Fred Hembeck Archives - Page 3 of 5

March Rambling: a quintillion or a trillion?

Fred Hembeck talks about a compilation of his Marvel work, House of Hem.

Delayed exoneration of a death row inmate, after 30 years.

9 Things Many Americans Just Don’t Grasp (Compared to the Rest of the World).

“The phone rang. It was my college rapist.”

What Happens When Mein Kampf’s Copyright Expires?

Building Equity: Race, Ethnicity, Class and Protected Bike Lanes.

Giving Homes to the Homeless is Cheaper Than Leaving them on the Street.

Man vs. Machine. A guy walks into a bar. He finds a video poker machine – run by the Oregon state lottery – which dealt him a strange hand.

Re: NCAA men’s basketball March Madness, the odds of a perfect bracket? It’s not 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Not incidentally, 10^18, or one followed by 18 zeroes is in the English system, one trillion. In any case, 9.2 quintillion is NOT 9.20000000000000000000, as NBC Nightly News showed earlier this month; THAT number is equal to a number smaller than 10.

Dustbury explained +/- (plus/minus) in basketball to me: “It’s based on the changing score during a player’s actual time: if, during a six-minute period in which he plays, if his team scores three points more than the opposition, he is +3. This of course varies greatly with substitutions, but electronic box scores update every minute or so.”

John Oliver won’t be your therapist: How he torpedoed the reassuring tropes of fake news.

Selma: the tragic anniversary of the death of Viola Liuzzo and Underground Railroad Project remembers the March.

Joseph Skulan on Wisconsin Mining Bill AB486 (2.17.12).

Major League Baseball’s Dirty Little Secret and Through the No-Looking Glass and Professional Ice Cream Taster.

25 maps that explain the English language.

Jaquandor: Writing Outside the Lines: on outlines. Plus the beer-drinking, 1970s sitcom DVD-watching Hank Speaks: How I Edit.

Dustbury hears voices; I’ve experienced this, too.

Gordon’s eight years in Chicago.

For all you lovers of the dance: here is an explanation of the influence of Africa on modern dance – if you have three hours to spare.

The Beatles or the Stones: Which Side Are You On? “If the Stones resented the Beatles’ cultural primacy, the Beatles resented the Stones’ unassailable coolness and sexual heat.” The Beatles themselves were like other men, but the music and lyrics channeled through them contained magic and messages from beyond the mind.

“Back when L.A.’s recording scene was a hit-minting machine that ruled the airwaves,” the Wrecking Crew worked up to four three-hour sessions a day. Here’s a review of a film about them.

Not only Diana Ross but also Mary Wilson turned 71 this month. 10 underrated Supremes songs.

SamuraiFrog ranks the Weird Al Yankovic songs: 165-151 and 150-136 and 135-126 and 125-116.

Art Spiegelman and jazz composer Phillip Johnston: “Wordless!”

Swamp Thing music.

The cover art on your favorite band’s album is awesome. It’s even better with cats. Must show the Daughter.

My friend Fred Hembeck is interviewed, and talks about a compilation of his Marvel work, House of Hem.

Irwin Hasen, R.I.P., the artist of the comic strip Dondi. Here’s the New York Times obit.

Trailers for 2015: The Best Animated Short nominees.

Muppets: Jim Henson Company and the ‘Into the Woods’ Movie that Could’ve Been and the message of “Rainbow Connection’ and Cookie Monster, Life Coach and Cookie Monster is making unboxing videos and Animal’s Whiplash.

How To Make The IDEAL Chocolate Chip Cookie: Add A Pinch of Science.

Getting more mayonnaise and toothpaste out of the container.

Dominoes and Etch-A-Sketch.

Srinivasa Ramanujan’s Magic Square.

Welcome to the Inauthentic Paper Detector. “Paste any text in the textbox. The chance that your submission is a human-written authentic scientific document will be output. Text over 50% chance will be classified as authentic.” Here’s the paper about it. Everything I write is inauthentic.

GOOGLE ALERT (me)

Chuck Miller: Welcome to the club, Roger Green!! Apparently, I have posted 1000 times on my Times Union blog. I had no idea. Also, Another win for the TU Community Bloggers.

My blog post re: the Barber Adagio was linked to EvilGeniusVic’s Capital Region.

Sharp Little Pencil: Outhouses and Holes We Dig, for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.

Jaquandor’s Sentential Links (the Leonard Nimoy edition).

Up on a rooftop, Beatles, quick.

I just figured out that the rooftop concert was on the 16th birthday of my good friend Fred Hembeck

Only recently did I realize that today is the 45th anniversary of the Beatles rooftop concert above Abbey Road studios. This was performed and recorded as part of some album/movie project, both of which would eventually be called Let It Be.

Here’s the 20-minute performance until the cops shut things down.

Of course, as Beatles junkies know, the project was scrapped and the band essentially split up, for a time. Yet they were able to get together again and put out the Abbey Road album and a few singles in 1969, which I’ve long thought was extraordinary.

Let It Be, the album was released practically simultaneously with Paul McCartney’s first solo album, McCartney, in April 1970, which was the final blow in the breakup.

It’s interesting how brief their stay as an influential working band was, six years in the US, a bit longer in the UK. Of course, their post-band impact remains enormous.

Funny too that I just figured out that the rooftop concert was on the 16th birthday of my good friend Fred Hembeck, who inspired my blogging. He was/is a massive Beatles fan – here’s his Beatles section on his now unused blog. He’s now on Facebook and, most notably, Tumblr.

So if Fred was 16 and that was 45 years ago: hmm, 16+45= Fred’s older than I am for the next five weeks.
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Fred’s birthday, 1992. It involves Superman.

Picture (c) and used by permission of Fred Hembeck.

October Rambling: artist Indigo Anderson; Arthur and Nigel get married

Olivia Pope’s dad reminds us of black parents’ favorite expressions. But I DON’T think they are limited to black parents.

Amen, 39.

The Perfect Epitaph for Establishment Journalism: “In other words, if the government tells me I shouldn’t publish something, who I am as a journalist to disobey? Put that on the tombstone of western establishment journalism.”

I just don’t have the energy to blast the jerks responsible for the 16-day US federal government partial shutdown. Fortunately, Dan is both willing and able to do so.

Reader Wil: After our time as p.o.w.’s in Japanese concentration camps, we were liberated by the British. Two months after the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki we could escape a new danger.

Arthur and Nigel got married today. Or yesterday – that New Zealand time zone stuff always confounds me. Arthur’s observations before the big day. (I still think it’s because of the broken stemware.) Congratulations!

Amy’s Sharp Little Pencil wrote The Migraine Speaks (much to my dismay) and In the Palm of God’s Hand.

Mark Evanier’s Tales of My Childhood #3, which made me cry.

Leslie on setting boundaries as a teacher.

Steve ponders The Things We Say When Drunk.

Young Indigo Anderson is passionate about manga, anime, cosplay and making comics. “That is why when her tenth grade AP World History teacher asked for a paper about the relationship between North and South Korea, she requested to do it as a comic.

“Give plenty of credit to her teacher for allowing her the opportunity! The result titled North and South is a wonderfully succinct, heartfelt, eight-page insight to a piece of history that continues to impact the entire world even today.”

I was in Bill and Orchid Anderson’s wedding in 1997, and Indigo may have been the youngest attendee at Carol’s and my wedding in 1999.

Esteemed Comic Artist Stephen R Bissette Educates and Amuses University Audience. One of the joys of blogging is giving props to your friends.

Speaking of friends, MIGHTY Q&A: Fred Hembeck from 13th Dimension.

Superman 75th Anniversary.

How were animated cartoons made in the thirties? This is an episode of a travelogue-type series narrated by the great broadcaster, Lowell Thomas. He takes us to the Walter Lantz cartoon studio.

Dustbury pointed me to Grace Braeger Has Been Driving The Same Car For Fifty-Six Years. We Asked Her Why.

How DID they make that Honda CR-V commercial? I think its really cool.

Why you may never see the definitive Shel Silverstein biography

10 Mind-Boggling Thought Experiments

Olivia Pope’s dad reminds us of black parents’ favorite expressions. But I DON’T think they are limited to black parents.

Ken Levine on writing for Barney Miller, which may be the most underrated TV show ever.

Speaking of cop shows, 27 Actors Who Got Their Starts on Miami Vice.

The Ghost of Stephen Foster by the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and the cartoon is marvelous.

The History of Music Media: Infographic.

A song from Carole King’s Tapestry, an album I’ve only purchased thrice. Plus a saudade for Patsy Cline, and other music stars who died too soon.

From BoingBoing: Singer, songwriter, guitarist, poet, and artist Lou Reed has died.

From Nippertown: Vancouver musician Michelle Kwan plays Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine” on an ancient Chinese stringed instrument known as a guzheng. Also, Stephen Clair’s “Love Makes Us Weird”.

History of lyrics that aren’t lyrics.

Chuck Miller: When “The War of the Worlds” played in Albany

Crease and Desist and The Down Rule.

Are Oreos as Addictive as Cocaine?
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Jaquandor picked such great links last week, especially about writing, that you might as well visit them all.

GOOGLE ALERTS (me)

Dustbury: “Roger on the dodgy subject of avoiding conflict.”
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SamuraiFrog: “Roger recently did a post about his favorite albums of the 50s, in which he name-checked me, and I figured that I’d try and come up with a list for myself.” (I LOVE this post.)

GOOGLE ALERTS (not me)

Colonel Roger Green (National Disaster Medical Systems for the 5501st U. S. Army Hospital), son of the late Rev. Reubin Green and Daisy Green has been awarded the Legion of Merit for exceptionally meritorious service with the U.S. Army spanning more than 30 years.

One overstuffed weekend: Roosevelt, Vezina, Hembeck

At the FDR library, I saw a poster chastising “the Jews” for taking the jobs of “white Christian men”; some things never change.

For whatever reason, I wasn’t sleeping well two weeks ago. When I booked our hotel for our trip to the Mid-Hudson for the first weekend in August, in my fatigued fog, I totally forgot that my wife had told me to secure a place for TWO nights and that she had even arranged for a cat sitter. I was just so happy that I finally remembered to book it at all. We had made this sojourn 1.5 hours south a few times, and it had always been one night. This time, though, we had added a couple of elements, so the extra time would have been helpful.

Instead, we headed out Saturday and went to Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s home. There will be much more on this.

Then to Hyde Park to visit the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. It was all but closed for repairs last year when we visited the mansion – though not TOTALLY closed, as the attendant at the locale properly noted – so the tickets we got last year for the site were still valid. I needed more time in the museum than The Daughter had to give; I got through the Depression era, but I really didn’t see the World War II stuff. Still, a great exhibit. I’ll go back some time, and it’s inspired me to want to see the other Presidential libraries, most of which are in the center of the country.

One thing that struck me at FDR’s library was a newspaper editorial cartoon of FDR and Congress rolling up their sleeves and getting to work on the nation’s problems together; THOSE were the days. Another was a poster chastising “the Jews” for taking the jobs of “white Christian men”; then again, some things never change.

We went to an annual party and The Daughter got to swim. Had a GREAT conversation with a minister and his social worker wife; we seemed to be on the same page in terms of social justice and the church’s role in same. But I was disappointed that my oldest friend from college was not present.

Finally, we went to our hotel. By this point, it was dark, and it was difficult to see, so we overshot it. FINALLY to bed, but one or more of the people in my room was snoring, and I got less than optimal rest.

Sunday morning, we went down to see what the hotel offered for breakfast. It was paltry: some fruit, hot chocolate, and instant coffee, and packets of oatmeal, which wasn’t so bad except there was no MILK and we would have had to use Coffeemate, a non-dairy creamer. We went out for breakfast, then checked out of the hotel and went to see Maria.

Maria Vezina is the sister of the late FantaCo cartoonist Raoul Vezina, who had died in November 1983, at the age of 35 of an asthma attack. I hadn’t seen her in nearly three decades. While she lives and works in New York City, she was up in the Mid-Hudson with TONS of boxes of Raoul’s stuff. I sorted out certain items for a possible project. She thought it would have taken me three hours, but I did it in 50 minutes; I knew what I was looking for. More details if this pans out.

Then we departed for the home of Fred Hembeck and his wife Lynn Moss. I met Fred back in February 1980 when FantaCo published his second collection of comic book-related strips. We made the sojourn to visit them for three or four years, then not for three years because of conflicts, then for the past two or three years. Fred and I have this shorthand way of talking that occasionally confounds my wife. Fortunately, she could go out with The Daughter to the pool. They made us a nice dinner, then we left for home.

I never realized how large one upstate county could be!

We stopped in New Paltz, my college town, to catch the Thruway, but, northbound, it was a parking lot, due to, as it turns out, an overturned tractor-trailer. So we took back roads to Saugerties, didn’t get to Albany until 9 p.m., and were exhausted.

After all that, I figured we’d follow that up with a nice quiet weekend. But the Daughter had a certificate for a FREE day at Great Escape, the Six Flags park about an hour north of here, and the coupon expired on August 11, so guess what WE did on Saturday, the 10th…

Friend Fred Hembeck is 60

Happy birthday, Fred Hembeck.

This past August, my wife, my daughter, and I got to visit Fred Hembeck and his wife Lynn Moss down in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York State. This had been an annual event for three or four years, but it had been four years since we last came by. I’m quite sure of that because their daughter Julie was about to go to college the last time we visited, and now she’s graduated. She was also present.

Anyone who has been following Fred’s Facebook page will know, right before Father’s Day 2012, Julie’s left leg was run over by a Mack truck! She went through a variety of treatments, including several different casts and at least three surgeries.

To add insult to injury, quite literally, from Fred: “Because the witnesses who stopped to help Julie drove by just as she was in the middle of the street fleeing the truck, they didn’t see her moments earlier trying to cross in the legal crosswalk, so SHE’S been issued a ticket!” They have had to spring for a lawyer to fight this, and her college town is about five hours away each way, so some unwanted travel as well.

Always glad to see Fred and Lynn at the biannual comic book shows in Albany. I’ve heard, though I haven’t seen it yet, that Fred’s story in Mars Attacks the Holidays is one of the highlights. AND I did not hear that from Fred or Lynn or Julie!

Fred turns 60 about five weeks before I do, so his job is to test the waters to see how it is in the land of the sexagenarians. Happy birthday, effendi.