Archives for 2012

Spotted in Arnhem

Comix
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Huge wallposter of Eric the Noorman in Arnbhem

I had to be in Arnhem for work yesterday and spotted this poster on a building opposite the station. As you no doubt have recognised, this is an image of Eric the Noorman, drawn by Hans Kresse, no doubt Holland’s greatest realistic cartoonist, comparable to a Burne Hogarth or Hal Foster in stature. The poster is a remnant from the 2006 celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the first appearance of the Eric de Noorman newspaper strip. More than 21 Kresse drawings and some ten homages from other Dutch cartoonists had been made into art projects and put together around the city, a bit like Brussels also long has had its comics route. Whether or not the other drawings are still in place I don’t know, as I’ve only had to visit the station and a dreary office building in the outskirts of the town.

But still, nice to see one of the comic strip heroes of my youtfh blown up more than life like in the middle of a city.

Now I know how an England fan feels

Football, funny, video
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Robben on his knees

Twentyfour hours later it still hurts. From being second in the worldcup to going home in the group phase of the European Cup, with nil points, never showing up in any match for more than fifteen minutes. The best players of their generation and they twatted it. Worse, they lost from not just two of the teams we most love to hate (portugal and, need I say it, Germany), they also lost from Denmark, a country they should’ve never lost to and one which had already cost us so much heartbreak in ’92 by eliminating us then and with it our chance to be in the final. Oh well, let’s have good old David Mitchell to put it all in perspective:



In fantasy football land meanwhile it’s 2016 and Plymouth Argyle has just won the Premiership, the League Cup and the Europa League… Not that I’m a Football Manager obsessive or anything.

Hate localisation. Hate IP based geolocation. Hate Hate Hate.

geekdom
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Google has long been localising its various websites and services, which I find incredibly annoying: if I want to read Dutch news I’ll ask for and I don’t want my search results tailored to where I am. Now as you know, Google bought Blogger a while back and has now localised blogspot as well and now every time I want to Alicublog, I’m directed to http://alicublog.blogspot.nl/ rather than http://alicublog.blogspot.com/. Suspicious minds have said that Google has introduced this to be able to selectively close down access to controversial/”illegal” blogs while keeping this censorship invisible outside the target country. For the moment it certainly doesn’t possible, other than using a VPN connection to the US or by masking my IP address in some other way, to get round this autoswitching.

And that has fucked up the commenting systems of quite a few blogs I follow, as the Echo system they depend on is not smart enough to understand foo.blogspot.com is the same as foo.blogspot.nl. So I can’t read the comments at Alicublog, I can post comments at the *.nl version, but nobody will every read them…

Fuckers.

Cicero’s Cat

Comix
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a single page comic of Cicero's Cat, probably by Al Smith

Mutt and Jeff was arguably the world’s first daily comic strip, starting in 1907 and continuing until 1982. Created by Bud Fisher but as with most strips later ghosted by others, the most prolific being Al Smith. Once comic books got started in the late twenties/early thirties Mutt and Jeff were reprinted in those as well: the page above comes from National Comics/DC’s long running series of reprints, Mutt & Jeff #18. Cicero’s Cat was a substrip of Mutt and Jeff, a socalled “topper” that ran above the main strip. I though I’d show it because I liked the dynamism of it.

Now we’re living in a golden age of comic strip reprints, so why hasn’t Mutt and Jeff not had a high profile Drawn & Quarterly or Fantagraphics reprint series yet?