This is a site devoted to casting a spotlight on those comics in the Sunday pages that for one reason or another, were never collected.
Also, I'll be paying attention to other comics worthy of wider recognition.
In an interesting moment of synchronicity, both of today's Doonesbury and For Better or for Worse reruns had the same theme as the Thanksgiving Famine tribute that occurred on November 28, 1985. However, looking closely, there's a significant difference - the Doonesbury one is one year earlier than the FbofW one.
After doing some further research, it seems that the Africa tribute was such a hit that cartoonists decided to do it again for next year. However, that's where this tradition ended.
This is part of a "lost" series of Doonesbury strips where Honey busted Duke out of jail. Its a shame they weren't collected, since as with anything involving Duke, they're pretty funny.
As before, I'll start off with the better known strips, and save the more cringe-worthy ones at the end.
I'm aware that I posted this BC strip last time, but that's just to give some setup for the next one:
And here's the strip that showed up a year later:
When you consider the cast of Shoe being made up of birds (who are sometimes hunted for sport by rifle-toting dogs), you have to either equate the characters as being feathered humans or resorting to
cannibalism. Either way, madness awaits for those trying to rationalize their customs.
Last time, I posited the possibility that Bill Watterson was dismayed that he wasn't able to contribute to the Famine last year, so he made up for it this year. Here's an interesting editorial change to one of the balloons of this strip from the Edmonton Journal.
There are plenty of unknown Canadian comics that have very little commercial appeal outside its home country, and Ben Wick's Outcasts is among them. A lot of the jokes were political, the drawings were of lower quality than Quentin Blake's and much of the humour was centered between an elderly couple with deep jowls that made them look like bulldogs. Oftentimes while making a particularly lousy joke, one or the other seniors would reply in raucous laughter. It's dubious an Outcasts collection would even manage to find an audience today.
Some strips went the extra mile by having a prelude strip the day before, or a concluding strip the day after.
In any other context, this Broom Hilda strip would make it seem like the witch was going from house-to-house to extort random people out of their turkey dinners. It would be totally in-character for her to do something like that.
This isn't a continuation of the last strip - the above was from last year, and the strip below showed a year later.
Some comic strip jerks were less cordial about helping the less fortunate, and tended to miss the point.
Other comics were a little more preachy in their message.
It's hard to tell, but I think Arnold's got the whole turkey stuck in his throat in the last panel.
Even licensed comics weren't safe from this:
The worst part about Looney Tunes newspaper comics is how much of Bugs Bunny's wisecracks come less from his mental dexterity manipulation of his enemies, and more from lucking his way out of circumstances.
Yes, there was a Mr. Men (and little Miss) comic strip. Should you be surprised at this point?
This Ripley's Believe it or Not! actually appeared a day earlier, but I'm posting it here for relevance.
I actually passed this one several times over, since it didn't have the title characters, it dealt with robots and didn't have a central Thanksgiving theme. That was until I noticed that the robot was actually giving excess abundance of energy over to a disheveled deprived robot. Some tributes aren't so easy to recognize upon first sight.
As with last year, the serious serials handled their reality issue with as much subtlety as space demanded.
Others just had the tagline of "Hands Across America" in their strips.
As warned, here's the worst saved for last. In addition, here's some more comics I found that I missed last year.
And now that you've made it to the end, surely you know the meaning of suffering too.
Lately, I've become addicted to a new form of online games - the escape room. Once considered a realm of unsolvable murder rooms, this mystery has now expanded to include trapped people to figure their way out of rooms they've unwittingly found themselves locked inside, and have to figure their way out using extremely obtuse clues lying around the place. The majority of these are Japanese games, but for the most part, they're fairly straightforward, even though the methods to determine the paths out aren't exactly intuitive.
Like most games, it takes awhile to figure out the rules, and can be tricky for first-timers not already versed in how such things play out. Here's a few beginner points:
Click EVERYWHERE to find elusive items, usually in out-of-the-way places, such as behind paintings, between shelf corners or under the bed.
Some pictures may rock if you click their edges. The trick is to figure out what sequence to click each edge in.
Looking left & right may not be your only options - some screens may have it possible to look up at the ceiling, or down at the floor.
The usage of certain items may not be obvious at first glance. You can use a coin to unlock some screws instead of using a screwdriver.
Some of the items in your inventory might be rotated around, showing items taped behind them. Highlight them, then "examine" or "look up close" to see them in detail, then click around.
Furthermore, some items can also be combined with others. Highlight the object as explained above, then use another item, such as a match to light it on fire, or combine it, making two halves into a whole.
For me, the worst kind of escape rooms are those that insist you solve one puzzle at a time in order to solve the others. Rather than having multiple paths that all eventually run towards the same goal, these force you to go down a very specific way and don't allow other opportunities to experiment with other puzzles when you get stuck. Not unlike those adventure games where you're required to collect 8 Macguffin items to unlock the boss area. Somewhat similar are escape-themed games where you're required to find multiple similar objects (puzzle pieces, Escape-Men) to get out, which is essentially a series of checkpoints, since these items are never used on their own for anything else.
All of Tesshi-e's puzzles end with this phrase if you find the coin before leaving. Open the door, but look around the room for an extra puzzle to be solved.
But so far, the most consistently impressive one has been Gatamari's escape rooms, even though he's only done twenty-five games. The first five were notoriously difficult, starting off with an Interrogation room, and a Japanese School, both of which required knowing Japanese to solve the puzzles. To this day, I don't think anyone's been able to solve the first Gatamri escape game. Things got "slightly" easier with a trial & error key-based game, which would break if you used the wrong key in the wrong holes. If it weren't for an online tutorial, we wouldn't understand exactly why those particular keys happened to work. Knowing how to solve a puzzle is one thing. Knowing why is another.
Other games were particularly tricky, since they were language-extensive, making playing and enjoying them somewhat problematic if you weren't already versed in Japanese. This included a game room, a gameshow room (with limited times for making mistakes) and a punishment room where you'd get slapped in the butt by Ninjas if you happened to come across anything that sounded like OUT! (Strike Out, Throw it Out, Time Out, Cut Out, Rub it Out, Put the Fire Out, etc.) If you found all 12 punishments, you'd get a surprise Bad Ending upon leaving (assuming you'd ever get that far). The proper course of action would be to intentionally trigger all the Ninjas the first time around, then once you know where they are, you can avoid them next time.
Did I mention the Demon game where our hapless victim finds himself in a mansion where a Demon proceeds to strip him of his clothes? This one was surprisingly amusing, but also frustrating to navigate through, because oftentimes the puzzles were rather obtuse. Most escape rooms are content with having somewhere in the realm of 10-20 objects for use, some of which can be reused multiple times in various places. Gatamari has upwards to 30 to 50 items.
All those empty squares on the right side are to be filled.
Further compounding the difficulty was that there was no online walkthrough in English, and I had to resort to using Google translate for a French forum in order to get some idea of what needed to be done. For instance, there's a calendar in the bathroom with circled numbers, and a similarly shaped square poster in the bedroom. You'd expect the numbers to be of great importance in solving the numbered passwords, but they don't turn out be be for that use at all - they're for something else entirely much later. Also, on the bookshelf are a bunch of books with these titles:
Son / Zone / On / Cent / Oz / Me / Nose / No
The basic assumption is that they'd be part of another password, right? Nope, wrong again. They're actually solutions to a miniature crossword puzzle on the back of a hand-held object in your inventory, the answer of which would be:
OZ*M NOSE *NO* CENT
The actual solution is pushing the particular buttons that spell out a certain word in front. Another annoying feature is that you'll be carrying around some items for a long time without being able to combine them with others, or knowing their intended use. One such instance is the Venus Fly Trap, which has to be placed between singing pillars in a hidden compartment.
I've just saved you the trouble of having to take screen captures of each dance. You still have to insert the correct password though.
But starting with the 6th game, Gatamari started with something quite different - a treasure hunt that would continue from where the last game left off. The first room would have several puzzles that needed to be solved in order to trigger a single summoned item in order to get through the door to the next room... which is blocked off by another obstacle that needs a specific item not yet in your inventory. There's a total of seven games in this series, consisting of the following summoners: The Hero, Susano the Monkey, the Samurai, the Decoders, the Archer, the Minotaur, and the Keymaster.
The first several rooms are simple enough, and there are online videos showing you how to bypass them, but the real joy comes out of figuring out the puzzles yourself. There were some real stumpers involved, since the answers were as far from obvious as possible, and I ran into serious trouble around the fifth (Archer) room, because I couldn't find any helpful information online. But I preserved, trying multiple combinations not yet figured out yet, and was surprised at how obvious the solution turned out to be.
Some helpful hints if you happen to get stuck:
Don't worry about getting the ball up the pipes - find another place where you can use the pipe pieces near the steam vents in the basement.
The light switches in the basement won't be of use until you open another door near the end.
The clay slab will be useful later.
Pay attention to the heights of the Egyptian Kings on the walls.
This isn't the answer - figure it out yourself.
The sixth part with the Minotaur summon was pretty bad enough, but that was nothing compared to the seventh and last part, which had seven rooms with multiple interconnecting puzzles, and it was very easy to get stuck early on. Having gotten this far, I caved in and checked for online help, and even the expertswere stumped. The forum resulted in an epic thread that lasted three pages (the average is usually 50 comments. There were 200 comments per page), and only had the walkthrough summarized up near the end. It took hours of calculating, saving and backtracking, which can be the the most maddening aspect of Escape Games, especially if you can't exactly remember what you did for every item involved. But it was worth it.
If going through all these games to see their special moves is too intimidating, a much more reasonable task would be to play the Christmas Special where all your special summons are kidnapped by a possessed Rudolph, and you have to go through various puzzles in nine rooms to get them back. For the most part, you shouldn't have too much trouble, though chances are you'll be stuck at the "Rubik's Cube" Snowman puzzle early on. The Christmas special also has the bonus feature of multiple endings, depending on which gift you happen to take with you when you get out, or no gift at all. Be sure to save beforehand so you'll see them all!
I will tell you that the clock answer is 259 though. (I still don't understand how either)
Recently, Brad Anderson, the creator of the Great Dane comic, Marmaduke, died. While the man was fondly remembered among friends and coleagues, the same couldn't be said for his most famous creation. They say the difference between a cat and a dog is that cats choose their owners while dogs aren't so finicky. Obviously, Marmaduke didn't get the memo, since upon his first appearance, his demeanor had all the warmth of a Russian prisoner exchange. "YOU. TAKE ME TO YOUR HOUSEHOLD. NOW FEED ME."
If you look at the early strips, you'll see a rather grumpy-looking dog with a constantly dour expression on his face. This would be gradually softened up over the years as he would become extremely popular among the neighbor children and less so among the adults, which would include his owners (who do the actual work of taking care of the dog) and his next-door neighbor who'd share remarkable similarities to Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace.
No imitation dogs were harmed in the creation of this comic. Injury to imitation humans are fair game, though.
The unfunnyness of the comic was such that it was Adrian Monk's (the Obsessive Compulsive Detective) favorite strip. (To further show how emotionally broken he was) Apart from selections of devoted fans (of which there's a surprisingnumber) the strips suffer from repetitions of the same Big Dog joke. Brad Anderson said that he based the cartoon dog's actions on regular dog behavior, but Marmaduke's antics were hardly typical of the average dog, even among other Great Danes. Marmaduke was such a bastion of banal humour that it was amusing in its consistent craft. The only real source of humour came from the (now defunct) blog, Marmaduke Explained, which went into hyper-informative exposition reiterating what just happened on the single panel, usually some form of being intimidated by a hulking dog capable of improbable feats, such as "Moonwalking".
William Randolph Hearst was indirectly responsible for Krazy Kat and Citizen Kane. Howard Hugh inspired The Aviator and... Howard Huge.
Owning a frog, jumping with said frog, along with the owner, who's also jumping in turn.
So what baffling rationale could there be for Marmaduke's long-standing tenure? Could it be the varied expressions and poses that the surprisingly ambidexerious dog could get himself into?
What medium will Robert Murdoch inspire, other than Simpsons levels of self-loathing?
Or is it that kids were amused by the prospect of having a powerful pet who'd fend off your enemies and have fun with you? Something not unlike Jack Kent's There's no Such Thing as a Dragon, whose titular dragon gets progressively larger the longer he's ignored. Kind of like Digimon in reverse.
Marmaduke had the same template and setup of Heathcliff (right down to their Sunday strips with the last panel taken up by "amusing" cat/dog anecdotes) where households and neighbors are held under sway by a jerkass pet who rules total dominion by sheer force and intimidation alone. (A trait best exemplified by Garfield) Another common factor is that both Heathcliff and Marmaduke never say or think a word - everybody else does the talking for them, providing chorus background commentary. These silent protagonists probably helped influence children's books such as Stephen Kellogg's Pinkerton and Clifford the Big Red Dog.
That large oval black thing on the dog's face isn't a mouth - that's a Nose.
So typical of Hollywood, they ruined that by having a movie with scatological talking dogs, forgetting that they'd already done this successfully with another silent dog movie.
You can never see this movie in another light again.
Every November around this time of year, I pay tribute to what's generally accepted as being the best World War I comic, Charley's War. Trouble is, it gets harder and harder to say the same thing all the time. "This comic's really great! you should read it!" There's only so many times you can heavily recommend a singular thematic comic before potentially interested parties become turned off at your enthusiasm. This year, I figured I might as well put a spotlight to other comics that have their focus on The Great War.
The first book is the most direct with its title, Terrorist: Gavrilo Princip, the Assassin who Ignited World War I. We know that the trigger for WWI was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but surprisingly not much about the man who did the killing that had similar world-shaking implications as Lee Harvey Oswald. If you've ever wondered about what the man's internal thoughts were that spurred him to such an action, then this book's for you. Especially since as a prelude, there's several historical similarities still relevant today.
In TGPtAwIWWI, we find that Gavrilo was a Bosnian Serb who was a school dropout with great pride in his heritage. He tried to apply for the army to fight for a war on Turkey (the Turks) but was turned down due to his persistent cough. Feeling discontent, he fell in with a crowd of radicalized anarchists who wanted to overthrow the crown. Any of this sound familiar?
There's information not only on the killer, but an occasional spotlight on political background dealings in trying to deal with the rather aloof mindset of the Emperor, who's more concerned over his trivial affairs than international politics. Somewhat shades of Mrs. Simpson and the King.
To amp up the tension of the inevitable, the government secret service is ordered to halt the assassination, despite instigating it, since the country's condition was delicate and still recuperating after two wars. You heard right - they were stirring up their own populace in order to spur on future profitable conflicts. You can see how well that plan worked out for them.
When you're surrounded by death and destruction and unreasonable chains of command, for some reason, it spurs the creative juices something awful. Above the Dreamless Dead is an anthology of WWI Poetry drawn by various British artists.
While the most amusing (and rude) ones are by Hunt Emerson, the majority of the book is of somber ruined battlefields and wounded (physically & mentally) soldiers. As such, it's something of an acquired taste, and may not be for everyone.
Last year, I mentioned The Black Battalion, a group of Blacks who fought in the War, but there was another regiment of that's almost been lost to history - The Harlem Hellfighters. Written by Max Brooks, best known for World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide, he did meticulous research from the scant few available articles that bothered to mention them. After failing to attract any prospective Hollywood directors (including Spike Lee!) who were interested, but didn't want to invest into a heavily-Black cast with disturbing racial overtones, he eventually found a reasonable outlet in the form of comics. Normally, failed Hollywood pitches turned into comics are little more than Die-Hard ripoffs, but this was something worth spreading to the masses.
The Harlem Hellfighters chronicles the ugly history of the highly reputed Black regiment who fought in the trenches during the war. But before they could reach the harsh conditions of the Front, they had to contend with the unfair conditions of back home where they were stymied at every turn including training, which necessitated no small amount of trickery in order to get the parts they needed.
Hollywood puts plenty of stock in rooting for the underdog, and indeed, these men had to overcome overwhelming trials. Being constantly harassed by the white public (and even Black labourers) for daring to think they were good enough to join the army. Having to keep stiff upper lips during repeat burnings of mock effigies... with actual Blacks standing in for the effigies. Furthermore, they couldn't exact any righteous vengeance, since reprisal on their part meant that they would be disbarred from entering the War. The whole humiliating experience was aimed at a race who were never intended to succeed in the first place, fighting for a country that didn't want them. Ironically enough, while they were welcomed as an assistance in the Western Front, the top brass (from America) decreed new orders for the battalions not to socialize with their allies, lest they become "too accustomed to being accepted as an equal". Fine way to treat Black soldiers who joined up for "a chance to shoot white men".
...that probably didn't come out the way I intended.
Since the dawn of fire, Man has sought ways to make the food they eat easier and more convenient to swallow. For a long time, it was thought that along other traits (dreaming, deducing, inventing) humans were the only animals that cooked their food, and for the majority of the animal kingdom (save some species of apes), this is true, since very few species go to the trouble of preserving their food stock, let alone go to the trouble of adding supplements to make it tastier.
Since wild animals are prone to having their livelihood taken away from them in unstable environments, there's not much chance of experimentation or seasoning something that'll be downed down in a matter of seconds. And when you have a small range of foods that don't threaten your immune system (and don't know how to make it harmless), that number goes down dramatically. When you have a limited diet of foods you enjoy (like I do), you look for more convenient ways to combine recipes more to your liking.
Cheap Ramen packs are a staple of College students and Manga artists. However, I've never been fully able to enjoy slurping the extra-loooooong noodles from the bowl, because I wind up splashing soupy parts all over me, ruining the few comfortable shirts I wear. I'm much more accustomed to smaller noodles that can fit on my spoon. Now, I could simply crumble the Ramen package into smaller pieces, but that results in uneven bits that're difficult to scramble anyways. Instead, what I do is boil water and dump in the stiff Ramen noodles as usual. Only, when the noodles are nice and soft, I put them on a plate, refill the soup pot with clear water, and put the soup stock in the noodle-free hot water. This makes it easier for me to separate the two, and as a bonus, I have a plate of spaghetti that doubles as a fuller course meal. Of course, having a bowl of just salty water isn't very nutritious, so I add some variety by sprinkling some chopped-up chives or shallots, and add an egg in the mix. Important - make sure you add the egg and soup stock at the same time, otherwise it'll be harder to combine the two once they permeate themselves throughout the water.
While Japan has their staple of Ramen as their cultural identity, Canadians are content with Kraft Dinner macaroni noodles. There are all kinds of innovative ways to prepare said noodles in variety of different meals, but the most reliable stock is Mac & Cheese. Usually, this is accompanied by boiling the noodles, then draining them, and dumping the cheese onto the batch and mixing. However, I've found that this method isn't perfect, since it makes it harder to evenly spread out the powdered cheese at the bottom of the pot. To get around this obstacle, after draining, it's far easier to refill the pot with HALF the noodles, THEN dump the cheese, THEN the remaining noodles. That way, the cheese is in the middle, which'll allow for wider distribution, making sure everything's evenly covered. This method can also apply to other recipes, such as Apple Cake, where you need to cover the thinly sliced apples in cinnamon, and have trouble covering everything in a small bowl.
Corn on the cob is a staple of summertime festivals and meals, though slathering butter on the uneven surface is something of an uphill struggle. The knife wavers all over, and the butter has a tendency to slip off due to the heat. There's a far easier method of ensuring your corn is buttered all over without losing your temper - simply put the whole cob on the butter stick and turn. This method will result in melting the interior of your butter stick, and you might get your fingers greasy, but that's a small price to pay for satisfaction.
It's no great secret that the food industry sells unequal amounts of food packages, forcing you to buy multiple sets of 8 hot dog buns to complement your pack of 10 hot-dogs. But there's another alternative to surrounding your meat with bread that works just as well. Indian Naan bread is a large swath of flat bread suitable for spreading anything you want on it. What I do is put the roasted hot-dog at one end of a heated Naan, put the usual condiments (ketchup, mustard, relish) in a thin line behind said hot-dog, then simply roll up the mass into one easily digestible phallic object. (Pizza dough & taco buns would probably work as substitutes)
An added incentive to the above recipe is that you get your ketchup flavor spread out all over your hot dog.
This was something I discovered purely by accident when I was attending a barbecue. I'm not the most adept person when it comes to social gatherings, and tend to make beelines for the buffets, rather than engage in small talk. In this instance, I was more flustered than usual, and wound up putting my Ketchup, mustard, etc. on the wrong side of the burger bun. Rather than fix the mess I made, I decided to make the best of it and eat it anyways, as I was feeling nervous & hungry. What surprised me was how much tastier the burger turned out to be. The thing is, for commercials, you always see your favorite ingredients on top so you'll be impressed by the mountain of taste you'll be stuffing into your mouth. But when I bite into these things, they never seem as tasty as they should be. Instead, I implemented the strategy done by the enemies in Dr. Seuss' Butter Battle Book. If the Yooks were so opposed to the Zooks' way of eating, there must've been something to it. And it turns out there was - by simply turning the burger upside-down, I was able to taste the condiments in conjunction with the hamburger, instead of having to put ketchup on the sides after every bite to retain that tomato flavour. I employ the same method when eating cakes or doughnuts to get the icing on my tongue. Give it a try!
Earlier, I touted how Back to the Future was pretty much a perfect series of movies that remarkably still holds up well thirty years later. That is, if you overlook the elephant in the timestream - the disturbing lack of usage for Jennifer, Marty's girlfriend.
At the end of the first movie, she's brought along for the time machine for purposes not yet revealed, and then unceremoniously "drugged" and dumped into a back alley (instead of the car) at the behest of Doc Brown who despite his urgent urging, never puts her to use. Much like the problematic plan of inducing near-rape to convince Marty's parents to get together, the implications of which are lightly touched on, and underplayed (what WAS going through Robert Zemeckis' head when he wrote that down?) for a movie whose themes basically touch upon incest.
There's plenty more at the link, including how Jennifer's basic function is to serve as a catalyst for further time-travelling between Marty & Doc, and how she's dumped (again!) in the bad present without bothering to check to see if she's alright.
Usually, the role of women in these time-travel movies is regulated to being little more than bystanders or eye candy, not unlike The Time Traveller's Wife. (A somewhat romantic book that had creepy overtones of a girl stalked throughout her growing life by an older man, who in turn would stalk said man as her future husband, because it was destiny or something) More observers than participants, with rare exceptions such as Sideways (more like parallel universes) or Hindsight. Even with Continuum, a dystopian futuristic cop coming back in time (to our present) the timeframe where females can go is also similarly limited. It's been suggested that the overall reason for women being unable to travel through time is because of PMS. This is half of realistic expectations and half of failure of imagination. One the one hand, there's the illusion of keeping up appearances (See how much accuracy is needed for surviving without shaving implements, hair supplies or teeth-cleaning products) and the lack of urgency from working in short time frames. There's no absolute necessity for having to stay in the past for months or years at a time. On the other hand, there's the danger of knowing too much about what the future holds. Even if futuristic people have access to impressive fountains of knowledge, that access is useless if the populace is unwilling or unable to accept such blasphemous ideas coming from total strangers; let alone FEMALE strangers spouting illogical quandaries at them in an unknown accent.
One possible workaround is that if being a woman back then is extremely problematic, then just employ the tactic commonly used in gaining access to Female-allergic/resistant areas - pretend that you're a man. (Think Mulan or Michael Critchon's Timeline)
This was evident in the Gender-bender Manga, Kaze Hikaru, a Shojo Manga about a girl who joined the Shinsengumi for revenge. The first cover which had the perplexing colouring choice of having the top of her shaved head blue. (While still leaving her bangs visible)
Chances are, the extent of your familiarity with the Shinsengumi comes from Ruronin Kenshin, or more specifically, the closing montages of the Trust & Betrayal OAV where we saw a brief cameo of Officer Okita Soji (who never showed up in the series) who coughed up blood. This was a common staple of Okita, who suffered from tuberculosis and when some research was done, it was determined that it was impossible for him to have served his service while sick for so long, otherwise, his sword skill wouldn't have been so heavily praised. So an alternate explanation was given where the blood came from the target (and just happened to spill upon his shirt) so when he came down with tuberculosis later, history figured it must've occurred back then.
The author, Taeko Watanabe, is something of a history buff, and is notorious for doing investigative research, even while the threat of an approaching deadline's breathing down her neck. The behind-the-scenes production notes were some of the most popular pages of Kaze Hikaru, some readers vastly preferring them to the main storylines. (Not unlike the amusing bonus pages for Full Metal Alchemist) One of these focused on the problematic process of finding a plausible reason for her protagonist to stay for months without arousing suspicion among the majority of the members who didn't know her secret.
It turns out that much like the untold history of toilet paper, the secret of retaining periods was kept via oral history, which wasn't written down for posterity.
Even with pumping the elderly for information, the author didn't seem able to get anywhere. However, she was in Japan. And Japan has respect for certain female workers doing the world's oldest profession...
However, even knowing where to look didn't help matters any. There was information on the technique, but not how it looked or was designed. Research can only go so far.
It was only by chance while browsing another unrelated book that the author finally found what she was looking for. So you can imagine how difficult it would be for male writers to even ENTERTAIN the possibility of working around creative obstacles of a monthly ritual they have no familiarity with.
Not much to say here, save for enjoy the remaining days of the year, and watch what you eat. Nov. 9: Remembrance Sunday - Don't forget. Nov. 30:St. Andrew's Day - Wear Kilt (Mrs Wicket - old dress?)
