The comic is hosted on Keen Spot, which I can subscribe on my reader, unfortunately I have to scroll through all the strips I don't read to get to the ones I do (and so far there are two, Two Lumps and The Devil's Panties.
Do you remember the fads of your youth? I'm thinking of things like when I was in elementary school and everyone was doing those origami type folded paper "fortune" games - you picked a number (after the paper device was opened and closed in the proper ritualistic sequences) then a letter (more ritual) and finally got to lift the folded paper inside to find something written like "your secret crush knows you love him" or "you're the teacher's pet" (and the spelling wasn't always that good).
Then there was the jacks fad - could you ever get to tensies or higher? We didn't have superballs then, we used these little red rubber balls that didn't bounce all that high.
There was a brief time when all the girls would play on the parallel bar, spinning around and around it until you got sick or wore a hole in the sweater you used to keep from sticking to the bar and scraping all the skin under your knee off.
These days it's LOLcats and all the permutations thereof. LOLpresidents (at FARK, which may not always be SFW), LOLgerbils (hosted at LOLgay) (who spell it gebril and I love that to death - as well as the gebrils which are just so damned cute), LOLPilgrims, for the literate and an entire comment thread on Making Light of literate lolisms...apparently we've reached LOLsingularity.
Finally, for tonight that is, I had read a rumor that said:
On Monday, Publishers Weekly reported that Bookspan, acquired just six weeks ago by Bertelsmann, will cut 280 positions and close some of its book clubs, which include Book-of-the-Month, Doubleday and The Literary Guild. It looks as if the 54-year-old Science Fiction Book Club, which offers a selection of graphic novels and comic novelizations, will be among the casualties.However, an update post raises hopes that this is not the case.
Although there haven’t been any official announcements, science fiction editor Jonathan Strahan reported on his blog yesterday that SFBC’s only editors — Editor-in-Chief Ellen Asher and Senior Editor Andrew Wheeler — have lost their jobs at Bookspan. Strahan says Bertelsmann probably will merge SFBC with its Doubleday Book Club.
I would be very sad to see the SFBC close. I have been a faithful member for over 30 years. I've been so loyal that about 15 years ago they took me off the "you better send in your card that says you are opting out of the monthly selection or we're gonna send it to you anyway and charge you for it" membership to "you just buy our books when ever you like, no worries about that selection response thingie". And I do buy from there, a lot. I hope it stays around for a long time.
dawno
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2 comments:
Regarding childhood fads, one I remember fondly was "Chinese Jump Rope." It might've had other names outside San Antonio, Texas, but that's what we called it.
You took a long loop of elastic (made at home or bought at a toy store) and looped it around the ankles of two people or chairs, about six-eight feet apart so the elastic was maybe four inches off the ground. Then the jumper did a complicated series of jumps inside, outside, over, and with the elastic band (so hard to describe!) while chanting "Chinese" words. (They were actually Japanese, but we were just elementary kids and didn't know the dif.
It was great fun. If you did all the jumps and didn't trip up, you could move the elastic band higher and higher. Eventually it would be too high to jump on, of course, but it was fun anyway.
I haven't yet run into anyone else who remembers this fad, but since the elastics could be bought at any toy store in the mid-1970s, I find it hard to believe it was limited to San Antonio.
Hm... childhood memories! Give me another twenty years and I'll be on my way to fogeydom!
I remember that one, too. I was a teen by the'70s so I suppose I saw younger kids playing it. I think I recall that if you couldn't get, or afford, the elastic you could knot rubber bands together into a huge loop, too.
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