h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Berkeley Breathed has resumed Bloom County. He posts strips on fb.

His fb page:

https://www.facebook.com/berkeleybreathed/

I don't use Facebook.

This may be a nonfacebook source for the new strips:

http://www.berkeleybreathed.com/

I didn't want you to miss the penguin.

I appreciate the concern.

At least Opus is not an evil penguin like the ones in "Madagascar."

I was given a stuffed Opus for Christmas years ago.

Did h2g2 ever get a penguin smiley?

Nope.

I will have to find a sticker for my computer, then. I had some dancing penguin stickers when I was about 16. They were cloth with a satin sheen to them. The penguins were dancing and had canes, top hats and martinis. A bit like hanging around h2g2.

Apparently P L Travers objected to having penguins in "Mary Poppins." She would also disapprove of the penguins in "Mary Poppins returns.

Any chance Mary Poppins would have looked too similar to Mr. Popper?

Not to my eyes, but I can't speak for P L Travers.

http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Poppers-Penguins-Richard-Atwater/dp/0316058432

The original book was made into a movie in 2011, starring Jim Carrey and Angela Lansbury. Angela is also in "Mary Poppins returns," but I doubt that she would want to resolve the controversy.

Maybe she didn't want Mary Poppins, the character and story, to be given the same treatment as Mr. Popper's Penguins, the children's book was given and wanted it to remain pure to the story.

I am going to assume that you read and probably more than an average person.

To that end, how do you feel about ebooks?

I ask because I love paper books, but there are a lot of old, copyright expired books that are available free as ebooks. And, there are free kindle book offers daily online. I don't mind an ebook. Kindles are quite convenient to read from as is the computer with either a text file download of a book or a kindle for pc (free software).

I wish the internet was available when I had to do term papers. One of my papers was about the Salem Witch Trials. That required a trip to LSU's Library for at least ten books for each paper, my brother's LSU I.D. and him to carry some while I carried the books for the other term paper for Chemistry. First time I went through gutenberg.org , I found most of the witch trial references that I had read back in 1985 and even more.

I spend lots of time looking things up on the Internet, and I spend an equal amount of time reading paper books. I will go with whatever seems to make sense.

There is a fb group that is a discussion of British literature. There are kindle users in the group, but when they say ''I'm reading this on my kindle'' others can be rather arrogant or disdainful that they are not reading 'a book'.

I cannot afford the books or the furniture to store them if I could read as much as I'd like. And being that I can read new, classics, textbooks, and really old books, the ebooks are just fine. And, if I don't like it, easy to delete and no bother with return dates.

There's a fine library less than two miles away from me. I can pile a dozen books next to my bed and read from them in order.

I am trying to decide which one is next between ''The Great Book of Amber'', by Roger Zelazny and ''The Mists of Avalon'' by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

The one I will start with tomorrow is "The Rain Watcher," about a family reunion in Paris during a period when the Seine River is getting higher and higher, and it just keeps raining!

There were floods in 2016, 2017, and 2018. I'm not sure which flood the novel is referencing.

We had a massive flood in 2016, called a 100 year flood after it was over. That was the beginning of the Cajun Navy, which never was mentioned in the national news.

There was a massive flood about 100 years ago, when the Mississippi was 70 miles wide in Louisiana.

Sometimes a river's gotta flood.

This was the Amite and Comite, the Mississippi River rose but that was not the major flooding. It rained for a week, heavily. A tropical depression stalled for a few days. The ground was saturated. Rain Continued.

It was August 2016. August 6, through August 14.

On the Thursday afternoon schools in flood prone areas were closing for the next day. On the Friday people were voluntarily evacuating. This is where the Cajun Navy was started.

People who were already in high water areas, and even flooded areas on the Friday were trapped or expecting to be trapped and needed boats to evacuate. The powers that be did not have boats or maybe it was no boats ready, not sure. They would not let anyone else use the main pier to launch boats saying licenses and permits were needed and they blocked the pier.

Louisiana license plates had the slogan 'Sportsmans Paradise' on them for years. So all those sportsmen who fish, sail, etc. who were able, got on fb and found a communication app for their phones that worked with fb. Then went to another pier and launched their own boats to get people out of the waterlogged areas for the next two or three days. All voluntary and without pay.

Saturday morning, the Amite and Comite reversed direction and flooded. The final mortality total, from what I heard on the news was 7 instead of hundreds.

Taylor Swift was reported as having donated a sizable amount to the relief funds. Harry Connick Jr. prompted a music instrument company to donate thousands of dollars of instruments to a local school that lost a lot of the band equipment.

In 2017 as Harvey, Irma and other storms were heading to the gulf and towards Texas, the Cajun Navy (they have a fb page), was contacted and their help was requested. They packed up, filled trucks and boats with donated supplies and headed to Texas.