Three French hens

I had a special week on my humor blog. I found excuses to write about the story comics three times, including one that I don't ordinarily cover because it's been in reruns for nearly a decade now. I cover stuff from decades before the reruns started. So here's the stuff you missed if you weren't reading it already:

• Everything There Is To Say About Programming A Computer In The 80s, me in a nostalgic mode that only barely has anything identifiable as a joke in it but that got a great response, so I'm not going to learn any lessons at all from that experience.


• Also, the old Mandrake the Magician comics are being funny, as I find something implausible in the story of a magician who hypnotizes jewel thieves into surrendering to the cops.


• Statistics Saturday: 80s Computer Magazine Titles, So Far As You Know which was basically a spinoff of the big essay for last week and then got to the silly point that some made-up titles turned out to be real.


• What's Going On In Judge Parker? Why did Judge Parker help fake Norton's Death? A Special Report as I try to work out what, exactly, the backstory behind what seems like a major, potentially world-wrecking, change in the comic strip was.


• What's Going On In Judge Parker? Is Judge Parker Going To Jail? February – May 2019 plot recap and, you know? I don't expect so, but I can't rule it out, and that's pretty exciting.


• Popeye’s Island Adventures shows us What’s In The Box? in one of those little tinkering-with-an-invention cartoons.


• In Which I Pick A Fight With Go-Bots Fans To Lower My Average Post Word Count which is one of those wordplay posts that doesn't actually lower my word count any.


• One Thing There Is To Say About How Language Evolution Helps Writers, this week's major piece, in which I get back in that absurdist explanatory mode that I like but other people don't care about one way or the other.

Now to close out Crossroads Village. We got to the Christmas melodrama they put on, which (at least through 2017) was always this little thing set in the Vague 19th Century with a cute if sheepish young couple and a fun leering baddie who's usually trying to destroy Crossroads Village for his own profit, but who gets redeemed by love and whatnot.

Our heroes: the female protagonist and her fiancee, clerk to the banker bad-guy.

Well of course I was interested in the bookshelves. Who doesn't go studying the bookshelves of anyplace they find themselves?

And in the center: our villain! Or at least the antagonist; this time around he was giving people a hard time but not actually trying to destroy the village, far as I remember.

Close-up of the female protagonist and the villain, who's just not having anything with her sweetness and kindness and all that. She's fine enough, performing, but I think even from a still picture you can see how he dominates the show

And the quartet. The new woman, on the right, represents some big New York money concern that's looking at whether our regular villain's worth doing business with. Also they used to be engaged and didn't get married and you know how awkward that was in the Vague 19th Century.

A tense moment. Do you imagine their personal and business conflicts are at all resolvable?

Well, the power of love came through and saved the village, although the clerk and his fiancee had to sneak back in to remind everyone they're in this story too.

View of Crossroads Village from the opera-house balcony. The place was closing by the time the show let out.

And a close-up view of the bedazzled Christmas tree. They leave the lights on this up all year, if our summer visit that one time is representative.

Trivia: The Atlas-Agena launch, meant to establish a rendezvous and docking target for Gemini VI, was from a pad about 6,000 feet away from Launch Complex 19, with Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford already in the Gemini capsule. (The Agena broke up on launch and the mission was scrubbed.)
Source: Sigma 7: The Six Mercury Orbits of Walter M Schirra Jr, Colin Burgess.

Currently Reading: Oz Before The Rainbow: L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage and Screen to 1939, Mark Evan Swartz.