8 Random Facts
May 17, 2007Jill at My Individual Take (On the Subject) tagged me for the 8 Random Facts meme, so here goes:
The rules –
1: Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2: People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3: At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4: Don’t forget to leave them a comment and tell them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
1. I’m writing this while packing. Today is the day I leave school for the summer.
2. I have a large and ever-growing collection of paint samples. I stop in at hardware stores just to collect more, and sometimes the employees eye me suspiciously.
3. I had a slight infestation of ladybugs in my room earlier this year, and just now I found dead one stuck to the bottom of my foot. No, seriously.
4. John Le Carré’s George Smiley is pretty much my favorite fictional character ever. And Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy is one of the few cases where I like a movie better than the book it was adapted from. But it’s close.
5. I named my cat, Stella, after the author of Cold Comfort Farm, which was my favorite book when I was thirteen. A lot of people do impressions of Marlon Brando when they hear her name, and I find it really irritating.
6. I won a prize last year for my collection of old children’s books.
7. There are piles of books all over the floor in my room at home, but this summer I’m finally going to get some new bookshelves. I know it’s bad that my first shelf-space-related thought is “now I can buy books again.”
8. I wrote my big interdisciplinary paper in 11th grade on Horatio Alger. I used a Jean Webster book and an anonymous short story from the back of an Alger book for an English paper this semester. I am currently trying to figure out how my history thesis next year can be about children’s books. Or Terry and the Pirates.
I’m not going to tag anyone. Sorry.
Redeeming Qualities 
My husband is a big *Terry and the Pirates* fan!
Why the fascination with paint samples?
I think most people who have read any amount of Terry and the Pirates must be fans — or ought to be. As far as I know, it’s the most perfect adventure comic ever written/drawn.
As for the paint samples, it’s mostly about the colors, I think. And the names of the colors. And the pocket sized format. And the fact that they’re pretty easy to stick up all over my walls. :)
I’ve been behind on reading this blog, clearly, but I enthusiastically endorse writing a thesis involving Terry and the Pirates, as you can well imagine. Did you ever read any of Kitchen Sink’s magazine reprints of Steve Canyon? One issue I have of that includes a couple of articles comparing Flip Corkin to the real Philip Cochran, and includes samples of Cochran’s correspondence with Caniff about flight training, which Caniff used in the sequences where Terry gets his wings. Cochran was involved in the India/Burma theater, and is a somewhat notable historical figure in his own right.
I’ve never read any Steve Canyon — I inherited all of my Terry comics from my step-grandfather, and he wasn’t interested in it — but there is a section on Philip Cochran in one of Bill Blackbeard’s introductions to the volumes I’ve got. And there’s also some stuff about him in a book of Milton Caniff interviews.
I thimk having inherited my collection makes me kind of lazy. There are big chunks of Terry that I don’t have, but I never had to look very hard for what I do have, so it’s hard to get started.
Ahh, you have some of the fancier hardbound editions, it sounds like. I have only one of those, the last. A couple of years ago I spent about nine months hunting up the 26-volume Flying Buffalo paperback set, which aren’t nearly as nice, but had the advantage of being significantly cheaper.
Checker reprinted Steve Canyon year by year through about 1954 (I haven’t checked to see if there’ve been any subsequent volumes). That’s nearly as far as Kitchen Sink got, which was till around the end of 1956. I don’t like Steve Canyon as much as Terry. The early years are okay, but Steve is just a less interesting character than Pat or Terry, and by the early 50s he was a stalwart Organization Man more than an adventurer, a major and then a colonel in the Air Force. It’s more constrained and less colorful.
Aside from a few odd volumes, I have Flying Buttress hardcovers — 8 volumes of color Sundays, and seven volumes of the full run. My step-grandfather used to have them all, I think, but now there are gaps. I also have a big pile of comic book style reprints that I haven’t really had time to go through.
I’m sort of hoping that if I do my thesis on Terry I’ll have an excuse to complete my collection. I also do want to at least have a look at some Steve Canyon. My expectations for it aren’t that high, but I am interested.