What WAS that creature in my backyard?

NOT a rat, a possum, or raccoon.

I wrote this on my Facebook page last Saturday morning after The Daughter and I saw something run across the back of our Pine Hills yard, under the raised shed, then towards the front of the house, before it evidently went into the neighbor’s property, heading south towards Western Avenue. “Albany, NY: So what was that stocky, gray beaver-like animal that ran out of my backyard this morning? Tail more like a cat, and it ran reasonably fast for its size.”

I really didn’t know, and I wanted to. The Daughter thought was a beaver, and it was similar, but I’ve seen beavers, and it did not look quite right, especially the tail.

“Woodchuck? We’ve had one in the backyard every summer for years. Pretty harmless, just eats the grass!” Well, maybe; I hear that they can be fast.

“Opposum? Did it look like a gigantic rat?” Nah, I’ve seen possums before. The tail’s all wrong, among other things.

“If you were down here in the city, I’d say it was a rat.” Definitely not. Saw a rat in the French Quarter of New Orleans way too close for my comfort.

“I’d guess opossum, too, but other possibilities are muskrat and woodchuck. Here are some native mammals; remember if it was early morning the color could be pretty deceptive.” Perhaps, but don’t think it was a muskrat either.

Definitely not a raccoon. Lacked the facial markings.

fisher_fullbody
“Fisher cat? I think they’re in the Pine Bush…” “Fishers are in the pine bush, so one may have moved into the city. If neighborhood cats and squirrels have gone missing, this may be your critter, Roger!” “They are vicious.”

And THAT seemed to be the most likely. A fisher, or fisher cat, though it is NOT a feline: It is “a large, dark, long-haired member of the weasel family. Their stature is relatively low to the ground, with short legs, small ears, and a well-furred tail. The color of their fur varies from dark brown to nearly black.”

So, if I were a betting man, I say 70% chance of fisher, 20% chance of woodchuck, and 10% of something else. And if it WAS a fisher, I’m glad our cats are of the indoor denomination.

The Black Panther on the Daredevil art spread

Perhaps the item appearing in the Daredevil Chronicles was an early iteration of what appeared as the cover of the DD Index

Daredevil.ChroniclesComic book connoisseur Alan David Doane, who used to frequent the comic store known as FantaCo, where I used to work back in the 1980s, asked me this on Twitter recently:

“It took me 32 years to wonder — why is the Black Panther in this pinup? Anyone know?”

He asked me because the picture appeared in a magazine called the Daredevil Chronicles, which FantaCo published in 1982. This was a magazine Mitch Cohn edited, while I was editing the Fantastic Four Chronicles. He also asked Klaus Janson, the inker on the piece over Frank Miller’s pencils, the same question.

Truth is, I had never thought about it. In the Daredevil “family”, Elektra (the woman on the top) and the Black Widow (the woman on the bottom) were featured in that comic. But Black Panther, other than being another costumed Marvel character, was not related to DD at that time.

But around that same period, there was a competing product, the Daredevil Index, published by George Olshevsky, which was, oddly, 9B in the series:
Daredevil index9b
Frank Miller also penciled this piece, although Joe Rubenstein inked it. Perhaps the item appearing in the DD Chronicles was an early iteration of what appeared as the cover of the DD Index, which also featured The Black Panther, as well as Shanna, Black Goliath, Human Fly & Dazzler. I no longer have my DD Index, alas.

I should note, for those unfamiliar, that the Black Panther had nothing to do with the political movement of the same name, and in fact, predated the organization. Rather, it referred to T’Challa, an African king, who first appeared in a Fantastic Four comic book, cover-dated July 1966, but released a few months earlier. It was the then-upcoming version of Olshevsky’s X-Men Index that prompted FantaCo to come out with the X-Men Chronicles the year before.

If someone has a more definitive answer to this question, please feel free to jump in. This is merely my best guess.

Meta: the case of my missing blog

What was MUCH more upsetting was what would not be retrievable: about 170 items in some form of draft, including at least a couple dozen blog posts that were complete, but unpublished.

RogerDuckWhen I went to the dentist to get a cavity filled back on the morning of Wednesday, April 16, I knew I’d feel pretty crappy afterward, so I took off the whole day. That afternoon, I tried to get rid of an alarming amount of spam – 770 and growing every minute – caught in the Akismet, fortunately. Eventually, though, I couldn’t access my blog at all.

I had suffered an outage earlier in the month; the vendor said it was 18 minutes, but I believe it was longer. The NEW problem, though, was for what turned out to be 15 +/-2 hours. I knew at least a few people noticed that my ABC Wednesday link was not working.

This got me thinking: what if the server never came back up? I wasn’t particularly bothered by the loss of the items I had posted over the last nine years.

The first five years still exist at my old Blogger blog. My current blog exists on the Wayback machine, at least through February 8, 2014. Some of my recent blog posts I posted again on my Times Union blog. There would be loss, but it would be minimal.

What was MUCH more upsetting was what would not be retrievable: about 170 items in some form of draft, including at least a couple dozen blog posts that were complete, but unpublished. THOSE I could NOT get back.

This prompted me to restart my shadow blog at rogerowengreen.wordpress.com. I’d initiated it after I decided to give up my Blogger blog, but it wasn’t as pretty as I thought it’d be. Frankly, I didn’t think I could copy from a WordPress blog to another WP blog, or maybe that wasn’t an option five years ago. I figured out how to copy my entire rogerogreen.com blog to my rogerowengreen WP blog, despite the size maximum for such a transfer having been exceeded. Yay, me!

Now I compose in rogerowengreen WP and then copy it to my main rogerogreen blog. This is a bit of an annoyance, especially when I have to make corrections, but it isn’t as much a pain as trying to recreate a few dozen posts from scratch.

This also addresses the issue of what will happen to my blog when I die. As long as WordPress is allowing for free blogs, I guess it’ll reside there for whatever time we have before the electrical grid goes kablooey.

One last thing: I’m still generating a ton of spam in Akismet, several hundred every day. I used to look at the items in my spam folder when it was a dozen or two daily, but now it’s onerous. So if your comment didn’t make it to my blog – and it’s been years since I’ve blocked one – it probably got caught up in the electronic junkyard.

Half a Bupkis is better than nothing

Bupkis means nothing. I mean literally nothing.

DVD.DTOne of the very few Facebook “fan” items I follow is The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book. As you may, or may not recall:
1) The Dick Van Dyke Show is one of the two TV shows of which I own the complete set on DVD; I’ve been slowly watching it with The Daughter, and
2) I really liked this book, as I noted here.

The book’s fan page posted recently:

I thought I’d pose a follow-up question to my recent post about Danny Thomas’s legendary cameo on “It May Look Like a Walnut!” For a super-sized supercilious and super-invisible Bupkis Award, name the one other time Danny appeared on screen in a scene with at least one character from the show?

As always with our trivia challenges on this page, this is “closed book” quiz–so no fair googling!

Of course, if you don’t know the answer, there’s never a penalty for just making something up! — with Danny Thomas and Richard W Van Dyke.

Do any of you know? I sort of half-remembered the plot of a Danny Thomas Show episode, which was included in the DVDS box set.

Someone had previously written: “The character of Buddy Sorrel [Morey Amsterdam] was a guest on the Danny Thomas show.” That didn’t sound right, so I dashed off a response to that: “I thought Buddy was a writer for the Danny Williams [Danny Thomas] character.” Some guy named Ian noted: “Buddy crossed over to The Danny Thomas Show, writing for Danny and his wife.”

The response:

Actually, Ian and Roger, you’re both partially correct. In the crossover show, Kathy hires Buddy to write for her, at which point it’s established that Buddy has an exclusive contract to write material for Danny’s nightclub act. What Alan Brady’s lawyers would’ve thought about that arrangement remains unexplored. I’ll write more about this episode when I have a minute. But for now, your partially correct answers have earned you a shared Bupkis Award. (You can decide between yourselves on whose non-existent mantle you’ll display your non-existent award.)

Bupkis, BTW, means nothing. I mean literally nothing of value. The award is named after a later episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show when Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) hears a song on the radio and discovers an old army buddy of his has left Rob off the songwriting credits. It gets even more complicated by the end of the show.

So I’ll be placing my half a Bupkis award over the mantle proudly.
***
Then I got a FULL Bupkis related to this pic:
DVD.Bain
It is, of course, Barbara Bain, who played Cinnamon Carter on Mission: Impossible; her then-husband Martin Landau played Rollin Hand. Bain was replaced by Lesley Ann Warren, Landau by Leonard Nimoy. And while I watched them on MI, I’ll bet others know Landau and Bain best from Space: 1999, though I never actually saw it.

I did not know this: during the Van Dyke show’s early days, Bain and Landau were personal friends of Carl and Estelle Reiner, and Bain regularly attended the show’s Tuesday night filming at Desilu Cahuenga. So when the part of Rob’s sultry ex-fiancee came up in season two’s “Will You Two Be My Wife?”, casting Barbara in the role seemed only natural.

Q is for Quirky: ABBA

The New Yorker’s 2014 article The Anatomy of an Earworm used Waterloo by ABBA as its example.

ABBA(I told you early on there were two letters for which I could not find a family band; this was one.)

When I first started blogging, I came across a blogger named Greg Burgas, who used to say, quite often, “ABBA rules!” That, he opined, was The Name of the Game [LISTEN] (#12 in 1978).

You mean that Swedish quartet comprised of that married couple Agnetha Fältskog and Björn Ulvaeus, and that other married couple, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, whose first initials spelled out their name? Yeah, that one.

He’d probably proclaimed, Knowing Me, Knowing You [LISTEN] (#14 in 1977), you ought to agree.

I used to refer to them as a “guilty pleasure,” though I admitted to liking Dancing Queen [LISTEN] (#1 in 1977). But as I think about a group that was one of the most successful of all time, all across the globe, which generated countless tribute bands – here’s one which came to my city recently – and after their 1982 breakup, and their marital breakups just before that, became MORE famous, then I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do [LISTEN] have to think that Mr. Burgas was totally right (#15 in 1976), though less successful in the US than elsewhere.

Though they faded from view somewhat for a time – SOS [LISTEN] (#15 in 1975):

In 1999, ABBA’s music was adapted into the successful musical Mamma Mia! that toured worldwide. A film of the same name, released in 2008, became the highest-grossing film in the United Kingdom that year.

I suppose we ought to listen to Mamma Mia [LISTEN] (#32 in 1976). Hey, are the songs from Mamma Mia! considered show tunes?

“The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on 15 March 2010.” The Winner Takes All [LISTEN] (#8 in 1981).

The group was in the news this year when it was revealed that they wore those garish clothes for tax purposes: “The band, whose spangly flares, catsuits and platform heels were considered naff even in the 1970s, exploited a Swedish law which meant clothes were tax deductible if their owners could prove they were not used for daily wear.” Ah, time for Money, Money, Money [LISTEN] (#56 in 1977).

2014 marks the 40th anniversary of their first hit “Waterloo.”
Agnetha hinted last November that ABBA could re-form.

She told German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag that she, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson are considering reforming in 2014… “Of course it’s something we’re thinking about,” she said. “There seem to be plans to do something to mark this anniversary in some way. I can’t say at this point what will come of them.” Agnetha is generally seen as the shy one who doesn’t want to perform anymore but in May 2013, she released a brand new album and has since been out there promoting it. But will the other three want to come out and play?

(Wish I had heard Wilco perform Waterloo last year.)

The New Yorker had an article this year, The Anatomy of an Earworm, you know, a song that gets stuck in your head. Guess what song is used as an example? The same song for which ABBA was “honored at the 50th-anniversary celebration of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005 when their hit ‘Waterloo’ was chosen as the best song in the competition’s history.”

I better end with Fernando [LISTEN], (#13 in 1976).

OK, OK, here’s the song that started it all, Waterloo [LISTEN] (#6 in 1974).

ABC Wednesday – Round 14

Ramblin' with Roger
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