On day 21 the tile went down. A couple of days later it was grouted and most of the wood trim was added. The tile needs to be washed.
Today the electrician was here. Most of his work is done, including the electric heat, but he has to come back to finish the ceiling fan.
I’m being hotlinked. Argh. I knew it would happen eventually, and for still pictures I don’t care. But videos are another matter.
Hotlinking is when a Webmaster uses a picture or video from another site, by referring to its absolute address, rather than taking it by downloading and putting it on their own server. It’s bandwidth theft, and bandwidth used to be so precious that a hotlink to a lowly JPG was annoying. Nowadays, it’s video that’s a concern.
Some FLV files I posted have been hotlinked for streaming video. The owner of the site is using Dreamhost, the same service that hosts Mark Evanier’s sites, so it isn’t as if this guy is short on storage capacity or bandwidth.
Up to now I haven’t tried to block hotlinking, because I assumed people would download the files. That’s now changed. I’ve edited the .htaccess file for the site with some code that should greatly cut down on the potential hotlinking of FLV files. It won’t prevent it entirely, and I’m not about to say under what circumstances it doesn’t block. With a little more tweaking I should be able to tighten the screws some more.
Unless you subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog’s comments, you may not have noticed a follow-up to my “Timmy In The Well” post.
Hi,
I thought you might like this video. You are correct that Jon Provost (Timmy) was never in the well. The joke became so well known that he has named his new book “Timmy’s in the Well”. The book will be out mid-November.
http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=894543076
Thx,
Bonnie Vent
Genesis Creations Entertainment
www.genesiscreations.biz
The video is from The O’Reilly Factor, but despite Bill O’Reilly I can recommend watching the segment, because Jon is interesting. Something that I didn’t know, and in fact joked about in my previous post, is that Lassie really did have a stunt double! I’ll embed the video here.
Jon’s Web site is here. The book can be ordered here from Amazon.com.
I hope copies of the book will be available in time for Provost’s appearance in West Springfield, MA on November 2-4, because I’m hoping to see him there to say hi. I’d like to give Jon the Give-a-Show slide that I scanned and posted, now that it’s confirmed he never fell into a well, playing Timmy Martin on Lassie.
PBS may not have made a documentary about Steve Ditko, but there’s one about Charles Schulz coming out next month. It will be on American Masters, Monday, October 29, from 9 – 10:30 PM ET. Here’s a brief write-up about the program.
This is a quintessentially Midwestern story of an unassuming, self-doubting man who, through expressing his unique view of the world, redefined the comic art form with “Peanuts.” His genius lay in depicting the daily collisions of insiders and outsiders, of mundane cruelties and transcendent hopes – seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. The “Peanuts” cast of characters is as familiar as our own siblings; their trials and tribulations speak of our families and evoke our childhood desperations. They are portrayed with whimsy and poignancy – and always with love and tolerance, each representing different facets of Schulz’ personality and his perspectives on 20th-century America.
I’m hoping they interviewed Donna Wold, Schulz’s real-life Little Red-Haired Girl. As everybody knows, Donna married somebody else. He was a fireman named Al. This is Schulz and Donna in April, 1950.
Cartoonist Jimmy Johnson’s ex-wife, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, in her book Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz, wrote about an encounter Schulz later had with Donna. By coincidence, Donna’s maiden name is Johnson. Her husband passed away some years ago. IMPORTANT CORRECTION — Al Wold is alive and well. See the comment by Mr. David Van Taylor the director of the documentary:
By 1956, when Charles Schulz was signing autographs at a downtown Minneapolis bookstore, he was married, a father, and beginning to ascend to that pinnacle of fame few ever reach. Donna, pregnant with her second child, waited in a long line to ask for his autograph. “That lady in front of me was saying, ‘I’m his biggest fan.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, no, you’re not!'”
Sparky signed Donna’s book with a rather generic inscription that bothers her slightly, even today: “For Donna, with sincere best wishes….” Later he gave her a ride to her parked car.
“I saw pictures of his wife in the newspaper; she looked very pretty,” says Donna. She read the news magazine accounts of his California digs and marveled that her unassuming Sparky had a four-hole golf course and an artificial waterfall. Years later, on a trip through California with Al, she stopped at the ice arena on the chance Sparky would be there. He wasn’t. “Al was good about it. He sat in the car in case I got a chance to talk to him.”
On a FiOS DVR recording from the Sci-Fi channel in July, Eric spotted a brief commercial I’d missed for the Popeye DVD. For posterity, here it is.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/PopeyeDVD.flv 400 300]
“Timmy’s In The Well” is a catchphrase that I suspect came from a comedian’s stand-up routine, but don’t ask me to say who or when. It’s a reference to the old Lassie TV show, when Jon Provost played Timmy, replacing Tom Rettig, who had played Jeff. There was a Simpsons episode where Bart faked being trapped in a well. Perhaps that added fuel to the popularity of the joke.
The skit involves Lassie running up to an adult, presumably Timmy’s caring and responsible, — yet somehow hapless — father, barking frantically. The joke is that the human can understand the barking. “What’s that Lassie? Timmy’s fallen in the well??” I don’t know with absolute certainty that Timmy never fell in a well on the TV show, but that assertion was made by somebody on a TV Land bulletin board.
So where exactly did the notion come from that Timmy fell in the well? Perhaps it came from a 1962 Kenner Give-A-Show slide. I’ve inserted a scan of the slide into the upper corner of this paragraph. Click to enlarge. This being the only proof offered on the Net that Timmy did, in fact, fall in a well, it deserves a thoughtful frame-by-frame analysis.
Click pictures to enlarge
All’s well that ends well for Timmy! But not for Mr. Jones, who finds a dead dog in his well and will later be sued by Timmy’s parents for failing to properly fill or seal the well.
