Author: DOuG pRATt

They bopped, they dropped, they’re back

It’s been over 20 years since Bop ‘Til You Drop, the first and, until now, only collection of Arlo & Janis comic strips. Beaucoup Arlo & Janis is here, and it’s worth the wait!

Every phase of the comic strip’s development is represented in Beaucoup Arlo & Janis. If you feel, as I do, that Gene’s early romances are as essential to the strip as his parents’ relationship, you will be as pleased as I am with the book.

I got my copy on pre-order, and now that the book is out it can be ordered at this link. You’ll find almost 1000 daily comic strips on over 250 pages. They’re in black and white, and that’s how Jimmy can sell these hardcover books — printed in Canada, not China, by the way — for only twenty five bucks.

A great job, Jimmy! Your fans know how hard you worked to put this together and make it a reality, and we thank you.

Pop and circumstance

A few minutes ago I made an edit to this page on Wikipedia, about the Buckinghams. It had said, “The group opposed the producer’s treatment of the song “Susan” by adding a psychedelic section that sounded very similar to the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life”, with an orchestral crescendo.”

http://youtu.be/aIacsdOfKAQ

I edited the article to note that the orchestral crescendo included a bit of Charles Ives’ Central Park in the Dark. Composed in 1906, it was, to say the least, ahead of its time and wasn’t performed publicly until 1946.

http://youtu.be/1qPZbHNuZzI

I love the song Susan, its production, the recording and, yes, the Charles Ives break too. In my opinion, the single coming after A Day in the Life is beside the point, because I think it’s far more significant that Susan came before Revolution 9.

http://youtu.be/LVf5Cr4M-F8

Black Friday blues

No, I didn’t wait in the dark and cold, hoping to grab a door-buster special at 4 AM. Earlier this week we bought a new refrigerator. My defrost fix on our Frigidaire was temporary, because the coils iced over again. I’m a terrible fatalist about some things, and having never had success with refrigerator repairs in the past I didn’t want to bother seeing if it could be fixed. We’ve never liked the thing anyway, so I told Carol let’s just buy a new one. Delivery of a new Kenmore side-by-side, model 5102, is scheduled for today, and from a check of appliances at Best Buy it appears the manufacturer of this particular Kenmore is GE.

Today the same refrigerator is on sale for $60 less than what I paid. So, hoping there might be a price matching deal, and wanting to avoid driving to the mall on Black Friday, I pulled out my receipt and called the phone number for the store at the mall. Doing that put me through the usual voice system nightmare that we all know well. Several attempts to reach the appliance department ended up dumping me to a national call center, where I was asked if I had the store’s phone number. “Uh, yes, I did, and that was how I got you.” They were unable to give me a direct-dial number of the appliance department at the local store.

I went online and dug up a local, direct number for automotive. Close enough, because it worked. I said I was trying to reach the appliance department, and the gruff sounding but nice guy who answered the phoned transferred me.

Once I was speaking to a person on the floor where had I spent an hour or two a few days ago, she really was helpful. She looked up my order and said, “Yeah, it’s sixty dollars less, but we won’t include free delivery at that price, and that would be seventy dollars, so you’re doing better with the deal you have.” I went online to check, which was what I should have done to begin with, and, sure enough, delivery “starts at $70,” plus another ten bucks for hauling away the old one.

With all of the lip service that large retail corporations give to customer satisfaction, it’s hilarious and frustrating how often they intentionally fail to deliver it. Voice systems that dump customers to national call centers just get in the way. The good news is that when I reached the appliance department I was given a straight, quick explanation. So, once you get past the corporate nonsense, old-fashioned customer service still exists at Sears.

Follow-up: The old refrigerator, when it was working, held the freezer at -10F, the optimal temperature. When it broke the best it could do was +10F. The new refrigerator has been running for ten hours, and so far the best it can do in the freezer compartment is… +10F.

Follow follow-up: Whatta difference a day makes. I’ve never seen a refrigerator take so long to find its temperatures, but by setting the fridge one level warmer it’s now below 35F and the freezer is at -10F.

Recovering and restoring sounds and pictures

For Thanksgiving, WBUR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook rebroadcast a program from last year, about the discovery and restoration of the Bill Savory collection of Jazz radio broadcasts from the late 1930’s and early 40’s.

[audio:http://audio.wbur.org/storage/2010/09/onpoint_0910_2.mp3|titles=On Point: The Savory Collection]

It takes a lot of technical know-how and painstaking work to copy old 78 rpm transcription records and then clean them up digitally, without losing the vitality of the original performance. Compared to dealing with old audio recordings, handling and restoring movie film is an even more difficult and expensive undertaking. Here’s a fascinating short documentary on the Chaplin at Keystone restoration project.

http://youtu.be/voEGsQj4CPs

As wonderful as it is that computers have made it possible to salvage, reclaim, and reinvigorate these materials to an extent never before possible, I wonder about the future. There’s so much technology involved, with so many different digital formats, how will people be able to see and hear this stuff in a hundred years? Which reminds me. I have VHS home videos from a full-size camcorder that I need to transfer to the computer.