thunderstorm of take-out: it’s been too long.

Wife was at Tennis, so Daughter and I enjoyed our meal, and chatted about things great and small. All quite normal and wonderful, but give it a fortnight, and poof: back to school, and the house will settle a bit, and sadden a bit, and grow still. But not yet.

Speaking of scanning: Meet Wendell Ehret.

Shibe Park / Connie Mack Stadium, a baseball park.

These cartoons ran in the CBI Roundup, a military paper. (I secured two dozen copies last week.)

It says something that there’s no biographical information about him. Anywhere. I found a snippet on a search result that does not go to his grave, but the cached version says:

Reah Wendell Ehret grave thumbnail. Reah Wendell Ehret. Born: 8 Jul 1907. Died: 31 Mar 1991

Did a newspaper search:

Hmm. Silly Symphonies, of course, were Disney cartoons. But Columbia distributed them for two years. Find a list of Disney animators, and you won’t find Ehret.

The bio in the newspaper came from an excerpt from his book, Dear Gertrood.

If you google Ehret, most of the results refer to his book, Dear Gertrood. That led me to this page on Mike Lynch's site, which said he was “stationed in the war’s animation department overseas.” Not sure about that. Anyway: Mike Lynch heard from the daughter of Gertrood - in other words, the girlfriend, Gertrude, to whom Ehret addressed all his cartoons.

After the war, he wanted to marry him, but as the daughter said, “she was not in love with him.” He would have been 38, much older.

The entire premise of the book was wishful thinking.

You wonder if that made him give up the art completely.

The nurse realizes how the pretense of this contest, the mere assertion of difficulty, has played itself out completely.

At the moment, I'm not sure who the cartoonist is. Or was.

Serial time!

You know, of all the serials we’ve done, I think this one has the least amount of plot - and that’s saying something. It’s basically Dick vs Pa Stark in a series of capers that never turn out well for the Stark clan. No 2-way wrist radios, no deformed villains. There’s a spy we have to worry about, but let’s take a look at how the story’s developed by episode 8:

That’s not the most thrilling set-up.

Oh hi Steve. Who are you again?

Wonder how this Stark got his name:

Rather goes without saying in the crime biz, no?

Our hero:

Why he tried to disarm him instead of putting a bullet through his head, I don’t know; there’s a lot of loose lead-slinging in the other scenes.

Cliffhanger was a hell of a scene:

WHEW

We’re down one Stark.

Well, the ever-diminishing Stark Clan needs a new large scheme that will attract the attention of the G-men, so let’s get to cuttin’ up the papers:

The message contains microscopic pieces of cellulose, and Tracy concludes the author of the note was chewing on matches. Wooden ones.

Tracy goes to the trucking company to see if he can help, and catches someone eavesdropping. He chases him and shoots him in the back. Hey, he shot first. In his pocket was a map of a nearby dam, and Tracy concludes that if the dam was destroyed, the trucking company would lose its government contracts because the road would be washed out.

It’s something of a stretch, but we have to get to the dam-bursting sequence as quickly as possible, I guess.

Well, Tracy goes off with the trucks, and the annoying delivery-boy sidekick trapped inside for some reason. One of the trucks is stopped; Tracy pulls alongside.

Suspcious, right? I mean, the guy just gives himself away.

Tracy's got his man. He doubles back and catches the men getting dynamite into the truck. He has them all dead to rights the plot's foiled. The nation is safe. Everything's great.

Yes, it’s your fault, you idiot. after a brief hats-on fistfight, one of the crooks takes the kid hostage and drives off.

But!

Kid, didn’t we learn anything about ruining Dick’s moves? The driver is kicked in the head and thrown out, but alas, the last time the truck was serviced, they took it to the Serial Garage over in the town of Plotpointe:

That’s . . . pretty good. One-upping the falling chimney. No story here, but nice effects, and a lack of drawn-out fistfights. It’s neat!

If you’re 12. But aren’t we all, somewhere deep inside?

That will suffice! Now, as ever, the Matchbooks. I am pleased to announce that the Promotion subsite has now topped 300 entries, the second matchbook site to attain that honor. Restaurants is the other. The only two subsites at lileks.com with more than 300 pages, and by that I mean a site that has does not break down into another category, because such a thing is not possible.