Odysseus is off to the Apple Store for a brain transplant today. Cards and letters intended for the Pope but now rendered moot will be welcomed.
Man, I am going to have a serious case of laptop withdrawal. Will I be able to resist the shiny, candy-colored Mac mini? I think so, but I will salivate.
ITEM.
Trying NetNewsWire for the first time. Not sold, very definitely not sold. Glad that I was able to export/import the blogroll from blogrolling.com. No beef with the app, it’s the way the content is sketchily available. I also miss the site formatting, although I clearly understand the advantages of leaving it out of the feeds.
ITEM.
Disk Tool reports the internal hardware testing status (“S.M.A.R.T status”: may the marketeer that came up with this abuse of the acronym be long between gigs) of the Powerbook internal HD to be “failing,” which made me realize that although I purchased backup software at Christmas, I have not yet implemented it. Nor have I defragged the drive. Nor have I, in fact, performed any sort of maintenace at all upon the drive.
ITEM.
My trusty DiskWarrior 3.x CD will not reboot many late-model Macs. An update is available but you must order a new CD from the manufacturer if your disk won’t boot the box. For $12.95, which, well, OK. And expect to wait up to three weeks. Grrr.
ITEM.
Very little makes me more angry than confronting a pissant electronics repair shopman noting that the television set I have lugged in is beyond the 90-day parts-and-labor warranty. In fact, it makes me so very angry that I did not realize while in the shop that the warranty was out by THREE DAYS on the day we brought it in, and furthermore, that the failure happened within the warranty period, and that we had we contacted the manufacturer at that time.
I haven’t decided if I am going to call them up and yell at them before announcing a William S. Burroughs inspired campaign of shame surveillance or if I’m going to call them up and try to learn more about what sort of shitful souls they possess before announcing my global campaign of utter revilement. It being Easter, perhaps egging would be a fruitful option to consider.
I downloaded and dropped gmail-lite on the server – and it was a seamless experience. All I had to do was point the browser at it.
Unfortunately, the page render on the PDA is a bit wide – it looks like it wants about 400px, and the screen is 320. But it’s a better experience than the Google-approved variant, which basically only disables javascript but retains top and side pagejunk that is problematic on a small screen.
Wait, I’m misremembering.
The apparently-new ‘plain HTML’ variant of official Gmail renders acceptably in the default Palm browser, Blazer. At first. Then, something untoward happens, and the page width exceeds the screen and the list of mail entries are vertically separated in a visually problematic manner.
The developer of gmail-lite notes that the application is also a probable violation of the Gmail TOS, which makes me nervous, as clearly Gmail is a monopoly application in my life now. Spammers, you have made Google into a king.
The upshot of this is I’m a bit wary of looking to use gmail-lite as a primary mobile interface into gmail.
I added a simple method of letting DJ Vicki speak a bit more randomly tonight.
The important bits are:
set A1 to some item of {“You’re listening to”, “What you hear playing is”, “Behind me you hear”}
set A2 to some item of {“by”, “lovingly performed by”, “laid to wax by”}
set B1 to some item of {“Before that, we heard”, “That was preceded by”, “Leading into that we heard”}
set B2 to some item of {“from”, “played by”, “recorded by”}
set C1 to some item of {“And starting off the set was”, “Three tracks ago, we heard”, “led off by”}
set C2 to some item of {“shouted into a wire recorder by”, “atrociously covered by”, “downsampled to mp3 from the original analog sixteen track by”}
Which should be more or less self-explanatory to any interested party.
I went to the Elysian for lunch on my way home from work, hoping to get some work done, and was puzzled by the repeated failure of my computer to connect to the wireless signal, which is clearly visible under the name “Elysian Free Wi-Fi.” The formerly open access point now required a password to join.
Inquiring with my server, I was informed that the network was “down indefinitely,” which seems odd given the visibility of the signal. Seems like this might be worth investigating further.
and one more try should do it.
I still need to code the image div, though, and the resize is fakied.
If not babies, then cats, of course.
Resize is yet unaccounted for.
It would also appear that preview may be an issue.
Huh. I actually posted a new entry from the road, but this one duplicated.
The Cartoonist passed on a plea the other day for someone to translate a few lines of dialog from Dutch to English in an old cartoon found tucked inside a book.
The original statement of curiosity originated here, with what was clearly a Dutch translation of a Little Nemo strip printed in black and white.
I recognized McCay’s hand and thought I had a copy of the original in one book or another and asked Ralf to put me in touch with Rob. We corresponded a bit, whereupon I learned that he was unfamiliar with Winsor McCay.
I dug out the book and copied the dialog, sending it to him with some links to McCay resources on the intarweb.
I assumed that the piece was a translation of the Little Nemo original; the images I saw looked familiar as part of a long sequence in which Flip, Nemo, and the Imp are wandering through Morpheus’ castle. I have several of the Fanagraphics reprints and thought I might be able to locate the piece.
I seem to recall something about early seventies bootleg Dutch reprints of Nemo preceding US reprints by a couple of years. I may have read that these reprints influenced Joost Swarte, who so clearly has looked at McCay (among other early cartoonists) pretty closely.
McCay also is widely credited as the inventor of animation, for his Gertie the Dinosaur films, and is remembered in the ongoing Kim Deitch Waldo epic as a frustrated old man, aggravated at the way the his inheritors had commercialized the form
Here’s a wikipedia article on Nemo.
The period in the strip which the images are drawn from is known as the “Befuddle Hall” sequence.
I have it in several republications. This transcription is taken from page 110 of “the Best of Little Nemo in Slumberland,” edited by Richard Marschall.
FRAME ONE
Nemo (on the left, in policeman’s cap):
I wish we had never come into this Befuddle Hall in the first place.
Flip (to right, in cap, appears bearded and with cigar):
That isn’t the question now, it’s how are we going to get out.
FRAME TWO
N: The whole affair seems to be sideways. It makes me dizzy.
F: There’s a hall running up and down and crossways! Don’t fall in, now, hear?
FRAME THREE
N: Let’s give ourselves up when we get out of here, eh, Flip?
F: Let’s get out first! Whoever named this Befuddle Hall knew his business!
FRAME FOUR
N (to the Imp): Come on! You slowpoke! Hurry up! Don’t be so slow!
F: I see daylight! Come on! Hurry up!
FRAME FIVE
N: We’ll hunt up the princess now, eh? And go back to the palace!
F: Yes! There’s the door to this befuddle place yonder!
FRAME SIX
I: Pug ug umble guck!
N (losing cap): I’m so glad we are going to get out of here!
F: I told you I’d find the way out, did I not, eh?
FRAME SEVEN
N: Yes! You did not! We are as bad off as ever!
F: Huh! This beats me! I’m certainly, um, twisted! the only thing we can do is go back again!
FRAME EIGHT
N: (having fallen out of bed and awakened): Huh! I was wondering why everything looked so sidewise like!
—
Every single installment of Little Nemo in Slumberland ends with Nemo awakening on the floor in a smaller frame. There is a wonderful sequence which starts with him in bed, and the bed grows legs and gallops over the city wildly until he awakens, having fallen out of bed.
The strip Rob found has an original publication date of 1908, and is drawn from a several-weeks sequence known as “Befuddle Hall.”
There was a very terrible animated film adaptation of the strip made in the 1990s. In the US in the seventies, a wonderful animated campaign for Levis’ pants made heavy and direct use of imagery and sequences originating in the strips, but wildly psychedelicized in the nineteen-seventies idiom.
Performing a google image search on the quoted term “little nemo” seems to yield a number of scans of the strip in color, as it was originally published. The strip was an anchor of the American sunday comics supplement and original rotgoravured pages are sought-after collectibles (I have never seen one in real life).
Anyway, there’s a ton of stuff out there of Nemo and on McCay. If you can find it, “Little Nemo 1905-1914” may contain every strip from the greatest period. This edition was published by the Evergreen Press (a subthing of Taschen), has an introductioun by Bill Blackbeard, and the ISBN is 3-8228-6300-9.
Rob also blogged our correspondence, upon which this post is based.
..ah, sweet relief! I can post from iPhoto again! ecto seems all happied up now too.
This is a shot of the late afternoon sun along the busway south of downtown taken with the cell. It has been manipulated.
Chris set me up the bomb, and now the remote posting widget is functional again!
Supposedly, mo:blog will allow me to post phone pix, too. But my pix dir is empty at the moment.
