Author: DOuG pRATt

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.

Technical Difficulties

Kamen1.gif

There’s a problem with my Web site hosting service, and I am unable to upload large files, such as video clips. In the meantime, click on the thumbnail picture to go to the gallery. An EC comic book sci-fi story is there, with the sort of O. Henry “Gift of the Magi” twist ending that EC was known for. All that’s left of EC today is MAD Magazine.

Note the name of the artist. Jack Kamen. When I’m able to post videos again you’ll see why the artist is noteworthy.

When I Was 17…

If the space below is blank, blame YouTube.

After Frank Sinatra died, already 8 years ago, CBS ran a special on him that included this remarkable footage from 1965, of Sinatra recording “It Was a Very Good Year.” Walter Cronkite narrates.

The audio player below has the song in stereo. Let it play all the way through and you’ll hear an earlier version of “It Was a Very Good Year” that was done as a folk song.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/NOV06/Sinatra.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Sounds/Wordpress/NOV06/KingstonTrio.mp3]

Post-Victory Colbert

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Here’s today’s obligatory sampler from The Colbert Report. After a very amusing exchange with Jon Stewart during the pass-off from The Daily Show, Colbert talks, and sings, with a previous guest — John Hall from the 70’s band Orleans, now a Congressman-elect. The complete show is available at Comedy Central.

Edit: If you happened to see the John Hall segment, you noticed an audio sync problem. So I’ve replaced it with The Word segment, which is funnier anyway. Some great pantomine acting by Colbert.