The Kitsune Channel

I was a first generation Roku customer. Being the sixth company founded by Anthony Wood, he named it the Japanese word for six.

My second generation Roku player on top of my first generation model

Today, I have two Roku sticks and Amazon’s me-too product, the Fire TV stick. (Fire TV has two technical advantages — there is an optional external Ethernet adapter, and the remote can control home theater receivers.)

With today’s announcement, Roku will no longer be the company it was. What’s the Japanese word for “fox?”

Roku is being bought out by Fox for $22 billion

https://9to5google.com/2026/06/15/roku-is-being-bought-out-by-fox-for-22-billion/

Where Were You in ’16?

Let’s wash out the bad taste of failed L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt with the ‘Happy Days’ theme song, performed by Truett Pratt and Jerry McClain.

The success of American Graffiti — “Where were you in ’62?” — motivated ABC-TV to pick up Happy Days as a series. ‘Graffiti’ celebrates a bygone era that was only ten years gone by. In between, the Sixties changed everything.

Ten years ago, Donald Trump was running for president. Today is Donald’s 80th birthday, and we’re stuck in the Trump doom loop.

Field Trip

Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson

Yesterday was the annual party, my first, of the New England Chapter of the National Cartoonists Society. Former chapter chairman Mark Parisi, the 2025 NCS Cartoonist of the Year, presented a survey of his life in cartooning.

Mark Parisi at the An Unlikely Story bookstore, Plainville, MA

Mark showed examples of cartoons he had created that had been subjected to the generative AI treatment by parties unknown. Cartoonists are now in the difficult circumstance of being accused of stealing ideas that were, in fact, stolen from them. AAUGH!

August will be the 80th annual National Cartoonists Society meeting and awards dinner. It’s being held in conjunction with the recently renovated and reopened Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum and Library in Columbus, Ohio. The library holds the collection of original Calvin & Hobbes comic strips, donated by Bill Watterson.

A touring exhibit, Exploring Calvin & Hobbes, has been curated by the museum. When it arrives at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, the NE NCS chapter is planning to be there.

https://www.nrm.org/2025/03/exploring-calvin-and-hobbes/

IMPish Tales

Bob Metcalfe rhapsodizes about working on ARPANET interfaces, the pre-Internet project that Bob Taylor headed.

Metcalfe later worked for Taylor at Xerox PARC, where he was a primary developer of what became Ethernet. Bob provides historical context for “America’s Technology Highway,” Route 128.