Today’s Rhapsody is a completely new one for me. I hadn’t even heard of Eduard Lalo before today. But now having heard his Norwegian Rhapsody I very much like what I hear. I hope you all do too.
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Welcome back everyone! It looks like we’ve finally managed to flush out the remains of that pesky out of the system. I was comfortably sure everything was okay my stats that had been pretty much dead all week started going up big time (on a SUNDAY) and I got a email from Google Adwords saying they had unsuspended my account (not that I was ever using it but the suspension email on Wednesday was the precursor to the malware wall) But on the other hand a friend had told me he was still getting the Google Malware Wall. So I had developed a nearly superstitious pessimism which kept me from even checking up to see if everything was working again. (I swear after a while it’s like looking at your bank account)
So anyway everything is up to snuff and with any luck changing all of my passwords to ones so strong they’re impossible to remember without writing them down will guarantee this doesn’t happen again for a LONG time.
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With any luck this will work. Since the last report Google and my webmaster were still finding bits of the virus lingering to the point it was decided to get drastic an wipe by rebooting the system.
So far it looks like everything is working. At first only about ten articles from the archives were showing up but. that turned out to just be a configuration issue. Something I would have remembered if I had just been updating the latest version of Comicpress. Other than that the only thing Is I had to do was reinstall the advertising banners and reconstruct the header. And now it looks like it’s ready for it’s final checkup.
Let’s hope it get’s the seal of approval because I am really sick of that stupid warning malware wall.
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Let me tell you about the week I’ve been having. Tuesday I’m down at one of my favorite hangouts and one of my friends comes up to me and tells me he had trouble getting into my page. I open my laptop to check and see nothing. I put it on my list of things to mention to my webmaster in passing. The next day another friend emailed me with the same complaint along with documentation. At this point there was still nothing on my end all three of the browsers I have access to were giving me a green light so I thanked him for the added data and forwarded it to the webmaster after all it could have something to do with why my stats were so bad for the first half of the week.
15 minutes later Google malware wall slams down on me too.
So here I am mildly panicky but still having to wait until five o’clock to do anything about it (can’t bother the webmaster at his day job) so I try to stick to doing all of the things I normally do as well as trying to look into any possibilities regarding sources of possible viruses just so I could be as well informed as a clueless Luddite could be when I made my phone call at five.
When five o’clock came we discovered the page had been hacked most of it was WordPress specific and hadn’t touched most of the archives and we were able to clean it up. As well as replace all my passwords with ones so strong that I have to write them down since there’s no way I can remember them.
However while waiting for Google to accept us as safe for human consumption I’m still getting emails reporting the problem with my site. Some from spammers trying to make a buck and some from well meaning friends. On top of that I found a few more bits of unacceptable codes that still need to be taken out… so looks like this problem will last through the weekend.
Anyway at least at this point I’m past the panic stage and now I’m just really annoyed. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel it’s just at the moment it feels like I can’t move towards it.
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I just stumbled over a review of a new recording of some of his piano work, so for today’s Rhapsody let’s return to Ern? Dohnányi with his Rhapsody in C Major Op.11 No.1 as played by the great Australian pianist, Eileen Joyce.
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I guess I always find myself being drawn to super heroes. As a cartoonist one of my dreams growing up was to be part of the Marvel Bullpen drawing all of my favorites. I made up my own characters and teams and their adventures within my imagination were epic. I moved on I gradually discovered Frank Miller, Walter Simonson and Alan Moore dabbled with as many different approaches to the super hero as my favorite genre and the superhero as modern mythology until I looked too hard and lost interest. (More of this recurring rant can be found in my Megamind review.)
But even so, I still like the genre and am frequently find myself drawn back to it. And every now and again I find myself taking another crack at it. These day’s I find the best approach is to not take it too seriously… accept it as fantasy and embrace the camp approach of the sixties and seventies. Keep in mind you still have to respect it, don’t do it as parody, in the end that’s almost as bad as many creators attempts at dark revisionism.
I think that’s why I enjoyed Austin Grossman‘s Soon I Will Be Invincible so much. Most superhero novels I have read treat it all like science fiction try and put four color characters into a real world setting. Rarely have I seen it work at all. “Soon I Will Be Invincible” embraces the absurdity treats it with respect and runs with it all through the eyes of the arch villain, Dr. Incredible.
I bring this up because just recently I was looking around Youtube and stumbled upon this clip of an actor’s audition based on some of Dr. Incredible’s narration from the novel and thought I’d share.
Enjoy.
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