Rikers Island 2: Electric Boogaloo

"Rikers Island" is my umbrella title for posts with corrections, follow-ups, and housecleaning. (Yes, it is a very lame joke -- it's called that because this is my department of corrections.)

It's been a while since I've done one of these -- about eight months, to be exact. Does that mean that everything in Antick Musings since that point was completely truthful...or that I have been amazingly lazy? You'll have to decide for yourselves...

When I reviewed The Flying McCoys, back in November, I referred to the art style of Glenn and Gary McCoy as "less professional" in passing, which wasn't quite what I wanted to say but was somewhere in the ballpark. (What I should have said was something like "sketchier" or "deliberately unsophisticated" or "faux naif" or some art-history term I don't actually know.) Gary McCoy e-mailed me himself to mildly take me to task for that; my apologies. (This is also a good point to mention that my older son, Thing 1, loves a collection of cartoons by Glenn McCoy called Tall Tales, featuring a remarkably off-model-looking Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy doing various silly things and being part of truly horrible puns. I read it myself while sitting in the car yesterday, and quite enjoyed it myself, on that cartoons-for-kids level. And the McCoy style -- though I'm surprised the control freaks at Disney approved it -- gives a lot of life and energy to those very familiar characters.)

When I gave advice for new parents, I mentioned that my wife loves Stride Rite outlet stores, and I got an e-mail from an Assistant Marketing Manager there which said that my wife's belief was correct: Stride Rite doesn't create separate, cheaper, lines of merchandise for their outlet stores, but just sends the outdated and overstock stuff there. (You know, the way an outlet store was originally expected to be?)

(And the lesson there is that anybody can and will Google their own or their corporate names. Anything on the Internet is effectively posted on a permanent world-wide bulletin board, and I hope everyone realizes that.)

Someone with the Blogger name of Roe has now commented several times here, and she's obviously someone I know and used to work with. Sadly, I haven't been able to figure out exactly who she is, though I should be able to remember who told me about the free stuff at the DC booth. I'm feeling very dumb right now, so, if you're still out there, can you drop me an e-mail that will make me feel even more stupid? Thanks...

Some time ago, I asked people about their experience with Bloglines, and particularly Bloglines's problems showing LiveJournal posts. (Which, on my end, is still not happening.) I tried importing my list into Google Reader, which slowed down to approximately the speed of that University of Queensland pitch drop experiment; I don't think that's a good solution for someone reading as many feeds as I am. I may need to set them all up as LiveJournal "friends" (though I hate the interface and hate the terminology), or try just doing the LJ stuff through Google Reader and see if that works.

(The reason I mention this is to say that, if you're on LiveJournal, I have to remember to look at your posts, so I'm probably missing things. So if there's any reason you'd want me, particularly, to know about something -- and I can't think of any, but we've previously established I can be imagination-deficient -- please let me know directly.)

My post about the movie Little Children had a few comments, which turned into an impromptu guide to the fiction of Tom Perrotta -- if anyone cares.

And that's it for this edition of "Rikers Island;" thanks to all of our wonderful contestants!