Sad and Glad and Making the Grade

Yesterday brought the news of the passing of Marvel founder (for all intents and purposes) Stan Lee.  I was never into the comic books, but came of age in the 60s era of Bad Animation and Cheap Syndication. New York's WOR Channel 9 (your home of the Mets- as it still should be, dammit) ran a half-hour block of their characters at 7 weeknights, often right before the pregame came on.  Captain America threw his mighty shield on Mondays; Tuesday was when Doctor Banner, belted by gamma rays, turned into the Hulk (ain't he un-glamour-ays?); Wednesday brought Iron Man; Thursday was, well, who do you THINK?; and Friday we went swimmin' with the Sub-Mariner.  Another station got nightly doses of Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can....

All of these except Fishy Boy had Stan's inky fingerprints on them- along with the Fantastic Four, the X-Men franchise, Doctor Strange, Black Panther and most of the teams into which they've been Assembling! on film for most of this century.  Perhaps that's why the Marvel Cinematic Universe retains a continuity that DC always manages to miss; Supe, Bat and WW came from different minds in different eras and never had the underlying snark that Stan's characters embodied long before "snark" was even a word.

The amazing thing is how this man didn't even hit his stride until his late 30s. Although he'd dabbled at Marvel's predecessor in the 1940s and worked in a variety of comic genres through the 50s, his first superheroes as we know them were the Four, created two years after my birth and 39 years after his.  To have created so much, and then enjoyed such a renaissance of them (and him!) in the MCU films and their Stan Lee cameos, respectively, must've made passing away almost an afterthought.

At least he outlasted Thanos by close to a year;)

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Meanwhile, I've just about outlasted the Great Laptop Outage of 2018:)

I checked on arriving home tonight and discovered that Horse With No Name, the Dell machine I shipped off two weekends ago, has been repaired and put back into transit and should be here by the time I get back from Rochester on Thursday.  This one's been fine for the transition- and I will probably start using this one at home permanently while keeping the Dell mostly at the office(s)- but this keyboard has quirks and missing features, and the prodigal laptop interfaces with the rest of the office technologies better than this one does, so I'm looking forward to it.

I'm also slowly getting used to the replacement adding machine I picked up last week to replace the one apparently fried a week ago during the Election Day Windstorm power surges.  They market it as a "mini desktop printing calculator" now, but that's basic BS: if you total your sums with a * key and not a = key, it's a flippin' adding machine. Dammit.  This one lacks a subtotaling function (that I can find, anyway), and has about 30 functions I don't understand- including an IT button, which I'm afraid to push lest it start screaming at me in a high pitched tone and getting hair all over my desk-



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Both of my offices were officially closed yesterday but both had attorneys in and out of them during- including me for a bit in the one here.  I spent most of today, when not in court, in the other one, and for the first time in ages, actually sat in on an interview of a potential new lawyer there.  He went to my alma mater here in Buffalo, and when he passed out copies of his transcript, I discovered that UB Law School has recently begun providing them with a useful new tool:

Grades. Real ones. As in A's and B's down to F's, with pluses and minuses and actual GPAs.

This is quite a change in how things used to be done out at the People's Republic of Getzville. In my day, we were graded on something best described as the "Q continuum"- hippy dippy 70s faculty decided to eliminate those ableist grades and cumes, going solely with whether your work was Q(ualified) or not. The latter eventually got divided by order of the state's highest court, which set the standards for bar exam eligibility and was having none of that, into D and F. Also around that time, the faculty, being after all a bunch of high-achieving pointy-heads, added an H grade for "honors" at the top, and by my time, this bizarre H/Q/D/F system also sprouted *s on the Qs for those showing more than "just qualified" but not quite "honorable" work. (I've even heard of 90s grads who had Q+ and Q- subdividing their qualification.)  Still, this system defied calculations of grade-point averages, and it became beloved by slacker students and abhorred by law firms staffed by anyone other than graduates of the same crazy system.

I have no recollection of the change to traditional letter grades- brief legal research suggests it dates to around 2010- but they've been so busy unbranding and rebranding themselves as UB Law, SUNY Buffalo Law and the NEW YORK State Law School* in conjunction with the undergraduate athletic programs making similar multiple changes in their laundry; I must've missed the memo.  I did confirm that one vestige of egalitarianism remains- that even though they compute the cumes to hundredths of a point, they still refuse to rank the class in order of those numbers.  Instead, the Registrar just offers some Very General Advice as to who can say they're in the top 10, 15, 20 or 25 percent. (We got similar VGA under the Weird System- 50 percent H's meant you were "probably" in the top 10 percent, meaning that I, and the other 90 percent of the class, could claim to be just outside the top 10 percent.)

 

*  at Buffalo.