It’s My Life…

I thought that I would do an update for this week. I have been quite busy this week but I fear that my life is about to get a lot busier. Next month I am going to be undertaking a new Open University subject with Monash University. It is another unit in the post-graduate linguistics course that I started early last year.

Browsing through the course guide the unit does not too difficult, but it will be very time consuming as there is a great deal of information for me to get through and I have to conduct a number of surveys, including one that needs to be tape recorded. (I have two months to do this one but already I am anxious that I won’t be able to find two or more people who will be willing to do this!)

I think that I may as well post updates here on my course and about the things that I learn and how I go about organising those darn surveys, including the dreaded ‘tape recorder‘ one. I think that in the next couple of days I will go through the course outline more thoroughly and then write about what exactly I have to do.

As well as this new unit of study that I am undertaking, I will of course continue to work full-time. I still need to pay the bills and put food on the table and I cannot do this if I do not work. I have to try to organise everything around my work schedule. There is one week where I am at work pretty much 7 days straight (Saturday – Friday) and another week where I only work 3 days in a row (Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday). Unfortunately I am currently in the full on week, but do get a little time to myself to do stuff like blogging or reading or watching TV or just generally having a life!

EC Comics – Judgement Day

This tale based on a Ray Bradbury story, is quite an infamous EC Comics story from 1953. Actually most stories from EC Comics were infamous in one way or another. This particular story was written not long after the Kefauver hearings into comic books and juvenile delinquency, when pretty much everything that was being published by EC was very heavily scrutinised by the censors. This one story initially was not approved by the Comics Code Authority due to the final panel, which really says more about the people who deemed what could be published and what could not, than about EC themselves. This is not a very articulate explanation that I have done so I have linked to Wikipedia who explains the controversy better than I ever could. I have also selected a relevant extract below to help support my explanation.

“Judgment Day”

Gaines waged a number of battles with the Comics Code Authority in an attempt to keep his magazines free from censorship. In one particular example noted by comics historian Digby Diehl, Gaines threatened Judge Charles Murphy, the Comics Code Administrator, with a lawsuit when Murphy ordered EC to alter the science-fiction story “Judgment Day.”^[14] The story depicted a human astronaut visiting a planet inhabited by robots as a representative of the Galactic Republic. He finds the robots divided into functionally identical orange and blue races, one of which has fewer rights and privileges than the other. The astronaut decides that due to the robots’ bigotry, the Galactic Republic should not admit the planet. In the final panel, he removes his helmet, revealing himself to be a black man. Murphy demanded, without any authority in the Code, that the black astronaut had to be removed. As Diehl recounted in Tales from the Crypt: The Official Archives:

“

This really made ’em go bananas in the Code czar’s office. ‘Judge Murphy was off his nut. He was really out to get us’, recalls [EC editor] Feldstein. ‘I went in there with this story and Murphy says, “It can’t be a Black man”. But … but that’s the whole point of the story!’ Feldstein sputtered. When Murphy continued to insist that the Black man had to go, Feldstein put it on the line. ‘Listen’, he told Murphy, ‘you’ve been riding us and making it impossible to put out anything at all because you guys just want us out of business’. [Feldstein] reported the results of his audience with the czar to Gaines, who was furious [and] immediately picked up the phone and called Murphy. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he bellowed. ‘I’m going to call a press conference on this. You have no grounds, no basis, to do this. I’ll sue you’. Murphy made what he surely thought was a gracious concession. ‘All right. Just take off the beads of sweat’. At that, Gaines and Feldstein both went ballistic. ‘Fuck you!’ they shouted into the telephone in unison. Murphy hung up on them, but the story ran in its original form.[15]

”

For more about this story visit this site.

Disney – Ferdinand The Bull Model Sheets

Looking on Ebay in the last few weeks I saw some Ferdinand the Bull model sheets up for sale. I believe that the model sheets are all copies of the originals, but they still look good to me. As I have said earlier, Ferdinand is one of my favourite cartoons.