Today’s the day that Amazon starts collecting the Massachusetts 6.25% sales tax.
Author: DOuG pRATt
Oh, Great Pumpkin, where are you??
I like that ABC TV is showing my all-time favorite cartoon special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, on Halloween night.
Evan gets even
Forty years ago I was in the first semester of my freshman year at Westfield State College. I was accepted at UMass in Amherst and at Boston University, but I had to put myself through school, and the only way I could afford to do that was by attending one of the 4-year state colleges in Massachusetts.
I worked hard to earn my B.A. in Economics, and I am very unhappy with the trouble that is going on at Westfield State now, because of Evan Dobelle.
What Boston Globe reporter Scott Allen doesn’t say in the video is that these events are history repeating itself, because Dobelle went through this before, ten years ago at the University of Hawaii. The difference is that the board of trustees in Hawaii didn’t want to hassle with a lawsuit, and they decided to give Dobelle a generous settlement to make him go away.
Happy Birthday, Joe Sinnott!
I have to post this fast, before Joe’s 87th birthday is over! This is the first photo I’ve seen of Joe since his shoulder replacement surgery. Haven’t heard yet if he’s added working at his drawing board to his physical therapy routine.
While I’m on the subject of comic books, a couple of things. PBS has made a big splash with the 3-part documentary Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle, and if you go that link the entire thing is supposed to be online for a limited time.
My interest level dropped off quickly in the third part of Superheroes, and I could nit-pick the first two parts — Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko deserved even more attention than they got — but as I said six years ago, when In Search of Steve Ditko by Jonathan Ross came out, I’m happy that comic books are now widely accepted as a valid creative medium. My mother sure didn’t think they were more than trash when I was a kid, because that’s where she threw my collection. In the second part of the documentary I was pleased to see Jim Steranko being featured prominently.
IDW Publishing has announced something that has me ignoring my self-imposed restriction on buying more big books, and these are REALLY big books! The Steranko Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. Artist’s Edition, and the Steranko Nick Fury and Captain America Artist’s Edition. What makes these IDW editions special is that they’re scanned from the original art. After all these decades, Steranko has held onto all of the original pages — well, most — of his ground-breaking comic book work, and for fans like me this is the payoff.
There is at least one piece of Steranko original art that isn’t in the possession of its creator. To scan the original cover art for Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #8, IDW will have to borrow it from none other than Jonathan Ross.
Over the counter dose
While running some errands today, on the radio I caught a chunk of This American Life. Just how risky is taking too much acetaminophen? Listen and find out.
TV as you like it… for now
The Web site name TVonline.cc was registered this past February 2, by somebody in Iran — if the domain administrator information is to be believed — and the site supposedly originates in California, west of Reno, Nevada. Wait! Now it’s in Germany. I don’t know where the video I’m watching now is coming from. What’s the video? Last week’s installment of Breaking Bad.
This isn’t a Torrent site, and it’s offering free embedded videos of popular TV shows that play through Flash, like most everything else does in a Web browser. I don’t know how they’re getting their material, but the quality is excellent, even in full-screen. I can’t imagine that any of the programs have been licensed, and I have to wonder how long TVonline will last before it’s forced to shut down.