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Comic and Rant for Tuesday, September 13, 2005
  Celebrity sightings...  Cows!  Cow!  Cow Water!
Strange Pictures from North of the Border |
Sorry about, yet again, missing an update, but I’ve been (slightly) swamped and (mostly) distracted by any number of things, including work and plumbing. Here’s the story of the latter: My bathtub faucet has been dripping for several weeks, but last week it finally got so bad that I couldn’t ignore it anymore. So I asked my landlord (I live on the second floor and attic of the house, they live on the first and cellar) to turn the water off. My plan was to go to State College (where I work), get the washers, go to work, fix the faucet when I got home (at around eleven o’clock at night), and have them turn the water back on the next day. Just one problem - there’s only one shut-off valve for the entire house. If my water’s off, so is theirs. It turns out, however, that there are a few other shut-off valves, so tried those, and it appears that those are only for my sinks - y’know, the things I can shut off just by opening the doors underneath them and turning two knobs? Of course this was discovered via trial and error, and with the knob and washers removed, the “error” part was ... how shall I put this?     In other news (but continuing the graphic theme that appears to have permeated this rant - be lucky I was too lazy to record an MP3 of myself making the “PFFFFWSSSSSSHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!” sound), I noticed this typographical error in last Wednesday’s Cuentos de la Frontera (I’d normally just link to the comic, but it’s a pay site, and only the most recent update is free - I think my use of the image counts as “brief passages in context of review”).  Now I don’t like misspellings in the things I read, and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why I tended to get such low grades in Reading and English at school despite the fact that my spelling, grammar, and vocabulary tend to be much better than those of the people who did well in those classes, but I’d best get to the point before I go off on a rant about the inadequacies of the American educational system. My point is, I can forgive misspellings in hand lettered daily web comics like Phil Likes Tacos or The Devil’s Panties (especially since Jennie Breeden has a learning disability - I suppose it would be in bad taste to point out that she could have spell-checked this, huh?) - in fact, it sometimes even adds to the charm, like Tang’s occasional grammatical errors - but if you’re doing a machine lettered comic that only comes out twice a week and people are paying to see it, well, you should spell-check your text before pasting it into the artwork (and yes, I know Photoshop doesn’t have spell checking, or at least the older versions I use don’t, but you can type your text into a word processing program, spell check it, then paste it into Photoshop). Forget the documentary, I have a better reason to criticize Cat Garza! My, that one sentence was long... Actually, before I drop this subject, I also want to criticize the spelling and, especially the punctuation of many of the comics on the Stone Of Adventure site. Again, it’s machine lettered, far from daily, and I’m sure it has pretensions of professionalism. I’d also mention how the pages, which are clearly intended for print, sometimes don’t work well on a computer screen because sometimes you’ll read dialogue at the top of the second and third panels only to find out there’s still more dialogue at the bottom of panel one that you were supposed to read first, but that might lead to ridiculously long hyperlinks or run-on sentences or something. Well, that’s enough for now, I guess. I guess I should get to sleep so I can get up early enough tomorrow (Monday) to actually do a comic ... Oh, wait, one last thing: Violet from Peanuts has a last name! In the April 4, 1953 strip her last name was revealed to be “Gray.” I’d scan the panel, but the copyright notice clearly states that “Permission to quote or reproduce for reviews and notices must be obtained from the respective copyright holders,” so far be it from me to risk the wrath of United. I will tell you it’s on Page 40. I don’t believe Linus and Lucy’s last name had been revealed yet, so could it be that Schulz was planning on naming all the characters after colors, and then changed his mind? |
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