General

It’s the Impending Holiday Season, Charlie Brown

It’s the day before Thanksgiving, and I celebrated this year by getting my new license plate! Dig the joy! (I do need to get a new license plate frame for it, though.) But I am also doing what I do every year at this time, writing my pre-holiday shopping season …

General

The way the AAUGH Blogger’s day is going

I’m feeling pretty ill, something I ate yesterday is apparently having its revenge. I really shouldn’t leave the house, but on Saturday I missed a postal delivery, and I’m pretty sure it’s the shipment from Poland, the one with that last book I need to complete my set of the …

General

Canada rocks!

Here is a cute Canadian ad for the McDonald’s Great Pumpkin Happy Meal buckets, and part of what makes it cute is that young witch… who, as it happens, is a relative of mine. She not a close relative (she’s a “blank blank” relative… i.e., one you describe as being …

General

A Peanuts-y stroll

If you’re in Philadelphia, out by the enjoyable Franklin Institute Science Museum, you can in about six minutes stroll from Van Pelt Street to Woodstock Street and on to a gilded bronze statue in Aviator Park memorializing the fighter pilots of World War I! (It’s all coincidental, of course. The street names …

General

Limited T’s of limited legality

What’s bugging me today is that the number of unlicensed Peanuts t-shirts that are showing up in paid Facebook placement is increasing. You may know the ones, they come from “fan clubs” you’ve never heard of before and don’t otherwise exist, they’re “limited editions” or “limited time”. They’re some folks …

General

David Liverett

Word has come out that David Liverett died on Friday at the age of 72. His contribution to Schulz scholarship was his book They Called Him Sparky, an oral history book on Schulz’s involvement in the Church of God. This was a book that I reviewed favorably when it came out, …

General

Free Comic Book Day: no Peanuts, but a crackerjack event nonetheless

Coming up this Saturday is Free Comic Book Day. Now, usually when I wax rhapsodic about this annual event, I’ve had some free Peanuts-inclusive comic book to steer you toward at your local comic shop, but not this year. With the KaBoom Peanuts series about to draw to a close, they’re …

General

Not the anniversary of Woodstock

Various sources will tell you that the April 4, 1967 strip was the first appearance of Woodstock in Peanuts. I’m here to tell you, that ain’t accurate. Yes, there was a bird who came to visit Snoopy on that date, unnamed at the time (as was every Woodstock appearance until …

General

Passages

Yesterday’s death of Joe Garagiola has me thinking about the ways in which Peanuts is designed for longevity, and the ways in which it’s not. The Peanuts strip was made in and for its time, and while the strip did not flow through current events the way that, say, Doonesbury …

General

What happiness is, for the record

Once Schulz had established that “Happiness is a Warm Puppy”, many other folks decided to put down their own descriptors. The Beatles famously indicated that “Happiness is a Warm Gun”, and as we’ve covered here before, Johnny Carson opined that “Happiness is a Dry Martini”. But it wasn’t until just …