Has Downton Abbey replaced Upstairs, Downstairs in the hearts and minds of Retro-Anglophiles? Well, not this canine one! …
However, I don’t remember it well enough to know the reasons for Snoopy’s delight at the idea of staying with Georgina. Was she the secretary that the widower eventually married? Or the sort of niece-in-law-once-removed?
“Didn’t we just have a different cartoon with an alligator at the dentists?”
“Maybe, but I thought that was a crocodile.”
Whatever! It was Monday’s CIDU:
Remember when they would say El Greco painted tall narrow figures because of his astigmatism?
Not gonna get that job with HMV Records!
Comics I Don't Understand 
Georgina, as I suspected from my dim memory, was the character played by the very lovely Lesley-Ann Down (note Snoopy’s beating heart). Wikipedia says “She was voted Britain’s most beautiful teenager at the age of 15”.
When Upstairs Downstairs was around in my school-age years she seemed like a proper grownup but I see she is less than four years older than me in real life.
https://soaps.fandom.com/wiki/Georgina_Worsley for the character’s life story.
And as for the actor’s career’s Tory, so to speak (ho ho) Wikipedia says she is playing Margaret Thatcher in the currently-filming Reagan, with Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan.
With the El Greco story, I always assumed that if his eyesight made people look tall and thin then they would equally make his paintings look naturally tall and thin to him; so to everyone else his paintings look be as perfectly proportioned as his subjects. No need for him to add extra thinness.
“his paintings look be as perfectly proportioned” – oops, meant “would look as” or “would be as”.
I see, on further checking, that the filming of Reagan was completed in 2021 after a Covid delay, and is due out this year.
I was all along dubious about the El Greco idea, on something like the grounds Narmitaj so ably explains.
Also thanks for the link and reminiscence explaining Georgina. So it seems, between our two guesses about her given in the post, “sort of niece-in-law-once-removed” was closer, though it was more simply just step-niece. (Or step-cousin, from the point of view of unfortunate James Bellamy.)
I had a literal LOL at the speaker-wire strip, mainly because of how irrelevant it is these days. I had speaker wire strung all over my homes from the 70s through the 90s. I moved into a new home last year, and the only wires from A/V equipment are the ones plugged into the power receptacles.
The original “Upstairs, Downstairs” series had already ended (in 1975) well before that strip appeared (on 11-June-1976). When he wrote it, Schulz may or may not have been aware that Down‘s “…fame led to a nude [appearance in] the magazine ‘Mayfair‘ in [January] 1975“, but that definitely indicates that she was a “hot item”. Given that “Down has spoken on several occasions about dealing with sexual predators in the film industry“, one wonders what her opinion of Schulz’s strip would have been.
@ Max – Two other things bothered me about that comic: first, just because the ghost can travel through walls is no guarantee that he can take a wire along for the ride (if he’s that ethereal, he won’t even be able to grab it). Second, what in the world is a “bonus” room, and where is that term commonly used?
P.S. Re: technology – audio signals are low bandwidth, and the information can be easily carried via WiFi or Bluetooth, but the Telekom will be “wiring” our neighborhood with optical fiber next year, and I have to figure out how to get that cable from our basement to the rest of the house. That’s relatively easy in America (assuming typical wood construction), but I will need to drill several holes through six to eight inches of reinforced concrete.
@Kilby – I am typing this from my bonus room! The previous owner converted some attic space into a home theater. I use it as a home office / mancave. A more official description may be :
“A Bonus Room is a room in a house that is not a kitchen, bathroom, family room, hallway, or closet — but for one or more particular reasons, it doesn’t qualify as a bedroom, either. This room might show up over a garage, for example, or represent attic or basement space in some states.”
I am completely on board with both of Kilby’s addenda of problems with the wiring cartoon.
On the plus side, the description of the character as “ethereal” made me think of the huge projects many places experienced getting connected in the era when that meant pulling Ethernet cabling up thru the walls!
@ Mitch – That’s exactly what I wanted to do when we moved into this house nearly a decade ago. The original plan was that our electrician was going to pull out one of the cable TV wires (from the basement to the top floor), using that wire to draw a “pull cord” through the embedded channel, with which he could then install new Ethernet and/or cable TV wires. We knew this could work, because one of our neighbors had already done it. Unfortunately, the idiots who placed the channels for our house had “doubled up” for part of the distance, leaving a “Y” intersection in the middle. Pulling out one of the two wires would risk the integrity of the other, which might have left us without any cable wires at all. Dimwit contractors!
P.S. @ Max – In Mid-Atlantic parlance, that room would be called a “den”, or (to paraphrase Dave Barry) an “emergency backup living room”.
I’ve never heard of “bonus room” either, but it sounds like it must mean a room that has been created since the house was built but in a space that was already there from the start. The original architect and constructor didn’t intend a “room” room there, but there was an existing volume of some sort, say an attic or a cellar, and someone since has converted that into a perfectly habitable room with carpet, plugs, heating, ventilation, maybe a window – so literally a whole extra bonus. Not the same as the “spare” room, as that’s an existing room only used for guests or junk, and not the same as an extension, as that is (generally) a brand new bit of new construction making a fundamental addition to the footprint of the dwelling (or to the height).
So in second grade or so they showed us the work of a one-eyed painter. All his paintings had a dark curved area at one side, and we were encouraged to hold one eyed closed and see if we could guess what that shaded area was — it was the side of you nose, which frames your vision on one side when you only look out of one eye. The Rhinoceros one reminded me of that, like he must have been in that same class with me.
I looked online to try and find that artist, but he must not have been famous enough, I can’t find anything. (The Web is basically divided, before 2000, there is only history of famous stuff, after 2000, there’s a crap flood of every little thing, with way too high a focus on the meme of the moment…)
“Fibre to the desktop” was a nice motto, but the realities of implementing are so peculiar!
@ larK – Given the perspective effects, if the (anthropomorphic†) rhino were to focus on the subject in the distance, he would see (and reproduce on the canvas) two images of the horn, not just one. To see what I mean, try focusing in the distance while holding a finger about a foot in front of your nose.
P.S. † – For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll ignore the fact that a real rhino’s eyes are on opposite sides of the head, meaning that they have virtually no binocular vision at all. Despite this weakness, there is a company that decided to name its 3D modeling software “Rhinoceros“.
P.P.S. I sure hope that Jonah can find his raft, and that he is wearing a good set of suspenders.
Perhaps a ghost wearing glasses can be able to manipulate speaker wire?
“Bonus room” reminded me of the old fashioned “rumpus room”. Does anyone still use that term?
@Kilby: I wasn’t saying that it was an accurate depiction, just that the artist to me seemed to have been inspired by the exact same lecture about the one-eyed artist…. Although, in my quick research on the web, I did find an article saying that a disproportionate number of artists seem to be among the 10% general population who due to eye misalignment do not have stereoscopic vision, so through your dominant eye, you would not see two representations of your horn, but only the one, assuming rhinos has forward facing eyes to begin with…
(Of course, now I can’t even find the article I saw; the internets are not aligned for me today…)
On HGTV when they show an empty house, they call any extra room a “bonus room”. That’s extra after the required number of bedrooms have been allocated. They brag about all the possible uses — guest room, office, media room, play room, etc. I guess it sounds better than “spare room”, a term I haven’t heard in 50 years, so it must be outdated … she said wistfully.
Our house, built in 2004, has Ethernet cable all through the walls. The contractor wouldn’t run it, so we did it before the sheetrock was put in. Then we cut out the sheetrock, fished for the wires, and installed the faceplates. It was fun at the time, totally useless now.
I can’t imagine that Ms. Downs would be offended that a child had a crush on her.
Or a puppy!
We discussed rhino vision at length, almost exactly a year ago. (Maybe I should say “in depth”. But we don’t know if rhinos can perceive depth.)
Back in the very early strips (in the 1950s), Snoopy used to be a “real” dog, with only a few unusual personality features, but as his nose ballooned in the 1970s, he lost all of his earlier “puppyhood” charm, and became a surreal, anthropomorphic (adult) character, in many ways a substitute for all of the parents who were never shown (and only very rarely even mentioned) by Schulz.
This Peanuts strip has a dual character, which I think was intentional. Children (and most teenagers) would never have understood the name references, and would probably assume that the “heart” in the last panel was an innocent “valentine”. For adults, that “staying upstairs with” does not sound quite as innocent. If Snoopy had been visiting Los Angeles, he might as well have mentioned “Miss January”.
I guess the next thing in the logical progression from Snoopy as a puppy in the 1950’s to Snoopy as an adult dog in the 1970’s is Brian the dog in Family Guy.
We have a room that is in the garage envelope, but a a normal room on the inside. Fire regulations prevent it from being a “bedroom”, so “bonus room” it is. (It’s a bit cold to be a den).
Robert never gets/like comics – he laughed at the ghost with wire one when I showed it to him. (Yes, as usual we are having our late night snack – it is 2:30 am – as I read CIDU – our third meal of the day.)
We looked for a house for several years. One of the things about this house was that it has a family room off the kitchen through a squared off archway. (As I write this on the kitchen table it is to my right and the TV we are watching is in it.) The house also has a good sized living room and half the basement is finished into another den. Plus there are 3 bedrooms (one for us, one for my teddy bear collection + his out of season clothes in the closet, and one for us.
So our studio really is a bonus room and is of a very good size.
We use it our main craft studio space. Since Covid started – my work table has served as our spare canned/bottled/jarred extra food storage so has not been usable for working on. Our other studio space in the basement and his woodshop in the garage. Though it is a rather 1949 subdivision house.