Author: DOuG pRATt

Simply Sibley

Brian Sibley's Production of "A Christmas Carol"I am very honored to be among the blogs and Web sites listed on author/actor/broadcaster Brian Sibley’s blog, which can be seen by clicking here. Sibley hails from England, and I have always felt a very strong association with England, the land of my ancestors; although I do wonder sometimes if my ancestors left on good terms, what with words like “pratfall” and “prattle” to live down.

Sibley writes about many things that I find interesting, including Disney animation and Nick Park’s Wallace & Gromit. I am pleased to have introduced Jimmy Johnson, creator of the comic strip Arlo & Janis, to the delights of Wallace & Gromit in 1995.

Sibley has an innovative and very well-received stage adaptation of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” playing in London at the Greenwich Playhouse, through January 6. You can read the theatre reviews and blog reader comments at this link.

In our house we have a copy of The Annotated Christmas Carol, which is a book that I recommend highly. Sometime this week I will post an Orson Welles radio adaptation of A Christmas Carol, starring Lionel Barrymore.

It’s a Khan Christmas!

I don’t know about you, but Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan makes me feel so Christmasy all over. A couple of years ago we gave Eric a Khan ornament, and this year we gave him Hallmark’s new, deluxe light-and-sound Khan ornament.

Trek Khan Ornament From Hallmark

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/DEC07/KhanChristmas.mp3]

Click a little button and you hear Shatner and Montalban going at it! Blasters and overacting combine to make this year’s tree the most festive ever. I give this ornament a rating of Warp 10.

No Heat!

With ten inches of snow already here, another six have fallen. It’s still coming down, and the furnace is off. I pushed the reset button and it ran for a minute and popped out again. Aaugh! This is the second blog post telling of the furnace being out. Here is the first.

We have a contract with a new oil company. It’s a very old company, but it’s not the outfit we used for nine years. One of several reasons why I left the other place was long delays in service, often eight hours or more. I’m told we’ll have a service tech here before noon, and it’s 10 am now. The roads are in terrible shape, but fortunately ours just got plowed.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, I’m glad I had electric heat put in the remodeled porch. Now I’ve got to get outside with the snow blower and clear the driveway for the service truck.

P.S. HEAT! Half an hour later, it’s working. He came, he fixed, he went. Impressive. Clogged fuel nozzle.

Tech Notes

There’s a way of defining a link in a Web page that either replaces the window or tab you’re looking at, or opens up a new one. Whether it opens a whole new window or just a tab in your present window depends on how your browser is set.

To open up a new window in a link, the command target="_blank" is needed. The problem is, this tag is no longer considered to be valid in the strict rules and regulations of Web pages, and there’s no replacement for it. The assumption is supposed to be that links will replace the existing window or tab. Fortunately, newer browsers have a feature where you can right-click a link and select whether or not you want to open a new window or a new tab.

I have been selectively using the target="_blank" tag, usually for external links that aren’t on my own site. I have decided to end this practice. For one thing, it’s a pain to do because I work in the non-graphical WordPress editor, and I have to enter the tag manually. So from now on if you want a link to open up a new tab or window, you’ll have to remember to first right-click. Sorry for the inconvenience.

On another matter, today I had tons of fun replacing the Computer Associates security suite with Norton Protection Center. It’s what Verizon wanted me to do, and I’d been putting it off, but the software is part of my FiOS package so I had to go along with it. Norton is uniformly rated as more secure than CA, so I didn’t really mind, but I’ve had Norton in the past and had a lot of trouble with it.

After some futzing around I got the CA suite uninstalled and Norton installed, I ran a full system scan that found five pieces of malware, and I customized the firewall feature. The system seems stable and it’s not running slowly the way McAfee made it do when it was part of my old Comcast service.

One incentive I had for installing Norton was a problem I’m having with my Web service. FTP — File Transfer Protocol — isn’t working. And I can’t post a couple of videos without FTP working, so I had nothing better to do. Sorry for this very boring post, but when I can upload the videos there will be something more interesting here!

Another Morty Gunty Writer Speaks

I was very fortunate a few months ago to have comedy writer Arnie Kogen, of TV and MAD Magazine fame, visit this blog and relieve my concern that I may have played a role in the demise of comedian Morty Gunty’s NY TV show for kids back in 1965. Gunty was the first comic who Kogen wrote for, and later the same was true for writer Alan Zweibel, best known for his stint on the original writing team of Saturday Night Live. He helped develop the characters Roseanne Roseannadanna and Emily Litella for the late Gilda Radner.

It all started when Alan Zweibel’s mother chatted up a comedian she saw open for Engelbert Humperdinck. Zweibel laughs at the thought of it. “She just went up and approached him, and said, ‘My son can write jokes.’ And pretty soon I was writing for $7 a gag for a comic named Morty Gunty.”

Alan Zweibel: The History of Me is a one-man show Zweibel has been performing at various venues throughout this year. Friday night he was in South Orange New Jersey, as featured in this newspaper article.

I’d like to embed a video excerpt of Zweibel doing The History of Me, but YouTube says it can’t be embedded. So instead here’s a picture of Zweibel you can click to take you to YouTube.

Alan Zweibel

Boston Common For Non-Commoners

I don’t subscribe to Boston Common magazine, but it comes in the mail anyway. I think I’m on the mailing list because of my American Express Gold Card.

The magazine is named after a park in Boston, and it’s intended for the young, beautiful, fashionable and rich of greater Boston, although the old, fashionable and rich are also featured prominently. I’m flipping through it now, and I see an ad for Stella Artois lager beer, recently featured here on DogRat.com. There’s also a must-see ad for clothier Blue Fly. My son is almost sixteen, so I see no harm in letting this one through. Click to enlarge. I can’t find this picture at Blue Fly online, but it’s in Boston Common magazine.

Oh, the expansive and expensive suburban homes! The in-town luxury condos! The cars and the fashions and the restaurants, and Harvard, and everything else that goes with being so fabulously well off. I refer you to the video in a previous post about Hyannis Homeys. How many people truly can afford to live this way? The Natick Mall, west of Boston, is now called The Natick Collection, and I’m curious to know how well Neiman-Marcus and Nordstrums, and Tiffany’s, and the new condos catering to the customers of those stores, will do.