Potrzebie
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Gorillas in the midst
.
See The Invisible Gorilla and article in New Scientist.
See The Invisible Gorilla and article in New Scientist.
Labels: gorilla, new scientist
¶ 10:56 AM 0 comments
Monday, June 28, 2010
Beat Memories
... an exhibition of Allen Ginsberg's photographs at the National Gallery of Art (May 2–September 16, 2010). © Copyright 2010 The Allen Ginsberg LLC. All rights reserved.
Audio: National Gallery photo curator Sarah Greenough talks with archivist Bill Morgan
Audio: National Gallery photo curator Sarah Greenough talks with archivist Bill Morgan
Neal Cassady and Natalie Jackson in San Francisco in 1955. Can anyone identify the movie theater?
William Burroughs in Metropolitan Egyptian Wing in 1953.
Gregory Corso in Paris attic room at 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur in 1957.
Kerouac on East 7th Street at Tompkins Park in 1953.
Labels: beat generation, burroughs, corso, ginsberg, kerouac
¶ 7:51 AM 0 comments
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Six Feet Under finale: Claire leaves. Best ending of any TV series ever
.
In the first episode, high school student Claire Fisher has no direction, no purpose. In the last episode, she leaves for New York. In the seasons between, we see Claire's growth as an art student and an artist.
In the first episode, high school student Claire Fisher has no direction, no purpose. In the last episode, she leaves for New York. In the seasons between, we see Claire's growth as an art student and an artist.
Labels: claire fisher, lauren ambrose, six feet under
¶ 1:35 AM 1 comments
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Wood Chips 20: Hansel and Gretel
.
There were only two issues of Harvey Kurtzman's Trump, and Wood had only three contributions, short satires on Candid Camera, Elvis Presley and Disney. Hansel and Gretel is from the first issue (January, 1957), scripted by cartoonist Ed Fisher. The trapper Troldheim is a caricature of Senator Joseph McCarthy, with the Troldheim name suggesting he is a menacing troll lying in wait to ensnare anyone.
There were only two issues of Harvey Kurtzman's Trump, and Wood had only three contributions, short satires on Candid Camera, Elvis Presley and Disney. Hansel and Gretel is from the first issue (January, 1957), scripted by cartoonist Ed Fisher. The trapper Troldheim is a caricature of Senator Joseph McCarthy, with the Troldheim name suggesting he is a menacing troll lying in wait to ensnare anyone.
Labels: disney, ed fisher, gretel, hansel, kurtzman, trump, wood, wood chips
¶ 8:37 AM 1 comments
Monday, June 21, 2010
Read me, Dr. Memory
Listen to the Firesign Theatre's I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus (1971)
Also listen to The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour
The Firesign's first self-hosted radio series was The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour, a two-hour weekly show that aired Sunday nights on KPPC-FM, Pasadena, from January to July 1970. Between September 1970 and February 1971, Firesign hosted the weekly series Dear Friends on KPFK-FM, Los Angeles. Their last self-hosted radio series was Let's Eat, broadcast weekly on KPFK between November 1971 and February 1972, plus the 90-minute series finale Martian Space Party in March 1972.
Firezine
Radio Free Oz
Firesign on WFMU
Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama (1939 World's Fair)
I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus (1971) remains their masterwork, a stereo spin-off cyber-springboarding from the Hall of Science at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama at the 1939 World's Fair and Disneyland. Here's an excerpt from Phil Austin's explanatory essay:
Bozos is the last of the four classic albums of the early Firesign Theatre and was written and recorded in 1971. It might be thought of as the first of our consciously Science Fiction pieces and although it attempts to span some time/space barriers, it exists primarily in a world just out of sight, in a future that seems to be just around the corner. At the height - so it would turn out - of our fame, interviewed and taken seriously for the first time, we felt ourselves under unusual scrutiny and pressure for the first time since Columbia had nearly dropped us just before we recorded our second album, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once, When You're Not Anywhere At All. (Available from Mobile Fidelity on Compact Disc:MFCD 834.)
We had tentatively settled upon a form that was to be reminiscent of the old Bozo the Clown children's records of the Forties and early Fifties. We did not fulfill that dream, with its musical page-turnings and breezy narration, but the idea of a Bozo certainly survived. The strain of the process of writing can be felt in the long, digressive opening which takes up almost all of Side One on the original, vinyl album. In it, a scientific and religious system that rules the Future is sketched in a number of impressions that are satires of the kind of script-writing for animated dummies that you hear and see at Disneyland. Clem, the main character of the piece, is only rarely heard and his motivations are maddeningly secret. This was a far cry from Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers - our third album - (also available from Mobile Fidelity on Compact Disc: MFCD 880) which immediately preceded this one, replete with complex characters and interwoven stories and media satires. Luckily, Bozos was an immediate success and has always been a favorite with a substantial portion of our listeners, especially those interested in science and Science Fiction.
The story is very concerned with computers although it was written in a time some years before the general availability of the Personal Computer. We drew a good deal of inspiration from the now-famous Eliza Program, an early attempt to elicit the questions and responses of a psychiatrist from a computer.
Bozos is also very much about the phenomenon of someone who can "Live in the future, now!" as the first voices of the fair tell Clem. Prescience and prediction of the future and the peculiar traps of fortune-telling are what this story is about. Clem is not who he seems, neither is Barney. (Much of our thinking about the future was conditioned by a mutual fascination for the history of the New York and Chicago World's Fairs and their exhibits about the future, in the General Motors pavilion in New York, or the Surreal, as in the Salvador Dali building at Chicago. But it is Wait Disney and Disneyland's peculiar slant on education that inspires most of what we will hear in the first half of the story.)
The first voice of the future is that of someone in the distance, over a loudspeaker, saying "... biting through, in this area." This reflects the throw of the I Ching coins, tossed by us upon beginning and ending any album in a process that by now was increasingly superstitious and not wholly inspirational. We had already been through a bitter but private breakup and had reformed. And the tumultuous social and political events of the early Seventies were mirrored on our own lives by the tragic deaths of two of our intimate associates, Jerry (Wacko) Brian and David Grimm. Circling whatever this idea was to be, like wolves under pressure, we had begun to think about the Future.
A man named Clem goes into the Future Fair by associating himself with a happy group of spectators called B.O.Z.O.s (Brotherhood of Zips and Others) whose mission in life seems to be to get together and do things together in a state we characterized as "mindless fellowship." He hooks up with a Bozo named Barney, who doesn't like to "clone alone." In the background, we can hear the receding sound of the ice cream wagon that is being chased by George Tirebiter at the end of "Dwarf." We hear a bus equipped with loudspeakers through which speak the voice that is "biting through." As it pulls to a stop at the station on Dutch Elm Street, we hear the voice of Clem. Practically the first thing he says is "Holy Fudd!" Science is God in the world of the future and Sir Sidney Fudd is His prophet and we will soon learn why.
Several lovable, life-size holograms leap from the bus and entertain and usher the passengers on board. They are large cowboy vegetables, evidently so familiar to everyone as to need no introduction and they sing of Another World, the Shadows:
"We're back from the Shadows again
Out where an In-jun's your friend
Where the vegetables are green
And you can pee right into the stream."
They seem to hearken back to some idyllic American time when no environmental conscience was needed and in which no Indian would have a discouraging word about his treatment, some slap-happy, Disney-like approximation of a shared longing for an imaginary past seen from the vantage of an imperfect present. Even when they quarrel - which is frequently - they tell each other something that will come to be a byword of our journey, that fighting is "out of style." Although there are evidences, here and there, that the real world is not free of fighting, (particularly in Hideo Knutt's Boltadrome, a mobile carnival of violence that must attract a more rowdy, sideshow crowd) it is clear that Whoever has programmed this future does not want its inhabitants to fight one another.
Once inside the bus, the ride to the future itself is accomplished by surrounding simulation screens and disembodied voices that trick the innocent Bozos into thinking that they are actually flying. Since they got on a bus, what must happen is that the bus simply drives to the site of the Fair, but they believe ("Do you suppose that was simulated?" askes Barney) what they see and hear much as we had been believing what we saw on TV in those end-of-Vietnam and beginning-of-Watergate times.
We are introduced to the rubber lines, moving colored walkways that transport visitors in the Future Fair. We learn incidentally that the Bozos - and presumably nearly everyone else in this world - wear wigs that must be locked down in flight and inflatable shoes that can walk on water. Clem, it seems, gave up all shoes years ago. By now, any serious Firesign Theatre listener knows that "taking off your shoes" serves us as an analogy for childhood itself and its attendant dreams of freedom. Clem's ambivalence and rootlessness project the image of a slightly bored and pleasantly childlike person with nothing much to do. In fact, he is something quite different but we will not learn the truth until the very end. The Bozos are a self-satisfied, cheerful lot, especially in the person of their "Chairman" Barney, (is this some implication that the Bozos are, in fact, communists or at the very least Maoists, somehow integrated into a capitalist world of the future? Hmmmm. If so, it's a cheerful, middle-class kind of Maosim and an interesting prediction in itself when set against the tumultuous events in the Eastern Europe of the early Nineties.)
The simulation that begins to surround Clem and Barney already shows the wearing and cracking of age and repetition. The scientific "knowledge" that is displayed is addled and mixed in strange ways, as if truth were less important than entertainment and entertainment meant to manipulate its audience by drawing on such basics as fear of the night, fear of science and fear of knowledge itself. As Clem rather aimlessly gets on the Yellow Rubber Line which will lead him to an exhibit called the Wall of Science, he seems to be just killing time, just letting the random events of the Fair move him in any old direction.
The Path of Science that leads to the Wall of Science is a recreation of popular myth of the social and intellectual development of Man. First we hear a kind of portentous telling of primitive Myth, the story of the Turtle and his Mother, a kind of arboreal, incestuous mixing of species and genera which produces a mythic figure, the walking Catfish, so human and so male that he carries two enormous testicles which are also the Sun and the Moon of our terrestrial world. This myth is roundly ridiculed as primitive naturism and is quickly replaced by animatronic scenes which detail the comfortable, self-satisfied view of Mankind that places scientific knowledge at the top of a pyramidal view of history and Man at the top of the Ladder of Progress. Full of his new-found power, Man drops a great fecal load of knowledge over the earth to fertilize it and make it grow.
The idiotic antics Of Sir Sidney Fudd, who by knocking a woman over invents the basic principle on which this civilization seems built - that "if you push something hard enough, it will fall over" - and the equally adolescent version of the invention of Technology by Tom Teslacle and Dick Beddoes that follows, would convince any Bozo that Science has solved the problems of the Present and has led us to a happy Future, wherein we may interact with a simulated President who seems to exist in a Model Government of the Future, both of them wholly dependent on electricity and cocaine (or do you think that the little boxcars are filled with industrial sugar water? Don't be naive.) Cocaine and electricity are the life's blood of the Bureau of Western Mythology, controlled by Chester Cadaver and presided over by President Springhead himself. It is one great system, fed by nonsense knowledge and skewed mimicry of nature which has resulted in this Future Fair.
(There is a temptation by some writers about the Firesign Theatre to look for some systematic political metaphor in this Path of Science and while it is true that we most often use electricity and power interchangeably and that a good deal of our work qualifies as social satire, it is equally interesting to examine the biological aspects that seem most superficial; the simple sexual ones. The primitive confusions of the Turtle and his Mother and the Catfish are all concerned with procreation and, by extension, evolution. Fudd's Law and Teslacle's deviant, although both are childish male adolescent ways of viewing sex, still are a good enough imitation of unruly Nature to lead to a kind of Frankensteinian Pushover Machine (called, presumably, "Nancy") that produces electricity through some mechanical sex act or another.)
Man, still without shoes, still living a dream of adolescent freedom, only divines the world around him from his own limited experience, entirely male. He sees the sun and the moon as is own testicles and he sees the power that issues therefrom to be capable of taming and controlling an unruly and presumably dangerously feminine world. It may not be Science as we know it, but it's good enough for the Future Fair.
1964 World's Fair Futurama II
The Firesign FAQ probes the origin of Dr. Memory:
l to r: Phil Proctor, Phil Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman
Listen to the Firesign Theatre's I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus (1971)
Also listen to The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour
The Firesign's first self-hosted radio series was The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour, a two-hour weekly show that aired Sunday nights on KPPC-FM, Pasadena, from January to July 1970. Between September 1970 and February 1971, Firesign hosted the weekly series Dear Friends on KPFK-FM, Los Angeles. Their last self-hosted radio series was Let's Eat, broadcast weekly on KPFK between November 1971 and February 1972, plus the 90-minute series finale Martian Space Party in March 1972.
Denny Zartman's 1999 Interview with Philip Proctor and David Ossman
Firezine
Radio Free Oz
Firesign on WFMU
Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama (1939 World's Fair)
I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus (1971) remains their masterwork, a stereo spin-off cyber-springboarding from the Hall of Science at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama at the 1939 World's Fair and Disneyland. Here's an excerpt from Phil Austin's explanatory essay:
Bozos is the last of the four classic albums of the early Firesign Theatre and was written and recorded in 1971. It might be thought of as the first of our consciously Science Fiction pieces and although it attempts to span some time/space barriers, it exists primarily in a world just out of sight, in a future that seems to be just around the corner. At the height - so it would turn out - of our fame, interviewed and taken seriously for the first time, we felt ourselves under unusual scrutiny and pressure for the first time since Columbia had nearly dropped us just before we recorded our second album, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once, When You're Not Anywhere At All. (Available from Mobile Fidelity on Compact Disc:MFCD 834.)
We had tentatively settled upon a form that was to be reminiscent of the old Bozo the Clown children's records of the Forties and early Fifties. We did not fulfill that dream, with its musical page-turnings and breezy narration, but the idea of a Bozo certainly survived. The strain of the process of writing can be felt in the long, digressive opening which takes up almost all of Side One on the original, vinyl album. In it, a scientific and religious system that rules the Future is sketched in a number of impressions that are satires of the kind of script-writing for animated dummies that you hear and see at Disneyland. Clem, the main character of the piece, is only rarely heard and his motivations are maddeningly secret. This was a far cry from Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers - our third album - (also available from Mobile Fidelity on Compact Disc: MFCD 880) which immediately preceded this one, replete with complex characters and interwoven stories and media satires. Luckily, Bozos was an immediate success and has always been a favorite with a substantial portion of our listeners, especially those interested in science and Science Fiction.
The story is very concerned with computers although it was written in a time some years before the general availability of the Personal Computer. We drew a good deal of inspiration from the now-famous Eliza Program, an early attempt to elicit the questions and responses of a psychiatrist from a computer.
Bozos is also very much about the phenomenon of someone who can "Live in the future, now!" as the first voices of the fair tell Clem. Prescience and prediction of the future and the peculiar traps of fortune-telling are what this story is about. Clem is not who he seems, neither is Barney. (Much of our thinking about the future was conditioned by a mutual fascination for the history of the New York and Chicago World's Fairs and their exhibits about the future, in the General Motors pavilion in New York, or the Surreal, as in the Salvador Dali building at Chicago. But it is Wait Disney and Disneyland's peculiar slant on education that inspires most of what we will hear in the first half of the story.)
The first voice of the future is that of someone in the distance, over a loudspeaker, saying "... biting through, in this area." This reflects the throw of the I Ching coins, tossed by us upon beginning and ending any album in a process that by now was increasingly superstitious and not wholly inspirational. We had already been through a bitter but private breakup and had reformed. And the tumultuous social and political events of the early Seventies were mirrored on our own lives by the tragic deaths of two of our intimate associates, Jerry (Wacko) Brian and David Grimm. Circling whatever this idea was to be, like wolves under pressure, we had begun to think about the Future.
A man named Clem goes into the Future Fair by associating himself with a happy group of spectators called B.O.Z.O.s (Brotherhood of Zips and Others) whose mission in life seems to be to get together and do things together in a state we characterized as "mindless fellowship." He hooks up with a Bozo named Barney, who doesn't like to "clone alone." In the background, we can hear the receding sound of the ice cream wagon that is being chased by George Tirebiter at the end of "Dwarf." We hear a bus equipped with loudspeakers through which speak the voice that is "biting through." As it pulls to a stop at the station on Dutch Elm Street, we hear the voice of Clem. Practically the first thing he says is "Holy Fudd!" Science is God in the world of the future and Sir Sidney Fudd is His prophet and we will soon learn why.
Several lovable, life-size holograms leap from the bus and entertain and usher the passengers on board. They are large cowboy vegetables, evidently so familiar to everyone as to need no introduction and they sing of Another World, the Shadows:
"We're back from the Shadows again
Out where an In-jun's your friend
Where the vegetables are green
And you can pee right into the stream."
They seem to hearken back to some idyllic American time when no environmental conscience was needed and in which no Indian would have a discouraging word about his treatment, some slap-happy, Disney-like approximation of a shared longing for an imaginary past seen from the vantage of an imperfect present. Even when they quarrel - which is frequently - they tell each other something that will come to be a byword of our journey, that fighting is "out of style." Although there are evidences, here and there, that the real world is not free of fighting, (particularly in Hideo Knutt's Boltadrome, a mobile carnival of violence that must attract a more rowdy, sideshow crowd) it is clear that Whoever has programmed this future does not want its inhabitants to fight one another.
Once inside the bus, the ride to the future itself is accomplished by surrounding simulation screens and disembodied voices that trick the innocent Bozos into thinking that they are actually flying. Since they got on a bus, what must happen is that the bus simply drives to the site of the Fair, but they believe ("Do you suppose that was simulated?" askes Barney) what they see and hear much as we had been believing what we saw on TV in those end-of-Vietnam and beginning-of-Watergate times.
We are introduced to the rubber lines, moving colored walkways that transport visitors in the Future Fair. We learn incidentally that the Bozos - and presumably nearly everyone else in this world - wear wigs that must be locked down in flight and inflatable shoes that can walk on water. Clem, it seems, gave up all shoes years ago. By now, any serious Firesign Theatre listener knows that "taking off your shoes" serves us as an analogy for childhood itself and its attendant dreams of freedom. Clem's ambivalence and rootlessness project the image of a slightly bored and pleasantly childlike person with nothing much to do. In fact, he is something quite different but we will not learn the truth until the very end. The Bozos are a self-satisfied, cheerful lot, especially in the person of their "Chairman" Barney, (is this some implication that the Bozos are, in fact, communists or at the very least Maoists, somehow integrated into a capitalist world of the future? Hmmmm. If so, it's a cheerful, middle-class kind of Maosim and an interesting prediction in itself when set against the tumultuous events in the Eastern Europe of the early Nineties.)
The simulation that begins to surround Clem and Barney already shows the wearing and cracking of age and repetition. The scientific "knowledge" that is displayed is addled and mixed in strange ways, as if truth were less important than entertainment and entertainment meant to manipulate its audience by drawing on such basics as fear of the night, fear of science and fear of knowledge itself. As Clem rather aimlessly gets on the Yellow Rubber Line which will lead him to an exhibit called the Wall of Science, he seems to be just killing time, just letting the random events of the Fair move him in any old direction.
The Path of Science that leads to the Wall of Science is a recreation of popular myth of the social and intellectual development of Man. First we hear a kind of portentous telling of primitive Myth, the story of the Turtle and his Mother, a kind of arboreal, incestuous mixing of species and genera which produces a mythic figure, the walking Catfish, so human and so male that he carries two enormous testicles which are also the Sun and the Moon of our terrestrial world. This myth is roundly ridiculed as primitive naturism and is quickly replaced by animatronic scenes which detail the comfortable, self-satisfied view of Mankind that places scientific knowledge at the top of a pyramidal view of history and Man at the top of the Ladder of Progress. Full of his new-found power, Man drops a great fecal load of knowledge over the earth to fertilize it and make it grow.
The idiotic antics Of Sir Sidney Fudd, who by knocking a woman over invents the basic principle on which this civilization seems built - that "if you push something hard enough, it will fall over" - and the equally adolescent version of the invention of Technology by Tom Teslacle and Dick Beddoes that follows, would convince any Bozo that Science has solved the problems of the Present and has led us to a happy Future, wherein we may interact with a simulated President who seems to exist in a Model Government of the Future, both of them wholly dependent on electricity and cocaine (or do you think that the little boxcars are filled with industrial sugar water? Don't be naive.) Cocaine and electricity are the life's blood of the Bureau of Western Mythology, controlled by Chester Cadaver and presided over by President Springhead himself. It is one great system, fed by nonsense knowledge and skewed mimicry of nature which has resulted in this Future Fair.
(There is a temptation by some writers about the Firesign Theatre to look for some systematic political metaphor in this Path of Science and while it is true that we most often use electricity and power interchangeably and that a good deal of our work qualifies as social satire, it is equally interesting to examine the biological aspects that seem most superficial; the simple sexual ones. The primitive confusions of the Turtle and his Mother and the Catfish are all concerned with procreation and, by extension, evolution. Fudd's Law and Teslacle's deviant, although both are childish male adolescent ways of viewing sex, still are a good enough imitation of unruly Nature to lead to a kind of Frankensteinian Pushover Machine (called, presumably, "Nancy") that produces electricity through some mechanical sex act or another.)
Man, still without shoes, still living a dream of adolescent freedom, only divines the world around him from his own limited experience, entirely male. He sees the sun and the moon as is own testicles and he sees the power that issues therefrom to be capable of taming and controlling an unruly and presumably dangerously feminine world. It may not be Science as we know it, but it's good enough for the Future Fair.
-- Phil Austin
1964 World's Fair Futurama II
The Firesign FAQ probes the origin of Dr. Memory:
"SYSTAT UPTIME 9:01 unhappy READ MAKNAM"
and "hmmm..."
Dr. Memory is based on an early "Eliza" type psychiatrist program
that ran on a PDP-10. The consensus of the alt.comedy.firesgn-thtre
newsgroup experts is that this program was written in (((((Lisp))))),
and compiled using the SAILON LISP compiler for the DECSystem10,
running TOPS-10 operating system. Tim Rentsch noted that one of these
systems was installed at Caltech, and that a former classmate of his
demonstrated the program for the FT .
There is much evidence that David Ossman attended Claremont McKenna College
(then "Claremont Men's College") in his younger days, at which there was one
of the first implementations of the Doctor.
Tim Brengle writes of the implementation:
"CMC is one of the Claremont Colleges, along with Harvey Mudd College,
Scripps College for Women, Pomona College, and Pitzer College. Five schools
taking up a total of about one square mile. The hot new shared computing
resource was a PDP-10 model KA-10 (with 256K bytes of *CORE* memory, and a
swapping drum) running Tops-10. This was the same type of machine upon which
Weisenbaum created the original DOCTOR program, one of whose scripts was
called "Eliza". The program, at least the version I hacked on, was written
in Stanford LISP 1.6--which did have a pretty awesome compiler..."
The evidence for these detailed descriptions of Dr. Memory are based
on the contents of Dr. Memory's commands and error statements:
For example, "SYSTAT" was a TOPS-10 command that gave the system
status, and "UPTIME" showed how long the system had been running.
In addition, the hero (P.) of the story identifies himself as "worker"
whenever he wanted to access the internals of the computerized fair; ("This
is Worker Speaking, Hello"). It is highly likely that David Ossman saw DOCTOR
on the Claremont PDP-10. The way that one started the program was to
activate the LISP environment and then execute the form:
(worker hello)
Up until executing that function, you had to enclose everything in () just as
one would expect from LISP. But the WORKER function changed the syntax
tables for the parser so that a double carriage-return delimited your
statements and told the DOCTOR that it was time to reply. But, there was a
bug in DOCTOR, forgetting to take into account that dots have special meaning
in LISP. Putting one in the wrong place confused the LISP function MAKNAM
("make name") which was trying to assemble characters into tokens. It
returned its error message to the top-level reading function (READ). It's
error message was, of course, "READ: UNHAPPY MAKNAM".
Labels: austin, bergman, disneyland, firesign, norman bel geddes, ossman, proctor
¶ 2:38 AM 2 comments
Friday, June 18, 2010
Wood Chips 19: Wally Wood Wadena wipeout
Wally Wood's birthday was yesterday. He was born June 17, 1927 in Menahga, Minnesota. But there were no celebrations, since a tornado went through that area yesterday. Wadena is the county seat, 20 miles south of Menahga. Here are some historical photos of Menahga.
Wally Wood's birthday was yesterday. He was born June 17, 1927 in Menahga, Minnesota. But there were no celebrations, since a tornado went through that area yesterday. Wadena is the county seat, 20 miles south of Menahga. Here are some historical photos of Menahga.
Topps Travel Poster
Menahga in the 1940s
Labels: menahga, topps, wadena, wood, wood chips
¶ 2:14 PM 3 comments
Walter Tevis, Denver Gillen and PR2
Walter Tevis official site
Labels: denver gillen, pr2, walter tevis
¶ 10:00 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
DailyINK expands vintage strip selections
Great news! King Features is, at long last, doubling the number of DailyINK vintage selections. And no indication so far that they will be increasing the $15 annual subscription fee, an amazing bargain. For Potrzebie's earlier review of DailyINK, go here.
The new line-up adds Billy DeBeck's wonderfully rich and funny Barney Google, John Cullen Murphy's Big Ben Bolt, Stan Drake's Heart of Juliet Jones, Jack Mendlesohn's clever Jackys Diary, Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids, Jimmy Hatlo's Little Iodine, the Lee Falk/Phil Davis Mandrake the Magician, Ted Shearer's Quincy and Radio Patrol by Eddie Sullivan and Charlie Schmidt.
Now we're rolling! This is what I had in mind when I suggested to King Features editor Jay Kennedy many years ago that he put vintage King strips on the Internet. His reaction then was, "Where's the money?" But he eventually succeeded in launching DailyINK only months before his tragic drowning in Costa Rica, ripped from life by a riptide.
This is the opening page of a 14-page story in Little Iodine #9 (December-January 1952). Mike Lynch has the full story at Mike Lynch Cartoons.
The new line-up adds Billy DeBeck's wonderfully rich and funny Barney Google, John Cullen Murphy's Big Ben Bolt, Stan Drake's Heart of Juliet Jones, Jack Mendlesohn's clever Jackys Diary, Rudolph Dirks' The Katzenjammer Kids, Jimmy Hatlo's Little Iodine, the Lee Falk/Phil Davis Mandrake the Magician, Ted Shearer's Quincy and Radio Patrol by Eddie Sullivan and Charlie Schmidt.
Now we're rolling! This is what I had in mind when I suggested to King Features editor Jay Kennedy many years ago that he put vintage King strips on the Internet. His reaction then was, "Where's the money?" But he eventually succeeded in launching DailyINK only months before his tragic drowning in Costa Rica, ripped from life by a riptide.
June 13, 1915
Labels: barney google, dailyink, jay kennedy, king features, little iodine, mandrake
¶ 9:21 AM 2 comments
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
From Gutenberg to iPad in six minutes
For the movie version, go here.
Mad #13 (July, 1954) ©2010 EC Publications
For the movie version, go here.
Labels: book, gutenberg, harvey kurtzman, helvetica, ipad, jack davis
¶ 7:06 PM 0 comments
Monday, June 14, 2010
Wacom for Godot
Moebius (Jean Giraud) and others painting at Angouleme 2009. Click "moebius" in bottom labels for the Moebius slide show posted in January.
Moebius: Moebiusprod
Benjamin: Xiaopan
Vatine: Comixburo
Ji'An: Xiaopan
Bellamy: Comixburo
Yian Yi: Xiaopan
Pascal Sibertin: Pixeltv
Musique: Jean Christophe Maillard: Mbutu
Moebius (Jean Giraud) and others painting at Angouleme 2009. Click "moebius" in bottom labels for the Moebius slide show posted in January.
Moebius: Moebiusprod
Benjamin: Xiaopan
Vatine: Comixburo
Ji'An: Xiaopan
Bellamy: Comixburo
Yian Yi: Xiaopan
Pascal Sibertin: Pixeltv
Musique: Jean Christophe Maillard: Mbutu
Lt. Blueberry panel by Jean Giraud
Orange by Benjamin
Livre de la Jungle by Vatine
Labels: angouleme, benjamin, blueberry, jean giraud, moebius, pixeltv, vatine
¶ 12:19 AM 0 comments
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Death of Newspapers #15: Farewell, Annie
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine when you control click the heading above to listen to Little Orphan Annie.
Little Orphan Annie won't be singing 'Tomorrow' anymore, Tribune ends comic strip after 86 years
On NPR, Jay Maeder reflects on Little Orphan Annie and Harold Gray.
We wave goodbye to Little Orphan Annie. Today's strip is the last. Below is a look back to earlier times. My earliest memory of listening to the radio was hearing Little Orphan Annie. The radio series ended April 26, 1942, so that suggests to me that I was five years old when I heard it.
Orphan Annie organized her Junior Commandos to collect paper and scrap metal for the war effort, and the idea spread to schools. Every time I pulled my red wagon around the block to the collection truck, unloading newspapers, magazines and comic books, they punched my card. When I turned the card in at school, they gave me a cloth shoulder patch. I then had the official rank of Colonel.
Little Orphan Annie won't be singing 'Tomorrow' anymore, Tribune ends comic strip after 86 years
On NPR, Jay Maeder reflects on Little Orphan Annie and Harold Gray.
We wave goodbye to Little Orphan Annie. Today's strip is the last. Below is a look back to earlier times. My earliest memory of listening to the radio was hearing Little Orphan Annie. The radio series ended April 26, 1942, so that suggests to me that I was five years old when I heard it.
Orphan Annie organized her Junior Commandos to collect paper and scrap metal for the war effort, and the idea spread to schools. Every time I pulled my red wagon around the block to the collection truck, unloading newspapers, magazines and comic books, they punched my card. When I turned the card in at school, they gave me a cloth shoulder patch. I then had the official rank of Colonel.
On the 1938 Telematic Decoder, ROASS stands for Radio Orphan Annie's Secret Society.
First Little Orphan Annie Sunday page (November 2, 1924)
Labels: harold gray, little orphan annie
¶ 3:01 PM 0 comments
Friday, June 11, 2010
Heinlein's Future History
Control click heading to hear "Universe" (May 15, 1955).
This is Robert A. Heinlein's Future History chart, first published in the May 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction (along with "Universe"). It was later reprinted in the back pages of some of Heinlein's early 1950s Signet paperbacks. I used Photoshop to increase the size so it will be more readable when clicked. To read two of the Future History stories ("The Green Hills of Earth" and "The Menace from Earth"), go here.
This is Robert A. Heinlein's Future History chart, first published in the May 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction (along with "Universe"). It was later reprinted in the back pages of some of Heinlein's early 1950s Signet paperbacks. I used Photoshop to increase the size so it will be more readable when clicked. To read two of the Future History stories ("The Green Hills of Earth" and "The Menace from Earth"), go here.
Labels: astounding, baen, future history, heinlein, signet, universe
¶ 11:18 AM 4 comments
Freberg on Cavett
Stan Freberg, as I recall, was always quite funny on talk shows but did not appear often. Here he is 40 years ago on The Dick Cavett Show.
Stan Freberg, as I recall, was always quite funny on talk shows but did not appear often. Here he is 40 years ago on The Dick Cavett Show.
Labels: cavett, freberg, vietnam
¶ 4:48 AM 0 comments
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Someone asked me if I thought my story "Bugged!" had inspired the recent Orkin commercial. I doubt it, but the doorway shot in the commercial is almost identical to the last panel of "Bugged!" Although credited to Jack Younger, the pseudonym frequently used by Russ Jones, the script is entirely by me, and Alfredo Alcala did a remarkable job of illustrating the story exactly as I had envisioned it. I regarded it as a horror story, but Marvel put it in their humor title, Arrgh! (February, 1974).
Bills arrived in the name of the previous tenant. I didn't pay the bills in an effort to get rid of an unwanted roommate, thinking he would leave when the power was turned off. He didn't. There was a period when I would go downtown weekly to pick up an unemployment check during mid-morning. Trash bins were filled with newspapers discarded as everyone headed for offices. I would select every NY newspaper from the trash and then go to a coffee shop, deserted except for the busboy cleaning up after the morning crowd. One morning he stared at the stack of newspapers on the table and said, "This isn't a library."
In the late 1960s I lived on West 12th Street. The building's superintendent lived directly below me. Drugs and gambling debts prompted him to flee the city in the middle of the night, and soon cockroaches from that empty apartment began to crawl up one flight. One visitor commented that my place had more cockroaches than any New York apartment he had ever seen. Evidently some even traveled with me when I moved to Boston. The address on page seven is 18 Lee Street, roach-free and where I was living in Cambridge when I wrote the story.
Labels: alcala, arrgh, disch, ralph reese
¶ 9:15 AM 2 comments
