Grey Cell Green
Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, 1991.
With Grandpa predictably having another heart attack just in time for Elizabeth’s wedding day, Lyn Johnnston has changed her mind about the future of For Better of for Worse (a/k/a FOOB) for the 413th time. Apparently the mix of old to new content will now be 50-50, and she will be returning to her old drawing style to match the old strips. Apparently she wants to make Ellie’s nose smaller, and “fix” some of the mistakes she made over the years.
That said, I’d like to announce that I will be re-launching Planet SOMA later this year. In the process, I will be increasing the size of my penis and correcting mistakes and mishaps like this one, this one, and this one.
Those of you ho have been following this FOOB saga over the past few years will probably agree with me when I say that I fully excpect Lyn Johnston’s next announcement to be that she will be re-launching her strip again in October using discarded artwork from Gasoline Alley and Snuffy Smith and recycled storylines from The Katzenjammer Kids.
Way to go, State Board of Community Colleges (along with both NC gubernatorial candidates). Let’s make sure we do all we can to guarantee there will be a persistent, dependent underclass in North Carolina for years to come.
Denying undocumented immigrants a means of getting an education that might help them support themselves is probably not the most efficient way to avoid having your tax dollars support them. Keep in mind that these people were paying out of state tuition rates which covered more than the cost of their education, so they weren’t exactly suckling at the public teat to begin with. However, without access to job training, it’s pretty much a given that they (or their children) will eventually be doing so.
A big happy birthday to my dad, who turned 83 today. As is his custom, there was dinner at the cafeteria followed by cake at home and no further fuss.
While I’m at it, a big happy birthday to me, who turned 44 last Sunday. I allowed slightly more fuss: dinner at Anton’s on Saturday night (as is my custom) and then a lovely day hanging out with my boy (which is something I don’t get to do enough of) on Sunday.
I got lots of cool stuff, much of it books:
- Motoring by John Jakle and Keith Sculle.
These are two of my favorite authors: geographers with a road culture and history perspective. When I write my book on the history of the American supermarket, the format will be based on their books on motels, gas stations, and chain restuarants.
- The Five Laws of Library Science by S.R. Ranganathan.
- Atlanta: An Illustrated History by Andy Ambrose.
- Books on Fire by Lucien Polastron.
- Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight by Eric Avila.
And then there was my new puppy:
I love having a boy who understands that a big stuffed puppy and an Elmo piñata are absolutely appropriate gifts for a bitter, cynical 44-year-old.
Fobia
Camila, 1991.
I remember seeing this in 1992 on some music video show, either on Univision or Telemundo, and really liking it for some reason.
You’d think it might have been a little sad putting Planet SOMA to rest after nearly thirteen years. And it was, sort of. But it’s been something of a dead site for years now anyway, as most of its content slowly migrated over here, and as all my attmpts to resuscitate it with a new focus pretty much failed. So now Planet SOMA redirects to Otherstream, as it probably should have done since roughly 2002 or so. For reference, the few items that were posted on the latest incarnation of Planet SOMA have been transferred over here.
I’ll always keep the domain pointed someplace, even if it’s just to this site or to a flickr album or something like that. It was my first, after all. And who knows? Maybe I’ll get another bright idea for it some day, one that will stick.
Mainly, though, I just didn’t want to have it pointed at a dead body anymore.
Picture it. Greensboro NC. Sometime in the vicinity of 1992.
Yer humble host was a long-haired homo misfit in a place that was having none of it. He had a few friends scattered between there and Charlotte to the south, and he relied on their tolerance to make life liveable. Generally, though, he hated everyone else he came in contact with, particularly his fellow homos, most of whom were just as happy as could be dancing around in their acid-washed jeans in the city’s collection of generic queer bars, immersed in the same bland “not quite disco, not quite house, not quite techno” musical sludge southern queer bars have relying on seemingly since the dawn of time.
So I visited my friend Jeff T., a co-worker and a recently uncloseted deadhead turned rave child, one night before drining heavily, as was my custom at the time. I met his new squeeze that night. He seemed a rather nice sort, and I had the vague feeling I’d met him once before, many years in the past, but that we hadn’t really gotten to know each other.
Mark G. Harris, 1992. (Ballpoint) ink on (notebook) paper.
This tme around, we actually did get to know each other, and Mark turned out to be one of the only people I manged not only to tolerate, but actually even to like during my last few months in Greensboro. He evetually broke up with Jeff (who later developed a rather unhealthy obsession with another of my friends) and Mark and I got to spend time lurking around dark bars, movie theatres, and the occasional Denny’s. I was sort of obsessed with Denny’s at the time. And then there was the famed 1992 Color Copy Tour of South Carolina, which I may dicsuss some day. This is not that day.
He was on an extended trip to Los Angeles when I moved to San Francisco in October 1992, but had returned to Greensboro by my first visit home the following year, which is when this picture was taken:
Actually, I think it was the Denny’s in Greensboro.
That was probably the last time we saw each other face to face. As often happens when people are preoccupied with life, the letters and calls just sort of stopped. And we both had fairly eventful lives from that point on, in San Francisco for me and in New York for Mark, as it turns out. I often wondered where he’d ended up and what had happened to him, and if he still hated pickles and flossed regularly and wrote really well.
Guess what. He does.
And after all this time, damned if we didn’t land about 2 1/2 hours from each other, back in North Carolina, which must say something about our home state, even though I’m not sure just what it is.
Now that we’ve run across each other again after fifteen years, I’m ready to admit that I’ve still never seen Heathers and still don’t quite get that reference in that letter from 1993. I’ll have to rectify that situation.
RSS aggregators beware: Otherstream is about to move forcefully into 2002, leaving the static HTML world behind and transitioning headlong into the world of PHP, SQL, XML, and all those other acronyms. I’ve been avoiding it for years, despite managing numerous other sites in database format, just because the mere idea of cutting and pasting twelve years of this site into a new format gave me the vapors. But it’s time. More soon.
Your exciting new Otherstream. Please try to contain your enthusiasm.
For your reference, particularly the nerdly among you, posts from 1 January 2008 to now are all in the database. Previous posts and much of the rest of the content are still in HTML format, but I’ve constructed a spiffy new page template based on the PHP template, so everything pretty much works the same. Some of the old content will be a bit buggy until I get the whole site transferred over (which may take a couple of weeks or a couple of months). Also, most URLS for pages other than the front page will eventually change.
The “Archives” and “Categories” menus on the right only cover items that have been imported into the database. They’ll obviously grow as I migrate more content.
Otherstream now has a nifty RSS feed and category tags and everything, bringing me completely up to date. 2002, to be precise. I haven’t decided about comments yet.I tried them during Planet SOMA’s brief PHP phase, and the spam outneumbered the legitimate posts by about fifty to one, so I’m not sure how tolerant I can be. Let me know if you have a strong opinion on the subject.
Enjoy.
Icicle Works
Whisper to a Scream, 1984.