The Google Blues
It's easy to remember back to simpler times when we didn't have cellphones and computers used floppy discs, one for the writing program (in my case Wordstar) and one for the files. It took two of them to store an entire screenplay, and we had to restrict the files to 10 pages, because otherwise the saves took too long as the computer groaned and struggled. With some effort I can even recall the typewriter, and carbon paper. I hated the damn thing, and didn't even know it because there was nothing else on the horizon to replace it then. But my mind can't wrap itself around the idea that there was a time when google wasn't a word, both noun and verb, and I couldn't indulge in the slightly subsersive, slightly erotic-sounding activity known as "googling myself." Nowadays you just aren't somebody until you have a web presence. Makes it sound a little like a fly caught by a spider, huh? Scary.
posted by John M Crowther @ 7:55 AM
9 Comments:
John C, I can hardly wait to google myself. You have opened all sorts of doors for me. Never knew I could do such a thing. This cartoon once again, in me humble opinion has great composition and correct negative space according to what I have been studying. Negative space is a very fascinating subject and hard to get correct, I believe.
By the way, thought that il professore would have been back on by now. Really miss his witty tales.
>It took two of them to store an entire screenplay, and we had to restrict the files to 10 pages, because otherwise the saves took too long as the computer groaned and struggled.<
Funny you should bring this up. When I went up the mountain, God gave me 27 commandments, but the technology being what it was back in those days I only could down load the first 10. God's name, by the way, was Yahweh, but he had such a thick accent we thought he said Yahoo.
~Moses
I someone could only find the other 17 they could do a sequel, Moze, what's known in the industry as a franchise.
Could never attempt to top the two of you. So glad that you are back, il professore.
...and it came to pass that the sequel would be "Guugul". You guys are hilarious! :-D
-Jean.
LOL, Jean.... that's funny!
If you reverse the lettering on the window behind the two guys at the bar you'll see that they are seated in an old fashioned "saloon" --an excellent sounding word with two liquid “oo”s which instantly evoke the taste of a tall glass of cold beer on a hot summer’s day. When Henry James wishes to describe a periodic gathering of people of social or intellectual distinction, he spells it the same way. Today, however, when folks like Adriana Huffington invite their pals over to the manse to discuss art and politics that is called a “salon.”
Sad to note, “saloon” is disappearing from our language as fast as the neighborhood “bar and grill.” One of the international chain of sanitized family restaurants now calls itself “Applebee’s Neighborhood Grill and Bar” with the obvious connotation that you are invited there to eat rather than get drunk. As far as I can see, the two guys in John’s drawing have something else in mind.
Back in the 60's, when I was a fledgling actor on Broadway, the actor Patrick O'Neal ("Night of the Iguana")opened a restaurant with his brother Michael in the (then new) Lincoln Center area. They called it O'Neal's Saloon. Not long after the sign went up, NYC authorities swept in and told them they didn't qualify as a saloon under the law. So they changed the S to a B and henceforth were known as O'Neal's Baloon [sic]. The full name of the saloon in the cartoon is Beef 'N Barf.
hahaha...how about Soup and Spruik...come to think of it that might be a good name for il professore's modern day Salon! Saloon, for me, has always had a bar room connotation...(having been reared on a steady stream of Bonanza re-runs out here in the colonies!)
- Jean.
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