Recent Comments

1. 2 days ago on Robert Ariail

   “Vacated” presupposes that there was something in there in the first place.

2. 3 days ago on Thatababy

   Much as I loved Trina’s work, there is one minor correction I want to make. Trina Robbins was the first female artist to illustrate “Wonder Woman” for DC Comics. That is, a comic book featuring Wonder Woman that contained Wonder Woman in the title. She drew the mini-series “The Legend of Wonder Woman,” which came out in 1986.

   However in 1977 Wonder Woman appeared in the DC comic book “Super Friends,” based on the Hanna-Barbera animated series of the same name. The late Ramona Fradon, who also died this year, drew several issues of that comic. So Ramona Fradon was the first female artist to illustrate a story that contained Wonder Woman for DC comics.

   So the first female artist to draw Wonder Woman was Ramona Fradon. The first female artist to draw “Wonder Woman” was Trina Robbins.

3. 4 days ago on Close to Home

   It may not be. It seems to be missing the hidden bug.

4. 7 days ago on Frazz

   I was figuring out the meanings of lots of words from context when I was 5. It’s one of the tools kids use to improve their vocabulary. They may not know the name of what they’re doing or realize they’re even doing it, but they do figure out the meanings of new words from context all the time.

   Case in point: waterspout. Where I grew up we usually called them downspouts, so when I heard “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” the first time, I wasn’t familiar with calling it a waterspout. But I was able to figure out that the song meant a downspout from context.

5. 8 days ago on Frazz

   Yes there was a time when I only knew one of the two definition, and it was the downspout in a gutter system definition. I learned that definition from the song when I was a pre-schooler. I learned about watery tornados from an Aquaman story sometime later when I was an older pre-schooler. So, even knowing only one definition, I wouldn’t have had Frazz’s confusion.

   Moreover, even if someone only knew the water tornado definition of the word, the context of the song makes it clear that the song isn’t talking about one of those. People who know about offshore whirlwinds know they’re a weather phenomenon so would know that if the sun came out and dried up the rain, there wouldn’t be clouds anymore and there wouldn’t be any more waterspouts. Meaning that at the end of the song the spider couldn’t have climbed up the spout again, because it wouldn’t have been there. At that point, people should realize that the song is talking about a different kind of waterspout and, perhaps, go looking for another definition to the word.

6. 9 days ago on Frazz

   According to some accounts of the song’s origin, neither itsy-bitsy or insy-weensy was first. They posit that the original version of the song was blooming bloody spider.

7. 9 days ago on Frazz

   Yes, Frazz said he made the mistake as a kid, but as I also said, when I heard the song as a kid, I knew both meanings of the word waterspout and didn’t get confused.

8. 9 days ago on Frazz

   Of for crying out loud, even as a kid, I knew that while a waterspout was a tornado-like phenomenon, a waterspout was also another term for a gutter’s downspout. I never thought that the song was referring to the off-shore twister and always knew the spider was climbing up a gutter system’s downspout (probably up the inside of the spout) but that the song used the three-syllable word waterspout instead of the two-syllable word downspout, because it needed three syllables to scan properly.

   I refuse to believe that Frazz, who became a successful song writer later in life, was that unfamiliar with words, synonyms, and a song’s scanning structure as a child.

9. about 2 months ago on Thatababy

   And for a CGI character Best Visual Effects is the same as Best Actor.

10. 3 months ago on Diamond Lil

    Does any state still use parallel parking in its driving tests? I know that Ohio switched from parallel parking to a obstacle course format called the Maneuverability Test decades ago.