Author: DOuG pRATt

Jewel is a Peach

If you happen to come across the calendar view of this blog, you’ll notice that nothing was posted on Sunday. It’s easy to explain. We — me, son Eric and friend Dennis — went to a fanboy convention in Springfield, MA to meet actress Jewel Staite. Actually, Dennis went to meet Monkee Peter Tork, but I don’t think he minded meeting Jewel.

Blame it on my friend Bismo! It’s his fault. He got us into watching DVD’s of the short-lived 2002 TV show Firefly, which is best described as an outer space western. Staite played the character Kaylee, the space ship’s mechanic. It’s like this, see? The ship’s engine has a glowing yellow tail, that’s supposed to make it look like a firefly and the significance of that is, well, uh …. never mind. There is no significance. But anyway, that’s where we were on Sunday.

Next weekend we get to meet Morena Baccarin, another cast member from the show, at yet another geeky fanboy-filled event. Hey, somebody’s gotta do the tough job of showing these struggling actors that their hard work is appreciated!

Oui Wii

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Eric has, at last, experienced the eagerly-anticipated Nintendo Wii! At a demo kiosk in the Natick Mall.

It’s been a long wait for the Wii, which was originally going to be called the Revolution. Here’s hoping Santa does a good job making sure they’re in ample supply for the Holidays Christmas! No! Wait! I got that backwards. Holidays Christmas. *Whew* There, that’s better.

There’s another Eric who’s anxious to play the Nintendo Wii. The foul-mouthed kid on South Park. Well, every kid on South Park is foul-mouthed. The language on the video above has been reasonably cleaned up with some judicious editing.

I’m not particularly a fan of the show, in part because of the needlessly gratuitous profanity. I made a point of watching the Scientology show, however, and it was quite good. I’m not saying the writers don’t score points against their targets, but for me the swearing muddies the message.

Vet’s Day


LIFE Magazine photo of American soldiers in Hürtgen Forest, Germany, September 1944.

 

Click For GalleryI didn’t want to let Veterans Day pass without sharing something special. I have in my possession an original paperback book, printed in Italy at the end of World War II. It’s a collection of cartoons by Bill Mauldin.

Click here or on the picture of Willie and Joe to go to the gallery to see selected cartoons from the book. I found this book for a dollar at a used book store many years ago. The inscription is fascinating in itself. Who was Grace? Who was Eugene? Were they just friends, or were they in love? Did they marry?

What immediately catches my eye in Mauldin’s cartooning is his superbly confident and slap-dash brushwork. Keep the photo above in mind when browsing the gallery, and you’ll see that Mauldin’s depiction of ragged and weary soldiers was no exaggeration! Below is a LIFE Magazine photo of Bill Mauldin with his infant son Bruce at the end of the war, probably taken around the time the book was published. More WWII cartoons by Mauldin, posted by Stars and Stripes, can be seen by clicking here.

Demo-graphics

My wife Carol gets a lot of clothing catalogs in the mail. One of them is title nine. The company is undoubtedly named after the legislation that gave girls and women parity in competitive sports programs with boys and men.

Title nine’s Web site seems to be missing the captions for the pictures of the women that are in the print catalog. Carol thinks the captions are very amusing, and she wonders how many of title nine’s prospective customers match this profile of athletic, professional super mom?

So let’s meet the self-actualized ladies of the title nine catalog! I bet that together these women have less body fat than a can of tuna.

Emma! Bear! Heidi! Isabel! Erin B! Erin not B! Penny!

There’s a woman named … Bear?? I saved Penny for last. She’s a PhD student with 13(!) siblings.

Continue reading Demo-graphics

Kamen Islands

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Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway Human Transporter, was Stephen Colbert’s guest Thursday night. Dean’s brother is a physician specializing in childhood cancers. That’s their father, Jack Kamen, in the still frame for the video that has Dean’s appearance on The Colbert Report.

Jack Kamen was an artist for the notorious EC Comics. Entertaining Comics Comics. Redundant, but so is DC Comics — Detective Comics Comics.

An example of Kamen’s work is in the gallery. The character Seymour bears a remarkable resemblence to Dean as an adult, but Dean was only 1 year old when his dad drew this story!

Jack was never a “fan favorite” artist, but he was a capable and dependable craftsman. Kamen’s work was always solid, consistent and, above all, never late. He’s what editors and publishers call a “pro’s pro.”

Back in the 50’s, EC Comics were a target of a Senate investigation into juvenile delinquency, and were considered to be a bad influence on kids. EC’s were admittedly gross and violent, sometimes in the extreme, but I’d say that Dean and his brother seemed to have turned out all right.

What’s Wrong?

Still having no luck with uploading big files. But a support person was quick to reply via email and direct me to the notice shown above. This is the first real outage I’ve had with them. The problem is with the network between Phoenix and LA, where there are ongoing power problems.

Usually when this sort of thing happens it affects everything, but in this case only File Transfer Protocol is broken. It makes no sense that only FTP would break, so my guess is they disabled it intentionally across-the-board, to allow the other services to continue working.