Decrepit Old Fool

Slight update to this post – I got to reading and thought this one was appropriate:

The rest of the original post is below the fold

This is the cover of a 1958 BC book which fell into my greedy hands in maybe 1964.  I remember giggling uncontrollably as I read this, the first of many Johnny Hart books that I would eventually own.  Was Hart really this brutishly misogynistic, or was it a parody of Jackie Gleason’s not-so-funny threats against Alice?  To put this stuff in context, go back and read the the contemporary 1950’s Mad magazine. 

Somehow I doubt that real cavemen enjoyed such dominance on this or any other basis.  But it wasn’t all domestic cruelty – there was plenty of time to explain celebrity culture:

Johnny wasn’t satisfied with his own more-insightful version of The Flintstones; he also created The Wizard Of Id, an equally funny (and occasionally clever) strip about a Medieval kingdom and its vertically (and ethically) challenged king. 

In his last decade Hart has been wrapped up in right-wing politics and religion, along with painfully ignorant hacks about science and evolution.  But over the years he’s given us a lot of laughs, and that’s a gift our world could use more of.  He literally died at his drawing board.  We should all be so lucky.

One of my least-favorite aspects of the comics pages is “fossil comics” that continue to run after the creator dies, crowding out promising new cartoonists.  This will certainly happen to BC and Wizard Of Id.  If they’re going to do that, I’d love to see them start over with his 1950’s stuff and hear the howls of protest from people who never realized how stereotypically crass and violent Hart could be. 

I just remembered I’ve featured Hart before a couple years ago

Next time you think you have problems, check out the contestants in this beauty contest described at The examining room of Dr. Charles. 

This afternoon at the gym I witnessed him doing an hour-long special report on his show, Hannity’s America, in which he examined “The Iranian Hostage Crisis” (by which he meant a dozen soldiers being held there for questioning, though they’d been released two days ago) from the perspective of “What would Ronald Reagan do?”  Oliver North was there to join him in all the important smug-looking and tough-talking.  For twenty straight minutes they played Reagan’s speeches about the original Iranian Hostage Crisis in ‘79 through ‘81.  (Hannity often plays Reagan speeches in their entirety)

The ironic part is that we know exactly what Reagan would do in a case like this, because we know what he did.  He traded arms for hostages under cover of the flag in which he had wrapped himself, and then blamed it on his subordinates.  (So much for “the buck stops here”)  It was a reprehensible thing to do, and if I were a hostage, I’d rather he drop a cruise missile on the building where I was being held than give weapons to the criminals holding me there. 

It does appear the sailors were roughly interrogated, though.  Well I’m glad we’d never do anything like that.  And I’m open to suggestions as to how any certainty can be had over whether the sailors were in Iranian or Iraqi waters. 

Lately I’ve sort of gotten hooked on Molecule of the day, an SB chemistry blog.  Today the author discusses melamine, a simple compound used in the manufacture of thermally stable plastics like Melmac™ or Bakelite™.  There are reports of it being used as a fertilizer, where it got into the wheat gluten manufacture process somehow and ended up causing kidney failure in pets.

Yesterday’s molecule was nitromethane, very cool.  But be sure to go back a couple days and read about tertiary butylhydroquinone, which is added to Chicken McNuggets™.  If the taste doesn’t make you think twice before ordering them, that molecule will.  Not that there’s any risk – McDonald’s uses ‘safe levels’…

Digital projectors are funny beasts.  They get a video signal from a computer or other device, and display it on a small LCD screen behind the lens.  The screen is illuminated by a ferocious gas bulb, xenon, I think, which projects the image on a screen.  In operation, they get hot and always have cooling fans, air filters that need to be cleaned, etc.

We had one in a classroom that kept dropping the image to garish colors and static.  It was an intermittent problem, the hardest to diagnose, but we had it nailed down to the projector itself and not anywhere on the signal path.  I took the projector down off the ceiling and ran it on my desk, reproducing the problem about 1 cycle out of 10.  Sanyo issued an RMA (Returned Materials Authorization) and I shipped it to them for warranty repair.

Three days later they called back, leaving a message on my desk phone.  They “ran it for two days” and “couldn’t find any problem” but it “needed to be cleaned” for which they wanted to charge us. (“cleaning” consists of blowing out the projector with compressed air, by the way)

The “we plugged it in and the problem didn’t happen” school of diagnostics only pisses me off.  Obviously they didn’t cycle it enough times to reproduce the problem.  Admittedly it can be time-consuming, and diagnostics can be difficult.  I used to inspect circuit boards with a magnifying glass to find evidence of component heating, or gently touch IC chips with my fingertips while the board was live (got a few blisters that way over the years but a really hot chip without a heat sink is indicative).  Sometimes I’d cool components with compressed air (in the old days, we used freon) to spot thermal intermittent faults. I’d look for wobbly fans, clogged air filters, pinched wires, delaminated circuit traces, leaky caps, or cracked solder joints.  Seldom had to go as far as signal-tracing.  Finding the problem does take time.

Disgusted, I didn’t return the call right away.  I waited two days and called back.  Much shuffling of papers and querying of co-workers ensued.

“Oh, they tested it for two more days, and the picture went all green and full of static.  They traced it down to a faulty IC.  We’ve repaired it and cleaned it under warranty, and it’s on its way.”

Yeah!

The Questionable Authority makes A sadly necessary introduction:

Mr. President, meet the Constitution. Constitution, I’d like to introduce you to President George W. Bush. It’s been a long six years since Mr. Bush took office, and it’s high time the two of you got to know each other…

wherein he relates the time his wife has been in a combat zone, and what it means to him. 

It is likely that as the president predicts, if the US pulls out of Iraq, there will be a disaster.  But let there be no illusions about the probability of a better outcome if we stay.  If only we could consider that equation before we pull the trigger on the next invasion.  We are currently in an almost irredeemable situation.  No amount of tough talk will make it better – that’s what got us there in the first place.  High time we started being suspicious of our own chest-thumping tendencies.  Past time, actually.

I’ve noticed more people lately watching TV on their computers, and it seems to work OK.  Not sure where I first saw this huge TV show site in the United Kingdom (somebody’ll fess up) but it’s really neato.  I have no idea how it’s legal, but there’s also movies and cartoons and other stuff that I don’t even know what the heck it is.

Great, just what I need, more entertainment.  Who was it who said we Americans were “entertaining ourselves to death”?  (clicks on another show, settles into watch…)

MrsDoF sent me a link to JibJab – “What we call the news”.

Oh, mercy, so true.  And so sad. (Yes, I remember real news on TV)

The Museum of Hoaxes presents: Top 100 April Fool’s Jokes of all time.  For some reason the site is a little busy and slow-loading today, but my favorite was the prankster who stacked up and ignited a pile of old tires in the crater of an extinct volcano…  And then of course there’s the spaghetti harvest and other classic hoaxes.

(From The Examining Room of Dr. Charles)

Then Deep Sea News reports on the hurricane-driven Mississippi squid incursion… an opportunity for fishermen in small boats on the great river, I would think.