Author: DOuG pRATt

Two of My Favorite Things

At the NCS conference last August, Colleen Doran and I discussed how, generally, comic book people are more familiar with comic strips than comic strip people are familiar with comic books. Today’s Jumble has an exception to that generality.

Boomer boy that I am, Marvel Comics from the Sixties are one of my favorite things. Another is, of course, the Beatles.

LBJ was notorious for strong-arming legislators into voting his way. What if he had been a flat-out authoritarian president, like Trump? Could he have kept the Beatles out of America?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/could-president-deploy-wartime-law-203749200.html

AI AIEE!

White collar jobs are stuck in place. Labor growth is sluggish. How much of this is from the effect of AI-related productivity isn’t clear. Wall Street Week had a worthwhile discussion last month.

One casualty of AI is the tech site Stack Overflow.

https://boingboing.net/2026/01/14/stack-overflow-is-dead-and-its-toxic-community-helped-kill-it.html

The AI gold rush is literally tearing up acreage across the country.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/14/1131253/data-centers-are-amazing-everyone-hates-them/

Do all of the companies competing for AI supremacy really need to invest so much money in those data centers?

https://www.businessinsider.com/big-short-michael-burry-warren-buffett-ai-boom-nvidia-palantir-2026-1

The solid-state drives in those data centers have undeniable advantages over hard disk drives. Yet they can consume as much, or more, electricity than the old mechanical disks.

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/ssd-vs-hdd-we-know-about-speed-but-what-about-power-consumption

Small Records With Big Rabbit Holes

Looking at the charts Denro provided in the previous post, I see ‘Nothing But a Heartache’ by the Flirtations. A powerful, catchy record that deserved to do better, it peaked at #34, even lower than ‘Will You Be Staying After Sunday’.

How did a 1968 Psychedelic UK record that didn’t chart in America (was it even released here?) …

… get reworked into the Soul Pop sound of ‘Nothing But a Heartache’?

Here’s the explanation. Its history starts with a former Beatle.

Five years later came this Sugar Pop classic.