Recent Comments

1. about 16 hours ago on Luann

   A figure-skater mom.

2. 2 days ago on Monty

   I had a friend who started working at the Student Counseling Center at Northern Michigan University in that state’s Upper Peninsula. He told me that he had a client whose father had actually been lost on the Edmund Fitzgerald and who freaked out every time she heard the song.

3. 2 days ago on Doonesbury

   “Let’s hope that the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution remains in force…”

   Apparently Trump has already announced the annulment of the birthright-citizenship portion of the 14th Amendment.

4. 2 days ago on Doonesbury

   “. . . he’ll replace them one by one by one. . .”

   Let us not forget that Trump minion tenure is measured in Scaramuccis of 11 days.

5. 4 days ago on Speed Bump

   “But for me, the most interesting part is where the main character Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) gets clues from a photo.”

   That was also the scene that did it for me. My memory is that the photo is not necessarily just paper. Deckard tells the photo-reader to zoom in here and there, and then something like “turn left,” revealing someone who has up to then been hidden in the field of the photo. That‘s when I said to myself, "Whoa, we’re not in Kansas any more."

   (Something similar was the appearance of the polar bear in Lost.)

6. 4 days ago on Speed Bump

   “But Blade Runner takes place in Los Angeles.”

   Yes, and Los Angeles is represented as Nuliajuk describes it: “. . . a city it’s constantly raining and it’s some anonymous Asian city.”

7. 4 days ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   “. . . if I somehow did it anyway, the university computer center would hire me to try to do it again.”

   I think that’s very true.

   (I was at Berkeley around 1966 when it got a CDC 6400. Cool machine, what would later be called Reduced Instruction Set Computer.)

8. 5 days ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   “. . . everyone hungered to waste a few days or weeks making the computer do stunts, . . .”

   My first year at college, in 1960, they had just installed an IBM 610—84 memory locations, programmed on either a plugboard or with punched tape, output device a pre-Selectric IBM electric typewriter. A number of us spent a lot of time on it, trying to program Newton’s Method for finding the roots of a polynomial (which we were just learning in freshman calculus), and in getting the computer to swear, with its very limited output capability.

   Later, as computers advanced along with us students, we discovered the efforts that had gone into making “Snoopy” posters (Aldrin on the moon was spectacular), and in getting the 1403 printer to play tunes.

9. 7 days ago on Doonesbury

   And Reality Winner got 63 months for the crime of making public the fact that Trump’s 2016 victory was at least partly the result of Russian assistance.

10. 15 days ago on Phoebe and Her Unicorn

    “It burns in Arizona! I don’t know how anyone can tolerate the heat!”

    You can get a t-shirt showing a skeleton leaning against a saguaro, saying, “But it’s a dry heat.”

    (My years in North Carolina proved to me that this is right—high-humidity heat is much worse.)