TSP On This Day

Published On: March 28, 2008

Al Jaffee has always been one of my favourite contributors to MAD magazine. I haven’t read MAD in years, but I picked it up religiously when I was a teenager, and had several of the paperback collections where I could find them in used bookstores. I’m pretty sure that “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” influenced more of my rhetorical style than is probably healthy, and the Fold-Ins remain artistic genius.

So I was delighted to get a pointer to a fantastic profile of him in the Sarasota Herald-Tribute. Go read it, its’ good stuff.

Published On: March 28, 2007

If you’ve ever wondered why people around my age were less likely to do drugs than people who grew in the sixties, I have a fairly simple theory. We had stuff like this to watch on Saturday morning, thus rendering the notion of hallucinogenic drugs largely redundant.

I mean, once you’ve tripped on Sid and Marty Krofft, LSD really has nothing to offer you. And that’s not even getting INTO the cartoon show where the Harlem Globetrotters were superheroes.

Published On: March 28, 2002

In my last post, I mentioned one other cool thing that happened that first weekend in March.

On Friday, before I left, I realized I had forgotten something that I wanted to take with me to Tennessee. Since my apartment is now only 5 minutes from work, I figured I’d just swing by there on the way out and pick it up. While I was there I thought to pick up the mail, and found a package from zencuppa that I had been expecting. “Cool”, thinks I, and tucks it under my arm and heads up the hill.

I go in, check my e-mail one last time, find the thing I’d left and stuck it in my pocket. Then I open the package, which contains an item I’d bought at the Interfilk auction at Gafilk. The reason it was being mailed to me was that I bid it up on the promise that it would be re-done in my size. When I opened the box, I saw a card sitting on top of the neatly folded t-shirt. “Oh, that was sweet,”, I thought, and set it aside. (For those who are wondering, yes I do carry on conversations with myself like this.) I examined the t-shirt, went to put it away, and then returned to the card. It was a housewarming card, and very pretty, and I was thinking how awfully nice it was for her to include it. “She didn’t have to do that.”

And I opened it.

Inside, was a gift card from Bed, Bath, and Beyond for $250. Apparently, zencuppa had been secretly organizing this among all my friends on #filkhaven, and the card was signed from all of them. (There was Continue Reading