Author: DOuG pRATt

Victory — With Casualities

I’m finished repairing the blog for now. I’ve lost six weeks worth of posts. Sorry! But at least that’s better than the three months I thought I’d lost. In fact, for a while, ALL was lost! Long story. I’m beat! Need a break. I think everything is OK, as far as it goes, but let me know what problems you see.

P.S. I need cheering up! I’m looking through the audio and video clip listings, which are in directories that are separate from WordPress, and I’m seriously depressed. So many posts gone! But at least the sounds and pictures remain. I’m going to re-post SOME of this stuff, but certainly not all of it.

P.P.S. I never want to go through that again! And if I do a better job of making backups I won’t, especially now that I’m better versed in how to use phpMyAdmin, the thing that administers the mySQL database.

Back (And Forth) In A Flash

One nice thing about the way embedded Flash video can be done in WordPress is that I can update and, if necessary, downdate the player in a matter of seconds. An update to Jeroen Wijering’s player, version 3.7, was released today. [Link] Unfortunately, it breaks the “overstretch” feature, which is how 4:3 videos that need to be wide are posted in 16:9 format. So it’s back to version 3.6 for now.

Virginia Tech Massacre

This letter is in today’s Boston Globe:

THE SHOOTING at Virginia Tech is another example of why gun-free zones are dangerous. This would have ended much sooner and with fewer people dead or injured if at least one of those students or faculty members had been armed and able to shoot back.

In February in a mall in Utah, another young man started shooting at customers. An armed, off-duty police officer engaged the shooter until other police arrived, and the police were able to kill the shooter.

If that armed citizen had not been there, the shooter could have killed many more innocent people.

When law-abiding citizens have guns, law-abiding citizens are safer and criminals are not.

ANNA DeMARINIS

Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has made this point in the past, that more guns equal more safety. Obviously, this is false. The statistical “proof” for this assertion doesn’t hold up. [Link] Would more guns make Baghdad safer? If the off-duty police officer in Utah saw another civilian drawing a weapon when he engaged the mall shooter, the safe assumption would have been that he was also dangerous.

I haven’t read everything there is to know about who knew what, and when, about the shooter at Virginia Tech, but it seems clear that concerns had been raised with the proper authorities. There was enough to go on for somebody to check if he owned guns, and to put him on a list of names to be reported when an application was made to buy a gun. I don’t know the Federal and Virginia regulations concerning gun ownership, but they were inadequate.

If only Abraham Lincoln had been packing heat. He could have returned fire!

Him Johnny, Her Maureen

This 1934 New Yorker cartoon appeared shortly before the release of the movie Tarzan And His Mate, the second in the series with Johnny Weissmuller and Mia Farrow’s mother, Maureen O’Sullivan.

William Crawford Galbraith, The New Yorker, 3/3/1934
The New Yorker, 1934

Tarzan And His Mate caused quite a stir, and it contributed to the Hays Office enforcing the Production Code that it had written in 1930. What, exactly, was objectionable? For starters, although Jane taught Tarzan to call her his wife, they weren’t actually married. The video player has eight minutes of the movie that I’ve spliced together.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/APR07/TarzanMate.flv 400 300]

Josephine McKimThe nude swim had been censored from prints of this movie for nearly 60 years. Weissmuller was an undefeated Olympic gold medal swimmer, so he did his own swimming for this scene. The woman with him underwater was another Olympic swimmer, Josephine McKim.

Yet another Olympic swimmer, Buster Crabbe, played Tarzan in a 1933 serial, between Weissmuller’s first and second Tarzan movies. I don’t know why swimmers, rather than gymnasts, were favored to play the Ape Man.

Jonny Questioning

Previously on Dog Rat, I featured a Marvel Super Heroes cartoon with Captain America. The low-budget cartoons in this series went into production thanks in large part to the relatively successful and ambitious Jonny Quest, a half-hour primetime cartoon from two years earlier.

Jonny Quest was developed by cartoonist-animator-comic book artist Doug Wildey, who had worked for Alex Toth on an earlier cartoon called Space Angel, which shouldn’t be confused with Toth’s Space Ghost. We’ll be seeing some of both those spacey guys later.

The premiere episode of Jonny Quest, “Mystery of the Lizard Men”, originally aired on ABC-TV at 7:30 pm, Friday, September 18, 1964. I had just turned nine, and I thought this was one very cool cartoon — except for Bandit!
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/APR07/JonnyQuest.flv 400 300]© H-B