Paul Gadzikowski

• Fri, 17:42: Hero of Three Faces update: keyword confusion? https://t.co/90WLIF7nPT #class #bbcclass
• Fri, 18:36: The Ableist, Racist, Classist Underpinnings Of 'Laziness' - The Establishment - dr-archeville: Hello, I’m... https://t.co/x4ls2bvwgR
• Fri, 19:21: "every kind of crime has gone down in the past 20 years, even as video games became a massive mainstream..." https://t.co/PruMx2dfdZ
• Fri, 19:41: dragynfox: starrynight35: julialoveandlightt: kyraneko: anightvaleintern: yolandaash: teapotsahoy:... https://t.co/uSPE7ESm7l
• Fri, 20:22: silvercatmon: winterwombat: owlygem: cripplechronicles: captoring: every time you ridicule a nasty... https://t.co/Hd3Jm2tUEO
• Fri, 20:57: 📷 sexysylvestermccoy: Interview with the Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, from The Sunday Post iN10... https://t.co/ptxSTNLcv7
• Fri, 21:36: sonnetscrewdriver said: I'm gonna say it: I like 90's US Godzilla. Worth the price of admission for Jean... https://t.co/iGEUDpN2Y9
• Fri, 22:26: 📷 You laugh, but one time when I was a kid my family was on a tobaggan and I was in front and there was... https://t.co/PpS27KI6OC
• Fri, 23:21: Indigenous Lands Are Even More Critical to Preserving the Earth Than We Thought - thechanelmuse: Nearly... https://t.co/op59JUxkK6
• Fri, 23:26: I don’t struggle with autism. I struggle with neurotypicals.. https://t.co/Vy83qlFPGq
• Sat, 08:44: I hope no Sanders supporter who now refuses to vote for the lesser of “two evils” is someone who has ever... https://t.co/u045wHkPPq

In the summer of 1977 I had a summer job between my junior and senior years of high school at an outfit to which was outsourced the answering of phone calls resulting from the running of national tv ads for various products - you know the ones, "Call this 800 number and use your credit card!" We fielded calls for about thirty products, mostly for record albums but a few other things too, the kind that today are "Not available in stores!" (unless you wait two months and go to Walgreens). I'd worked there the previous summer too. There were often quiet spells, when the phones wouldn't be ringing. Until August 17th. Four of the albums we carried were Elvis Presley collections. Some callers ordered all four, even though the ad they'd seen was for only one.

I don't know whether I've ever forgiven society for allowing Elvis' death to so completely overshadow Groucho's the same month. I remember the obit in Newsweek (Elvis was the cover story), and I remember Mark Evanier's obituary some years later in whatever he had at the time that was passing for a pre-internet blog. Prolly the from-the-writer page of DNAgents? DNAgents was Evanier, wunnit? In part Evanier told the story of seeing Groucho in (I guess you could say) concert once during his last years, as on the record album An Evening with Groucho. Groucho wasn't having a good day when Evanier saw him, however - his mind deteriorated in his later years - and he was walked off stage and Duck Soup was shown instead.

I had An Evening with Groucho in the 70s (and still do), which is solely responsible for what Irving Berlin lyrics I know, as well as those of Lydia the Tatooed Lady (that album is also responsible for my being familiar with the name Marvin Hamlisch before it became mainstream with the Oscar success of The Sting). But the bit I seem to remember best is a poem Groucho himself wrote many, many years beforehand in order to cover a scene change during the brothers' vaudeville or Broadway years.

Did you ever sit and wonder as you walk along the Strand
That life's a bitter battle at the best?
And if you only knew him and would lend a helping hand
Then every man could meet the final test.

The world is but a stage, my friend, and life is but a game,
And how you play is all that matters in the end;
For, whether a man is right or wrong, a woman takes the blame,
And your mother is your dog's best friend.

I once asked daisy_knotwise whether rain puts humidity into the air or takes it out. I asked daisy_knotwise because she has a degree in meteorology, though unfortunately she discovered that such a thing wasn't very useful to anyone who didn't want to be a tv weatherperson. She answered my question in reasonable depth at reasonable length for the time and place I asked. Though at the time I genuinely listened to what she was saying, because I had been expecting (well, wanting) an either/or answer I only really retained that the answer was depends.

To qualify to tell me that I need to get a life, you must first spend the first ten years of your marriage outnumbered 3 to 1 in your own home by undiagnosed manic-depressives.

In Mr. Daly's A.P. English, senior year of high school, we were to pick a literary work from a provided list and do a report on it in front of the class. I don't recall whether it was compulsory or optional that we work in teams but I did my report with Noel Anderson. The list consisted exclusively or nearly so of works I knew nothing of, so for the vague Arthurian connection I chose Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and read that. Well, I say I read it... The edition I found had an introduction by Christopher Morley, who contended that no one but the proofreader has ever read all of Tristram Shandy, and I did not prove him wrong.

When Noel and I did our presentation I introduced it: "Most humor consists of a chain of logic with one bad link. People may think the form of humor consisting of all bad links but one originates with Woody Allen or the Marx Brothers, but it goes back at least as far as 1767. In order to incorporate this facet of Tristram Shandy into our presentation on it, my partner and I have commited our presentation outline to index cards and have painstakingly put them in order in a stack ..."

Meanwhile behind me Noel was shuffling the index cards.

theferrett wrote about using netspeak in spoken language. One of his commenters said: See, I don't generally differentiate between "online" life and "real" life. I replied:

I don't either, not in language usage. Now, I'll occasionally use netspeak on the net - for instance, lol (if I genuinely laughed out loud) - in the same way that I occasionally used, e.g., the word ( word that has never appeared in this journal before )

when I lived in a college dorm. But generally I'm one of the people who're told I talk like I write and vice versa.

Another commenter said, in a discussion of using MUD, MMORPG and chat emotes in spoken language, I never MMORPGed. I just say "sigh" a lot. I have no excuse at all. I replied,

I know someone who's been doing that since the 80s at least*. It comes from reading comics, I'm sure.

* I'm on your flist. You know who you are.

The year I was at Northwestern University (1978-79), the first quarter I had a comic strip appear in the university paper. It was called NUances because the editor and I couldn't think of something cleverer. The characters in it were M*A*S*H characters converted into college students, much the way AKOTAS converts King Arthur characters into, among others, M*A*S*H characters. NUances appeared alongside the works of Robert Leighton, S. A. King, and Tim Downs (he was syndicated, he wasn't a Northwestern student).

I drew thirteen or so strips at the beginning of the year and turned them in to the editor. Near the end of my first semester or the beginning of my second semester, I phoned the editor to ask when he was going to run more NUances. He said, "When are you going to bring me more?" I said, "You still have three from the first batch!"

What I should have realized (whether he actually said it or not [which I don't remember he did {though he should have}]) is he didn't like those last three and wasn't going to run them. But I didn't, and I never took him another batch because I was still waiting for him to use up the first one, and NUances never did appear in the Daily Northwestern again*.

* Or if it did I'd sure like to hear about it.

Since 1978, or maybe 1977, I've had an arrangement in my head of the Throne Room/End Title cut off the Star Wars [Episode IV] soundtrack album with the native melodies replaced by melodies from Camelot: Follow Me for Obi-Wan's theme/the awards presentation, the verse of Camelot for the Rebel Alliance fanfare, C'est Moi for Luke's theme, and Guenevere for Leia's theme. Perhaps one day, if I get famous before Peter Schickele dies ...

War's Low Rider will always make me think of a Nissan tv commercial from about ten years ago which used the song as its soundtrack. In it a man sleepwalking or hypnotized by his dog takes the dog for a ride in his truck at night. They pick up all the dog's friends while they're out, and at the end the man is left behind because there's no room left in the truck for him. The last shot was of the little old man who was, or was supposed to represent, Nissan's president assuring us, "Dogs love trucks!" scarfmom didn't like the ad. She said it was like a nightmare. Perhaps she even said it was like nightmares she's had. I said, "But you're supposed to identify with the dog, not the man."

Twice in my life now I've had someone drive up behind me on the road, ride on my bumper, honk at me, and pass me, because I was doing only the speed limit in the right lane.

The psychic from whom qtrhorserider and I took meditation classes in the early 90s, and the school of thought he came from, had two rules about it: don't give advice and don't predict the future. I think of that every time someone jokes, as for example when the Psychic Network went out of business, "He/she/they should've known that was going to happen."

The third or so episode of the third season of BVS Giles spends badgering Buffy about the precise events of the battle with Angelus in the previous season finale, on the excuse that there's a closure spell required to make certain the whole thing is really done with. In the end Buffy confesses that yes, indeed, Willow's spell had worked and Angel's soul had returned just after Angelus had opened the evil world-destroying portal, and to save the world Buffy had had to stab her One True Love and send him to Hell to plug the leak. Willow witnesses the confession and after Buffy leaves is all Oh poor Buffy what can I do to help with the closure spell?, and Giles says, "There is no spell." Well, I burst out laughing, and qtrhorserider said, "That's not funny!" But I wasn't laughing at the character, I was laughing at the writers.

Some of you are aware I have been known to write or draw erotic pornographic adult fanfiction. I can't speak for other guys', but the reason my sex fantasies tend to make the woman the aggressor is so there's no doubt of consensuality.

I was going to animate one of these as an exercise instead of just printing it, but I chickened out.

The turnover in Moebius Theatre must be a lot higher now than it was in my day. Every few years scarfboy ifoxg5 tells me this story:

"I was at a con, and there was this Moebius Theatre person getting all snobby with me because I larp and write fanfiction, where they produce original material like, for instance, Sveden in de Sky. I said, 'My parents wrote that.'"

I say, "You already told me this story."

He says, "It happened again!"

Edit Full disclosure probably requires notice that I am scarfboy's stepfather, and not an author of Sveden in de Sky.