fly your geek flag.

Without consulting Google or Wikipedia, tell us one of the claims to fame of Mr. Ron Obvious from Neaps End.

the hilarity of violence.

My brother gave Quinn a Tom & Jerry DVD for Christmas.  The other day, I sat down with him to watch it, and it's a gem.  It's a collection of all the original 1940s and 1950s Hanna/Barbera/Quimby cartoons, not the later (crummy) Gene Deitch or Chuck Jones ones.  These are the ones that won seven Academy Awards.

There's something utterly hilarious about the over-the-top cartoon violence mostly inflicted on hapless Tom.  I hadn't seen any of the Tom and Jerry cartoons in ages, and it occurred to me that the entire series, Academy Awards and all, is not only one of the best animation features of all time (if not the best), but also completely politically incorrect. 

What is it about the PC mindset that's so infuriating to me?  It's not the intentions of the people perpetuating it.  Well, maybe it is--these are the folks who preach that violence is always unacceptable under any circumstances, even in self-defense, and that's why the current generation needs to be shielded from the images of a cartoon cat getting its tail smashed in a waffle iron.

I watched a ton of violent cartoons as a kid.  I've watched poor Tom getting his butt handed to him by Jerry many times, and the more outrageously the manner of it, the funnier it was.   I've watched Elmer Fudd go full-auto on Bugs many times with that double-barreled shotgun of his, and I can't count the number of times I've laughed at Wile E. Coyote's Acme products backfiring on him.  (For someone who's never had a good experience with the product line, he was unreasonably brand-loyal.)

Yet even at six or eight or ten years of age, it never occurred to me to stick my brother's hand into a waffle iron, or throw him head-first into the open fridge.  Why is it that I was able to see the cartoon violence in context, and to correctly classify it as caricature, yet the current guardians of youth welfare think that the current generation of kids lacks that ability, and that only complete non-exposure will prevent them from playing Tom to their little baby sibling's Jerry?

Of course, now that I'm a bit older, I recognize a bit of a libertarian bent in the old cartoons.  It occurred to me that all the characters on the receiving end of the most gratuitous cartoon violence are almost always the ones who initiated force against their opponents.  Jerry wants to be left alone--it's only Tom's initial aggression that triggers the epic onslaught.  It's the same with Bugs Bunny, and the Road Runner--the good guys are always minding their own business until the bad guy comes around and tries to eat them, at which point the violence is not only hilarious, but completely justified as well.  There's a great educational message here: Don't give an attacker what he wants, give him a hammer in the face. 

Of course, that kind of message is equally unacceptable to the PC crowd, isn't it?

by popular request.

Alright, alright...enough with the snark. Here's something other than black-on-white.

Amber on green looks okay in a word processor, but not a web browser. The new background is supposed to be a parchment sort of color, and the ink is red instead of dark blue because it matches the color palette of the header image better.

Wow...I'm talking color palettes and color matching. That's just one step away from taking an interest in interior design, and watching Christopher Lowell, right?

Oh, and fflliberty...thanks for suggesting Open Office. I toyed with it a while back when it was just barely 2.0, but I didn't know you could change the text and background colors just like in WordPerfect Mac. I just downloaded the latest version, and it works like a charm. It's also file-compatible with MS Office, and has a nicer full-screen mode to boot. I think I'll use it for a few weeks and get comfortable with it, and if I don't find myself missing any Word features, then I may just toss Office 2007 off the hard drive.

question for fellow keyboard jockeys.

The office package on this PC is Office 2007, which is all shiny and glitzy.  It's very comprehensive, weighs in at 623MB on the hard drive, and sports a new look that makes its predecessors look like relics from the dark ages of computing.

However, there are two things it still cannot do.  The first is to remember its cursor position in a previously edited document.  When you open a document, it dumps you at the beginning of it by default, and you have to scroll down and insert the cursor in the proper position before you can start typing away.  That's a pretty minor grievance, but it's one of those little things that save five seconds every time I open a document.

The other thing is something that only one word processing program has ever managed to incorporate: different colors for text and page background.  I'm not talking about differently colored text that prints out as such, but rather text that only shows in your color of preference on screen, yet prints out as regular black-on-white text.

I don't like to look at black text on a white background on backlit screens.  It's like watching ants on a light bulb.  Word used to let you display white text on a blue background as an alternative, which is an improvement, but it's still not quite the way I want it, and they seem to have dropped that option in Word 2007 anyway.

On my old Macs, I run a 1990s-vintage word processing program called Corel WordPerfect 3.5.  It lets you configure any background color and any text color you'd like to see on the screen.  To my eyes, amber text on a dark green background looks most relaxing, and that's what I have set in WordPerfect.  That color scheme greatly reduces eye strain, and the ability of WordPerfect to let me make all documents appear in that fashion makes it my favorite word processor.  I even put up with having to export the document into HTML and then re-import and -format it into Word, which is a bit of a hassle. 

Why is it that no other word processor offers this simple feature?  Or do any of you know how to make Word do what the long-discontinued Mac version of WordPerfect delivered ten years ago already, and let me specify a text and background color of my choice?

(Yeah, you can change those system-wide through Display Properties > Appearance > Advanced, but then all document windows in all applications change color.)

the fun surprises of parenthood.

Quinn woke up this morning at 6AM, crying up a storm.  I went to check on him, and he had gotten sick from the seafood lasagna last night, vomiting all over his bed and the floor.

Then he got up to meet me at the door, covered in puke and all, wanting to be comforted.  (I challenge anyone to not give your kid a hug when he desperately wants one, even if he does have barf on his jammies.)

So, it was early shower and bubble bath time.  Now we might as well stay up, since his sheets are in the wash anyway.

crossing the border.

I drove my brother down to Boston yesterday for his return flight to Germany. It was kind of odd to come back to Boston after ten years--I didn't have any problem at all finding my way around, but some features were definitely not there in 1997. The Mystic River bridge was a new one to me, for example.

Apparently, MA passed some new and (more) draconian gun law that stipulates a mandatory year in jail for anyone caught with an unlicensed pistol there, loaded or unloaded, in your person or in the vehicle. "Unlicensed" means "not accompanied by both a Massachusetts FOID and a home state permit, and not locked in a triple-locked safe at least two zip codes away from its ammunition." They don't recognize NH Pistol Permits, of course.

This may seem a cowardly cop-out from the guy who once wrote an essay called "A Declaration of Civil Disobedience", but we can't currently afford for me to take an unpaid year-long hiatus, so I grudgingly disarmed before driving into MA.

I don't know that the justice system of a state deserves that kind of title when they are perfectly willing to take a year of someone's life for the offense of having the wrong piece of steel in our possession. Then again, all the states have even higher penalties for possessing the botanical equivalent of a bottle of vodka, so we're already a very long way down the slippery slope of victimless crime enforcement. Sadly enough, part of the reason for that is the cheerful consent of people who defend their gun rights tooth and nail, yet don't bat an eyelash when their neighbor gets hauled in and locked up for ten years because he grew some funny tobacco in his basement.

I hate to be a pessimist, but I look at the way things are going, and I have to concur with Tam. A storm is coming, and it's going to catch a lot of folks in the open.

catch of the day.

Cheddar Bunnies: They're To Die For!