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Imponderable: Hoquiam Washington (Classic Repost)

13 Apr

April 13, 2012

The Imponderable is on a brief break but don’t worry, new ones are already lined up and ready to go.

Consider yourself warned.

From June 24, 2011

Is that the world’s worst knock knock joke?

*knock knock*
“Who’s there?”

“Me.”
“Me wh- hey, wait a minute, what are you doing carrying a dead weasel?”
“It’s not a weasel, it’s a marten.”

smashes resident in the face with weas- er, marten
“Maybe it’s a mink.”

But that’s not the Imponderable. And neither is “what the heck is a marten?” (A marten is in the same family as minks and weasels, and those are all just ferrets to me.) The Imponderable comes from the following article which reports the same story from a very different point of view.

Why does the writer of the article think that the salient point of the story is that a man mistook a marten for a mink? And bonus points if you realized that the headline got it wrong- he mistook a mink for a marten.

The AP article doesn’t mention motive, which anyone reading that article must be dying to know. Wouldn’t you want to know why a man hit another man with a dead animal? The first article gave the motive, that they were dating the same woman. The second only hinted at a motive, that he was looking for his girlfriend. Believe it or not, the New York Post had the better reporting.

The AP article must not find that angle interesting. It devoted more space to the identification of the animal, its scientific family, and its habitat.

Why does the Associated Press find it more interesting and important that a man misidentified a mink than the assault?

The question is Imponderable.

The Saturday Comics: Superman and the Tandy Computer Whiz Kids (Classic Repost)

7 Apr

April 7, 2012

I like this one. It features Superman, a guy in an eye patch, and a computer with as much as 512 KB of memory. What’s not to like?

From August 3, 2010

The answer is so obvious, I’m shocked no one else has seen it.

We have oil spilling into the gulf.
We have the threat of terrorism.
We have severe economic troubles.

Has no one ever read this comic?

Al Gore would love this comic. It combines two things he invented, the internet and climate change.

Back in the ’80’s, Radio Shack, perhaps hoping to create the next X-Men, put out a series of comics featuring “The Tandy Computer Whiz Kids.” Alec and Shanna, the “Whiz Kids,” were you’re typical Archie and Betty-type kids (very bland) that somehow found themselves in Scooby Doo situations every week.

You know he's evil because he wears an eye patch!

They foiled kidnappers, stopped drug dealers, and even averted World War Three by stopping a rogue soviet nuclear submarine.

How did they do it? By using their Tandy Computer TRS-80, which they plugged every chance they got.

Behold the TRS-80!

BEHOLD!

Type: Home computer
Release date: 1980
Discontinued: 1991
Operating system: Color BASIC 1.0 / 2.0 / OS-9
CPU: Motorola 6809E @ 0.895 MHz / 1.79 MHz
Memory: 4 KB / 16 KB / 32 KB/ 64 KB / 128 KB / 512 KB

Imagine- they stopped World War Three with less computing power than your average cell phone!

Eventually Alec and Shanna managed to clean up their own city and were soon invited into the Justice League, where they teamed with Superman to save Metropolis.

The Brave and The Bold

Alec and Shanna retired from heroics in the early nineties. They could no longer keep up with villains who used the internet or texted. (There were also rumors of an affair between Shanna and Robin.)

However, their influence is still felt today, as one of their community organizers has gone on to greater fame.