Dark Anniversary Earlier this week a murder-suicide incident that happened essentially next store came to mind, and upon looking back I saw the anniversary was to be on the 25th.
Posts
Still Alive Just Quiet An update -- not much more than a note. I haven't bothered to post anything in a while -- longer than it seems, as some of the more recent posts were set up to auto-publish most of a year earlier. There are others in the que for April and June, at least, and it's entirely possible I'll start finding a little time and interest for this again. Always an option. For the time being I'm boring myself preemptively with topics, stopping myself from holding forth on yet more crap. Otherwise, it's more of the usual: What's on my mind isn't for a public forum. Quick posts of notes, links, etc. have been happening over on Facebook , of all places, in recent months. Definitely nothing expansive, but that's not how it's designed. It's structured to be light. With posts limited to 420 characters (IIRC) the packets are light and conversational. Those for whom that's still prolix can move on to Twitter . (Where I've yet to se...
Final Season Of 'Lost' Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever Looking forward to the new season starting Groundhog Day, I couldn't resist posting this. As two of the people who came up to speed in time to watch the previous season -- I wanted to be reasonably sure there was an actual plan to conclude it in place before jumping on board -- we (more or less happily) missed out on most of the speculation the fans were going through week to week for the first few years of the show. Between tight reruns on (then) SciFi, a borrowed season three (thanks again, Pat and Abby) and buying season four when it hit, season five was the only one we had to wait each week for a new episode. Given how they'd end each episode with an effective hook, that can be a little aggravating. Still, we've generally stayed in the realm of light fans -- speculating here and there but otherwise just letting the show unfold.
One of those ideas that comes up from time to time has done so once again. In this case it's via a Michigan company that's looking to sell a $1.99 application that will install a character one can use as closing punctuation to mark a statement as being sarcastic . As noted, it's not a new idea. The irony mark , which is a horizontally flipped question mark,؟, goes back to the late 19th century and was intended to mark a statement as one that is to be understood on a second level, including irony and sarcasm. Much as people use emoticons in casual, written communication to at least give a clue to nuances filtered by a lack of intonation or facial expression, the idea here is to assist in conveying meaning. While the idea catches my interest, and we've definitely long since moved into an age where the limits of typography are essentially gone (I can easily remember when textbooks with elaborate mathematical expressions were inflated in cost on the basis of s...
Late of the 616: Mission Statement The idea behind a new series of pieces. I’ve been reading and collecting comics since roughly 1968, though comics had begun creeping in at least two years earlier, as my first comic was Fantastic Four #52, the debut of T’Challa, the Black Panther. Full of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby goodness, it was my introduction Marvel’s First Family as they and Johnny’s (the Human Torch) new college buddy Wyatt Wingfoot found themselves in a bizarre, high-tech jungle somewhere deep in Africa. Jack had a typical blast with the bizarre man-made terrain, and Stan & Jack accomplished in one issue what many of the current crop of writers would have taken at least two to do, and they did it better than any of those expanded versions would have likely been. Feel free to picture me shaking my fist at kids and telling them to get off my lawn. People of different ages will have different idyllic ages for their comics, naturally. I'm still often taken aback as I meet f...
At least I'll be able to watch a new Fringe tonight Okay, well, the Phillies were clearly out-gunned as some key players failed to perform in the World Series, and they needed at least a couple other players to peak to have a chance against as well-funded and talent-packed a team as the Yankees. It became increasingly clear that the Yankees were getting the Phillies players' numbers enough to connect hard with more than enough of the pitches and to neutralize some of their hitters enough of the time to make them fairly irrelevant. Once we hit game three, the first of the ones to be played back at home, I could see it wasn't going to go well. The loss in game four was for me the critical nail in the coffin as they came back to a point where they could have taken it... only to lose as another set of runs was scored against them. Lidge certainly didn't lose it all by himself, but he was a big part of it. While it was good to see them win game five, keeping their chances ...
Phillies Headed To World Series Again! They managed to pull it off in five play-off games. Tomorrow night the Dodgers may seal it for the American League, though I won't mind if the Angels take the night and force them to fight for it in one or two more games. (Not that I'm going to be watching those games, but anything to stress them and maybe get someone else on the D.L.) Now to see how out of control things get in Philly overnight. Wednesday morning they were pushing out the info that they'd greased the sign/light poles to prevent people from climbing them, and have remote-controlled cameras on each street corner. Then tomorrow we'll see what condition some of my co-workers are in. My lab assistant's down in there somewhere...