Of course, sitting here right now, I can think of several other parts of the body named for their shapes. There are tiny bones in our ears called the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup. There’s also the armpit, the arch of the foot, The ball of the foot, and, well, remove the word “foot” from that last one and make it plural.
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TiVo is a prime example of a company that created a transformative technology only to watch it get copied and have those copies transform an entire industry while they went out of business.
We had a TiVo, and much preferred it to any DVR any cable company offered. But then the cable companies changed to a transmission technology TiVo couldn’t support out of the box. Legally, the cable companies had to make an adapter available. They didn’t have to make the adapter easily to use, inexpensive, or reliable.
We called the cable company’s tech support many times over problems with that adaptor box, and their response was always some version of “Yeah, they do that. The best way to fix it is to rent one of our DVRs instead!”
There’s a reason that if you go to TiVo’s website, you’ll see they concentrate on streaming and over-the-air broadcasts these days.
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Missy and I took a gun safety course when we lived in Florida, because we lived in Florida.
They started us off with a trainer where you fired a fake gun at a big projection screen showing actors jump out from behind things menacingly. Going out for that gig must be an unpleasant conversation with your agent.
“We have a client who’s looking for performers with a certain ineffable something; an inherent shootability. Someone audiences take one look at and immediately want to kill. I think you’re perfect for it!”
Note from Missy: I remember that the instructors humored me when I wanted to try shooting the fake gun sideways just to see if it worked like in the movies, and were not particularly pleased that I was able to hit the target.
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I know someone who had a steady acting job (what’s sometimes called a “sit-down gig”) where their contract lapsed every year. The entire cast would be called, one at a time, into meetings with several members of upper management where they would be told whether or not they would be offered another year’s employment. The actors would then have to negotiate their salary for the coming year in that same meeting. They would go from worrying that they were about to be unemployed, to being grateful to have a job, to claiming that they weren’t willing to continue working there unless they got a raise within the span of one minute, while their bosses sat across a table, staring at them.
Which, now that I think of it, would be an amazing test of one’s acting abilities.
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I’m told there are those who only read the dialog in my comic and skip the narration. I understand this. Not everyone can quite handle my signature “Wall of Text” cartooning style. If you are in that category, I would point out that in this particular comic, panel 1 only makes sense if you read the narration and the dialog.
On a semi-related note, they’re about to release a 4K restoration of Flash Gordon.
I’m not sure that particular movie will be made more enjoyable by being able to see it more clearly.
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We did a lot of camping when I was a kid. Dad took camping rather seriously. He loved camping gear. We had two tents and a pickup with a canopy that we’d set up together, connected into a sort of small shanty town.
We only had one cot, on which Dad slept. Mom and the three of us boys got the tent floor. The line about Mom and Dad bickering us to sleep is not an exaggeration.
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Brace yourselves for a tepid, non-committal political statement.
The current presidential race seems to have boiled down to a man who never apologizes for anything he says, even when his statements are completely inaccurate and in some cases genuinely dangerous, versus a man who apologizes immediately when he says something wrong, which he does with alarming regularity.
If my description of either candidate has offended you, I do not apologize. I have honestly and diplomatically described the situation as I see it. I am tremendously sorry that this is the situation we are in. That’s not an apology; just, again, an honest description.
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In retrospect, I don’t know how well the Han Solo joke works. Of course, my first impulse when making a joke about having someone fire a laser at someone would be to make a Goldfinger joke, but it’s usually a good idea to ignore the first instinct as too predictable. Also, Goldfinger’s getting to be a really dated reference.
It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes before they stop bothering to make up new stories for James Bond movies and start remaking the classics. One might assume that they never will because they won’t think they can ever live up to the original classics. To anyone who thinks that, I suggest you re-watch the classics with a critical eye, rather than letting nostalgia color it for you.
A surprising amount of time in both the book and movie Goldfinger is spent cheating at either cards or golf.
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