Month: May 2009

That old car smell

I’m not big into driving for its own sake like my buddy Bismo is, but I’ve always noticed the makes and models of other cars while behind the wheel. Without thinking about it, I make mental notes about other vehicles, and I can recognize many cars with the smallest of visual cues. For example, have you noticed how the fenders are now flat vertically around the wheel wells? That’s a recent design trend.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I carry a percentage of typical car vintages, and some weeks ago, while commuting on the Mass Pike, I realized that it seems there are fewer new cars on the road these days. Since then I’ve been consciously looking for brand-new cars, and I’ve confirmed there really are fewer of them showing up compared to a year and more ago. The way things are going, we’ll probably be hearing auto dealers proclaiming “The 2009’s are here, so come on down!” for another year or two.

Monte Schulz to unveil “This Side of Jordan” at Book Expo

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Fantagraphics has put out a press release about Monte Schulz’s new novel, “This Side of Jordan”:

FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS ANNOUNCES THE ACQUISITION OF THIS SIDE OF JORDAN, A NOVEL BY MONTE SCHULZ

THIS SIDE OF JORDAN, by MONTE SCHULZ, will be unveiled at the 2009 Book Expo America in New York City, May 29-31, with an appearance by the author on Saturday, May 30, at 2:30PM in the Autographing Area.

Monte Schulz

The novel is described as, “a tapestry of American life in the summer before the economic crash of 1929, and a quintessential novel of the rural Midwest offered unexpectedly as a crime thriller.” You can pre-order it from Amazon at this link. Monte says “This Side of Jordan” is very different from his first novel, but like “Down by the River” I’m sure a ripping good read is guaranteed for all!

Beav it to Cleaver

Netflix Watch Instantly on the Roku means TV Land no longer exists for me. I was watching an episode from the third (1959) season of “Leave it to Beaver” tonight when I was surprised by a brief guest appearance. June is at a women’s club party, hosted by Mrs. Harrison.

Leave it to Beaver

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/MAY/Beaver01.mp3]

They don’t explain what sort of trouble Mrs. Mondello’s daughter is in, but by having the ladies point out that she’s eighteen, parents in the audience can imagine for themselves. This is the sort of clever scripting for family TV shows that later disappeared. After “All in the Family” premiered, TV comedies dealing with personal issues were about as subtle as a backhoe breaking a gas main.

A year after her appearance on Beaver, the actress playing Mrs. Harrison would be heard on TV again, and her voice has been ever-present ever since, even today, ten years after her death. Listen carefully to the audio clip. She’s out of character here, but she played somebody you’ve heard a thousand times.

Leave it to Beaver

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/MAY/Beaver02.mp3]

Never a DELL moment

I was going to post an “e-toy update” but now my primary PC — a one-year-old DELL Inspiron 530 — won’t start. Not even in safe mode. After running a full scan yesterday, of course. AAUGH!

So I’m on the Acer netbook. I won’t bother trying to figure out what’s wrong. I’ll just go straight to an installation of Windows.

(Later) OK…. I shall not die this day. Not yet, anyway. I ran Safe Mode so it would go to a command prompt, and I was able to launch explorer.exe (the desktop GUI interface). Running chkdsk revealed some file system problems, so I set chkdsk to run with the fix option on the next restart. Why did NTFS develop a problem? Don’t know, but I won’t ever run the Verizon system optimizer again, that’s for sure. It’s the one thing I did differently yesterday than I usually do when doing a maintenance scan.

(Later still) Well… the first restart after the last thing I wrote resulted in a BSOD with PFN_LIST_CORRUPT. So I most likely have a hard memory error, or a bad device driver. I removed the Cisco VPN and its virtual adapter, and the error hasn’t returned. But just in case I burned a bootable Microsoft Memory Test CD.