Rutabaga

@Alien Son is too modest to toot his horn, so I'll let folks know that the "Drawn from Life" page (one of the links across the top of the AwesomeDude home page) has been refurbished and looks much nicer than before. I corrected a few links a few days ago so everything should be working. R

Invision (the forum software) doesn't understand the difference between an embedded video and embedded audio-only, so it's leaving room for a non-existent picture.\ R

So Mrs. Ford has identified three specific challenges that James needs to deal with, and seemingly has made big progress on the first one (replacing the smashed horn). I can see here that French Horns can be pretty pricey, although it appears that Mr. McKindry has given enough to get some pretty decent instruments. We will have to see how they fare on the other two problems -- the bullying in school, and James's unsupportive parents. Unknown at this point is whether Mr. McKindry will actually move Giff to another school, or whether, if not, the principal will actually take action to stop bullying by Giff and others. And it's even more unclear whether anything Mr. McKindry said to Giff would actually succeed in keeping him from picking on James and others. In a way I'm kind of hoping Giff tries something again so we can all witness the you-know-what hitting the fan. As for the Glière piece that Freddie is working on, it really is a handful, especially for a 15-year old. One rendition of it can be found here. Despite being described as set in B-flat major, the piece has a poignant quality that may derive from the inherent tonality of the French horn, perhaps aided by our own experiences hearing French horns in sad or emotional parts of films. But even more of a challenge comes from the staccato acrobatics that take place at roughly 5:30 in the piece. As tricky as the French horn is to play, these runs would be extra tricky. If Freddie can handle those he is a star. Anyway, looking forward to the next installments! R P.S. -- I didn't forget about the fourth issue that Mrs. Ford identified. She gave hints that one of her own sons probably had to deal with the same thing. UPDATE: I discovered that I linked to the wrong Glière piece. It should be this one, Nocturne from Reinhold Glière's 11 Pieces for Different Instruments and Piano, Op. 35, No. 10. This piece would be far more manageable for a student at Freddie's level, although the French horn remains a challenging instrument to play in all circumstances.

This story, found here, is referred to in Aaron's story "Did He Really Say That?" which is a part of the current Picks of the Past. I recall reading this story quite some time ago, possibly while the Mail Crew web site where it originally appeared was still in operation. It is a great story, only four chapters long so not too imposing to tackle, and is well-crafted, with an intelligent and insightful writing style. In it, a precocious and introverted mid-teen discovers what happens when he agrees to play host to a dying alien being who has crash-landed behind the teen's house. Highly recommended. R

And here I am, bumping this thread again eight years later because the tetralogy is a Pick from the Past again. You can start here but I'm not sure the order of reading the four stories is critical. What's fascinating is the Rashomon-like presentation of four different points of view concerning the same underlying events. I like this method better than having points of view switch around willy-nilly in the middle of a single story . . . I have never thought much of that approach. I can better live with chaptered stories where new chapters start out with new points of view. "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner was my first major exposure to this technique, and it was done quietly, rather than with the blatant labeling of "Josh's POV" or the like that we find at that site that rhymes with Thrifty. I'm not sure any of the collaborators on this tetralogy are still around. The early 2000s were clearly a fecund time at AwesomeDude. At least we still have the legacy . . . R

Whoa - Mrs. Ford rocks! Forget playing poker with her . . . I just would not like to get on her wrong side! R

That helps clear things up. I found this post from @Tanuki Racoon that pretty clearly establishes that he is the aforementioned Wibby. His last visit to the forum is shown as happening in 2010. His personal page on Tripod (remember that platform? It too is archived on the Wayback Machine) mentions his stories being hosted by Dabeagle, Nifty, and AwesomeDude. I have checked all of those places with all variations of these names, and come up empty. The obvious inference is that Wibby took steps around 2013 (or earlier) to scrub his work from all the platforms where it appeared. Given that, my inclination is to leave it scrubbed. If anyone feels differently, please speak up. R

Goody gum drops, another Cole Parker story found right here. James's challenges made me think of Luke in First Year. I look forward to learning how James manages to deal with them. And three cheers for Mrs. Ford. R

As part of living up to our nerd tendencies, John and I receive reports from Google as to what it finds when it tries to index the AwesomeDude site in its current form. One result of this is that this morning I fixed a number of broken links Google reported on the "Drawn from Life" page. I'm not sure if anyone looks at that -- no one was complaining about the broken links. But they work now. A more intriguing mystery comes from Google's report that it could not find a directory called "wbms" on our server. Google is correct: there is no such directory. I looked over at Codey's World and nothing there seemed likely either. Using the Wayback Machine web archive service, I found a snapshot from 2013 of this directory: https://web.archive.org/web/20131111124013/https://awesomedude.com/wbms/ There was no trace of it after that. Most of the earlier snapshots that included this directory were from the 2002-2006 time frame, so this goes back quite a few years. It turns out this directory belonged to an author called "Write By Myself." There are a number of stories listed under the archive page above. I have not read any of them, and I don't know if they're any good or suitable for this site. Does anyone recall this author? Any idea why they once were hosted here and then disappeared a decade ago? I can't find any trace of this author on the current internet or other likely story sites. Any reason to pursue resurrecting this author, or should we just leave sleeping dogs lie? (Another mystery I will probably never be able to solve: Google would never even have gone looking for this directory unless there was a link somewhere in the 1.7 gigabytes of AwesomeDude content pointing there. Talk about your needle in a haystack.) R

The backup domain of www.awesomedude.net has now also completed transfer to our current host. Anyone entering awesomedude.net will be automatically forwarded to awesomedude.org. R

I just checked, and the last visit by @LittleBuddhaTW to this forum was on June 22, 2008. R

I am starting a new topic for this because the previous one is about 14 years old, when the story was first being posted here. In the course of cleaning up the new/relocated Codey's World site, I discovered that the link to this story simply sent people over to the AwesomeDude site instance of this story, with no way to return to CW. I decided that it would be better to have something that was tailored to CW, so I essentially cloned the author page and story at the CW site. The index page is here. Having moved the story, I was intrigued and decided to read it. It is quite long, and quite a journey. Some stuff in it gets rougher and more graphic than the typical CW fare, and I wondered how it ended up there. The lead character is a young man named Connor, who faces some rather daunting challenges and makes some debatable decisions along the way. Readers will go from moments of cheering Connor to moments of wanting to slap him. The same can be said of a number of the other characters. It seems unlikely that any reader would come away indifferent. It took quite a while to read through the whole thing, but I finally got through it on the weekend, and I'm glad I did. The author, @LittleBuddhaTW, participated in the original thread for this story as it was being posted, and may chime in here if they're still around. All the story pages are formatted in the ancient (by computer standards) manner of Microsoft FrontPage 6.0, and could stand a facelift to our current CSS-based page design, but that's a task for another day. For now I just wanted to bring it to peoples' attention. It might also be a good candidate as a Pick from the Past at some point. Worth a read, but understand the time commitment! R

Note to all: The domain transfer completed today and luckily the proper DNS settings carried over into the new home. So there should not be any service interruptions. Cheers, R

But all in all the pictures are striking and the story is sweet. R

Cute story. Found here. The most amazing thing about the boys' space travel is how their shorts switch color in the middle of their game. R

My yellow Lab, Rocky, is about 1/2 the weight of Bonkers but still impressive as dogs go. My brother calls him the "Love Sponge" -- he does not have a mean bone in his body. He is friendly with everybody. And will gladly accept a head scratch or other attention from anyone he can rope into it. And of course he loves to chase tennis balls. Interestingly, we had a Doberman Pinscher named Sheba who was also a complete sweetheart. Kids would run up and start climbing all over her, and while the adults all gasped, Sheba would just calmly let the kids play. Not the image of Dobermans you get from Magnum P.I. We're super-happy to have you back James. If Rocky was there with you he would be nudging your hand with his nose to scratch his head. R

Lumet had been doing some work in television in the 1950s but Twelve Angry Men was his first feature film. William Goldman's books Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? are also very entertaining reads. Goldman was the screenwriter for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride, which are two of my favorite movies, as well as Marathon Man and All the President's Men among many others. R

I have been reading this memoir by director Sidney Lumet, which finally came up on my "holds" list at the Los Angeles Public Library. Lumet directed a bunch of movies, both well-known and otherwise, and I have seen only some of them. His first feature from was Twelve Angry Men (1957), and I was inspired to dig out my DVD copy of the film and watch it last night. His last feature film was Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), which came out before his death from lymphoma in 2011. I did not watch that one again, although I have an awards screener of it, because it is just a bit too dark and somewhat depraved for my taste. In between those two movies he helmed a number of others that I have not seen, such as Serpico (1973), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976), Deathtrap (1982), The Verdict (1982), and many others. Actually, looking at the list, I realize that I have seen Orient Express and Deathtrap. In any case, I have been finding it very interesting to read his philosophies about how to approach movie making, from selecting scripts to casting to running the show once photography starts. Of course, living in Los Angeles it's hard to escape the influence of the entertainment industry, but even for people elsewhere I predict that they would find this book rewarding, especially when it touches on films they are familiar with. R

It appears that the Los Angeles Unified School District has adopted the plan of making middle school cover grades 6 through 8 and high school cover grades 9 through 12. Until recently I lived directly across the street from a Los Angeles middle school, which meant that twice a day (morning and afternoon) my quiet little street became clogged with kids and cars. But there's something nice about seeing the energy of youth. And when one of my dogs escaped the yard and went missing, the kids were eager to help look for him and put up posters around the neighborhood. (He eventually turned up at a house several blocks away, where he apparently just showed up and asked, "What's for dinner?") R

This is a heads-up that there may be a bump or two in accessing the awesomedude.org site in the next day or two, as we are in the process of transferring its domain registration to the company that @Alien Son signed up with for hosting the new site, which also is the registrar for codeysworld.org. Once the receiving registrar reports that transfer as being complete we have to make sure the DNS information is still pointed correctly to our hosting company's name servers. One thing we would like to bring to the attention of the AD family is the identity of an unsung hero in the site rescue process, namely, forum member @Chris191070. Back in September 2023, when Mike had just passed away and all of us realized the trouble we were in because we did not have the login credentials for the AD hosting and domain accounts, @Chris191070 jumped into action and registered both awesomedude.org and awesomedude.net. This was quite prescient on his part. Thus, at the beginning of January, when the lights went out on the site, @Chris191070 immediately furnished @Alien Son and me with his domain account credentials and we were able to scrape together a replacement site under the awesomedude.org site in a mad rush. We are now moving the awesomedude.org and awesomedude.net registrations over to the company that @Alien Son signed up with in January to act as our overall host. The recent codeysworld.org registration is already housed there. I should add that @Chris191070 also took a very proactive part in notifying a number of other story sites on the net of our new .org address. The word got out very quickly, thanks to his efforts and others. It feels to me as though the site has new energy, and Mike would be pleased. We still have some kinks to work out but we are in pretty good shape overall. R

Ah, middle school. Except that when I went it was called junior high school. It ran from 7th through 9th grade, except that the year I went it started at 6th grade because the elementary schools had run out of space. So I was stuck in that hormone incubator for four years. I was definitely ready to move on after 9th grade. Goat rope? R

Words fail me. R

I love snow. Looking at it. In pictures. While I'm sitting out on the patio. 😄 R

They're saying that another big storm is due tonight (Sunday) in southern California. Wave at me if I end up floating past . . . R