2011 — 21 September: Wednesday
A distinctly moist morning of mellow fruitfulness.1 Today's lunchtime treat will be a trip out to the biker café if my neighbour is still up for it. Plenty to do before then, however.
Paperless office, part II
I now have all the olde-worlde-type physical filing capacity I need in place. "All" that remains is to sort the paper mountain of bumf into the various pigeonholes. At this rate, dear Mama's paperwork will soon be in better shape after a year or so than mine is after forty. Such ungood unfun. It's probably just as well that I never pursued a career in the legal "profession" even if I do tend to live in the midst of the modern day equivalent of an Alexandrine collection of dusty scrolls.
Time for my next cuppa already. It's 08:58 after all.
Under the skin
I was browsing some of the more infuriating links from the latest "Butterflies and Wheels" newsletters before discarding them in the endless fight against entropy. They contain a litany of horrible examples of prejudice and bigotry and ignorance (often "inspired" by a religious approach to life, though all the major religions strike me as equally culpable in human hands) and I got to thinking about good ol' Dr Fredric Wertham and his ridiculously prejudiced, bigoted, and ignorant attempt to "protect" the youth of America in the early 1950s. "Seduction of the Innocent", indeed.
His chosen battleground was that of comics. Yet, consider this single panel:
It's the last frame of the story "Judgment Day" (US spelling) that appeared in the final issue (#33) of "Incredible Science Fiction". The story was about a space galaxy investigator tasked with assessing whether a planet populated by orange robots and blue robots had made enough progress in ending prejudice between them to be permitted to join the galactic empire. So far, so good.
But the revelation that the investigator was a man whose ancestors were clearly from the African continent was unacceptable to Judge Charles F Murphy — the chap with the job of administering the "Comics Code" that Wertham's scare-mongering had caused to be established. Not that Murphy read such things himself, it seems. According to Steve Ringgenberg's interview with publisher Bill Gaines in a 1992 interview in "Gauntlet" magazine "The Comics Code group was run by three or four old ladies who were shocked by almost anything." Sounds typical. When threatened with a press conference, Murphy tried a compromise: "Just take off the beads of sweat." Priceless!
And that's in a country with a written constitution that guarantees free speech :-)
How cool is this?
Spotted under "Unexpected" in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue.
Not street legal? Now there's a surprise.
My vague plans...
... for this evening's video entertainment were derailed by the doorstep delivery (that Mr Postie had failed to signal with a knock). I'd been intending to move on to "Northern Exposure, season #3", but I may just end up in outer space now that the Blu-ray edition of...
... the cancelled 2002 TV series — the predecessor to "Serenity" — has finally shown up. I shall make my evening meal and then my decision. It's 18:30, cool, and clear.