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Oh yeah, some really bad spelling.
Archive for May, 2008
Will Elder passed away late last week, Born Wolf Eisenberg, he both had a unique personal style and the gift of perfect mimicry of other artists. His mimicry of advertising art was indistinguishable form the real thing, until you found the gotcha. I’ve heard it argued that he actually had multiple personal styles, his painted work considered from his line work. He was the origin of Mad’s gag art in the margin, although in his case it was additional gags he wrote and blended perfectly with the art for the (usually Kurtzman written) piece he was illustrating. This became known as Chicken Fat or Chotchkies. Along with Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood he was the backbone of the original Mad Magazine. For those of you that don’t know, Mad was the only EC comic book to survive the great Comic purge of the early 50’s, in which various clergy and a certain psychologist claimed that comic books were perverting the youth of Amerika. Elder was unique in his mastery of parody and satire, his become famous not for his pioneering work at Mad, but for Little Annie Fanny, and adult strip he and Kurtzman did for Playboy.
I grew up reading the old copies of Mad that littered the barbershop we frequented, and coveted the bound in copies that Mad put in their Specials in the early 70s, I bought all the mad paperbacks to get all the old work. Will Elder was one of the reasons I’ve used some variation of the ords parody and satire as my online nicknames for close to 30 years.
This post brought to you by Sugar Frosted Epidermis, the Doctor recommended treat that Plebes love too!
If I was articulate, concise, direct, forceful, principled, sincere and had a good voice I’d be Ketih Olbermann tearing Shrubs head off in this chunk of his show. (with thanks to The Reel Jeff for the pointer)
MIlwaukee Road #261, a huge steam engine is in Chicago for filming. What they’re filming I have no idea, but you can see the engine and some cars in and around the Dearborn yard and Union Station today. It leaves manana to go to Minnesota.
For more info on #261 visit it’s webpage. I beleive it’s a Baldwin, the article identifies it as both an Alcor and and A Baldwin.
If you just need an online contact manager or just on online backup of your contacts without all the social notworking 
that Plaxo dumped on top of their original service, Get a a Yahoo mail account. Don’t tell anyone you have it, pick one with a really long name like “thepersonlivinginthewhitehouse”, for whatever reason this cuts down on spam (i haven’t gotten a single piece at my sync account).
Here are the instructions for setting up syncing with OS X Leopard, iPhone, and various flavors of Outlook plus Palm (Windows only). It’s simple for Leopard. I’m surprised how over looked this is. Hell I forgot about it and I wrote about it as being one of my most anticipated features for Leopard.
Bonus tip: if you haven’t deleted your Plaxo account, you can sync it to your Yahoo account, then delete it. The contacts will still be in the Yahoo account.
UPDATED: Frank (@comcastcares on Twitter) is on this this week’s TWIT podcast for a few minutes explaining what you can really expect from Comcrap’s boost technology. Leo’s going to bring him back for more explanations. Frank’s job at Comcast is to monitor social media and help- so use him. After he left the podcast to take care of his baby, they covered a story that the Max Planck Institute in Germany has proven that Comcast (among others) is still blocking peer to peer despite their statements to the contrary.
A Comcast employee on Twitter asked. So I’ll answer. You can’t can’t do anything. I don’t doubt your sincerity, you may in fact be the only honest person in your company. Your company needs to change.
Corporate culture doesn’t start at the bottom, it’s starts at the top When your leaders are greedy scum, it filters down. Greedy rapacious boards and management make scummy business decisions. They hire scum, although every now and again a good person sneaks in. In Comcast’s case, they prefer to hire contractors, who hire subcontractors. No insurance for the workers, and plausible deniability for management.
So start by replacing the current board and firing all management from assistant VP up (unless that applies to Frank). Hell, I’d cut all management salaries too.
Acknowledge you lied. All the lies, all the lies your contractors told, all the ones you told Congress. Even the ones you haven’t been caught on 
And stop doing the things you lied about.
Apologize for lying.
As an act of contrition, hire all those subcontractors. Unionize. Retrain them. Invest in infrastructure, like fiber or wimax or 700 spectrum, anything to get you away from the current one person on the cable loop eats all the bandwidth-because that will cut down on this (read it all the to the bottom and follow the link).
Stop flooding our mailboxes with junk mail. Plant some damn trees.
That’s a start.
(Part of my antipathy towards Comcast comes from dealing with them on behalf of my elderly parents. I spent hours every month on the phone. Hours after their contract finally ran out I switched them to AT&T-and I can’t tell you how much I hate dealing with those people. But so far, I’ve spent less then 8 hours in total dealing with AT&T.)
BTW, if you’re on Twitter and are having problems with Comcast, Tweet Comcastcares. John C. Dvorak even likes him
I had been using Plaxo as my online backup address book and contact manager. Then they sold themselves to Comcast today. I’ve spent months of my life on the phone with those idiots straightening out my parents account with them, until their contract ran out. Comcast’s craptacular billing and customer service is just part of their problem: lying is part part of their corporate culture. Not just to you and me, not just in ads, but to Congress. Screw them, they lie about service, they lie about blocking ports, they lie about your bill. I do not trust them with any of my data. If you use Plaxo, delte your account NOW, before Comcast has a chance to change the terms and conditions-right now Plaxo removes any and all traces or your data form their servers.
Obviously if you use Plaxo’s syncing tools, sync one last time. Then back up your data locally, and remove their syncing software. Then remove your Plaxo account-you can use this link to delete you account. (Thanks to Leo Laporte for the link!)
Because I’ve been operating without my own computer for the last 5 months. To save a link of interest to the sidebar i either need a bookmaklet in the browser toolbar or a client program. Most of the people who loan me computers or let me borrow theirs for an hour or so aren’t too keen on me installing crap on their computers.
If you want to comment and aren’t registered, email me with a login name and password request. I had to close open registration for security reasons. Just click on the about tab link thingy on the header image to get the address.
