Went to see the Barbie movie, so I could discuss it with my Daughter. Well, tell her what it really meant, I suppose, and correct any ideas she may have about it. (jk) Wife had a problem with the buttons on her recliner, which was adorable, and I had to show her how to operate the machinery. She started to lose interest around the Ken Patriarchy sequence, which is when I started to enjoy it more.
I'm not the target audience, obvs, but I found it amusing and not stupid. It could've been stupid.
I mention this only because I took a brief vacation from all the candy-colored enthusiasms to use the restroom, and found myself . . . here.
I wonder how many people at that bar order an Advocaat.
Well, here we are at the beginning of the last ration of summer. I'd have more to say but it has been a busy day and the thing I was going to write about below did not quite work out, inasmuch as I don't think it's of interest to anyone. So do me a favor, and go read my newspaper column: NO SUBSCRIPTION OR PAYWALL! Goose my numbers. Can't hurt.
I was going to write about something I was watching, of course, and find some greater reason for discussing it that would be apparent to all.
I cannot find that reason.
Moreover, I cannot find a good reason to talk about something that first came out in 2017, and has haunted me ever since to the point where I still get shivers & tingles at the recollection of certain sounds.
I swear, this sound has haunted me for five years.
Make that six.
And then there's this.
The first is the sounder for the production studio that did Twin Peaks: the Return, and the second is one of the leitmotifs that ran through the show, the big reverb-heavy guitar, often whammy-barred into something even more rueful. In the TP Return there was barely anything but a single chord, everything in the haunted American landscape reduced to a single potent sound.
But I'm not here to talk about that. Or the fact that there won't be a return to Twin Peaks, or how the show felt like the end of an entire American era, and actually was a (literally) fantastic set of bookends for the time from the end of the Cold War to the end of American institutional stability. It's this - and yes, spoiler - a moment the show spent 16 hours getting to, and as such just lifted the audience off their seats. When I say 16 hours, I mean it: this was what the audience had wanted from the opening minutes of the show, and not only didn't they get it, the refusal to give us what we wanted was intentional, infuriating, and agonizing. Will this be the week? No, this wasn't the week.
Until it was.
I'm thinking now, that was the last time most people heard the words as they were intended: dedication and duty.
And then that went horribly awry, and we were stranded in a familiar street, a dark place, lost and confused.
Two thumbs up! You'll laugh until you cry! I know, not much of an endorsement. A matter of taste. But again, that sound:
The ghost of a train, far away, caught by the wires on poles that run alongside the old highways with rusted signs that say the Lions once met here.
</pretension>
It's 1935.
A Flit ad by Helen Hokinson, the doyenne cartoonist.
Encouraged by an instructor she began submitting comic drawings to magazines, and became one of the first cartoonists to be published in The New Yorker, appearing in the magazine for the first time in the July 4, 1925 issue. She specialized in wealthy, plump, and ditsy society women and their foibles, referring to them as 'My Best Girls', those dowager denizens of woman's clubs, beauty parlors, art galleries, summer resorts and Lane Bryant; they were also popularly known as “Hokinson Women”.
According to James Thurber and Brendan Gill, Hokinson relied on the magazine's staff writers to provide captions for her cartoons, a common practice at The New Yorker in the Harold Ross era, until entering into a professional partnership with James Reid Parker in 1931.
“Flies, I move . . .” So they had Robert’s Rules of Order in the insect kingdom?
Everyone is unhappy; the meeting is a failure
You’d think closing the windows would have been obvious, in skeeter season, but it was hot. No AC, I guess. Also, no screens.
OBSERVE THEIR MASS DEATH
All of a sudden the event is militarized by the appearance of a living, breathing, advertising mascot:
Kills them all.
The cost is never small. Surely history has taught us this. Merrily off to war, lads, we'll be home by Boxing Day!
Hopkinson was on Flight 537.
Eastern Air Lines Flight 537, registration N88727, was a Douglas DC-4 aircraft en route from Boston, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C., via intermediate points on November 1, 1949. NX-26927 was a Lockheed P-38 Lightning being test-flown for acceptance by the government of Bolivia by Erick Rios Bridoux of the Bolivian Air Force. The two aircraft collided in mid-air at an altitude of 300 feet about half a mile southwest of the threshold of Runway 3 at Washington National Airport, killing all 55 aboard the DC-4 and seriously injuring the pilot of the P-38. At the time it was the deadliest airliner incident in United States history.
Here’s a conversation no one ever had.
Lest you think they’re telling you to use the laundry soap for dishes as well, Land Sakes no! Just telling you that the same luxurious ingredient that cuts grease in the sink cuts the grease on the clothes.
Did anyone think that? You can be perfectly nice and still rot out the pits of your blouse.
Oh, don’t they? Fool!
Is this a Timmons? I never remember the name of this artist, unless it’s Timmons.
A QUART A DAY
Good Lord, were people keeling over from BO-induced dehydration?
She seems to realize that she is an undesirable, though. She picks up on it, the way, oh, a nose pics up on BO.
Bathe, or face social ruin.
Well, it’s true. Not to cut to the chase, but it works, and in the last panel she has a man who is happy to be with her because there are no wavy lines coming off her underarms. Next year: washing clothes more frequently!
Now two ways to chip in!
That'll do. A generous portion of Comics Obscura today, since I wanted to do all the blow-ups of a big Sunday page. I'd be more miserly in handing them out, but I have 247 pages in the hopper, so we're good.
