(Roughly) Daily

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What with the economy going pear-shaped and all, it seems prudent to develop a second (or third) potential income stream…  just in case.

Readers are already armed with the Dictionary of Carny, Circus, Sideshow & Vaudeville Lingo…

Now with How Old Are You? readers can practice the skills they’ll need to pull down a packet on the Midway.

As we consider simply inventing a way out of this mess, we might plug in an extra lamp for Thomas Alva Edison, born on this date in 1847.  Edison may have been the greatest– or at least, the most productive– inventor in modern times. He earned patents for over a thousand inventions, some of which profoundly changed the trajectory of life in the Twentieth Century– e.g., the incandescent electric lamp, the phonograph, and the motion-picture projector.  He improved upon the original design of the stock ticker, the telegraph, and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone.  He created the world’s first industrial research laboratory.  And he was a pioneer in copyrighting films and in clustering patents into Trusts that then rigorously (some suggested, ruthlessly) enforced their intellectual property rights.

This lattermost achievement notwithstanding, Edison was not above a bit of piracy himself: in 1902, agents of Edison bribed a theater owner in London for a copy of “A Trip to the Moon” by Georges Méliès (known to film buffs and pre-blog readers of these missives). Edison then made hundreds of copies and showed them in New York City– for which Méliès received no compensation.  Méliès had been counting on recapturing the huge cost of his pioneering animation by showing it throughout the US…  a plan preempted by Edison.  Méliès was bankrupted.

The Wizard of Menlo Park

The 14th of February– under a week away– is to the poor members of the family Rosaceae (in particular the Rosoideae, the subfamily to which the flowers we know as roses, genus Rosa, belong) as Thanksgiving is to turkeys…  Many a lover scurries to have the blooms beheaded and delivered in dozens to his inamorata.

But how seldom is the full effect taken into account!  How rarely does the swain spare a thought for the display of the bouquet!

Thus, as a service to the masculine portion of his readership (and indirectly then, to the feminine contingent as well), your correspondent directs the reader’s attention to the fine work of Pierre Blanc; more specifically, to his offer of a selection of “Heavy Metal Vases.”

What girl friend could fail to gush, what wife wouldn’t be wowed at the receipt of her beloved’s floral tokens in a kick-ass vase like this:

(Readers will note that, while they are not inexpensive, all designs are also suitable as containers for final remains.)

For the complete selection, click here.

As we do our best to avoid the thorns, we might wish a breathy Happy Birthday to the romantic chanteuse Roberta Flack; she was born in Black Mountain, N.C. on this date in 1937…  Among her many hits:  “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”

Roberta Flack

Long-time (pre-blog) readers may remember an earlier post on Scott McCloud‘s extraordinary Understanding Comics— a book that, while it is in fact the canonical work on its stated subject, is also an invaluable guide to visual communications in general.

Now a fellow-traveller, long-time letterer Nate Piekos, has created “Comics Grammar and Tradition.”  Like Understanding Comics, it’s very specifically (and usefully) about the craft and conventions of displaying verbal information in strip and page panels.  But at the same time, also like UC, it’s a provocative– and amusing– look at how speech plays in a visual world.

DOUBLE DASH
There is no Em or En dash in comics. It’s always a double dash and it’s only used when a character’s speech is interrupted. The double dash and the ellipsis are often mistakenly thought to be interchangeable. That’s not the case in comics, even though it’s rife in comic scripts. For the record, there are only TWO dashes in a double dash. It sounds like common sense, but you’d be surprised.

As we send to India for ink, we might recall that on this date on 1895, Wiliam G. Morgan, the athletic director at the Holyoke (MA) YMCA, modified the German game Faustball to invent volleyball (though it was originally called “mintonette”; Alfred Hasted came up with the new name a year later).  Unbeknownst to Morgan, on exactly that same day, the very first intercollegiate basketball game was being played several states away:  the Minnesota State School of Agriculture beat the Porkers of Hamline College, 9-3.

The first “real” volleyball game was played in 1896 at Springfield College.

William G. Morgan

From Rat Bike (masquerading as “Microtoss”), a new simulation game…

Microtoss Train Spotting Simulator brings the power and excitement of one of the world’s most favorite hobbies to your PC, placing you in the role of a trainspotter with unprecedented realism, exciting real-world challenges, and the tools to recreate almost any trainspotting experience in the world.

Play it now!

As we clean our spectacles, we might we might recall that, on this date in 1967, Peter (Asher) and Gordon (Waller) ended the singing partnership that had given the globe “A World Without Love”…  thus laying the groundwork for “California rock” and for the subsequent success of James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, and others.  On leaving Peter and Gordon, Asher took over the A&R department at Apple (Records), where he signed the young James Taylor.  Taylor’s Apple debut bombed; but Asher so believed in the Tarheel’s potential that he resigned from Apple to become Taylor’s manager and producer– a role he played for several decades (during which time he also produced hit albums for Ronstadt, Raitt, and other acts as various as 10,000 Maniacs and Cher).

Peter and two of his wards in 1977

Long-time (pre-blog) readers may recall this beautiful example of misunderstood intentions:

“Jen,” who first circulated this product of Wal-Mart’s custom bakery, was subsequently inundated with other amusing examples…  enough others to occasion the founding of Cake Wrecks, a blog devoted to postings like “The Problem with Phone Orders“:

[answering phone] “Cakey Cake Bakery, Jill speaking! How can I help you?”

“Hi, I need to order a cake for my boss. We have a photo of him playing golf that we’d like to put on it, though – can you do that?”

“Of course! Just bring the photo in on a USB drive and we’ll print it out here.”

“Great, I’ll bring it by this afternoon.”

Later…

“Hey, Jill, what am I putting on this cake?”

“Oh, check the counter; I left the jump drive out for you there.”

[calling from the back room] “Really? This is what they want on the cake?”

“Yeah, the customer just brought it in.”

“Okey dokey!”

As we think twice about phoning it in, we might spare an optimistic thought for Sir Thomas “Man for All Seasons” More, born on this date in 1428.  More was the English Lord Chancellor who refused to recognize the ecclesiastical supremacy of Henry VIII– and was thus executed by Henry (and canonized by the Catholic Church) for his allegiance to the Pope.

But More was also the author of Utopia, the very avatar of positive thinking.  Indeed, as Oscar Wilde observed, “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at.”

Woodcut of Utopia by Ambrosius Holbein, for the 1518 edition
Read Utopia online here

Oh, and Happy Dickens’ Birthday!