Movies

Rattle of a Simple Man (1964) Muriel Box's last film as a director, written by Charles Dyer from his stage play. Harry H. Corbett is a shy bumbler down from Manchester to see the football match and his mates goad him into going home with a b-girl, played by Diane Cilento. It is very much a two-person one-room stage play with some framing sequences tacked on for cinematic purposes, and runs you through much the usual flip-flops and turn-arounds you get when you stick two dissimilar strangers in a situation of forced intimacy. It develops both characters sympathetically and intelligently, and is overall a good experience. If you want to see one of these, that doesn't get too harsh or ugly as they sometimes do, this is an okay one to see. 6/10

Movies

I use the term "Exploding Robot Movie" to denote a particularly crappy type of modern cinema of excess. Since a new Exploding Robot Movie was just released, I have been seeing a lot of references to the previous one, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), specifically references to how bad it was, so bad that Attention Deficit Director Michael Bay felt he had to pick it out of his so far mercifully short career to apologize for. That sort of thing is a red flag for me, of the bull-baiting variety, so despite my vow after enduring The Island that I would avoid his movies (I almost said films) in the future I buckled down and sat through it. If he really cared about our feelings he would have retired. I want to tie that guy in a swivel chair and spin him around in it for two and a half hours, banging trash can lids together and yelling HOW DO YOU LIKE IT, HUH?? Thank god they put ten minutes of credits at the end of movies nowadays, it is like getting out early. Not even rating this - the nearly tolerable first half was undermined by the nearly unendurable second half making it all a net loss. And yet, it was not as stupid as Steelyard Blues.

Movies

I can't think of a movie I have seen lately that was as stupid as Steelyard Blues (1973), and I tend to seek out stupid movies. A movie like Private Snuffy Smith or Queen Kong is lousy, horrible and half-assed in any number of ways, but they all seem excusable compared to the intense stupidity of Steelyard Blues. Donald Sutherland is a guy who is supposed to be cool because he is such a jerk and loser, and is defacto head of a bunch of other unlovable losers who can't play by society's rules and they band together to fix up an old seaplane to fly off to "a place where there ain't no jails." I have never been drunk, stoned and brain damaged enough all at one time to think this movie is not the stupidest thing I can remember seeing since I don't know when. I guess it is probably on permanent rotation in the DVD player at any number of biker clubhouses and other establishments where gather folks who dream of facing down a hundred flashing police cars and going out in a blaze of glory and I thank god I never go places like that or know that sort of people. I got this with some early Jane Fonda movies and she is the only woman in the movie, so of course she is a hundred dollar hooker. Stupid. The only redeeming feature was getting to see Howard Hesseman as the strait-laced brother beating the crap out of Sutherland. I wanted to see all those jerks get beat up the whole time. 2/10

Yeah, that's right. STRAIT laced.

PORCH PROJECT - phase one complete

Today I finished the major construction. All the most expensive and arduous work is done. Below you see how I used shims to space the boards. The shim is about 1/4 inch thick at the wide end. When I got past the halfway point on the deck I doublechecked my measurements to make sure things would fit roughly as they were supposed to, then I went to the west end and cut the end boards to fit around the pillar, as I did on the east end. I cut the remaining boards to length and put them roughly in place so I could fiddle with the placement to see that the spacing was fairly even. The spacing is a bit wider on the west half of the porch, but not so anyone would notice it. It falls within my 90% success rate requirement.

Most of the work was pretty repetitive; cutting boards to length, setting them in place, pre-drilling and driving the screws. I have foam knee-pads from when I re-built the downstairs bathroom and did the tile in the shower, and they were a good thing to have for this. The next goal is to design and build steps for the west end of the porch for direct access from the car. After that all the work will be cosmetic, re-using as much of the old wood as I can to make it resemble its original form, with certain needed improvements. I worked over four hours - more if you count going to buy the lumber, and I am tired. It was also quite a bit warmer than I like it to be for this kind of work. Donna doesn't know how hard it is for me to act nice and friendly when I am this tired, but I think I fooled her.

Movies

The British director Muriel Box recently came to my attention via her film Simon and Laura (1955), a light drama/heavy comedy about a theatrical couple forced to conceal their failure in marriage when they take the only work they can get - playing themselves on a daily television show. I was more interested in the BBC studio scenes than the story or characters, as they are the sort of charmingly hateful people I prefer to see cruelly skewered and brought low, (like Alan Bates in Butley), not glamourized and reconciled as it appeared was happening here, so I quit about halfway through. The production itself had many superior qualities so when I had a chance to see Box's 1957 The Passionate Stranger, a.k.a. Novel Affair, I made it a Family Movie Night feature. It is the story of a writer (Margaret Leighton) who uses the people around her as inspiration for her newest novel, with alarming consequences when her Italian chauffeur reads the manuscript and takes it rather too seriously. It's not a great movie - Donna and I both felt it lost a lot of pep midway and wound down a bit uneventfully, but it was a really good try which had a number of interesting features. I was especially impressed with the "gimmick" of the film, with the "reality" framing sequence being in monochrome and the extended fantasy, when the chauffeur is reading the manuscript, filmed in color. The entire fantasy sequence, which comprises half the film, was laughably melodramatic and intentionally so, aided to a great degree by the excessive gowns by Norman Hartnell with improbably vast stiff shawl collars and iconically '50s bell-shaped skirts and floral prints. Also deserving of recognition was the performance of Patricia Dainton as the maid; in the fantasy harsh, sharp-edged and painted; in the reality sweet, fragile and delicately appealing, by far the most sympathetic character in the film. This seems to me to point up the slightly unbalanced feel of the story. I also felt that in the end certain sequences needed for dramatic balance never materialized or took place off-camera. For overall quality I rate The Passionate Stranger 7/10, good but not great, and am looking out for more of Muriel Box. I thank you.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

"I don't have any ideas for a webcomic" is now officially a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC recognized webcomic genre. The creator of Books dont work here addresses the problem of not having any ideas for a webcomic by making the webcomic be about not having any ideas for a webcomic and nothing else.

[As of Sept 28 2011, the comics have been removed. :( ]

In contrast, The Phantoms Pyre: The Servant of Cerberus may be loaded with ideas, enough to make an extended multi-part space adventure epic. May be - it is hard to tell.

Last, but in no particular order of quality, Basement Show Girls differs from the others in not lacking an apostrophe.

I don't even have enough ideas for a vague rambling paragraph on how I don't have any ideas today so read 'em and weep. For humanity.

PORCH PROJECT - basic functionality restored

Today the first batch of surface boards went on. Here is another useful feature of the sawhorses. After I marked all these boards for cutting, I stowed them in the sawhorses so I was able to pull them out without having to go walk over and pick them up somewhere. That saw surprised me when I unplugged it and the round grounding prong from the plug just fell out. The other prongs are kind of bent up from being pulled this way and that over the years so I will see if I can find a replacement plug for it next time I go to Home Depot. That transparent face guard lying on the ground by the front sawhorse, a gift from my tool patron Barron, is what I wear when I saw. I always work with earplugs in whether I am using noisy machines or not.

The first board had to be cut to fit around the corner post. The first one I did was a little better than this but I realized I had cut it so the bad side of the board was up, with tiny writing dot-printed on it at a couple of spots and I knew if that was the first thing I saw every time I stepped on the porch I would not like it. If you peer closely you may see down in the crack that I put two long screws into the side of the end section in the hope that it would decrease the risk that it would split off some day.

I used plastic shims as spacers to keep the boards roughly the same distance apart, and marked the spots for the screws before pre-drilling so it is pretty consistent in appearance. I realized after the first board was on I probably should have gotten the special deck screws that are the same color as the boards instead of the grey outdoor kind, but what the hell. Nobody will notice but me. I am not 100% satisfied with that step, but I am going to go with it. I do like the fact that it is shorter than the width of the concrete step so you can step up on it from both the front and side. The far end of the step, by the door, has a piece of pressure treated 2x4 under it, because the porch has a two inch slope, good design work on the part of the original builder, meant to let the rain roll off away from the house. With gaps between the boards that is fairly moot now, but not much rain gets in there any way. Just don't drop your pocket change because I am the guy who will have to crawl in there and get it.
The front door is back in use again. I used up all the boards I had, and tomorrow I need to get caught up on some other work - bake bread, grind peanut butter, sharpen the push mower, make limeade, etc. I am pretty sore and tired just from toting, hammering, and generally working for hours and then riding my bike to the health club. I just flopped down in the sauna for a while, then bathed and shaved. That's what my life is like.

PORCH PROJECT - frame up

I borrowed this gigantic saw from Barron, and it really pays to have friends who can loan you good tools. I got rid of my crappy old circular saw because it isn't supposed to cause clouds of smoke to spew from the burned black ends of the wood you are trying to cut. I didn't know what the problem was so I stuck it out front a few weeks ago, with a warning label on it, and it went away. I set the sawhorses up inside the porch thinking it would be more convenient but that was kind of stupid. What wasn't stupid was screwing a couple of blocks onto the sawhorses to keep the boards from moving around - that worked really well.

I got the frame put together in spite of the fact that I dropped everything it was possible to drop as many times as it was possible to drop it. Because of the pillar at the center it was necessary to make two frames with a space between them. Anything that rests on concrete is held in place with screws, and anything not resting on concrete is secured with nailed brackets. Vertical load is the main concern - the frame has to distribute the weight, like a cat burglar wearing skis because the floor will set off the alarm if anything over ten pounds is placed on it. That's how you learn things about life - from heist movies. The side-to-side stringers are roughly two feet apart, and the surface boards will be going across them from front to back. It should distribute the load well enough that if I ever had any three hundred pound friends they could stand on one leg on any board and not go crashing through. All my six hundred pound friends would have to stay on the porch because I don't know how much the living room floor could take.
The toughest thing about this for me is buying things. I agonize over whether a three dollar piece of cheese is an extravagant luxury, so spending over a hundred dollars on a carload of lumber is really difficult. I have to keep reminding myself that this is something we will be using every day for as long as we are in this house, and doing it right the first time is cheaper than trying to fix it later. I try to get maximum value for what I spend so making this porch last as long as possible makes its per day cost a matter of pennies.

FATHER'S DAY!!!

If the State says there are five fingers, there are five.

We watched the 1956 Edmond O'Brien version of 1984 last night, and I was reminded of a time in my childhood when my father didn't think I was sufficiently cowed into submission, so he called me into the center of the living room for a mind control session. He pointed to the rug and asked me what color it was. I said green. He said, "If I say that rug is blue, then it is blue. Now what color is it?" Because he was a huge intimidating bully and I was a fragile bespectacled child of course I was forced to lie to avoid his ever-simmering wrath. Just like the scene in which Winston Smith is tortured into saying that four fingers are five. One thing I regret about my relationship with my father is that I didn't realize at the time that his bailing out on our family to go have hot sex with another man's wife was the best thing he could have done for us. I really regret all the sorrow I felt over that, and I still feel embarrassed at the way I kept trying to maintain a positive image of him because you are supposed to love your father. I only wish he had left us sooner, before he had ruined my life.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Helpful readers have kindly pointed out that some of my choices for SUNDAY WEBCOMIC are not as totally mindblowing as the most totally mindblowing SUNDAY WEBCOMICs ever. I am glad they noticed that. It means they are paying attention. I welcome all comments, contributions, analysis and suggestions for webcomics to look at. It's hard to believe, I know, but I don't actually know everything and I am counting on you, dear readers, to aid in my education.

Not every SUNDAY WEBCOMIC is going to be so amazingly great and unique that you can't believe it even exists. Sometimes they are just going to be an incredibly bad idea, of the sort that seems hilarious when slumped stoned on a couch and you think it would be great if somebody actually did it, but then if someone really does it, it seems like not such a good idea after all. Like Hipster Hitler. The funny thing about Hipster Hitler is that it is mocking hipsters but you have to BE a hipster to even get why it is a mockery. The only reason I can recognize that some of those references are intended as jokes is because I know people who are somewhat hipper than me.

It wasn't too many years ago that people who got the cartooning bug had to draw their comics on paper and carry them around physically to show their friends, or haunt the copy shop and post office to distribute their works to the world. Some people would realize after a few pages they just didn't have it in them to be cartoonists, and their notebook mouldered away in a corner and was eventually discarded. Some kept cranking out volumes of marginally readable work documenting their cryptic obsessions, until their archive comprised a three inch section in some other nut's filing cabinet. I have seen and known both kinds in person. The great thing about the World Wide Web is that the former type, who would otherwise have languished unknown, have their works temporarily viewable by all the world if anyone cares to seek them out. Take a look at this one - a guy who decided he should do a webcomic, but he didn't have any ideas for a webcomic so the first strip is about how he doesn't have any ideas for a webcomic. What I think is great about this is that he never does get any ideas, but his comments on each strip get longer and more detailed, explaining every joke and reference and detailing his artistic technique, before the strip finally peters out. Contrast its ignominious conclusion with the final page of Different Kind of Mustard. In a rare moment of clarity and self-realization the cartoonist ends his strip with an apology to the world. Bravo!

Taking all that into consideration, what does CODE NAME: U-FORCE have to do with anything? I don't know. It's an old fashioned 80's indy comic style costumed hero comic drawn in pencil 1991 and stuck into the web now in the 21st century. I just wanted you to see it.

BOSTON BLACKIE'S TV CAR - mystery solved!

REVEALED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME,

THE MYSTERY OF BOSTON BLACKIE'S CAR!!

I have a photographic memory for some things, shapes and colors and design details of various kinds, especially when it comes to certain periods of automotive design. It's very rare for me to say "what the hell is THAT thing" when I see a car from the '40s or '50s but that's exactly what I said when I watched an episode of the Boston Blackie TV show from the Internet Archive. I started googling around and found a few other people were saying the same thing and nobody was able to tell them what the hell that thing was. One person suggested this 49 Crosley which is believed to have been created for the show. My friend Jim located this purported 1940 Willys which also claims a Boston Blackie connection, but considering the age of the vehicle it seems more likely to have been for one of the movies. It's nearly impossible to get good pictures from the small files available from the Archive, but one of my fellow wonderers posted these two shots which I enlarged and enhanced as well as I could.


They didn't give the car many glamor shots and since it is all black, most of the detail is sort of inferred from seeing it move by. It has "suicide" doors - hinged at the back, and an inelegant slab-sided design which cause some to suggest it was a Nash. The problem with all these suggestions is the Crosley, Willys and Nash are very high in the middle, and the first two are cut down at the doors where this thing is flat across the top side to side and front to back. It seems to be the sort of design one might sketch on a napkin, not the work of a professional designer, and that led me to think of some of the oddball American marques of the era. The first one that came to mind that had that slab-sided inelegant design was the MUNTZ JET.

The split windshield was replaced with a single curved windshield with no frame across the top. They added three fins to the back and a goofy nose to the front, and put Dodge or Plymouth front bumpers on front and back, discarding the distinctive tubular frame bumpers which give the Muntz a lot of its style. The only thing I can't identify with certainty is the grill, which is unusual for that period. So there you have it. Thus ends the Mystery of Boston Blackie's TV Car.

ADDENDUM: The episode Inside Crime features a chase sequence beginning at 20:00 which provides some good views of the car in action. It appears that the tail end is considerably different from the blunt Muntz tail, and sloped down strongly between the three tail fins. Blackie's car also has skirts on the front wheelwells as well as the rear, giving it a real tublike appearance. Still the overall form and distinctive front end indicate the car was based on a Muntz Jet.

ADDENDUM, March 2014: After years of dubious and blatantly mistaken responses I am gratified to have gotten two very helpful comments pointing to Spohn Coachworks.  If you check their site you will see they are responsible for some fabulous custom oddities.  Though none of the pictures on the site are the BBCar itself, there is a similarity to the 1952 Spohn Palos.  I still insist it is fundamentally a crudely customized Muntz.

PORCH PROJECT - lag screws and the sudden return of doomaflotchie

Yesterday I pulled a 4'x3' piece of heavy plywood out of the basement and cut it into 9"x4' strips with the electric sabre saw. I pulled off the pieces of siding I had temporarily placed over the opening to the basement, and attached the plywood to the ends of the floor joists and the sill beam on which they rest. The sill beam is a rough old 6" beam resting on the top of the foundation. I marked the positions of the joists on the beam before I put the plywood on. Then I pried up the lower edge of the siding and pulled out the nails so I could slip pieces of tar paper up underneath to provide some degree of waterproofing, then stapled the tar paper to the plywood and marked the position of the floor joists in chalk, in case I needed to screw anything into them in the near future.
Today's job was to attach two 8 foot long pieces of pressure treated 2x6 to the sill beam. I rested the outside ends on the concrete foundation and, using a level for levelness, attached the other ends to the plywood under the tar paper using one screw for each 2x6. That was just to hold them in place. I marked positions every two feet to drill holes for the lag screws so they would enter the sill beam about an inch down from the top. This was all done blind, calculating the height of the joists to find the top of the beam. Well it makes sense to me, and it worked. Below you see the lag screw and the tools used to screw them in. Why they call them lag screws I don't know. I pre-drilled with a 1/8th inch bit, which I always do before using a large bit, so it keeps it from going crazy and wandering around. I drilled through the 2x6 with a bit almost as large as the diameter of the screw, then through the beam with a smaller foot long bit. The idea was for it to be fairly easy to get the screw through the 2x6 but be pretty tight in the sill beam. I was able to go inside and see where the bit came through to make sure my plan was working, and it did. I got the screws most of the way in with the ratchet, then used that fine old crescent wrench and a lot of body weight to tighten the last two inches.
Here it is. I really feel like I got my exercise today because getting those eight screws in was a lot of work and I had to rest a while after each one.
As I was cleaning up afterward, putting the tools in the bucket or something, feeling good and tired, my mind suddenly said to me, for no apparent reason and apropos to nothing I was thinking or doing, the word doomaflotchie. I had not thought or heard the word doomaflotchie in so long that I don't even know how long it was. As I recall it, doomaflotchie came from Grandma DeVries, as part of my Midwestern (Chicago) Euro-American heritage. Or maybe it didn't but that is how it seems to me. It is the equivalent of thingumabob or dealybobber, but it has an exotic elegance those rather silly terms lack. Doomaflotchie.

PORCH PROJECT - complete disassembly

Yesterday I took the rest of the porch to pieces. Most of the decking was secured only by a single nail up next to the house wall so it came off easily until I got to the section by the door, which was newer wood - not tongue-in-groove decking but plain pine - and nailed excessively. This was the rottenest wood, right by the front door, because it was the wrong kind of wood for the job. Look how the cinder blocks hang over the inside edge. Some of them were actually teetering on the uneven concrete. Also note how the end of the long stringer at the bottom right is sitting on a little block of wood. Most of the older boards were not nailed to that stringer at all. I suspect those parts were re-used from the original porch when it was stupidly rebuilt.

I found to my surprise that 16 foot long rough cut 2x4 you see going all the way across the front of the house at the bottom of the yellow siding was nailed to the ends of the joists for the floor of the house and when removed it gave access directly to the basement. The piece of wood crossing the space from left to right was the center support for the stringers that ran the width of the porch.
A shot of the other end of the intricate support system. I admit I knocked that block askew a little. The end of the crosspiece where it is set into the concrete at upper left was completely rotted away.
I'm sorry to report that this was the most interesting thing I found in there - a section of the framing from when they poured the porch foundation. That upright piece was stuck about three inches into a flow of concrete that must have leaked out. I chipped around it for a while with a cold chisel and when I got tired of whacking my hand with my U.S. GOVT. issue 5 pound ball peen demolition hammer, I just started whacking it away from the side of the foundation until it finally came out. You can see right down into the basement through that opening on the right. That is the end of a floor joist that runs all the way across the underside of the living room, on the far right of the picture.
Cleared away and cleaned up, with the opening to the basement covered up by some of the siding from the porch rail.
This is what a former porch looks like. Those 16' stringers are a little naily on top but still mostly in good shape. At the very least they would burn like crazy, having aged for 80 years or so. I started some time in the afternoon and worked about three hours. I know when I start hurting myself and knocking things over it is time to do something safe like sorting and stacking the wood. Plenty of free cinder blocks - you haul.

PORCH PROJECT - second and third pillars replaced

Today's work was easier since I had a better idea of what I was doing and what to expect. Here are my basic tools for this entire project. A corded drill for pre-drilling and driving screws, and a very inexpensive rechargeable one for light work. A full-length Stanley hand saw from a thrift store which I sharpened myself - power saws may be faster and more accurate but those are not necessities to me. Using and maintaining a hand saw makes me stronger and healthier. That crazy orange plastic speed square came from the dollar store, and though it isn't perfectly square it is great for the type of rough work this job requires. I mark my cuts with a fat tipped sharpie so I maintain a certain amount of leeway. I operate on the principle that this house was built with hand tools and I can do at least as well by working in the same way. I also used an electric sabre saw to cut away the floor boards where necessary. I don't have a good keyhole saw or I would have done that manually too.

Replacing the central support was a piece of cake. I propped up the end pillar to make sure it wouldn't go anywhere and cut the railing just to the right of where the jack and prop went in, and the majority of the railing and the central pillar came right out. When it came time to clear away the corner for the third pillar I found it necessary to tear the step away so I could cut out the end of an ancient piece of wood which you can see right next to the cinder block at the end of the porch. That was the only difficult part of the day's work.
Here it all is, cleaned up. The pillars went in so easily I couldn't believe it and the roof structure is probably more stable now than it has been for ages. I started around 10:30 and ended at 2 p.m. The porch is officially closed to anyone but me and I installed a new keyed door knob on the side door which you get to by going past the tall green shrub to the right of the porch. The next step is disassembling the porch floor.

The brick standing at the base of the right hand pillar is the one on which the full weight of that corner of the porch rested for decades. It will be put in a place of honor.

PORCH PROJECT - first pillar replaced

Today I replaced the corner pillar on the west end of the porch. I used a prop consisting of two 2x4s screwed together with 3" nails every foot, with a block screwed to the bottom and a longer piece screwed to the top to spread the load on the box beam when lifting. The old pillar is lying on the ground, and it wasn't nailed to anything, just gravity keeping it in place. When I jacked the roof up an inch or so the pillar stuck for a minute and then just dropped down onto the railing with a clunk. This supports my belief that if there were a drunken brawl on this porch any one of the pillars could be knocked away by a crashing body.

This is the screw jack, one of two I borrowed from Barron. I use a big screwdriver in the holes to turn it. Just behind it is one of the 16 foot stringers running the width of the porch on which the floorboards ostensibly rest. That end of it can be moved back and forth freely a foot or so, indicating that the floorboards aren't even nailed to it. They do seem to be nailed to the other one, seen in the upper left corner of the picture. This end of the nearer one isn't really resting on the wooden block beneath it either.

I cut a square piece of the 9x2 railing from the end of the porch to use as a header block for the box beam to rest on. It may have been added in the idiotic rebuild which I am trying to rectify, and inside it was white and fresh, and smelled great. The wood of the old pillar seems to be more 1930s era, very dry and easily split with a blow of the mallet. You can see the top of the prop to the right.

Below is the spot on which the supporting member rested. They put the floor down, then built the railing on top of it, then set the pillars on the railing. The weight of the roof on one 2x4 resting on the flooring for decades compressed the board to about a third of its original thickness, and to a consistency of dry crumbly cardboard. I swept it away with a broom.

Here is the treated 4x4 in place, the ends wrapped in tar paper as a bit of excessive precaution against decay. When they tear this down I hope it will still be in pretty good shape. I laid the old pillar across the end of the porch to keep the unwary from stepping off into a hole. I started around 10:30 a.m. and ended about 1:30, but it seemed like a lot longer. Shower, lunch, and goofing off for the rest of the day. I have the rest of a Wheeler and Woolsey movie to watch.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

Readers of SUNDAY WEBCOMIC have begun sharing with me the unusual webcomics they encounter, and I am grateful for this tribute to my consciousness-raising efforts. They are starting to seek that mysterious quality that makes for an outstanding SUNDAY WEBCOMIC.

The Dada art movement of the early 20th century, inspired by genuine lunatics, strove to attain a type of conscious unconsciousness which disconnects the mind from normal thought patterns in such a way that it is possible to create things, events and ideas so novel as to be purely meaningless. In the middle and later 20th century the elevated level of both lunacy and access to creative media made it possible for people who were not "crazy" enough to be locked up and not "artistic" enough to be acclaimed, to release upon the world their own unique creations, the greatest of which partake of a quality which, in my religion, has been called Bulldada. This ineffable and ethereal quality can only be attained when the best efforts of a dedicated person, whose talents are unsuited to their field of endeavor, fail so cataclysmically as to constitute a new category of success. I seem to be the first person to apply bulldadanalysis to the field of webcomics.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC reader Cloe shared with me a horrible, horrible, horrible webcomic. It is badly drawn and not funny. The problem lies in the fact that the cartoonist knows it and says so in the title. The most basic principle of Bulldada is that it cannot be created by anyone who is aware of the concept of Bulldada. The application of that principle in this case is that knowing your webcomic is lousy does not make it great. It makes it lousier. Except when the lousiness is meant ironically, but fails. "a horrible, horrible, horrible webcomic" is a success at being bad, and thus falls beyond the purview of this exercise. Purview.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC reader Diana shared OF NOOBS AND MEN, a strip of notable qualities. It is very well drawn and its jokes are recognizable as such. Its transcendent quality comes from the fact that the content of those jokes is so obscure to the normal or average reader as to be incomprehensible. I can read dozens of them and see exactly why they are supposed to be funny, and if I knew what the in-jokes and references meant I know they would be very funny indeed. The local community radio station has a Dutch Hour program on Sunday mornings, and the host sometimes plays standup comedy - in Dutch. You can tell that stuff is funny as hell just by the pacing, the cadence, and the audience reaction - you just can't tell what the joke actually is. Another vital principle of Bulldada is that it is fully comprehensible to no-one, not even the one who created it. Somebody is reading OF NOOBS AND MEN right now and totally cracking up because that is their life it is talking about.

This leads us to today's SUNDAY WEBCOMIC, The Simple Life.

PORCH PROJECT - primary disassembly

Today I took all the siding off the lower section of the porch. Here is a glamor shot for you Wisteria fans.

This is not the support for the central pillar, because there is nothing underneath it. What's holding it up? Not the vertical member to the right, because that wiggles freely. Apparently the load is distributed by the railing to other parts of the porch. This has made it necessary for me to re-think where I can cut the rail to put in my temporary supports, so as not to bring the roof crashing down. I think there is a lot of cantilever action going on in that roof thanks to adequate construction done in the 1930s.

Below you see the quality of workmanship involved. Each newer vertical member is accompanied by a couple of older chunks of wood - I said accompanied rather than supported by, because those chunks of old wood pivot freely on the nails attaching them. They do not appear to serve any purpose. The curve of the rail at the top of the picture is not lens distortion, it is the result of the load pressing down on either side.

This is a closeup of the west (left) corner. The direct support for this corner of the roof is the spongy, fragmenting older piece of wood with the big rusty nail in it, resting on the very corner of the cinder block. The other piece is just there to nail the siding onto.

Here it is with all the siding removed, and a sign for legal purposes reading, IF YOU COME IN HERE BE CAREFUL. The roof is no more likely to collapse today than it was yesterday, but seeing just how bad the situation is makes me worry more. All it has to do is stay up a few more days until I can get some support in there.

PORCH PROJECT - preliminary

Today's work - the insanely overengineered sawhorses I have always wanted. Not as elegant as the Naked/Weavers design on which it is based, but very very strong and sturdy. I settled for wobbly metal-bracket sawhorses for years and have had enough. You could do a go-go dance on these, or put a door across and ride a unicycle on it.

Below is the front porch (looking north) with the lower boards pulled off revealing the idiotic cinder-block structure supporting the flooring.

Here is the west end of the porch showing a fragment of the original wooden structure. It probably rotted away and was replaced by the stupid cinder block mess, I assume because they got a bunch of cinder blocks for free so they didn't have to do it right. I stuck some spare bricks in the bigger holes just to keep the cats out. The next step is to strip away the siding and prepare for propping the roof to replace the uprights with 8' treated 4x4s.

SUNDAY WEBCOMIC

It took me half the day to finally find a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC for my SUNDAY WEBCOMIC fans. Fortunately CANINE COPROTHRUSTIVE CONUNDRUM is "on hiatus," i.e. the guy finally ran out of ideas or steam, or had exams, or left school and got a job. This has many of the top features for a SUNDAY WEBCOMIC; especially interesting in the earlier episodes are the injokes about things I know nothing about, and the paragraphs under the strips detailing his struggles with the muse and how he views his advancement as an artist. Have you ever noticed how careful I am about not saying outright negative things about these strips? It is hard.

portland craigslist crank

Those That Sacrafice - $35 (SEa)

You sacrafice shit you murdering fucks. You do it for your own gain.

FBI = Pig Cop

ATF = Pig Cop

CIA = Pig Cop

Cop = Pig Cop

Hitler would be proud of you but I don't like you murdering swine military fucks one bit.

If you look its always greedy pigs that support the war and the natural recorces they gain from it.

You scum bags kill women and children just as depicted in the movie DISTRICT 9. You treat others as less than human beings when really your the lesser of a human being being a murderer. You go into other peoples homes just like pig cops here in the USA go into peoples homes, and just like Hitlers hatful murderinmg soldires went into Jews homes and took them away to murder them.

Military = Future FBI agent, CIA Agent, ATF Agent, or Future PIG COP.

Does it suprise you these District 9(movie) fucks kill innocent women and children every single day in other contries?

You go to Hell after this I garantee it faceless coward fucker face murderers.

Here is memorial day from me murderers.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-szfJuEU2M

Avater fools rush in you over-glorified military pigs.

• Location: SEa
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

portland craigslist crank

Mind reading technology (Is there greater of a murderer)

Will someone please exterminate, execute, yes justifiably kill these murderers with this mind reading technology. Destroy the device itself as well. Please these military fucks are monsters and the Obamanation president is lying its not other countries hacking my computer its the US govornment pigs and they are radiating me with who knows what in order to STEAL thoughts from my head. Please kill them if anyone is listening and can help please kill them it would be just.

Location: Is there greater of a murderer

it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

MOVIE POSTERS

Thirty Years of Happiness!