Meaner, Still

The can of Campbell’s soup is in the sidebar, due to connection problems as well as projects that aren’t being dealt with as efficiently as I’d like. For those who’ve not seen it before, I should point out that the can is a mysterious “ancient Internet tradition” begun by Mark Evanier, as explained and in fact recently invoked by Evanier on his blog, News from ME, which if your interests are anything like mine offers a variety of fine, funny, and fascinating material by the bushel.

I hope to have a volley of posts up soon (yeah, When don’t I?), but meantime here’s another batch of Blogger word-verification definitions.

abendsl — n. #2 graphite stick, when you’re congested.

betoofsr — Father of Betoof Jr.

boophala — n. A shout-out from Ms. Betty.

Mini-Slog and Miscellany

I’m sitting outside in a lovely breeze, reminded of how wildly the weather
fluctuates this time of year — and how nice it is to sit outside in a lovely breeze.

The laptop says it’s 86° at nearly 6:30 p.m., which the stifling heat up in my bedroom reflects, but I only just realized that the storm windows probably aren’t coming down again. Hefting the air conditioner into place seems premature, though.

I’ve had a little more trouble restoring the blog after the other day’s sabotage than anticipated. Of course, I should’ve anticipated it — Blogger often doesn’t work as planned. The ability to export the entire code of your blog to your hard drive, however, makes for a decent bulwark against hackers and the service’s own glitches. Not long ago, I realized that I should be doing so regularly in addition to saving the HTML of individual posts. When my blog was vandalized Apr. 1st, the entire thing was deleted, but fortunately I’d saved the code to my laptop the night before. All the posts and even the comments were preserved; while the sidebar widgets unfortunately were not, they’re easy enough to set up. My biggest complaint by far is whatever bugs in Google
or Blogger security allowed this hackery to begin with — quite a concern since my password was total nonsense and changed frequently.

Dinner on ME

Once upon a time in 1994, at the Javits Center in New York City, back when the
World-Wide Web was but in its early days and videocassettes were the primary medium of personal viewing, I was lamenting a lack of access to the Hall of Justice.



I’d been active in the AOL chat rooms devoted to comics for a short while prior. Some acquaintances made there — as well as folks I knew in person from working at Fat Jack’s Comicrypt in Philadelphia and a couple of fellow contributors to the venerable amateur press association CAPA-Alpha — were trying to get me to join what they described as the more sophisticated Comics/Animation Forum on CompuServe. And so, during a comics convention being held at the aforementioned Javits, I tagged along to an informal Forum dinner during the convention with them.

The dinner was presided over by Mark Evanier [ev-uh-neer]. I would joke that Mark has forgotten more about comics and show-biz history than most people remember, but I’m not convinced that he forgets anything. If you have an interest in behind-the-scenes tales about Vegas, Broadway, or Hollywood — particularly the Golden Age of TV sitcoms, variety shows, talk shows, and voice-over work — you should be following his own blog: News from ME.