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Now That’s Funny

October 2, 2020/0 Comments/in Comics, Friday Afternoon, Trivia /by Steve Kowalski

I’ve been looking at the comic pages since before I could read. In fact, I might have learned to read in the comics section. Especially on Sundays! And to think comics were started in newspapers by that little “Yellow Kid” above at the top left over a hundred years ago. Details below. Enjoy!!

Let me see … there’s Charlie, Calvin, Abner, Blondie, Spidey, Marmaduke, Dennis, Lois, Robin, Betty, Brenda, Bugs, Cathy, Flash, Garfield, Hagar, Heathcliff, Mickey, Moon … no, not the night shift here at KHT working on your wonderful PIA (Pain in the %#$) Jobs! – but a shortlist of some of my favorite comic strip heroes. Today, Oct 2 marks the anniversary of the first American newspaper comic strip back in the 1890s, when newspapers began to add paneled drawings of created characters in various situations connected to everyday life. (likely some of my younger blog readers are asking – “what’s a newspaper”- yikes – if I had hair, it would be gray!) I’ll admit, as a kid, and still, as an adult, I enjoy reading my favorites and seeing the characters deal with life’s situations. Who doesn’t love the Family Circus, Marmaduke or Dilbert? The short, simple creativity and wit makes me smile, and very often, laugh out loud. My top three are Hagar for all of the husbands out there, Dilbert, for a look at life’s silliness, and of course Garfield, just because that cat has attitude! Special thanks to Wikipedia and Google for the history info and YouTube for the videos. Enjoy!

A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, these have been published in newspapers and magazines, with horizontal strips printed in black-and-white in daily newspapers, while Sunday newspapers offered longer sequences in special color comics sections.
Storytelling using a sequence of pictures has existed through history. One medieval European example in textile form is the Bayeux Tapestry. Printed examples emerged in 19th-century Germany and in 18th-century England, where some of the first satirical or humorous sequential narrative drawings were produced. Today, quite the collectable!
The Biblia pauperum (“Paupers’ Bible”), a tradition of picture Bibles beginning in the later Middle Ages, sometimes depicted Biblical events with words spoken by the figures in the miniatures written on scrolls coming out of their mouths—which makes them to some extent ancestors of the modern cartoon strips. In China, with its traditions of block printing and of the incorporation of text with image, experiments with what became lianhuanhua date back to 1884.
In the United States, the great popularity of comics sprang from the newspaper war (1887 onwards) between Pulitzer and Hearst. The Little Bears (1893–96) was the first American comic strip with recurring characters, while the first color comic supplement was published by the Chicago Inter-Ocean sometime in the latter half of 1892, followed by the New York Journal’s first color Sunday comic pages in 1897. On January 31, 1912, Hearst introduced the nation’s first full daily comic page in his New York Evening Journal.
Starting in the late 1920s, comic strips expanded from their mirthful origins to feature adventure stories, as seen in Popeye, Captain Easy, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and The Adventures of Tintin. Soap-opera continuity strips such as Judge Parker and Mary Worth gained popularity in the 1940s. There are more than 200 different comic strips and daily cartoon panels in American newspapers alone each day for most of the 20th century, for a total of at least 7,300,000 episodes.
In 1931, George Gallup’s first poll had the comic section as the most important part of the newspaper, with additional surveys pointing out that the comic strips were the second most popular feature after the picture page. During the 1930s, many comic sections had between 12 and 16 pages, although in some cases, these had up to 24 pages.
Proof sheets were the means by which syndicates provided newspapers with black-and-white line art for the reproduction of strips (which they arranged to have colored in the case of Sunday strips). Michigan State University Comic Art Collection librarian Randy Scott describes these as “large sheets of paper on which newspaper comics have traditionally been distributed to subscribing newspapers. Typically, each sheet will have either six daily strips of a given title or one Sunday strip. (Thus, a week of Beetle Bailey would arrive at the Lansing State Journal in two sheets, printed much larger than the final version and ready to be cut apart and fitted into the local comics page.)
Starting in the late 1940s, the national syndicates which distributed newspaper comic strips subjected them to very strict censorship. Li’l Abner was censored in September 1947 and was pulled from the Pittsburgh Press by Scripps-Howard. The controversy, as reported in Time, centered on Capp’s portrayal of the U.S. Senate. Said Edward Leech of Scripps, “We don’t think it is good editing or sound citizenship to picture the Senate as an assemblage of freaks and crooks… boobs and undesirables.”
The comics have long held a distorted mirror to contemporary society, and almost from the beginning have been used for political or social commentary. This ranged from the conservative slant of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie to the unabashed liberalism of Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury. Al Capp’s Li’l Abner espoused liberal opinions for most of its run, but by the late 1960s, it became a mouthpiece for Capp’s repudiation of the counterculture.
Pogo used animals to particularly devastating effect, caricaturing many prominent politicians of the day as animal denizens of Pogo’s Okeefenokee Swamp. In a fearless move, Pogo’s creator Walt Kelly took on Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, caricaturing him as a bobcat named Simple J. Malarkey, a megalomaniac who was bent on taking over the characters’ birdwatching club and rooting out all undesirables.
During the early 20th century, comic strips were widely associated with publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose papers had the largest circulation of strips in the United States. Hearst was notorious for his practice of yellow journalism, and he was frowned on by readers of The New York Times and other newspapers which featured few or no comic strips. Hearst’s critics often assumed that all the strips in his papers were fronts for his own political and social views.
The world’s longest comic strip is 292 ft long and on display at Trafalgar Square as part of the London Comedy Festival. The London Cartoon Strip was created by 15 of Britain’s best-known cartoonists and depicts the history of London.
The Reuben, named for cartoonist Rube Goldberg, is the most prestigious award for U.S. comic strip artists. Reuben awards are presented annually by the National Cartoonists Society.
Many older strips are no longer drawn by the original cartoonist, who has either died or retired. Such strips are known as “zombie strips”. A cartoonist, paid by the syndicate or sometimes a relative of the original cartoonist, continues writing the strip, a tradition that became commonplace in the early half of the 20th century. Hägar the Horrible and Frank and Ernest are both drawn by the sons of the creators. Some strips which are still in affiliation with the original creator are produced by small teams or entire companies, such as Jim Davis’ Garfield.
Historically, syndicates owned the creators’ work, enabling them to continue publishing the strip after the original creator retired, left the strip, or died. This practice led to the term “legacy strips,” or more pejoratively “zombie strips”). Most syndicates signed creators to 10 or even 20-year contracts.

To get a complete list of comic strips, you can click HERE (you’ll be surprised how many there are and how many you’ve not seen or heard of).

Fun Comics Character Based Music:
Popeye
Peanuts
Flash
Spiderman
Batman

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DO YOU LIKE CONTESTS?
Me, too.
As you may know the Kowalski Heat Treating logo finds its way
into the visuals of my Friday posts.
I. Love. My. Logo.
One week there could be three logos.
The next week there could be 15 logos.
And sometimes the logo is very small or just a partial logo showing.
But there are always logos in some of the pictures.
So, I challenge you, my beloved readers, to count them and send me a
quick email with the total number of logos in the Friday post.
On the following Tuesday I’ll pick a winner from the correct answers
and send that lucky person some great KHT swag.
So, start counting and good luck!
Oh, and the logos at the very top header don’t count.
Got it? Good. :-))))
Have fun!!

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Oh Henry.

September 25, 2020/0 Comments/in Friday Afternoon, Trivia, Work, Work From Home /by Steve Kowalski

Okay. So, we all work hard to earn our keep. Run our butts off until it’s time to go home and collapse. (or have a beer) Even though a lot of people are working at home these days, there are an awful lot of jobs that simply can’t be done at home like, say, heat treating professionals. 🙂 Some random others are: Proctologist (yikes!!), sidewalk artist, high-rise window washer (yikes!!), male model, barber, sewer cleaner (again…yikes!!), office tower construction (double yikes!!), coal miner, pilot, jockey and dog groomer to name a few. So, whatever you do—just keep running, baby!! And HAVE FUN!!!!!

Work. From about age 13, it’s something I come to just do naturally. Imprinted from my Dad for so many years, when the sun comes up, he’d say it’s best you are at your desk, ready to take on the day. We all structure our lives “around” work – sleep time, commute time, vacations, shopping, exercise, lunch, friends, fun, church/synagogue – it’s just how we’re programmed. I really enjoy coming to work in the wee hours of the morning – it’s always amazing how beautiful Lake Erie is as the sun rises! This is a great way to start the day, and of course, the added benefit of never being in traffic also helps! For all the talk of how freeing it’d be to shave a day or two off the five-day workweek, little attention has been paid to where the weekly calendar came from. Understanding the sometimes-arbitrary origins of the modern workweek might inform a movement to shorten it – or modify it as we become adjusted to our present-day “work from home” situation. So many of us have adjusted to less commuting time, no lunch hours, and just working well into the night (honestly, who’s not working on the weekends these days??) Today marks the anniversary of when the famous manufacturing and business entrepreneur Henry Ford, credited with creating the “work week” (of course there’s more to the history). Special thanks to The Atlantic magazine, CNBC and Quora for the info and You Tube for the music. Enjoy. And be sure to set your alarm for Monday (hopefully you still get Sat. & Sun. off!)

A little workin’ music: CLICK HERE

The roots of the seven-day week can be traced back about 4,000 years, to Babylon. The Babylonians believed there were seven planets in the solar system, and the number seven held such power to them that they planned their days around it.
The seven-day, planetary week spread to Egypt, Greece, and eventually to Rome, where it turns out the Jewish people had their own version of a seven-day week. (The reason for this is unclear, but some have speculated that the Jews adopted this after their exile in Babylon in the sixth century B.C.) At the very latest, the seven-day week was firmly entrenched in the Western calendar about 250 years before Christ was born and as reflected in the Bible.
A week in Ancient Egypt comprised of 10 days. Examining records from Deir el-Medina, the village where (non-slave) artisans who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived, workers officially toiled away for eight hours a day with an hour’s break for lunch at midday. Sounds pretty reasonable – and familiar – but they actually did this for eight days before resting for two days.
The typical farmworker in the Israel of 100 BC tended crops or engaged in other farm work for around eight hours a day. For a working day began at dawn and concluded at dusk that’s a heavy load, but three hours would have been set aside for prayer while eating the day’s main meal was likely to have taken an hour or so.
Slaves in imperial Rome were at the grindstone 24/7, but most free artisans only worked six hours a day, from 6 am to midday. Not only that but festivals were frequent. In fact, according to some historians, Romans who were not in chains ended up working only half the year.
In 1817, Welsh manufacturer and labor rights activist Robert Owen coins the phrase “Eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest,” dividing the day into three equal eight-hour parts. The idea did not take hold in Europe, but it made its way to the U.S. over the next few decades. According to Lichtenstein, American workers adopted a similar slogan in the years following the Civil War.
The legislature passes the law, but it contains a loophole that allows “employers to contract with their employees for longer hours,” the historical society writes. In response, a large strike erupts in Chicago which spreads to other cities across the U.S. and Europe. That day became known as May Day.
The earliest recorded use of the word “weekend,” occurred in 1879 in an English magazine called Notes and Queries: In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on a Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his week-end at so-and-so.
Some 19th-century Britons used the week’s seventh day for merriment rather than for the rest prescribed by scripture. They would drink, gamble, and enjoy themselves so much that the phenomenon of “Saint Monday,” in which workers would skip work to recover from Sunday’s gallivanting, emerged. (We call it “Browns” Monday). English factory owners later compromised with workers by giving them a half-day on Saturday in exchange for guaranteed attendance at work on Monday.
The ‘weekend’ rose with the Industrial Revolution where people worked in factories or mills all day, typically in the north of England. It started out as a voluntary arrangement between factory owners and workers, allowing them Saturday afternoon. Owners found workers were more refreshed on Monday morning.
In 1926, Ford Motor Company issued a five-day, 40-hour workweek for its workers in a newsworthy move by founder and business titan Henry Ford. (Ford is often cited as the inventor of the five day/8 hour day) In a statement, Ford writes, “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege.”
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 went into effect in 1940, mandating a maximum 40-hour workweek. The two-day weekend was the result across the nation after that.
For 24 hour/7 days a week processing and manufacturing companies, “shift work” became the standard. Other professions where workers are required around the clock (think hospitals, police, fire, elder care, military, security) management needed to adjust schedules to cover hours – some doing 3-12hour shifts. If you know any health care heroes these days, you’ll learn about “3 on and two off” schedules.
A 1965 Senate subcommittee predicted Americans would work 14-hour weeks by the year 2000, and before that, back in 1928, John Maynard Keynes wrote that technological advancement would bring the workweek down to 15 hours within 100 years.
Tony Schwartz, the author of Be Excellent at Anything, told Harvard Business Review that people work best in intense 90-minute bursts followed by periods of recovery. Compare that to our “always working” routines of today (and COVID restrictions), the right scheduling of bursts and rests could get a similar amount of work done over a shorter period of time, not tied to hours worked requirements. INTERESTING – JUST NOT REALITY FOR MOST OF US!
Given the ongoing conversation about how most of the old 8-5 ways are just sitting there, and now getting disrupted by COVID, technology, no commuting, online work software, teleconferencing, etc. it will be surprising if the traditional workweek remains wholly intact.
With the advent of technologies, (and Covid) who knows what the next 100 years will bring… KHT will be here for you…!

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SWEEEEET!

September 18, 2020/0 Comments/in Friday Afternoon, Grapes, Trivia /by Steve Kowalski

Grapes are natures candy. Fun & delicious. Kids love them and so do adults. Eat ’em, drink ’em and dry ’em like that pile of raisins above.

It’s that time of year again-when the sun starts setting a bit earlier, the grass begins to green up, the light dew fills the yards and the thermometer begins to drop. It’s also the time of year for one of my favorite foods (and I have a lot of them) … grapes. I know it’s kind of a simple thing – with all that’s going on these days it just sort of struck me what a treat they are. I’m not picky – give me green, pink, red, purple – I just love the juicy flavor bursting in my mouth. I especially love the rich concord grapes, seeds and all. And I know throughout the world farmers and winemakers are rejoicing that another great crop means wonderful wine to come. Same excitement at the jam, jelly and juice plants. At my local grocery store Jackie loaded up the cart with a bag of some big, tasty red grapes that didn’t last long in the house. Not sure about you, but I love to pop them into my mouth and savor the flavor. I did some diggin’ and found a bit of info for my trivia friends and a few tidbits I didn’t know. Take a read and enjoy, and be sure to grab a bunch for yourself – they’re great this year.

– A grape is a fruit, botanically a berry, of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus Vitis.

– Grapes can be eaten fresh as table grapes or they can be used for making wine, jam, grape juice, jelly, grape seed extract, raisins, vinegar, and grape seed oil. Grapes are a non-climacteric type of fruit, generally occurring in clusters. (WHY ARE THEY CALLED BUNCHES??)

– A few nutritional specs per 100 grams: (Higher concentrations) Energy-288 kJ, Carbohydrates-18.1 g, Sugars-15.48 g, Dietary fiber- 0.9 g, Fat-0.16 g, Protein-0.72 g, Thiamine (B1)- 6% 0.069 mg, Riboflavin (B2)- 6% 0.07 mg, Vitamin B6- 7% 0.086 mg, Vitamin K-14% 14.6 μg. And Water-81 g

-The cultivation of the domesticated grape began 6,000–8,000 years ago in the Near East. Yeast, one of the earliest domesticated microorganisms, occurs naturally on the skins of grapes, leading to the discovery of alcoholic drinks such as wine. (The earliest archeological evidence for a dominant position of winemaking in human culture dates from 8,000 years ago in the country of Georgia).

– The oldest known winery was found in Armenia, dating to around 4000 BC. By the 9th century AD the city of Shiraz was known to produce some of the finest wines in the Middle East. Thus, it has been proposed that Syrah red wine is named after Shiraz, a city in Persia where the grape was used to make Shirazi wine.

– Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics record the cultivation of purple grapes, and history attests to the ancient Greeks, Phoenicians, and Romans growing purple grapes both for eating and wine production. The growing of grapes would later spread to other regions in Europe, as well as North Africa, and eventually in North America.

– It only takes about 2.5 lbs. of grapes to make a bottle of wine!
– In North America, native grapes belonging to various species of the genus Vitis proliferate in the wild across the continent and were a part of the diet of many Native Americans, but were considered by early European colonists to be unsuitable for wine. In the 19th century, Ephraim Bull of Concord, Massachusetts, cultivated seeds from wild Vitis labrusca vines to create the Concord grape which would become an important agricultural crop in the United States.

– Grapes are a type of fruit that grow in clusters of 15 to 300, and can be crimson, black, dark blue, yellow, green, orange, and pink. “White” grapes are actually green in color, and are evolutionarily derived from the purple grape.

– Mutations in two regulatory genes of white grapes turn off production of anthocyanins, which are responsible for the color of purple grapes. Anthocyanins and other pigment chemicals of the larger family of polyphenols in purple grapes are responsible for the varying shades of purple in red wines.

– According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 75,866 square kilometers of the world are dedicated to grapes. Approximately 71% of world grape production is used for wine, 27% as fresh fruit, and 2% as dried fruit. A portion of grape production goes to producing grape juice to be reconstituted for fruits canned “with no added sugar” and “100% natural”. The area dedicated to vineyards is increasing by about 2% per year.

– Commercially cultivated grapes can usually be classified as either table or wine grapes, based on their intended method of consumption: eaten raw (table grapes) or used to make wine (wine grapes). While almost all of them belong to the same species, Vitis vinifera, table and wine grapes have significant differences, brought about through selective breeding. Table grape cultivars tend to have large, seedless fruit (see below) with relatively thin skin. Wine grapes are smaller, usually seeded, and have relatively thick skins (a desirable characteristic in winemaking, since much of the aroma in wine comes from the skin). Wine grapes also tend to be very sweet: they are harvested at the time when their juice is approximately 24% sugar by weight. By comparison, commercially produced “100% grape juice”, made from table grapes, is usually around 15% sugar by weight.

– Seedless cultivars now make up the overwhelming majority of table grape plantings. Because grapevines are vegetatively propagated by cuttings, the lack of seeds does not present a problem for reproduction. It is an issue for breeders, who must either use a seeded variety as the female parent or rescue embryos early in development using tissue culture techniques.

– In most of Europe and North America, dried grapes are referred to as “raisins” or the local equivalent. In the UK, three different varieties are recognized, forcing the EU to use the term “dried vine fruit” in official documents. A raisin is any dried grape. While raisin is a French loanword, the word in French refers to the fresh fruit; grappe (from which the English grape is derived) refers to the bunch (as in une grappe de raisins).

– Muscadine grape seeds contain about twice the total polyphenol content of skins. Grape seed oil from crushed seeds is used in cosmeceuticals and skincare products. Grape seed oil, including tocopherols (vitamin E) and high contents of phytosterols and polyunsaturated fatty acids such as linoleic acid, oleic acid, and alpha-linolenic acid.

– Comparing diets among Western countries, researchers have discovered that although French people tend to eat higher levels of animal fat, the incidence of heart disease remains low in France. This phenomenon has been termed the French paradox and is thought to occur from protective benefits of regularly consuming red wine, among other dietary practices. Alcohol consumption in moderation may be cardioprotective by its minor anticoagulant effect and vasodilation. (I’m ABSOLUTLEY fine with this stat!)

– The consumption of grapes and raisins presents a potential health threat to dogs. Their toxicity to dogs can cause the animal to develop acute kidney failure (the sudden development of kidney failure) with anuria (a lack of urine production) and may be fatal.

– Although alcohol is permitted in Judaism, grape juice is sometimes used as an alternative for kiddush on Shabbat and Jewish holidays, and has the same blessing as wine. Many authorities maintain that grape juice must be capable of turning into wine naturally in order to be used for kiddush. Common practice, however, is to use any kosher grape juice for kiddush.

– Christians have traditionally used wine during worship services as a means of remembering the blood of Jesus Christ which was shed for the remission of sins. Christians who oppose the partaking of alcoholic beverages sometimes use grape juice or water as the “cup” or “wine” in the Lord’s Supper.

– The Catholic Church continues to use wine in the celebration of the Eucharist because it is part of the tradition passed down through the ages starting with Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, where Catholics believe the consecrated bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, a dogma known as transubstantiation.

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