Where my head is. At.

Actually, this is pretty much the way I am all the time. Is it business? Busyness? Bidenness? Am I just so full of trivia that I can't make room for new data? I'm voting for the last option, as you can see.  

Christmastime is here!

 I'm back! And slightly lamer than ever!

ho ho ho

What a year this has been. So full of... Crap, mostly. But worry not! Your old friend Fred is here to try to pick up the thread on Your Daily Dose of Vitamin Fred. Why? Because you're showing signs of grippe, my friends, as well as catarrh and pox and housemaid's knee. All these are well known to be caused by a deficiency of vitamin F.

But mainly, because I missed you! 

In a nutshell, for those who have not followed the whine trail through the comments on the site of the Great Lileks, or just been personally close enough to hear me, we got a new puppy named Izzy in the summer and he is part cupid and part angel of doom. Mostly all dog, but there are issues beyond mere dogginess. Elder dog Tralfaz has not been well, but that's another story. There was a financial crisis, and much gnashing of teeth (gnash gnash). Which reminds me--I haven't been to the dentist in ages. So it's been a tough year. I'm sure I'll be addressing a lot of this stuff in bite-size pieces going forward.

I'm still crushed for time, as in under the famous Letterman 80-ton hydraulic press, so I don't think I'll be able to revive the Wednesday book feature anytime soon. If I do, I'll finally stop calling it the Humpback Writers. 'Twas a silly name.  

Anyway, that's all for today, and thanks for visiting. Going forward we can expect to see the usual snide remarks, dopey anecdotes, goofy commentary, and poorly rendered cartoons. Hope to see you around!

A pause.

I'm afraid circumstances are requiring me to announce a hiatus in this blog.

No, not that kind!

Sadly, it's not a vacation, nor a big book tour (ha!). I just have a lot that must get done this next week and no time in which to do it. I hope to be back next Saturday, but plan to post again if the situation worsens. 

Please enjoy the rest of your April!

George & Dragon.

Today is the feast day of St. George. You know -- dragon killing dude. That's pretty much the only thing anyone (including me) thinks of. And yet he's the patron saint of England, Catalonia, and Moscow; there are 26 towns named for St. George, including the seat of Richmond County in New York; and the cross of St. George -- red cross on white banner -- can be found all around England. The Coptic Church calls him the Prince of Martyrs, and he is even revered by Muslims. There is a statue of him on the grounds of the United Nations building in Manhattan, slaying a "dragon" made of actual pieces of US and Soviet missiles, a Russian gift in 1990. But who was he? 

Like several early saints in the church, such as Christopher, his legend had a tendency to crowd out the facts. He was the real deal, whom Pope Gelasius I canonized in 494. Here's what the Saints & Angels page says:

George was born to a Gerontios and Polychronia, a Roman officer and a Greek native of Lydda. Both were Christians from noble families of the Anici and George, Georgios in the original Greek, was raised to follow their faith.

When George was old enough, he was welcomed into Diocletian's army. by his late 20's, George became a Tribunus and served as an imperial guard for the Emperor at Nicomedia.

On February 24, 303 A.D., Diocletian, who hated Christians, announced that every Christian the army passed would be arrested and every other soldier should offer a sacrifice to the Roman gods.

George refused to abide by the order and told Diocletian, who was angry but greatly valued his friendship with George's father.

When George announced his beliefs before his peers, Diocletian was unable to keep the news to himself. In an effort to save George, Diocletian attempted to convert him to believe in the Roman gods, offered him land, money and slaves in exchange for offering a sacrifice to the Roman gods, and made several other offers that George refused.

Finally, after exhausting all other options, Diocletian ordered George's execution. In preparation for his death, George gave his money to the poor and was sent for several torture sessions. He was lacerated on a wheel of swords and required resuscitation three times, but still George did not turn from God.

On April 23, 303 A.D., George was decapitated before Nicomedia's outer wall. His body was sent to Lydda for burial, and other Christians went to honor George as a martyr.

That sounds like a brave but very typical saint of the early church, willing to go to a horrible death rather than renounce Jesus Christ. 

So... what about the dragon? 

Here's the story:

There are several stories about George fighting dragons, but in the Western version, a dragon or crocodile made its nest at a spring that provided water to Silene, believed to be modern-day Lcyrene in Libya.

The people were unable to collect water and so attempted to remove the dragon from its nest on several occasions. It would temporarily leave its nest when they offered it a sheep each day, until the sheep disappeared and the people were distraught.

This was when they decided that a maiden would be just as effective as sending a sheep. The townspeople chose the victim by drawing straws. This continued until one day the princess' straw was drawn.

The monarch begged for her to be spared but the people would not have it. She was offered to the dragon, but before she could be devoured, George appeared. He faced the dragon, protected himself with the sign of the Cross, and slayed the dragon.

After saving the town, the citizens abandoned their paganism and were all converted to Christianity.

Obviously there is at least one thing in the story that's deeply weird -- the idea that the men of Silene said to themselves, "We're clean outta sheep; what do we do? Go fight the dragon? Nah, that's crazy talk. Let's just feed him the girls." Although to be fair, that was probably one hell of a dragon (or crocodile).

No disrespect meant to St. George or the other martyrs of the church, but I kind of think that without the tale of bold St. George killing the dragon he would not have nearly the same popularity. Sober men of the church revere the saints who gave their lives for Christ, but all guys like the story of a dude willing to kill a dragon and save the princess.

Laff away your gut!

When my doctor says, "You ought to lose weight" I say "Har har HARDY har har!"

Why do I say that? It's obvious that with my back and my general shape I am not going to go to the gym to flail around on the weight machines willy-nilly. If someone were to ask me, "How do you perform a standing dumbbell cobra with alternate arms?" my answer would be to hire a guy.

But you see, my plan is to laugh my way into good shape! 

You may laugh at that. Good! It's good exercise. Hey, I've got science on my side here.

While doing some research for work I came across a 2006 study from the London International Journal of Obesity. It's called "Energy Expenditure of Genuine Laughter." According to these chucklesome boffins, "Genuine voiced laughter causes a 10–20% increase in EE [energy expenditure] and HR [heart rate] above resting values, which means that 10–15 min of laughter per day could increase total EE by 40–170 kJ (10–40 kcal)."

That's great! I can just laugh my way to health. I love to laugh; I love to read and watch funny stuff. And I'm not talking about the sarcastic ha-ha I do when I look at "news"papers or the clapter that follows feeding the crowd some bit of political stuff they like. I'm talking gut-busting laughs that make me crawl to get tissues as I try not to knock over any beverages. Damn straight that burns calories!  

Now, you're probably wondering how long it will take for me to hyuk hyuk all my lard off. Let me do some math here.... If we take the old formula that states 3,500 cal (or kcal) = 1 pound, and 15 minutes of laughter burns 40 calories... 87.5... per hour, 21.875... round up to 22 (close enough).... 

Looks like if I laugh around the clock for 46 days straight I'll be in excellent shape.

Um.

Hm.

Ah.

I wonder how many calories you burn by crying?

Fred's Book Club: Such Tripe!

It is Wednesday, which is Hump Day, and that means it's time for the Humpback Writers, our serious book feature with the silly name. To date no actual humps on the writers have been detected, despite our best efforts. In fact, today's author/artist, while being a bit advanced in years, still has no sign of back problems, as one can see on his Web page. 

Yes, today we're profiling British cartoonist Bill Tidy, and specifically one book-length installment of his long-running cartoon saga, The Fosdyke Saga (a takeoff on the novel and TV series The Forsyte Saga). And if you stay to the end of today's post, you'll see an interesting connection between this comic strip and a notorious case currently in the papers.

When I was a kid, I loved comic strips, especially the funny ones. What would prove to be my favorite form was not the straight gag or the adventure stories, but the rarest and most difficult -- the continuing story that still had a daily punchline. Strips like Thimble Theatre and Little Nemo were known for it, but they were long gone. It was a vanished breed in my youth, at least in America, but across the pond Bill Tidy had been writing and drawing one since 1971 for the Daily Mirror. The Fosdyke Saga featured the various adventures of the Fosdyke clan, Britain's greatest tripe-selling family, and their ongoing struggles in the Edwardian era and beyond, especially against the nefarious rival Roger Ditchley. The adventures centered around selling tripe, promoting the public's awareness of tripe, inventing new uses for tripe (tripe parachute!), fending off various wicked persons, and acquiring rare tripe-related objects for their tripe museum (on the book cover above you can see the South American tripe pyramid, composed completely of dried tripe). 

From the front matter

I bought the above book (the last in the series) at the Forbidden Planet store in the Village. While a lot of the humor (or humour) was lost on this young American at the time, I still thought it was brilliant, funny, endlessly inventive, and a veritable a circus of great characters.

Tidy maintained interest with cliffhangers and rotating storylines. In one adventure in the book above, adventurous son Tom Fosdyke has been dispatched to the Arctic Circle to seek the Arctic Tripe Snake!

Meanwhile, in Manchester, youngest and strongest son Tim has had a breakdown following a plot of Ditchley's to convince the Fosdykes they are haunted! Unfortunately the doctor leaves much to be desired....

Meanwhile Jos, head of the family, is stuck in a pub, where he is spying on a devious plan to rob a bank and pin the blame on his own horse, the mighty and faithful Tripeworks!!!! (!!!)

I loved the format and desperately wanted to create a comic strip like that for the American market. Unfortunately by the time I was coming of age, newspapers were starting to die and the comics pages were shrinking, a shadow of what they once were -- and that was before the Internet just about delivered the coup de grace. 

But that came much earlier for Tidy at the Mirror. In 1984 the Mirror was acquired by Robert Maxwell, MP, who didn't think Bill Tidy was funny, and cast him out. Tidy had been at the paper since the fifties, so this was a pretty big blow. The thing that saddened Bill most was that he'd planned to extend the Fosdyke adventures much longer:

“It was a very sad day when, with forty years of the Fosdyke story told, the Mirror’s new management decided to axe the strip [in 1985]. Fosdykes at Dunkirk, The Salford Blitz, the place of tripe production in the Marshall Plan, the possibility of free school tripe under the terms of the 1944 Education Act. All these stirring events are ready chronicled and simply need the light of day — a nation waits.”

But alas, that was the end. The Fosdyke saga, which had been adapted into radio plays, a TV show, and a stage play, came to a close. And people wonder why hardly anyone eats tripe anymore.

Here's the kicker I mentioned at the top: Robert Maxwell, who later annoyed New Yorkers by buying the Daily News, perished in 1991 in a bizarre incident where he apparently fell off his yacht naked while peeing in the ocean (as one does). Murder and suicide were ruled out (hmm); death by heart attack that caused drowning was the coroner's deduction. Maxwell had defaulted on a fifty million pound loan, which set off a feeding frenzy among his creditors, and his publishing empire came to the same fate as did he, minus the peeing.

More recently, Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine has been much in the news. As I write, she still faces serious charges for her dealings with the late Jeffrey Epstein, who probably did not kill himself. That story is, shall we say, tripe. The question is whether she can bargain her silence for freedom, based on the high rollers that went to Pedo Island under her watch. 

But on goes Bill Tidy, drawing and doing many other things, and God bless him. His is the kind of saga one should emulate, not that of the strange and awful Maxwells. 

Silly-con valley.

 

The BodiSocc, a one-piece garment, is becoming popular among Silicon Valley types
who hate dealing with laundry.

You know they'd go for it because it:

• features technologically advanced fabric
• is anti-cultural
• is good for the lazy
• has a stupid name
• is childish