More Morning Thoughts

Things have caught up with me a bit. I will be going in the afternoon to the MOCCA event. Things have been a bit busy, mostly taking care of minor personal things. Oops, things caught up with me even more. I have to go tomorrow. Life is like that sometimes, you just have to adjust and do the next best thing.

I watched a little bit of The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr. T, a film written by Dr. Seuss. It has be one of the oddest films I have ever seen. Dr. Terwilliker is planning to make 500 children play his massive piano with thousands and thousands of keys. The sets are astoundingly weird looking. They are what would happen if you had Seussian pictures in real life. I was bowled over the by the oddness. I think it is one of the first live action cartoons.

Morning Thoughts

Classic 1902 Washington Post Political Cartoon of Theodore Roosevelt and Bear

I now have two books which I am looking at which I am ambivalent about revewing that I read recently, The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushie, and One Foot In The Grave by Jeaniene Frost. I feel like, I could just sit and watch them for a while until my mind gels around them and I can start writing about them. But, then maybe not.

Tomorrow is The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival at the Puck Building In New York. I am definitely going to go see the show. It should be fun. I have gone every year since it started. http://www.moccany.org/ . It is kind of funny, I have never really had a chance to go to the actual museum. I might leave the show a bit early and go the exhibit they have at the museum, Moving Pictures Comics to Film.

I am browsing through, Theodor Seuss Geisel The Early Works of Dr. Seuss, Volume 2. It is mostly editorial cartoons with some short articles on ridiculous subjects like Sex and the Sea God, The Facts of Life, Or How Should I Tell My Child, and various other things.

Today has been pretty quiet. I made a few donations for retirement parties at work. It will be the usual cake, card, and a small gift. This morning, I brought my car in to the repair shop. Someone grazed the side of my car while it was parked near the house. It was late at night, the car that hit my car drove off before I could even get a look at it.

I have a kind of long term project at work. I have to start weeding the law books. I'll probably start with thinning out some of the books in the storage stacks, then bringing down some of the less used books. Things are quite tight in our law collection.

Todays Meanderings

Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

I am almost done reading Full of Bull Do What Wall Street Does, Not What It Says, To Make Money In The Market by Stephen T. McClellan. I will probably finish reading it on the train home. I have enjoyed his criticism of the current use of analysts on Wall Street. He believes analysis should be separated from investment banking and should have a much more long term focus. He mentioned a book which I have in my bookshelves, Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd. He calls it the foundation stone for modern security analysis.

It makes me think deeply about stocks lately. I have been noticing that there is a lot more demand for mass transit lately, especially things like hybrid electric buses. I have been looking closely at Capstone Turbine which has an advanced hybrid electric turbine bus engine for mass transit. I think they will be doing well lately. I am of course not a professional and cannot know the future.

Two more books came in for me to look at today. One is the graphic novel, Castle Waiting by Linda Medley. There is an introduction by Jane Yolen. It appears to be a kind of fractured fairytale. The other book is American Nerd: A History of My People by Benjamin Nugent.

I also have been looking at another title called Theodor Seuss Geisel The Early Works of Dr. Seuss Volume 1, it is printed by Checker Publishing Group, c2005. It consists of Dr. Seuss's work before he was a children's author. Apparently, he met Chuck Jones, the animator during his stint in Frank Capra's signal corps. He wrote numerous editorial cartoons in support of the war effort during World War II.

He also ran a series of advertising cartoons for Atlas Oil. Right know I am looking at a magazine article entitled Ye Knights of Ye Round Table Being The Inside Dope on King Arthur's Court Translated From Merlin's Memoirs by Theophratus Seuss. The book is fairly entertaining so far.

The majority of his cartoon lampoon society. They often include rube goldberg type contraptions, make comments on peoples style, or physical aspects of people like mustches, beards, and adams apples.

There are also advertisements for things like mirrors and fountain pens. He did a campaign for Chilton Wing Flow Pens.

I am at the point where there are several anti Lindbergh for president cartoons. He wrote a number of pro-war cartoons well before Pearl Harbor.

I don't think it is as good as his children's cartoons. The majority of the cartoons are in black and white. This book is definitely not a childrens book. I still found it quite intriguing.

Daily Thoughts

Betsy Ross, 13 Colonies Flag

It is memorial day weekend this morning. We are supposed to remember our fallen. One of my grandfathers taught mathematics to bomber pilots on the home front during World War II, the other was a merchant marine and went to fight in the Lincoln Brigade on the side of syndicalists in the Spanish civil war.

Anyways, I am looking at Grow Your Money, 101 Easy Tips To Plan, Save, and Invest by Jonathan D. Pond. The reason I picked up this book is that I saw Jonathan Pond on a pledge drive for the PBS Public Broadcasting Service. They were offering a free financial help book if you donated money to public television. I saw this while I was folding laundry at the laundromat. He looks and seems to be a practical man without a lot of fluff. I hope that his writing is as good as his speaking.

I went to my local library this morning. The computers were down. There was no internet access. I could not sign up to use the machines for an hour. We occassionally have the computers go down at our branch. The worst time for it to happen is in the afternoon when there are a lot of people. This is quite inconvenient. I walked around and looked at the books.

I checked out MBA In A Day Learn What You Would Learn At Top Tier Business Schools by Stevem Stralser, Ph.D.. I think it is a kind of funny title, because I could probably read the book in a single day, then review it in the next. I also checked out Viewpoints Critical Selected Stories by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.. I rather like L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s writing, especially his ecologically oriented science fiction.

Finally, I picked up Comics Values Annual 2007 by Alex G. Malloy. I don't think it is too accurate, but I occassionally find out about a few science fiction and fantasy titles which I never heard about or read when I look through the listings. I usually don't pay attention to the prices at all. At our library we have the Official Overstreet Comic Price Guide 2008 edition. Overstreet is the guide used in most comic book stores.

At Roger's Time Machine in Manhattan, New York when I used to go there, they priced a lot of the comics at half the Official Overstreet Comic Price Guide except for some of the Golden Age, or Silver Age comics which were often guide price and some of the very popular titles. Most of the underground comics were priced differently than guide. There is no current price guide for underground, ground level, and independent comics. They are irregularly covered in the Overstreet and Comics Value guide, but they do not have much depth.

The prices are all over the place for this kind of material. A lot of the material is rare or not understood. This is one of the reasons I collect ground level comics. I can often get very interesting material at very reasonable prices. People often keep this kind of material on the shelves of stores for a long time. Some people call them alternative comics. Basically it is smaller presses that bring their material in at "the ground level". Usually it is not underground, counterculture, or drug focused comics that I am interested in.

I often like unique titles like Alien Worlds, Alien Encounters, Berni Wrightson Master of the Macabre, Ms. Tree, Death Rattle, Vaughn Bode, Fantagor, and Usagi Yojimbo. Everyone has their own tastes.

I just finished watching the old fashioned cartoon version of Horton Hears A Who by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel) and Chuck Jones. I really like the storytelling even if it is very nonsensical.

I also watched the Butter Battle Book produced by Ralph Bakshi and written by Dr. Seuss. At the time this cartoon was done, it was considered quite controversial. It is about escalation and mutual destruction. It was also done during the height of the cold war.

If you think Dr. Seuss only wrote children's books, you are wrong. There is an excellent book called Dr. Seuss goes to war : the World War II editorial cartoons of Theodor Geisel edited by Richard H. Minear. It is really interesting to look at.

Ralph Bakshi was also famous for doing one of my favorite films, Wizards. He also did the animated version of The Lord of the Rings. He was also famous for creating the first animated film to get an x rating, Fritz the Cat, based on the character created by Robert Crumb. A lot of his work is very controversial.

I thought I would add a quote I found while reading Grow Your Money by Jonathan Pond,

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge"-- Bertrand Russell