Month: March 2008

Chabon on Capes and Cowls

If clothes can make the man, what can a costume do for a superhero? Ye old buddy D.F. Rogers has sent the link to a New Yorker article by Michael Chabon about the why behind the masks. Chabon won a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and he was a screenwriter for Spiderman 2. The New Yorker also has a Podcast interview with Chabon, and for convenience I’ll post it here.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Nov/chabon.mp3|titles=Michael Chabon interview]

And while we’re thinking about The New Yorker, Charles Schulz never got a cartoon into its pages, although he had reasonable success selling submissions to The Saturday Evening Post. However, Snoopy has made at least one appearance in the New Yorker.

Edward Frascino, The New Yorker, 11/2/1992
Edward Frascino, The New Yorker, 11/2/1992

And, In The End…

No, this isn’t the gullet of the asteroid creature in The Empire Strikes Back. It’s gross! It’s obscene! It’s my cecum!

The cecum or caecum (from the Latin caecus meaning blind) is a pouch connected to the ascending colon of the large intestine and the ileum.

Today, I had a colonoscopy of the initial screening variety. Nary a pocket nor a polyp in sight, I was relieved to learn. Here was how the doctor looked through my drugged gaze. Yikes!

Actually, the moment they hit me with the sedative I was out. It doesn’t take much to get me to fall asleep! (That reminds me. I still need to write my TM post.) I sort of remember some of the procedure, but not much. I didn’t wake up until I was back where I started, in the recovery area.

The real fun was yesterday, of course. As with painting and wallpapering, success depends on the prep.

What If… Saul Bass Did the Star Wars Opening Credits?

I spotted this on Heidi MacDonald’s The Beat. Apparently, it’s the work of an animation student, and I think it’s laugh-out-loud excellent.
[flv:/Video/2008/MAR/SaulBassStarWars.flv 440 300]Somehow, this makes me realize that the original opening credits to Lost In Space were influenced by Saul Bass.

Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s New Book

What has cartoonist Jimmy (Arlo & Janis) Johnson’s ex-wife, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, been up to? That’s the subject of her new book, Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana. Rheta is the author of the only authorized biography of Charles M. Schulz published in his lifetime.

Poor Man's Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana

For over a decade, syndicated columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson has been spending several months a year in southwest Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun country. Rheta fell in love with the place, bought a second home, and set in planting doomed azaleas and deep roots. She has found an assortment of beautiful people right on the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp.

These days, much is labeled Cajun that is not, and the popularity of the unique culture’s food, songs, and dance has been a mixed blessing. Poor Man’s Provence helps define what’s what through lively characters and stories. The book is both personal odyssey and good reporting, a travelogue and a memoir, funny and frank.

Spam, spam, spam

The past few weeks have been brutal for spam floods, both in e-mail and blog comments. The Akismet service for WordPress does a great job of filtering out spam comments, but when the volume is bad, some slips through, especially when there are multiples of the same message. Here’s one example:

Name: best motorcycle insurance | URI: http://www.fullsizeinsurance.com/
| IP: 86.96.226.14 | Date: March 4, 2008

This is why I have to moderate comments. It’s not because any of the legitimate comments need censoring, it’s because I’d have to delete spam that would have already found its way to the RSS feed for comments.