Christine “dabbled” in Witchcraft…

Heeheehee…

Afternoon Humor: Jane Austen’s Fight Club

Thanks to Sandy Underpants at The Aristocrats:

Had enough? How about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls…

Related Articles

• “Jane Austen’s Fight Club” and related posts (mediabistro.com)

Cartoon(s) of the Week – The GOP Pledge as viewed across the country…

Ben Sargent in the Austin American Statesman:

It seems that the GOP Pledge is recognized as fiction…

– and –

Tony Auth in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

… but the Republicans find it something to dance to…

– and –

Steve Sack in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

… at least it gives the very rich what they want…

– and –

Lee Judge in the Kansas City Star:

…but in the end, there’s nothing new under the sun.

Light Booth Pre-Show

Getting everything ready as the audience starts to come in. Checked my e-mail and found I had a donation to the Under The LobsterScope operating fund from a reader in New Hampshire… so I, of course, immediately sent out the Bill’s Barnhart Ornaments font package (this month’s appreciation gift) by e-mail. The tile on the left is a Barnhart Ornament.

This is the first of the last three performances of Thurber Carnival… just tomorrow night and Sunday Matinee to go and it’s over. Not sure if I’ll be working on the next show here… I have some conflicts that they didn’t bother to ask me about… I guess they just assumed I’d be here. I much prefer it when people ask me in advance to work on their shows. This next one lands on Elly’s birthday and Thanksgiving week and I have lots of other things I’m involved with, like the Film Festival, during the rehearsal weeks. (That’s another Barnhart Ornament on the right.)

We’re at the 10 minute call and there are about eight people in the audience… I don’t know if there is a last minute rush out in the lobby, but one would hope. Oooops… it hit 11 as I write this.

After the radio show and we’re having coffee at Mellow Moods…

John Case and I are enjoying our post-show coffee over on German Street as we watch Phil work like a demon to service his customers (including getting our two bagels toasted). Right now none of his help are around and he is working like a mad man… impressive!

Today I’m finishing up my search for a sale of my dead car for parts. So far the best offer is at Brown’s for $200.00… I’m still hoping that one more guy who is looking for an Echo motor might come through and buy the car to retrofit. I gave him two days and this is the third, so I’ll call him. Whatever I get from the parts goes into paying for Linda Bartash’s Subaru.

Tonite starts the second and final weekend of Thurber Carnival… John says their brushup rehearsal was pretty good last night. I skipped it… the director said she didn’t need lights for the rehearsal. Just as well, since I was exhausted last night. Maybe we’ll have some audience, too. Full Circle does a really bad job of promoting shows and a 10 or 12 person audience in a 90 seat house is not unusual. We hit 30 on  the Sunday matinee last week and that was the best house so far.

OK…have a great Friday. The rain has stopped here and the sun is out…first time in a couple of days…and I want to enjoy it.

Related Articles

• It looks like I may buy Linda Bartash’s Subaru Outback… (underthelobsterscope.wordpress.com)
• Coffee’s Place In The Global Economy (mint.com)
• Doctors and Nurses Are Fueled by Coffee (webmd.com)

The major issues are still there requiring attention… and Congress goes home accomplishing nothing.

This is the kind of job to have. Be elected to maintain and improve our Nation, get swamped by letters and blogs and broadcasters from the great majority of Americans pleading with you to attend to the problems, blame each other for doing nothing, and go home to campaign for office again. On top of that, you get paid pretty well to do all of this.

I am disgusted with Congress, both the people I voted for and trusted and supported and the people I already expected this crap from. As I have said in previous posts, we seem to have no system that works to really keep this political joke from being told. Voters seem to have no real control… that control is granted (and now endorsed by the Supreme Court) to major corporations and foreign countries.

Will questions be raised in the next month of campaigning which will find truth in what a candidate will actually stand for, actually DO? Is honesty too much to ask for? If candidates are prepared to spend outrageous amounts of their own money to shut opponents out of the media (Linda McMahon has pledged to spend $50 Million of her own dough in CT, a state where a Senate election used to find $13 Million as outrageous), will we find out what they would hope to accomplish when (not if) elected?

I doubt it sincerely. And yet, if I decide not to vote, I am paying into the problem. What choices remain? Think back to a country founded by patriots who saw the domination of money (ie: the British Government and The King) and power as a threat to their lives and freedom. What would they say if they saw us today?

Related Articles

• Tax Cut Extension in Limbo as Lawmakers Skip Town (politics.blogs.foxnews.com)
• And They’re Out! Congress Flees D.C. to Campaign for 2010 Election (politics.usnews.com)
• And they’re out! Congress flees DC to campaign (sfgate.com)
• Linda McMahon’s Surge: Ads, Voter Anger Propel Senate Bid, but Doubts Linger (politicsdaily.com)
• Bob Burnett: The 2010 Elections: What’s at Stake? (huffingtonpost.com)

Two more deaths to note: Arthur Penn and Tony Curtis

I’m afraid my obituary list gets longer today, marking the deaths of film director Arthur Penn (88) and actor Tony Curtis (85).

Penn, who directed such great films as Bonnie And Clyde, The Miracle Worker, and  Little Big Man, was one of the most influential directors of our time, changing the way films were made – director-based instead of studio-based. He died one day after his 88th birthday.

From the NY Times bio:

1953, Penn was writing and directing live TV productions for the Philco Playhouse and Playhouse 90. Earning a shot at feature films, Penn combined the Method acting concentration on character psychology with the story of legendary Western outlaw Billy the Kid in The Left-Handed Gun (1958). Starring Paul Newman as Billy and shot in crisp black-and-white, The Left-Handed Gun emphasized ’50s rebel neuroses over pastoral spectacle, becoming more of a character study of youthful revolt spiked with dramatic violence than a typical good vs. bad oater.

Tony Curtis, who died last night, was active as a performer for five decades. Not bad for a Lower East Side Jewish boy. Bernard Schwartz (Tony’s real name) was born on June 3, 1925, to Helen and Emanuel Schwartz, Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Emanuel operated a tailor shop in a poor neighborhood, and the family occupied cramped quarters behind the store, the parents in one room and little Bernard sharing another with his two brothers, Julius and Robert.

In the 1950s Curtis appeared in Some Like It Hot and The Defiant Ones, among many others, with major leads that took him through the 1970s. Later in life he did smaller parts, but never really stopped acting. His final screen appearance was in 2008, when he played a small role in “David & Fatima,” an independent budget film about a romance between an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Muslim. His character’s name was Mr. Schwartz.

He is survived by his 6th wife and his first daughter (with Janet Leigh), Jamie Lee Curtis.

Related Articles

• ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ Director Arthur Penn Dies (pbpulse.com)
• ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ director Arthur Penn has died (cnn.com)

Matt Taibbi on the Tea Party Movement…

The current issue of Rolling Stone has an investigative article by Matt Taibbi entitled: Tea and Crackers: How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster. Allow me to say that it is both amazing and revealing. Here is a brief section… please, please, please go in and read the whole thing… you will not regret it:

By  Matt Taibbi

Sep 28, 2010 7:01 AM EDT

This is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.

It’s taken three trips to Kentucky, but I’m finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you’d expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.

“We’re shaking up the good ol’ boys,” Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. “Buck up,” she says, “or stay in the truck.”

Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

“The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.

After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.

“I’m anti-spending and anti-government,” crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. “The welfare state is out of control.”

“OK,” I say. “And what do you do for a living?”

“Me?” he says proudly. “Oh, I’m a property appraiser. Have been my whole life.”

I frown. “Are either of you on Medicare?”

Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

“Let me get this straight,” I say to David. “You’ve been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?”

“Well,” he says, “there’s a lot of people on welfare who don’t deserve it. Too many people are living off the government.”

I’d love to go on here, but I owe it to Rolling Stone to have you go THERE.

Related Articles

• The best and funniest Tea Party exegesis ever…. (tagg-lines.com)
• Taibbi among the teabaggers [Pharyngula] (scienceblogs.com)
• Following Palin to Kentucky (politicalwire.com)
• Matt Taibbi Drills LeBron, Jim Gray, ESPN (thebiglead.com)

I really need your support to keep this blog going…

Contribute $5.00 or more and receive one of my classics, Bill’s Barnhart Ornaments, as a gift for supporting Under The LobsterScope.

In 2004 I started Under The LobsterScope during the election season. For six years I have presented the best liberal-oriented material I could find and my own comments on politics and the arts (and a few other subjects).

I need your support to keep this blog going… when I started I was employed and well-paid, but, as a result of the Bushified economy, I was more-or-less unemployed for four years, and now I have retired having reached early Social Security eligibility. Under The LobsterScope is my major achievement each day.

I’m asking if you will donate at least $5.00 to Under the LobsterScope. If you do, you get my picture font,Bill’s Barnhart Ornaments (usually priced at $29.00) , absolutely FREE OF CHARGE, sent to you immediately by e-mail. This font is based on the historic floral and decorative dingbats from the Turn of the Century Barnhart Brothers and Spindler Type Specimen Book. These are classic font images and not available anywhere else. I created the font over 22 years ago and it has been one of my best sellers ever since.

That’s it. $5.00 or more and I will send you this font (partial sample below) which is only available at my UTF Type Foundry site.

Even a small donation of $1 or $2 helps (although $5 helps a whole lot more…and gets you the font. Some folks who really like this blog give even more!) The amount is up to you. We accept contributions through PayPal and the credit/debit cards shown below.

Remember…All contributors of $5.00 or more receive a copy of my Picture Font, Bill’s Barnhart Ornaments (I send you the versions for both Macs and PCs, plus a handy keyboard chart). As I said, I regularly sell this font for $29.00

This offer will end on October 30th.

I appreciate those of you who have come on board every time I’ve put up a new Free Font and hope more of you will join in. Previous donors have received four of my Free Fonts…Bill’s Universal Symbols, Bill’s Cast O’Characters, Bill’s Dingbats and Bill’s Century Marks. Since several contributors have come back more than once, it is clear that this is viewed as a “good deal”.

So please click on the “Donate” button below:

Thanks,
Bill T.

Related Articles

• Handy Web Typography Tools (aext.net)

Cartoon(s) of the Week – Perhaps Reality Will Set In…

Rex Babin in the Sacramento Bee:

Perhaps the Teabaggers are suffering from shortness of view…

– and –

Chan Lowe in the South Florida Sentinel (reprinted from 2009):

Perhaps McCain can tell…

– and –

Matt Davies in The (Westchester NY) Journal News:

Perhaps the Congress will get back to this after the election…

– and –

Joel Pett in the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Perhaps real Americans are uneducated and closed minded…

Art Clokey, Creator of Gumby, Dead at 89…

clipped from www.artknowledgenews.com Animator Art Clokey, whose bendable creation Gumby became a pop culture phenomenon through decades of toys, revivals and satires, died Friday. He was 89. Clokey, who suffered from repeated bladder infections, died in his sleep at his home in Los Osos on California’s Central Coast, son Joseph told the Los Angeles Times. Gumby grew out of a student project Clokey produced at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s called “Gumbasia.” That led to his making shorts featuring Gumby and his horse friend Pokey for the “Howdy Doody Show” and several series through the years. He said he based Gumby’s swooping head on the cowlick hairdo of his father, who died in a car accident when Clokey was nine. And Clokey’s wife suggested he give Gumby the body of a gingerbread man. Clokey said that though Gumby eventually became one of the most familiar toys of all time, he was at first resistant to roll out the bendable doll. Eddie Murphy brought a surge in Gumby’s popularity in the 1980s with his send-up of the character on “Saturday Night Live” as a cigar-smoking show business primadonna. Clokey said he enjoyed Murphy’s profane Gumby.

Related Articles

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The frustrations of a poorly structured piece…or don’t revise the blocking during the tech rehearsals.

I’m up in the lighting booth, of course, with a show that opens in three days, and the woman who plotted the opening dance number (I hesitate to call her a choreographer)  is changing the blocking AGAIN. On top of that, the music has never really been heard in one piece and the cast really doesn’t know when to start or finish a move.

And I’m trying to light this piece based on where they stop and read lines. Did I tell you we open in three days? One of my cardinal rules when I direct is you freeze the blocking during tech week. If you don’t, you run major odds that the lights will not fit on cue and the show will look like hell.

Not to mention what it will sound like. Using a computer stored score, you should have the music edited down by the first rehearsal… or at least by the start of the second week. I wonder if I mentioned we are three days away from opening?

So now they are calling an extra tech rehearsal tomorrow at 5:00.  Maybe we will FINALIZE something.

But I doubt it. Then again, we open in 3 days.

Cartoon(s) of the Week… Teabaggers Topple Traditional Tag Teams…

Jeff Danziger in the L.A. Times:

Post Primaries’ Pachyderm Pandemonium…

– and –

Tom Toles in the Washington Post:

Rough Ride Racks Right…

– and –

Chan Lowe in the South Florida Sun Sentinel:

Couch Candidates Claim Congress…

– and –

Joel Pett in the Lexington Herald-Leader:

Reality Rejected Republican Rhetoric…

– and –

Pat Bagley in the Salt Lake Tribune:

Whores Walk With Wealth.

How the Taiwanese Animators see the Christine O’Donnell/Tea Party win.

I love these guys. Their views are so…uninformed! But funny.

Related Articles

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Something my Theatre Friends may find very interesting… a play by Jack Kerouac!

This discovery of a previously unpublished and certainly unproduced Kerouac play, written at the height of his literary power, is something of interest to those of us who are interested in the Beat Generation. This article from the Guardian has more in it… I suggest that those interested read it all:

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk ‘Lost’ Kerouac play resurfaces after 50 years Beat Generation ‘conveys the mood of the time extraordinarily well’ It is the sort of irony that would not have been lost on the notoriously hard-living writer. Excerpts from an unpublished play by Jack Kerouac are to be published in the July edition of a men’s lifestyle magazine. Beat Generation, written in the autumn of 1957, the same year as the publication of Kerouac’s breakthrough work On the Road, was unearthed in a New Jersey warehouse six months ago. An excerpt will appear in the July issue of Best Life magazine. The play recounts a day in the life of the hard-drinking, drug-fuelled life of Jack Duluoz, Kerouac’s alter-ego. Although the play was never published or performed, the third act became the basis for a film, Pull My Daisy, starring Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, said Kerouac had sent it to several producers but it was turned down. Kerouac even sent the play to Marlon Brando, Mr Lord said.

Related Articles

• They Bared Their Brains to Heaven: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg (observer.com)
• Book Review: Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters edited by Bill Morgan and David Stanford (blogcritics.org)
• Last-minute plan: Kerouac in Queens (timeoutny.com)
• Would Kerouac Have Blogged? (globalneighbourhoods.net)

Harold Gould…What can you say when one of the greatest character actors dies?

They announced in the press today that character actor Harold Gould, veteran of hundreds of movies, stage plays and TV shows, died of pancreatic cancer on Saturday. He was 86 years old.

I guess everyone has their favorite Harold Gould character… mine is the con artist Kid Twist in The Sting who sets up the environment for Newman and Redford’s master plan. Many people remember him most fondly as Rhoda’s father (Martin Morgenstern) on the spinoff of Mary Tyler Moore’s show.

Gould was born as Harold V. Goldstein in Schenectady, NY (a name he never legally changed), and was educated at Cornell (where he earned both a Masters and a PhD in Drama).

He worked right up to this year, with a part in the TV series Nip/Tuck.

Related Articles

• Character Actor Harold Gould Has Died (seattlepi.com)
• “Harold Gould, RIP” and related posts (billcrider.blogspot.com)
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What’s the most predictable action of a Backbiting Crudsucker?

Joe Lieberman has come out in favor of extending the tax cuts for the rich.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/obamas-tax-goals-just-got-more-complicated-mitch-mcconnel-threatens-to-filibuster-2010-9#ixzz0zRXP0k10

Working Morning

I’m getting ready to meet Candi from the American Conservation Film Festival for coffee at Mellow Moods at 10:00. We’re going over the stuff I’m filling in on their website database for people looking up the 30 or so films (features and shorts) that are now scheduled.

Once everything is up and running, I’ll direct my readers to the site… this is a film festival that Elly and I have been going to for several years now and we always enjoy it (and learn from it.)

One of the films I’m looking forward to is “Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist”:

Seen through the eyes of activist Peter Jay Brown (“Whale Wars) Confessions offers an intimate look at shipboard life amongst members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. These self-proclaimed animal saviors and sea rebels immerse themselves in action-packed conflict including ramming illegal fishing vessels, sinking pirate whalers, and arguing amongst themselves over a vegetarian vs. vegan diet.

I’ve got to pack up and get out of here… more later.

Kevin McCarthy has died at 96…

Kevin McCarthy, the suave, square-jawed actor who will always be best known as the star of the 1956 science fiction movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” died Saturday at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. He was 96 and lived in Sherman Oaks, Calif. His death was confirmed by his daughter Lillah McCarthy.

Nothing in the NY Times notice said why he was on Cape Cod, but I assume he was vacationing. The Hyannis hospital serves the entire Cape, so he might have been staying in any of the towns from Provincetown to the Canal. One of his daughters, Mary Dabney McCarthy, lives on Cape Cod.

Kevin McCarthy was born on Feb. 15, 1914, in Seattle, the son of Roy Winfield McCarthy and the former Therese Preston. Both parents died in the famous influenza epidemic of 1918… their four children (one of which became the famous writer Mary McCarthy) were sent to live with relatives in Minneapolis. After five years of near-Dickensian mistreatment, described in Ms. McCarthy’s memoirs, the youngsters moved in with their maternal grandfather.

McCarthy went to college at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University with the intention of having a career in diplomacy… but at some point he took up acting and went to New York in the late 1930s. His first part was in Abe Lincoln In Illinois.

After serving as a Military Policeman in WWII, he returned to NY to actively pursue a theatrical career. At 35, a veteran of seven Broadway plays,  he was cast as Biff, the shallow, elder son of Willy Loman, in the London stage production of “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 drama about illusion and the common man. His portrayal of Biff in the 1951 film version earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

Although Body Snatchers is what most people knew him from during his long life, he never abandoned the stage and did both live and filmed performances for the rest of his life (his last film was 2 years ago.)

Related Articles

• Kevin McCarthy, Actor Linked to ‘Body Snatchers,’ Dies at 96 (nytimes.com)
• Rest in Peace – Kevin McCarthy (dreadcentral.com)
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Cartoon(s) of the Week – What’s important in contemporary politics…

Lalo Alcaraz in the LA Weekly:

It’s important to identify real enemies…

– and –

Ben Sargent in the Austin American-Statesman:

It’s important to hang on to your past…

– and –

Bruce Plante in the Tulsa World

It’s important to help others…

– and –

Tom Toles in the Washington Post:

But it’s most important to really work out the problems…

Related Articles

• anti-Tea Party cartoon reveals ignorance (redstate.com)
• Lessons of 9/11: ‘Fear of Islamophobia inhibits discussion’ (fullcomment.nationalpost.com)
• Obama: Quran burning ‘a recruitment bonanza’ for al Qaeda (crooksandliars.com)

My Car will now not be done until noon tomorrow…

…and I remain trapped at home. John Case is going to pick me up at 6:30 AM to get to the radio show setup at Mellow Moods (you can listen from 7:30 to 9:00 AM on WSHC 89.7) and I assume he’ll drop me off at Brown’s Auto Repair after the show.

It seems the new water pump (another part I didn’t know about) wasn’t delivered until late today and the guy working on my car won’t have everything back together until the late morning. This will only add hourly charges and watch the whole thing go beyond the $1200.00 they estimated yesterday.

That blows my evening out of the water, too. I was going to go to the Thurber Carnival rehearsal at Full Circle tonite to work on the lighting plot… looks like the next rehearsal I’ll be able to get to is Monday.  John is going to express my regrets to the Director, as he has to be at rehearsal at 7 PM. They haven’t run both acts in sequence and I have plenty of time to get the lighting down.

And life goes on…

Now that Labor Day has past, here comes the Campaigns…

September and October are going to be the big campaign months for the 2010 elections and this is the only opportunity for the Democrats to turn around the really bad numbers that are coming out in the in the polling reports. At the same time, they are going to have to do more than campaign… actually find a way to make employment figures go up or, failing that, to shift the responsibility for unemployment back to the Republicans who gave us the Bush economy.

Then there is the Tea Party movement to consider and whether that will actually help the Repubs or split them. That all depends on the who’s  and where’s (the Nevada Senate race being one of the prime locations… perhaps saving Harry Reid’s career.)

I’ll be watching Manchin’s Senate race here in West Virginia where it looks like he’ll get a big majority… but that could change.

Related Articles

• Hugh Hewitt: “Election Outlook on Labor Day: A Veto-Proof Senate or Even a Congress?” by Clark Judge (hughhewitt.com)
• Obama Revs Into Campaign Mode in Wisconsin (cbsnews.com)
• Polling and Political Wrap, 9/6/10 (dailykos.com)

For Support Contributions in September, I’m giving away a great picture font!…

It’s one of my classics, Bill’s Barnhart Ornaments, being given as a gift for all who support Under The LobsterScope with a contribution of $5.00 or more.

In 2004 I started Under The LobsterScope during the election season. For six years I have presented the best liberal-oriented material I could find and my own comments on politics and the arts (and a few other subjects).

I need your support to keep this blog going… when I started I was employed and well-paid, but, as a result of the Bushified economy, I was more-or-less unemployed for four years, and now I have retired having reached early Social Security eligibility. Under The LobsterScope is my major achievement each day.

I’m asking if you will donate at least $5.00 to Under the LobsterScope. If you do, you get my picture font,Bill’s Barnhart Ornaments (usually priced at $29.00) , absolutely FREE OF CHARGE, sent to you immediately by e-mail. This font is based on the historic floral and decorative dingbats from the Turn of the Century Barnhart Brothers and Spindler Type Specimen Book. These are classic font images and not available anywhere else. I created the font over 22 years ago and it has been one of my best sellers ever since.

That’s it. $5.00 or more and I will send you this font (partial sample below) which is only available at my UTF Type Foundry site.

Even a small donation of $1 or $2 helps (although $5 helps a whole lot more…and gets you the font. Some folks who really like this blog give even more!) The amount is up to you. We accept contributions through PayPal and the credit/debit cards shown below.

Remember…All contributors of $5.00 or more receive a copy of my Picture Font, Bill’s Barnhart Ornaments (I send you the versions for both Macs and PCs, plus a handy keyboard chart). As I said, I regularly sell this font for $29.00

This offer will end on September 30th.

I appreciate those of you who have come on board every time I’ve put up a new Free Font and hope more of you will join in. Previous donors have received four of my Free Fonts…Bill’s Universal Symbols, Bill’s Cast O’Characters, Bill’s Dingbats and Bill’s Century Marks. Since several contributors have come back more than once, it is clear that this is viewed as a “good deal”.

So please click on the “Donate” button below:

Thanks,
Bill T.

Here’s a Film Notice from Sustainable Shepherdstown

Sustainable Shepherdstown to show “Age of Stupid”

“The Age of Stupid,” a British environmental film made in 2009, will be presented by local environmental group Sustainable Shepherdstown on Friday, September 10 at 7 p.m. at the Byrd Center Auditorium at Shepherd University. The film runs 89 minutes and is free of charge.
Oscar-winning actor Pete Postlethwaite (In The Name of the Father, Brassed Off, The Usual Suspects) stars as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055 who asks: Why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?

Runaway climate change has ravaged the planet by 2055. Pete plays the founder of The Global Archive, a storage facility located in the (now melted) Arctic, preserving all of humanity’s achievements in the hope that the planet might one day be habitable again. He pulls together clips of “archive” news and documentary from 1950-2008 to build a message showing what went wrong and why. He focuses on six human stories: Alvin DuVernay, is a paleontogolist helping Shell find more oil off the coast of New Orleans. He also rescued more than 100 people after Hurricane Katrina, which, by 2055, is well known as one of the first “major climate change events”. Jeh Wadia in Mumbai aims to start-up a new low-cost airline and gets a million Indians flying. Layefa Malemi lives in absolute poverty in a small village in Nigeria from which Shell extracts tens of millions of dollars worth of oil every week. She dreams of becoming a doctor, but must fish in the oil-infested waters for four years to raise the funds. Jamila Bayyoud, aged 8, is an Iraqi refugee living on the streets of Jordan after her home was destroyed – and father killed – during the US-led invasion of 2003. Piers Guy is a windfarm developer from Cornwall fighting the NIMBYs of Middle England. 82-year-old French mountain guide Fernand Pareau has witnessed his beloved Alpine glaciers melt by 150 metres.

“This is a signally important film–a very clever and very powerful reminder of exactly where we stand on this fragile, lovely planet.”
Bill McKibben, Author, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“Think An Inconvenient Truth but with a personality.”
Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

Cartoon(s) of the Week – The President Says Iraqi Fighting is Over…

Tom Toles in The Washington Post:

In and Out and…IN?

– and –

Jimmy Margulies in NorthJersey.com:

Then again, what do we really pay attention to aside from American Idol?

– and –

Clay bennett in the Chattanooga Times Free Press:

At least Iraq will be able to take care of itself… you bet!

– and –

Mike Luckovich in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Perhaps SOMETHING useful came out of Iraq… like discovering what’s wrong with US.