Complex Numbers

Revisited: "Calvin Tribute"

The random number generator for my trips to the past led me, today, to that rarest of all beasts: a short blog entry.

This one's from January of 2009: "Calvin tribute" 

You'd expect, given the proliferation of short-attention-span media such as Twatter, that brevity would be more popular. But no, the view count on this one is actually somewhat lower than for many of my weightier tomes from the same era.

Anyway, since it's short, there's not much to talk about, but I'm going to try anyway.

First, the link: it's dead. Not too surprising, given its age, but the website it was from still exists. Just not the article. Nor did I do my usual (even for the time) selective quoting, so I can't recall exactly what it was about. It was not, as the title may suggest, referring to the stick-in-the-mud Protestant proponent of predestination, but to the play-in-the-mud comic strip kid.

Doesn't matter much. People (including me) are still singing the praises of this now-classic comic strip. One of my most prized possessions is the three-volume hardcover Complete Calvin & Hobbes, and I still occasionally come across retrospectives and "What's that crazy Bill Watterson up to these days?" articles.

Not to mention that at this old entry, I provide a link to a story I wrote imagining a middle-aged Calvin. That one's still in my port here.

What I've hardly ever mentioned is that C&H was instrumental in cementing my decision to never have kids. He was fun to read about, but, as I recall commenting back when the strip was in its heyday of the 1980s, "Calvin is the kid I wish I'd been, and also the kid I desperately don't want to ever have."

Not that this was the only reason, mind you. There's also laziness, appreciation for uninterrupted sleep, and a strong desire to have things I own remain intact and be wherever I left them. Just to name a few.

But I digress. After all these years, those strips still make me laugh uncontrollably.