cartoon life

I used to go into the London Public Library some days and wander to a shelf location where I had never been before, walk till felt like stopping and browse through the shelf - whatever shelf was beside me and look for a book that might be interesting. Something usually turned up.

I had found Rives on 4 a.m. on Miro on the TED channel the other day, and sent the link to a friend of mine, Spanner McNeil, who replied with a story of his coincidentally tuning in to a shortwave broadcast on “NHK Radio Japan. Signal strength 3-5. Hiss poor to inaudible.  “…the show is World Wide Interactive and this is DX Mailbag” where they read a letter sent to them where Roy talked about being up at 4 AM.

This little exchange prompted me, to, for the hell of it, Google ‘Shortwave Radio Blogs’ to stumble on  WFMU’s Beware of the Blog and the MP3 link leading to a series of articles on a very long page about very obscure recording finds, cassettes, old vinyl, and some really obscure videos.

Of course it leads to Classic Television Showbiz and Saturday Morning Blog

I could be trapped in this internet thing forever.

It’s facile to look back and laugh.  I would have been 12 years old, when in 1965, this video about “The Computer at Western” was broadcast. Yes. THE Computer at Western! which plays music and can do ‘ten years worth of astronomy calculations in just one day!’ One of many period news pieces at  The CFPL TV news archives, like this one; High School Student Appeals for the Right to Wear Long Hair and the Saga of Slippery the Seal, the story without which London wouldn’t have a soul.

While digging about in old stuff in the basement for some other purpose, I came across this old illustration. I found it at Ernie Rentz’ downtown ‘Ye Olde London Antiques and Junque Shoppe’, that he opened after selling the bookstore - some 20 plus years ago… really… wow…I bought it because it was the illustration in a grade school reader from a story I remembered, likely early 1960’s? I couldn’t recall the gist of the tale right now, but it involved this unfortunate little sedan which wound up towed to the garage, for what was, in hindsight, likely a transmission problem. I think he just couldn’t make it up the hill, or something.It is on a piece of 10 inch by 15 inch High Art #79 illustration board. The 3 1/2 scale guide measures 4 inches, or 12.7 cm for the Imperially-impaired. A small line of pencil written copy in the upper right says “little green car” and the writing at the lower right says:Gears & Gasolinetop l h pagep 12That is where the illustration was in the book, on the top half of the left hand page.There are various bits of wonderful tight brushwork, white, likely gouache, which was used at the time, to sharpen black edges, add detail and lighten the hatching in the tow-truck body shadows.Large image of the artwork