Stephen Colbert has broken his left wrist! Don’t know how, but it seems to be for real. See for yourself.
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Year: 2007
Pratt Porch Project – Day 2
Not a whole lot is different today, because our contractor could work only in the morning. He ripped out all of the wall board that was projecting into the porch. He called it a “70’s-style flare-out.” The building code requires that the exhaust vent from the over-stove microwave oven, to the left of the sliding glass door, be re-routed to the roof.
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That’s fiberglass on the porch roof, by the way. We’ll be getting a proper roof, with a skylight on each side. See that other dated decoration, inside of the house? The geometric room divider? We’ll get rid of that in a future remodeling project.
Fight the URGE
FiOS TV has added URGE Radio, on the stations that follow Music Choice. As I mentioned in a post in early June — unfortunately lost in the Great Database Debacle — the sound quality of the Music Choice stations is uniformly excellent. The same cannot be said of URGE Radio. Played over a digital coaxial cable going from the Motorola DVR into my Kenwood THX receiver, what I’ve heard so far sounds, at best, like a 128 Kbps MP3 at 22050 Hz. The player has four minutes of URGE Radio. Don’t judge the sound quality by this, as it’s encoded here at only 64 Kbps/22050 Hz.
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As you can see, there’s a progress bar, but it doesn’t appear on all of the screens within a track, which sort of limits its usefulness. I’m not complaining about the service being added. I continue to be impressed with everything that FiOS TV offers for the money, but URGE Radio’s audio quality relegates it to the TV speakers.
A Porch There Was – Day 1
This year the pollen was rather late in arriving, but when it did it came with a vengeance! For most of my life I’ve been allergy-free, but no longer. The pollen not only made us miserable, it kept leaving a dusting of yellow on the back porch.
So we decided to remodel the porch into a 3-season room, with casement windows, electric baseboard heat, and a through-the-wall air conditioner. Today was Day 1, and what a difference a day makes! Every day that something gets done, and there will be gaps, I’ll try to post some pictures.
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Mort Walker’s The Best of Times
Here’s something I didn’t know. For the past year cartoonist Mort Walker (or, more likely, his son) has been publishing a magazine of cartoons, ads, and household hints, called The Best of Times. The formatting of the page at that link is a bit messed up, but clicking on the pictures works to bring up PDF copies of the issues.
When Walker isn’t in Florida he lives in Wilton, Connecticut, next to Norwalk, where I grew up. In fact, I used to ride my bike through Wilton, on my way to buy comic books. My two regular stops were in the same shopping center — a stationary store, and a drug store. Click the picture to see a map of my bike route. I made that trip many, many times between the spring of 1966 and the fall of 1968, weather permitting. Two miles exactly. I don’t believe Hillcrest was there 40 years ago. If it had been I probably wouldn’t have taken it anyway, as I preferred to avoid Route 7, which was a very busy and fast stretch of road. When I was older, living in Massachusetts, it was painful to realize that in Fairfield County I had been surrounded by many of the cartoonists and illustrators who I idolized.
Superman in “A Game of Moonball”
In a blog post that was lost in what I’ll call The Great Database Disaster, I made a comment that I’m not ready to buy an HDTV set. I haven’t even decided yet if I want a direct-view set or a front projection unit. Note: I said FRONT and not rear projection. For example, this little gem looks interesting, but oh that sticker shock! A more reasonable choice would be this model.
For now, it’s an academic question, because it’ll be a year or two before I do anything, and the gear will be completely changed by then anyway. But why would I be considering a projector, rather than, say, a plasma or direct-view LCD? Because when I was a kid I had one of these…
…which was my #1 favorite childhood toy. This is the Kenner Super Show. The picture came from an eBay auction I just won. To a great extent, this blog is nothing more than me playing with an updated Super Show. In acknowledgment of this, I will present my favorite slide that I enjoyed projecting on the wall. It’s Superman and Lois Lane, in “A Game of Moonball.”
I have two comments about this 7-panel comic strip that I used to think to myself, whenever looking at it over 40 years ago, shining on the wall.
- The red and yellow are reversed on Superman’s “S” emblem
- Superman seems to almost be acting as if Lois knows his secret identity.
What I didn’t wonder back then, but I am now, is who did the art? It’s fairly apparent that Curt Swan did the pencils, but I’m not sure of who inked them. At the moment I’m inclined to say Stan Kaye.