This just in:
Month: August 2007
Best. Beauty Show Moment. Ever.
During last Friday’s Miss Teen USA pageant, Miss South Carolina gamely tackles a tough question…
Mr. Vick, Meet Miss Boop
Don’t you think Betty and Grampy pretty much figured out the proper response to all instances of cruelty to animals?
Blondie Gets a Lift
Say, it’s time for a Sideways Comic Strip(tm). Return with us now to less than four months after Blondie‘s debut, when the Bumsteads were not yet the Bumsteads (well, Dagwood was one, but Blondie wasn’t), Dagwood had a blue-collar job working for his father, and the whole thing was better drawn, funnier, and generally more lively and charming than it would later become. And as far as I know, it was actually drawn by Chic Young.
Please turn your head 90 degrees to the right and enjoy…
Chat is Back
I can’t quite believe this, but the little weekly chat I host has been going on for more than sixteen years now. It started on the late and lamented BIX online service during the first Bush administration (see above proof), and segued onto this site in–well, I can’t remember, but some time in the late 1990s, I think. It’s been on different days at different times, but settled into a Sunday night ritual some years ago, which came in handy when I moved to San Francisco from Boston and found myself doing it three hours earlier.
It’s one of the constants in my life, and while I can’t say I’ve never missed a week, I have done one almost every single week when I’ve been home. (As I recall, there was a brief period when I only did two a month.) But I’ve been traveling the past three Sundays–to San Diego, then Saratoga Springs, and then Las Vegas. And I think it’s possible that the three-week gap has been the longest in the history of the chat.
I’ll be home this Sunday, and am looking forward to picking up where we left off a month ago in the Chat-O-Torium. See you there, I hope…
There He is to Save the Day
I’m visiting my nephew Gus (and his parents, Elizabeth and Edward) in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yesterday, we visited nearby Lake George, where Mighty Mouse has found work sitting astride an elephant in a parking lot, beckoning motorists to visit a local amusement park.
For a brief, peculiar time in the 1980s, a New Hampshire animal park called Benson’s changed its name to New England Playworld and adopted a Terry-Toons theme–you could meet Oil Can Harry, eat at a Lariat Sam snackbar, and dump your trash in a Sad Cat wastebin. It had a sculpture of Mighty and the elephant, and this one in Lake George is either that very one or an identical example…
