Category: Doug Marlette

Another Busy Weekend


Here are my wife and daughter frolicking at a MidSummer’s gathering this past Saturday. On Sunday, it was on to the Hembeck/Moss residence. More on these in the coming days.
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Hey, Fred: NBC is rerunning that Jerry Lewis episode of Law & Order: SVU tonight at 10 pm EDT.
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I love those synchronistic stories: Fred Glavine used to tell his son Tom how his favorite pitcher, the great Boston/Milwaukee Braves left-handed pitcher Warren Spahn, would have handled a situation. Warren Spahn, who had 363 wins, finished his career with the New York Mets.
Now Tom Glavine, the great left-handed pitcher, long with the Atlanta Braves, won his 300th game Sunday night, playing for the New York Mets.
I also learned that Spahn, Glavine and Early Wynn are the only three pitchers to win 300 games without having a 20-win season.
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I don’t know if you bugged them about it, as I did, but Dead or Alive HAS added Doug Marlette to its list, only a couple weeks after the fact.
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I’ll probably be mentioning this at least once a month until February: the 7th Annual Underground Railroad Conference, Friday-Sunday, February 22-24, 2008, primarily at the College of St. Rose in Albany. Save the date.
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A couple suggested readings: ADD interviews James Howard Kunstler about the state of the nation, Kunstler’s writing career and other stuff. It’s long, but interesting, and an audio is available as well. A much shorter piece is the Brad Blog piece about the California Secretary of State Debra Bowen requiring paper ballots to be counted, “not invisible electronic bits and bites from computers run by private corporations using secret machines and secret software.”
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My sister Leslie flew in from San Diego last night; actually she arrived about 12:30 this morning and is still still asleep. I, on the other hand, am (allegedly) awake.
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Finally, a quiz I found on the site of Kelly Brown. FWIW, I think it’s incredibly accurate.

You Should Rule Saturn

Saturn is a mysterious planet that can rarely be seen with the naked eye.

You are perfect to rule Saturn because like its rings, you don’t always follow the rules of nature.
And like Saturn, to really be able to understand you, someone delve beyond your appearance.

You are not an easy person to befriend. However, once you enter a friendship, you’ll be a friend for life.
You think slowly but deeply. You only gain great understanding after a situation has past.


ROG

ROG

I AM the Iron Lady

Dennis, are you at the gin again?
Which Annoying B-list Celebrity Are You?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey.

It’s the librarian in me. Cartoonist Doug Marlette died recently, but he’s not showing up in Dead or Alive. The Pulitzer Prize winner was as least as significant as Kerwin Mathews, who “starred in the movie ‘The 7th Voyage of Sinbad’ and “had other swashbuckling film roles in the 1950s and 1960s”, who died on July 5; or Claudia Cohen, the “high-profile gossip reporter often seen on ‘Live with Regis & Kelly'”, who passed away on June 15. So, I’ve submitted Marlette’s name, so far unsuccessfully. Maybe if enough folks do it, they’ll change their minds. They’ve done it before with singer Ruth Brown, who they initially ignored.
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In this worrisome article, an argument against the (mere) censure of the President suggested by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is made, whereas this piece says that censure is an appropriate “senatorial compliment to the burgeoning movement for impeachment.” I would support the censure.
But the main thrust of the former article is that there will be some self-generated trigger to send a population already primed for an attack on the “homeland” to war: Chertoff’s “gut feeling”, followed by a more stark “national intelligence estimate” (NIE) of the situation, compared with 15 months ago, to show that the intelligence community was “correct”. So, say, San Francisco is secretly attacked by our own government and this will justify an attack on, e.g., Iran? Very paranoid, I hope.
In any case, Mark Evanier, who linked to this article nailed it: “If [the new NIE is] right, we’re in for more terrorist attacks. Isn’t it comforting to know that either that’s true or the entire U.S. intelligence community doesn’t know what they’re talking about?”
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A YouTube video called Led Zeppelin – Rip-off Artists. I like LZ, yet this, admittedly, is a hardly exhaustive examination of the appropriation of songs by the band.
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ADD linked to a wonderful reminiscence of the glory days of local TV news in Albany by former anchor Ed Dague (the best news anchor Albany, New York ever had). This is almost certainly true. He justified the link in his mostly comic-related blog because I have a comment.

Scott answers my questions about God and baseball.

I provided 5 questions to a bunch of folks. Here are the replies from ADD and Greg and Johnny B and the person who gave me questions in the first place, Jaq.

Also, I did a meme, and at my request, Mrs. Lefty and Edwin and Gordon responded to it.

Those relationships I get, people I mostly don’t know, but I’ve read their stuff, and they mine. But I was looking at my Technorati thingy, and found that I got picked up by a couple aggregators, including this one. The Internet continues to fascinate and confound me.

Oh, speaking of Gordon, something I did a while ago and forgot about:

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Spam is 70. Possibly literally.

ROG

ROG

V-A-C-A-TION

This is sad. I’ve realized that I had, again, forgotten the art of the vacation. As I’ve suggested, this has happened before.

First off, I need to define vacation. Generally speaking, visiting the relatives, as much as I love them, does NOT qualify as vacation. One exception: I went to visit my sister Leslie in the late 1980s in San Diego, and we went together to San Francisco.

When I was working at FantaCo, I didn’t go on vacation much, especially in the early years. I didn’t think I could afford to, either monetarily or workload-wise. I distinctly recall Tom pretty much insisting I take some time off, so I took five Wednesdays in a row, and went to a movie matinee almost each week.

I did make it up to Montreal in 1992, but that was a business trip. (Also, in 1991, but that’s another story.) Indeed, I HAVE gotten to go lots of places for work and had time to play.

In my current job, the first real vacation I took was in 1998. I took off two weeks, which I seriously doubt I’ve ever done before or since, again excluding family trips. The first week, I went to Detroit to visit a friend, and saw a Tigers game, Motown and Henry Ford mementos, etc. I had intended to spend the second week at home, catching up on my clutter, but ended up going to DC to try out for a game show.

In 1999, Carol and I did the honeymoon in Barbados, but then my wife was a poor college student, so I can’t recall going anywhere until our 2002 trip to Concord, NH, followed by our 2003 trip to Maine. Nothing since, though, which seems to have correlated with the addition to the household.

So, it was Christmas 2005 or was it Christmas 2004?- when when my parents-in-law offered us, and their other children as well, to make use of their timeshares, which are all over the country. But one has to book these things well in advance. My wife must have booked ours late last year for the last week in June. If she told me the dates, it must not have stuck in my mind, for in the beginning of the year, I scheduled my annual physical for the same week, which I subsequently had to postpone.

I think it’s because the description of the place sounded OK, but the notion of the vacation seemed rather fuzzy. “It’ll be a chance to get away.” Away from what? Work? I can take off days from work without going anywhere. It was a week when my wife was off from school before starting to work on summer school. I suppose if the literature for the place wasn’t filled with things such as “close to” all these other places, I might have been more excited. What inherent enjoyment will we find at the place, I was wanting to know? And lacking that, I was not very enthused about the trip.

This was going to go on, but:
Big storm in Albany on Monday evening – electricity in our house for over 11 hours (6:40 pm-6 am) + the hottest night in the year – electricity at Lydia’s day care on Tuesday + Roger watching Lydia = Story To Be Continued
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And speaking of sad, cartoonist Doug Marlette died in a car crash. He drew a great Reagan.

ROG

ROG
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