Oh boy! I’ve done a factory-restore of Windows XP on my desktop system. Windows is all the way back to SP2, and IE is at version 6. A zillion updates are downloading, and they’ll probably take an hour to run. I’m planning to update to Windows 7, so I figured it would be nice to start off with a nice, clean installation.
Follow-up: Well, this is fun. I’m entering this using Firefox, installed on Ubuntu Linux, within a VMware Player virtual machine, running on Windows XP.
Further follow-up: I am very impressed with how this all works. Windows has locked up a couple of times while I was mucking around with the virtual machine settings, but that doesn’t phase me, and I’m tempted to go virtual underneath the covers with this setup.
There’s a daily radio news program based here in Boston, called The World, that’s co-produced with the BBC World Service. They explain the cuts that are being implemented:
Internet access in Egypt has been cut. Whether or not the protesters intend to overthrow the government in favor of a Muslim-based system, the fact is that the value of radio is obvious in these situations.
Buddy was gone, Elvis was in the Army, Little Richard got religion, Jerry Lee and Chuck were having some “personal problems,” and they said Rock and Roll was dead. But it wasn’t all Doo-wop and teen idols, thanks to Jackie…
Obama’s SOTU speech is on TV, and every so often I turn off muting, but every time I do that I’m not too excited by what I hear. So, instead, I’m going to watch Stephen Colbert absorbing Keith Olbermann’s power, only to find it too much, even for him.
I’ve been reading an excellent book, The Horror! The Horror!, by Jim Tombetta, about the short-lived horror genre of comic books, in the first half of the 1950’s. In response to public pressure, resulting from Senate Subcommittee hearings led by Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn), the industry censored itself with a regulatory agency called The Comics Code Authority — which, as of last week, seems to finally be at an end. I’ve always felt the weakness in the defense of the comic book industry, in testimony by E.C. publisher William M. Gaines, was his failure to cite radio shows like Suspense and Inner Sanctum as inspirations for the horror stories. Those programs were very popular with both kids and their parents.
That same period of time saw one of the all-time greatest comic book creators, Carl Barks, hit his stride, working in the funny animal genre. Superheroes, the formerly dominant genre, had fallen on hard times after WWII, and had yet to recover in the mid-50’s. One thing that helped bring it back was the success of The Adventures of Superman on TV, which had previously been a radio series, and a movie serial.
Watching the DVD set of the series, it started out as a surprisingly hard-hitting, and often spooky, drama, but like comic books it lost its edge and lightened up. Throughout the show’s run, Jimmy Olsen was played with great spirit by Jack Larson. Some years ago, Denro and I saw Larson in Boston, introducing a collection of Superman shows, and talking about the series and his life since then. One of the screenings that evening was the pinnacle, or nadir, of Superman silliness, a pilot for a proposed Superpup series. This brief bit of video was taken from a 2006 TV special, narrated by Kevin Spacey, who played Lex Luthor in Superman Returns; a movie that did nothing wrong, yet failed to spark imaginations.
Now THAT’s what I call horrible! Here’s Jack Larson in an interesting recent interview. He’s slowed down from his “golly gee” youth, but Jack’s still as personable and engaging as ever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjV9H35Hu5w
A more extensive video interview with Larson, from the Archive of American Television, can be found at this link. I would have embedded it here, but it’s an unlisted YouTube video.
