My other daily writing project has long been a third-tier comics blog but this week I managed to be almost nothing but comics, plus two big doses of somebody else's writing. Here's what you missed if you weren't already reading it. Spoiler: lot of comic strips, so you might enjoy that.
- MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 8: A Fast Runner
- Since I Can't Say Anything Original About _Peanuts_
- Statistics Saturday: Some Days Charlie Brown Did Not Kick The Football
- Robert Benchley: Let's Not Dance This!
- It's Nice to See _Skippy_ Doing Something for the 75th Anniversary of _Peanuts_ Too
- What's Going On In Olive and Popeye? Did _Olive and Popeye_ and _Eye Lie Popeye_ end? July - October 2025
- What's Going On In Eye Lie Popeye? Who is this ‘Susie'? July - August 2025
- MiSTed: The Tale of Jimmy Rabbit, Part 9: The Great Race
Now that you've been briefly somewhat entertained by all that please enjoy a dozen pictures of Bronner's from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger's birthday last year:
Prop from the Rankin/Bass special Rudolph and Medusa Christmas in November!
Bronner's sells prelit trees and there's no reason they have to be boring old green. Some of them go all-out Pride or at least Popsicle.
There are the occasional bright green trees hiding away back there, though. bunnyhugger kept having trouble with her camera's shutter speed being so fast half the LEDs were off in every picture.
Here's a prelit tree that's also pre-decorated in white frosting to look all fresh-snowed.
Did you know Bronner's has a small side museum dedicated to the place's history and, of course, their collection of Hummel figurines? Sorry to spring this on you by surprise!
More precious figurines, including something celebrating the year 2000 there.
And some unpainted Hummels, for everyone who figures someday they'll get around to painting their tabletop roleplaying game mini-figs.
There's also these cases showing the steps in making Goebel or Precious Moments figurines.
Ready for the tour of how the magic happens?
So, the figures start out, like you'd expect, as abrasives, flower, and a pestel.
These then combine to make brushes, spatulas, and (on the right) a kid who kind of looks like pantomime comic strip star Lio.
Finally, they get married. I hope this helps you make your own figurines!
Trivia: The trans-Uranian planets predicted in the calculations of John Couch Adams and Urbain Le Verrier were both a good bit farther out from the sun and more massive than the actual Neptune. (They also forecast much more elliptical orbits than the actual Neptune, which has one of the most nearly circular orbits of all the Solar System's major bodies.) Source: In Search Of Planet Vulcan: The Ghost in Newton's Clockwork Universe, Richard Baum, William Sheehan. Adams and Le Verrier had to make some guesses as there otherwise wasn't enough data just from Uranus's orbital perturbations to find a planet.
Currently Reading: Lost Popeye Zine, Volume 74: The Slippisippi Riverboat Race, Ralph Stein, Bill Zaboly. Editor Stephanie Noelle.
