Day: February 10, 2008

Picking Pet Pics

Recently I went to PetulaClark.net and joined the International Petula Clark Society. Last week I received a copy of latest issue of Petula & Company. Among the interesting items in the digest magazine is Irene Seaton’s story about how she started the PETition to get Pet the title of Dame. At the moment there are 1,052 signatures. There’s only a month left to go!

Issue #134 of Petula & Company also has a photo I’ve never seen before, of Pet at age 25. Here it is, cropped. The full picture shows her in “her Microbat speedboat on the River Mole at Easy Molesey, Surrey.” How bizarre and fascinating! I’d love to know more about this. Was the boat given to her for promotional purposes?

Petula Clark - December 13, 1957

And here’s a photo of Petula I took from a different source. She’s ten years younger here, only 15, and if you look quick you could almost mistake her for Shelley Fabares at the same age.

Petula Clark - January 1, 1948

Monte Schulz Says…

Over at this link on Cartoon Brew, Monte Schulz says…

It seems as if my essay and the others will appear in the April issue of The Comics Journal. I hope you will all find my 36,000 words to be both informative and entertaining! And I hope to never have to write about the biography again! I think it’s a decent essay. It offers a lot of information, and it is not a re-hashing of what I’ve written on here. It’s all new.

So the issue of TCJ coming out in April is the one to get. We’ll be on the lookout, for sure. And just a little while ago, Monte added this comment…

Actually, Bill Melendez adored my father and could not have cared less whether Dad drank or not. That’s just another example of something David wrote that was either false or misleading. Bill and my dad were truly great friends and Bill is distressed over some of things David quotes him as saying in that book. In any case, had you ever seen my dad and Bill Melendez, you’d have known how fond they were of each other, and of Lee Mendelson, too. They made a great team back then.

If you haven’t read the David Michaelis biography Schulz and Peanuts, and you’d like to flip through the book at a store just to get a sense of what Monte is talking about, give page 384 a try. Read to the end of the last complete paragraph on page 385. Posthumous psychoanalysis.

Why Yahoo! Is Better Than Google

Ten years ago, Microsoft ruled the roost. But now, thanks to the return of Steve Jobs, Apple is a powerhouse in consumer electronics, and online it’s big, bad Google that’s calling the shots. So Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo! Does Microsoft need Yahoo more than Yahoo needs Microsoft? Yahoo thinks so, because they’re holding out for more money.

But let’s keep Google in perspective. Its search engine isn’t perfect. For example, here are the results from a search I did a few minutes ago. Click to enlarge the picture, and look at the fourth hit.

Google Search Results

Google doesn’t put the popular Pratt Hobbies Rocket Catalog on the first page, but there’s a link to wedding pictures that you can’t look at, because they’re password protected? What’s up with that?

Now here is the same search, but done on Yahoo! Look at the first site listed.

Yahoo Search Results

There. Much better, don’t you think? Top of the world, Ma!