Terror Alert In Toonerville ...

Are you a book editor or are you a historian with a book in process? You'll want to check out the color coding at Five O'Clock Bot. Thanks to The Little Professor and Maud Newton for the, ah, alert.

Speaking of terror alerts, the Easily Distracted Cliopatriarch is at Code Yellow and barking orders at Michael Eisner. (Scroll down to"A Brief Rant.") One of the things I love about blogging is that you can do such things. Back in November, I ordered some of you"high toned historians" out in California to get on the picket lines in the grocery strike.

When I stomped my foot and did such things as a kid, my mom would call me"The Terrible Tempered Mr. Bang". Years later, when my mother-in-law finished a major housecleaning, she'd refer to herself as"Powerful Katrinka". [NB: the discussion of Katrinka's evolution from a"Negress" to a Scandinavian Amazon.] Years after that, I was researching in American newspapers of the 1920s-1940s and found my mom's and my mother-in-law's common frame of reference:"Toonerville Folks" or"The Toonerville Trolley". Fontaine Fox originally drew the comic strip series, which ran from 1908 to 1955. Its inspiration was a horsedrawn trolley in Louisville, Kentucky, my hometown. Here's an early power model of it. The comic strip series had spin-offs, in 50 silent film shorts, starring Mickey"Himself" McGuire, who later took the name, Mickey Rooney, and in modeltoys. Good lord, they want $1,250 for this one. Note to The Terrible Tempered Mr. Burke: That might get Michael Eisner's attention.