Bud is doing what I spent a majority of my “free” time in the mid to late 70s… soldering. I built a lot of my own stuff, including a neat little audio mixer from scratch. I built three synthesizers from kits and after those, I put away the soldering iron for a long time.
“Pictures at an Exhibition” was a live album by Emerson, Lake & Palmer in 1971 and “Nutrocker” was a take on Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” suite. I love when rock and classical mix. I had a hard time coming up with a title for squirrels on a fence, so this seems to fit…
😀
He’s eventually gonna have to move the exotic pets, unless those squirrels can stop the city’s wrecking ball………
Almost forgot. WILLLLLMMMMMMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!! 🙂 🙂
RE: vince – To quote Yoda “Difficult to see, always in motion the future is.” I’m not ready to give up on Jeff’s house just yet.
I figured Wilma’s hairstyle would be an easy one to pick out. Though I thought Betty was the better looking of the two until they cast Rosie O’Donnell as Betty in the live action Flintstone movei. UGH!
Stranger than fiction. In my days as a commercial real estate valuer I visited a vacant shop in a tatty part of North london. Looking round the back of the property I found a power lead trailing from the downstairs window to the shop next door. The occupiers were running their commercial size fridges from my client’s power supply!
Nothing’s new eh?
Actually have done this myself once. I was doing some re-wiring and had to shut off the entire house and suddenly realized I needed LIGHT to see what I was wiring! DOH!! Ran a cord to my neighbors front porch outlet and TA-DA! I was in business.
Here in the states we call your job a Real Estate Appraiser. Love how we pinch your language and then mess it all up! Oh, I’m adding “tatty” to my vocabulary right now!
🙂
So just what is Bud making, I wonder?
If the comic were placed in more recent times, he’d be building something cool, but since it’s 1977 and computers had only 32Kb of RAM (a TON) it’s probably a stereo amp or something… I built so much stuff it wasn’t funny…
To put this 32Kb of RAM in perspective, the C64 came out in 1982 and had 64K of RAM. It was technically on the low end of the market, with IBM PCs generally having around 512K RAM, but an IBM PC could cost you something like $2000. That’s not $2000 in today’s money, that was $2000 in 1982 money. According to Wikipedia, they were available for as low as $1565, but I don’t think I saw name brand PCs that cheap in my area until 1983 or so.
I had a C64 that I shared with my brothers, and if I recall correctly, it wasn’t until late 1983 that we actually ran it out of memory for a program we were trying to run. (If ones goal was to run it out of memory, it’d be pretty quick to do that, but I’m talking about actual use.) That said, to be fair, we were kids. My mother’s oldest didn’t start college until 1986.
Back in those days, if one wanted a fast program, hand-coded assembly was a pretty common option for a C64. While hand-coding assembly doesn’t perform nearly as well as using a C compiler and optimization these days, this was long before we had that much compiler optimization sophistication. Sure, compilers had optimizing routines, but we didn’t have enough overall industry experience to have the kind of sophistication we have now, and running that complex of a compiler on a C64 would have been tricky.
(The trick would’ve been to use its expansion port to run a cartridge that had more memory and a separate processor. But that wasn’t really a thing until something like 1984-1986, in part because the processor that would be used for it didn’t actually exist yet. Said processor was what would’ve been the C128 processor, but for a couple sub-optimal business decisions and hard feelings. However, that was an 8-bit/16-bit processor, and the C128 got a strictly 8-bit processor instead.)
Damn! And there I was thinking I was being all trans-atlantic by using ‘real estate’ rather than ‘property’. Glad you like tatty though, it’s one of my favourites!
*laughs at the ELP song title*
Maaaaaaan, I wonder how much you have to “inhale” before “Nutrocker” sounds like a good name for a song… 😉
(For some odd reason, this strip now has the ghost of Foreigner in my head, singing “Headknocker” – a song I could never stand. Even as a kid, I thought it sounded lame. Now…? In the Stupid Lyrics Dept., I’ll take Kiss over Foreigner any day.)
RE: satyrblade – To me, Progressive Rock meant “We’re so stoned these long songs sound good to us” or else how you gonna listen to a 15 minute synth’ solo by Rick Wakeman (of Yes)? The truth shall set you free!!
Some groups over time lose their charm and Foreigner is one of those groups. Some of their rock tunes still hold up, but the rest of the 80s “rock ballad” shit from Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon and others just sounds so lame today. (If I hear “Babe” “Take It On The Run” or “Open Arms” again I’ll break my sound card!!)
Don’t forget “git” and “chuffed”. I’m sure musicobsessive can help with the proper usage.
Well, I knew “git” was like “twit” or an idiot. “Chuffed” is new to me, but seems to mean happy. I love cockney slang, especially the rhyming slang.
Example: “We’re Barney… Rubble… TROUBLE!!” My favorite line from “Ocean’s 11” as the English chap explains his comment.
And speaking of Barney Rubble, was it intentional that the neighbor woman looks like Wilma Flintstone?
Looking at the first couple of comments, I see the answer is “yes.” Maybe I shouldn’t post at 12:30 anymore.
>RE: satyrblade – To me, Progressive Rock meant “We’re so stoned these long songs sound good to us”:
*laughs* With a few minor exceptions (like Rush or King Crimson), I totally agree! And Rush didn’t turn their already-long songs into solo-jam jerk-a-thons, either (although Crimson could be known to do so), so I’m not sure they count as that kind of Prog anyway.
>Some groups over time lose their charm and Foreigner is one of those groups. Some of their rock tunes still hold up, but the rest of the 80s “rock ballad” shit from Styx, Journey, REO Speedwagon and others just sounds so lame today. (If I hear “Babe” “Take It On The Run” or “Open Arms” again I’ll break my sound card!!)
Gods, in total agreement there! I got over Foreigner in my early teens (okay, I confess I still enjoy “Long Long Way from Home,” but that’s about it), never liked REO (save the live version of “Riding the Storm Out”), and began hating Styx after Pieces of Eight (“Three cheers for the Lords of the Ring/ For the magic and mystery they bring…” WTF?!?!?!). Like you said, a handful of songs like “Crystal Ball” and “Wheel in the Sky” still sound good once in a blue moon, but bands like that show why Punk was so damned necessary. (No pun intended in reference to The Damned – and yes, I became an utter Punk fan after seeing The Plasmatics on Tom Snyder around 1980 and The Ramones in Rock-n-Rll High School around the same time.)
Funny you should mentioned Journey this morning. I was a stalwart Judas Priest maniac in my teens, back when I was dating Randi… who was mad for Journey. We argued constantly about the merits and flaws of our respective favorites. So who am I listening to right now as I read your strip and write this response? Judas Priest! Some things, thank all the gods, never get old!