A dream personified for both those who love seeing poetry in their statistics and those who love seeing the game played the right way, Stan Musial left this mortal coil on Jan. 19th at the age of 92.
Trading-card photo © 1953 Bowman Gum.
During a couple of my years away from the comics world and without an Internet connection, I was fortunate enough to live next to a library. I mostly read nonfiction and young-adult fantasy as neither my comprehension nor my retention were great (not that they’re where I’d like them to be now) — essentially, I needed books that weren’t too complex for me to follow as I read and/or to remember where things left off when I had to stop for a while. One area of interest into which I got to delve more deeply, being freed not by choice but by circumstance from having to stay current with the latest in my hobby-turned-profession, was baseball; I read up a little on the likes of Musial, Willie Mays, and Mickey Mantle.
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For some time now I’ve been planning to add a Wordle graphic to the blog. The one below, set in a font called Enamel Brush, has at this writing just been slipped into the sidebar between my general and exhaustive lists of post labels.
Wordle is an online application created by Jonathan Feinberg. You enter a bunch of text into its box and it produces a nifty “word cloud” out of that, customizable in typeface, color, and (to an extent) layout, with the size of each word or phrase based on the frequency with which it appears in the source.
The bad news is that it doesn’t work quite as easily as I thought it was supposed to work.
If you’ve ever left a comment on a blog, you may very well have come across “word” verification.
On blogs hosted by Blogger, as elsewhere, the author can select an option asking
people commenting to type a seemingly random bunch of letters to prove that they’re actual humans rather than automated envoys of mischief or malevolence. This used to take the form of a single nonsense string that almost always could be a real word, but wasn’t; then, last year, the hosting service joined the ranks of websites using heinously jumbled-up, visually skewed mixes of characters. Previously the nonsense “words” tended to have vowels and consonants placed in such an order that they were pronounceable, leading me to invent definitions for them based on actual words, morphemes, and phrases they suggested.
I took to sharing those definitions in comments, when they came readily to mind, then filing them away and periodically presenting batches here on my own blog. It was an endeavor not unlike Sniglets, which Rich Hall popularized on HBO’s Not Necessarily the News and in a series of books back in the ’80s, except in reverse. I’ve laid absolutely no claim to being either the first or the best at this, but I’ve been told I’m not bad at it either, and I’m genuinely sorry that the absence of that older format of word verification has led to a near-total shutdown in new definitions.
• cztory — [ztoh ree] n. A Slavic tale.
• ermend — [uhr mend; ee ahr mend] v. Fix someone up in the trauma center.
• archMC — [artch em see] n. Preeminent (or sly) rapper.
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I dragged some old stuff out of the basement during my sister’s visit with her kids last summer.
My nephew Ishmael (real name classified) had gotten a Batman figure for his birthday — I believe from the 2008 Dark Knight movie line, although I was happy to find one with a gray-&-black motif rather than the solid black seen in the films. He told me that he “really, really wished” for a Batmobile and he thought that we could find one. Aware that no Batmobile per se was in my stash but having discussed with my sister giving him my Kenner Star Wars figures, I decided to literally dust off a couple of great Mego items for him: the Batcave playset and what was officially titled the Mobile Bat Lab; I liked to call it the Batvan.
