The first time I learned about the gentle sea cows of Florida’ everglades was through a Sierra computer game called EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus. Sierra was actively doing its part to help better the world through creating a series of games that brought to light the dangerous effects of ...

Photo: “One of these days, you’re gonna die laughing.” Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988)

The 1988 mixed animation-live action film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, set in 1940s Toon Town, had a whimsical villain called Judge Doom with a team of henchmen in tow known as the Toon Patrol. The ...

Photo: “Rhino and Zebra Playing Chess”. Illustration from The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base. (1988)

My uncle could see nine moves ahead in chess. Nine moves. I could never understand how one could predict the future moves of an opponent by sheer chance. A predictable opponent makes predictable moves, yet ...

Photo: “Untitled Signature” by Francis Picabia

The year was 1915, when a thirty-six-year-old Francis Picabia showed up to the New York Dada scene. His alibi to leave Europe was a story about his travels to Cuba in order to purchase molasses, a story he cleverly forgot once he arrived in ...

Photo: Venus and Adonis by Peter Paul Rubens

There are few days more appropriate than today to write about Love as a topic. Aphrodite herself, the goddess of love, fell in love with the beautiful Adonis, before his ill-fated day when he encountered the wild boars.

Love comes in many ...

A teacher once told me a story about an in-law who worked in the animation studio for a very popular children’s cartoon. The studio used hand-drawn animation for the first season and transitioned to more computer animation for season two and season three. The job entailed drawing the main ...

Photo: A collection of “Le Petit Prince” books in various translations.

“Le Petit Prince” (French), “The Little Prince” (English), “Regulus” (Latin), “O Pequeno Principe” (Portuguese), and “El Principito” (Spanish) are a few of the titles of Antoine De Saint-Exupéry’s book that has been translated over three hundred and one ...

Photo: Young Louie Anderson in “Life with Louie” TV Series. (1994-1998)

In another round of shocking events, the comedy world lost another great last Friday, with comic Louie Anderson.

As part of the target demographic for Saturday morning cartoons in the mid-nineties, my introduction to Louie’s humor was through ...

Photo: Bob Saget (1956-2022)

Bob Saget revolutionized home videos years before they could be instantly uploaded, streamed online, and go viral. Yes, that is right, Sunday nights in the nineties meant a new episode of “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, a show where home movie enthusiasts would send recorded copies ...

Ah, public transportation. A favorite bastion for random encounters with strangers from various walks of life.

In the early days of riding, a chance encounter on public transit would usually be drowned out using a variety of props: stereo-headphones; a pair of sunglasses; face mask; eye mask; inflatable neck pillow ...