Breaking Cat News by Georgia Dunn for January 10, 2023

Time to start culling the herd!

OK so “Star Stuff” is kind of clearly Star Wars. I thought “Violent Goblin Pet” might be Gremlins but then I would expect it to be Pets (plural).

“Buy Nothing” worldwide groups I heartily recommend.

Meanwhile, Back on the Nile

Beatrixia: I’ve unearthed a cache of scrolls from the Very Good Pyramid Library that must have been written in ancient times.

Elvis-Anum: What makes you think that?

Bea: The colors are faded, unlike the vibrant inks you use as a scribe. And the script is hard to decipher.

Elvis: I’ll be glad to take a look. Maybe Violet-Ifa can help out, too.

Sometime Later

Violet-Ifa: The script looks like it may date from around the time of the Just Okay Pyramid.

Bea: I’ve heard of that. Wasn’t there something about the bricks not lasting?

Vi: Supposedly they forgot to fire the bricks. In a desert climate, who would care? But then they forgot about sand storms.

Elvis: I would imagine whoever forgot to fire the bricks got fired instead.

Bea: Can you translate the scrolls?

Vi: I’ll take a look.

Elvis: I wonder if there are other scrolls if we can locate the Just Okay Pyramid.

Vi: I was able to translate one of the linesl

Elvis: What does it say?

Vi: It says, “Yes, there are plenty more scrolls if you can find them,”

That’s my grandmother. Won’t throw out an old VHS for anything.

Ah, I can relate. After putzing around with my old decluttering style last year I am FINALLY getting serious and a ton of stuff, much like Elvis (Presley) has “left the building.” Except for the new unworn clothing in 2 plastic tubs I still want to sell or ? I’d say we are about 85 percent done. Feels GREAT!

Hey! What’s so funny about this? This exactly describes my collections. This is completely normal!

(I mean, everybody still has a collection of cassette tapes and maybe even 8-tracks that they don’t even have a (working) player for anymore, right?)

Are those piles cassettes, 8-tracks, or floppy disk’s?

We have cassettes, VHS tapes, records (including some 45s,) even a few MP3 players. Most of my Christmas music is on discs, my husband realized we no longer have a working player so I was given one as an early Christmas gift. Old fashioned we are!

I’m definitely wincing here.

But my old VHS tapes, and DVR discs, could be worth something someday…right…right?!

They’re all irreplaceable when fond, Tommy.

We have cassettes and VHS shows. Dad has some Betamax shows with a deck to play them. The quality is superior to VHS.

All that stuff helps make it smell and look more like home.

There’s only one precious thing to me that’s pretty much gone out of electronic style, if you will. I have a cassette tape of our wedding and I keep meaning to send it to LegacyBox to have them change it over to CD and maybe a stick I can plug into my laptop and load to the cloud. My dad had a stroke the day we got married and my mother walked me down the aisle. I don’t remember much of the day and really need to get that taken care of.

My house has a brand new baby kitty! Momma was a stray who came to us pregnant about a month ago and the vet said to expect one kitten around Christmas. Well, he was off by two weeks, but it looks like momma and kitten are healthy and happy. Haven’t messed with the little one enough to know whether it’s a boy or girl. I was honored that momma came and got me when it was time instead of sneaking off to hide somewhere, and she had it in the prepared kitten box too! What a sweet girl!

Tommy Toe Beans and Paw Pad! Double shot!

My day has been made. ☺

Even if you don’t own a VCR, VHS cassettes make nifty decorations. I have a Star Trek movie box set that belonged to my grandfather and a Japanese copy of Gamera 2: Attack of Legion on display in my bedroom.

Which reminds me. I need to clean the heads on my VCR.

Ouch.

Leaky old hoses and unmatched wool mittens

A bike with no pedals and guide books on Britain

One unused guitar that doesn’t have strings

These are a few of our “wonderous” things

Cracked and chipped dishes that can’t hold our noodles

Dumb bells and conch sea shells by the oodles and oodles

Old broken cell phones that can’t even ring

These are a few of our carefully boxed things

Warped CDs and DVDs with deep scratches

VHS tapes that cause player crashes

Silver white powder that covers old bling

These are a few of our save-able things

Well, Tommy’s right, and the truth stings

But we don’t feel so bad

We simply keep packing our favorite things

And then we all take a nap

- Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II – My Favorite Things

I feel seen by the third panel.

Better keep “Sand” away from “Star Stuff” before someone gets irritated. These would make an excellent art installation if Sophie wants to continue with her “mixed media modernism.”

Star Wars came out in 1978. I was mesmerized when I saw it at the theater with my brother and father. Never before had any movie captured the attention of my teenage brain like that movie did. I think I saw it several times that summer. As soon as the film was available on VHS, I bought it. As soon as Star Wars was available on DVD, I bought it.

I no longer own a VHS player, but the VHS tape is still on my shelf. Now, when I look at the video cassette, I remember a young man with his whole life ahead of him who sat in a dark theater and could experience wonder. Silly treasures like that are priceless.

Oh Tommy, I just bought a video capture card (professional, like you use at the CN station) for digitising all my VHS and 8mm video tape from the past 30 years. If you have any tapes that need preserving, hit me up and I’ll fix you up.

That describes almost all my possessions.

Better to be paperweights than lost media!

We have slowly been getting rid of VHSes that we can stream. It is very hard to part with that part of the past.

Wait there are only three Bill and Ted’s aren’t there?

Paperweights? :O

The last VHS tapes I still have are classic Doctor Who episodes I picked up opportunistically from Half Price Books. When I’m able to get them on DVD, they’ll go back to Half Price Books for someone else to discover and enjoy.

(Yes, someone’s about to tell me that everything Doctor Who that still exists is streaming on BritBox. But I don’t trust streaming; it’s developed a nasty habit of pulling stuff down when people aren’t looking. Anything I truly treasure, I have in my hands and no one can take it from me.)

Photographs and memories

Christmas cards you sent to me

All that I have are these

To remember you

Memories that come at night

Take me to another time

Back to a happier day

When I called you mine

But we sure had a good time

When we started way back when

Morning walks and bedroom talks

Oh how I loved you then

Summer skies and lullabies

Nights we couldn’t say good-bye

And of all of the things that we knew

Not a dream survived

Photographs and memories

All the love you gave to me

Somehow it just can’t be true

That’s all I’ve left of you

But we sure had a good time

When we started way back when

Morning walks and bedroom talks

Oh how I loved you then

I keep intending to digitize the cassettes I want to keep, but don’t get around to it.

The CDs and vinyl I still have I have for a reason, though.

And the “Beatles ’65” 8-track is pure sentiment, but there’s no way I’m getting rid of it.

OT: Yippee! My phone is almost working normally since Mercury went retrograde. What, waitaminit!! Working normally? And Mercury’s retro?

I have gotten rid of my cassettes. I need to cull my CDs, but my DVDs are all recent acquisitions, and I’m keeping them all for now. I am also keeping my vinyl and my dad’s 78s. As I said above, I need to replace my Beatles Double White album. I don’t care if I do it on CD or vinyl, as long as I get another copy of it which, hopefully, will not be eaten by a black hole.

Hey, I still use DVDs and CDs. They aren’t entirely out the door just yet (or else companies would’ve stopped producing them by now).

Throw out the tapes. Nothing left on them.

Not that they have any paper to weight.

OT: Eye doc

Related to the comment topic – “decluttering” – I offer a word:

“Culch” – loosely defined as: “Stuff you have no immediate use for, but is too good to throw out and might come in handy some day.” (Or, as my brother put it: “All that @#$% out in the garage.”)

It me. I have so many nostalgic paperweights.

When will the paper balls make their appearance?

“Countless oudated media now just nostalgic paperweights” Well said Thomas. Well said.

Nostalgic paperweights! LOL! I have too many of those.

Outdated media? Not for some of us. I still regularly buy cds and dvds (and play them too). I’m not into streaming. I want my own massive library that never expires.

StarStuff! I watched that as a child. Chris and Ingrid, communicating through their computers, him on earth in 1980 and her on a space station in 2010. www.imdb.com/title/tt0415451/

Who dies with the most stuff, wins!

(Because someone else will have to deal with it, then!)

I used to own a lot of VHS tapes back in the day. I had to give them away, though, since my video recorder stopped working.

Ripped all my records and music to FLAC 6 years ago. They now reside on a NAS box.

This sounds all too familiar!

8^)

A hope for a future BCN comic. I would love to see a special BCW event once Tommy and Sophie have move in.

One of my mom’s Christmas gifts this year was a portable hard drive – I forget whether it was 1 or 2 TB, but either way it’s a ton of storage all on one device. She spent last week downloading photos to it off stacks and stacks of burnable CDs and miscellaneous flash drives – including pictures that her mother, my grandmother, took before she died a few years ago, and that Mom thought were lost. She’s now a fan of portable hard drives!

Stay away from my “oudated media” and nobody gets hurt!!

Better off having the VHS tapes and DVDs. Never know when you’ll need them over digital streaming. Have protable DVD players and a portable charger we use during blackouts. Able to watch movies and TV shows that way. So we have more entertainment options beside reading and playing games and talking when the powers out.

And this is why you should always make prints of any photos you want to keep. Eventually all media,including computer files and CDs, will become corrupt and unreadable, or there will be no way to access them.

Was just thinking about Rumpole of the Bailey!

How about games on CDs? =) I have fond childhood memories of CD games like Frogger, Carnivores, Myst, & Nancy Drew. Some of them required a CD change at certain points!

I have an adoption announcement. A dear little dog age 9 lost his Mama recently, and the two daughters cannot take him. Here he is. All health info is up to date. I have his detailed info on a Google doc. You can write to me at ilora@ilora.us https://flic.kr/p/2oaTn8j

I love old stuff. I miss the old days. You didn’t need instant everything like you do now. You waited 6 to 8 weeks for your mail order record to come in that you saw on television. No internet, no instant streaming, when music was good and there was so much competition for good music.

OT: Happy Gotchya Day

OT – kinda . . .

Tuesday from Georgia’s FaceBook page: “Today makes one year since Lupin passed away. It still feels like it happened only a few weeks ago, and will likely stay fresh in the heart for a long while. I miss him every day, I still look for him sometimes. Occasionally I see a flash of white out of the corner of my eye, and always hope it is him. Forever will hope it is him. He was one heck of a cat. Fearless, friendly, warm, affectionate, hilarious, ridiculous. I’m proud to have known him, and I’m so grateful I was able to share his personality, antics, and charm with all of you. Thank you for loving him with us. Nine years was not nearly long enough.”

Good for Tommy’s Woman, we don’t need Space Stuff: Special Edition!

Stuff like this makes me feel so ancient.

The Girl’s birthday present was the first physical CD I think she’d ever seen: Harry Chapin’s “Greatest Stories Live” – signed by Steve Chapin and Big John Wallace when I saw them in concert a couple of months ago. Not that she cares very much about that, at least right now. Also, she only wants to listen to two songs: “Singing Bear” (Mr. Tanner) and “The Banana Song” (self-evident if you are a HC fan). We listen to them on the way home from preschool.