DCML digest #817

Don Rosa donrosa at iglou.com
Mon Jan 28 13:51:49 CET 2002


> From: "Simo Malinen" <malines24 at hotmail.com>
>>>>Rosa is from the other solar system (not comparable).

Gort, Klattu birada nikto. Squa tront!


> From: Mike Pohjola <mikep at iki.fi>
> Helsinki Media in Finland has been publishing "language tutorial" books
> with Barks gag stories in English. Mostly one pagers, I think.
> Couldn't they theoretically publish a similar thing with new Rosa
> stories?

Think of what you're asking! It's one thing to print a short, simple
one-page gag with an English translation to help young Finnish readers.
That is nothing like trying to take one of my excruciatingly detailed
adventures and print the thing side-by-side with an English translation...
that would require *huge* expensive books, and who would buy them when they
already have the stories in the normal Finnish editions? If you are simply
asking if they *theoretically* could do so, I guess the answer is "yes".
But why would they want to?

> Of course, for the American audience to buy it, they couldn't
> market it with a title such as "Don Rosa Teaches English"...

Again, for the American public to buy such a book, even if it existed, they
would all have to move to Finland. Is there that much surplus apartment
space there?

> From: Kriton Kyrimis <kyrimis at cti.gr>
> Not having read the story, I'm not quite sure to what you are referring
> here, but I was under the impression that when switching from the Julian
> calendar to the Gregorian calendar, both days and dates were skipped,
> and that this was used as a theological argument against the adoption of
> the new calendar in the east, as, supposedly, the sequence of weekdays
> since the creation of the world would be broken!

Really? I had assumed that there was no logical reason why days-of-the-week
were skipped. Why should they skip days? The Julian calendar had the
incorrect leap year system, causing the first day of the year (for example)
to slowly drift off from what it had previously been of the same moment of
our position in the solar system (of which I am not a member. Spa fon.) ...
but it never caused the days-of-the-week to drift off from what they should
have been. Tuesday would/should still have always followed Monday, etc. And
then there were two readers who told me this as well, after reading the
"purposely incorrect for the sake of alleged humor" closing gag that Donald
spouts.
But I hope you are right! Then Donald's gag wasn't incorrect after all.
By the way, I don't have the exact year at hand here, but another calendar
quirk is that the first day of the year was not always January 1st. The
year used to start on March 1st or so, but then it was moved back, perhaps
to get as close as possible to the winter solstice or whatever it is you
call Dec. 21. This means that there was one year that had no January or
February and we have another bunch of year-month-day dates that *never
existed*, an even larger group than the 10 days in my story, this being
about 60 days! I am thinking about this just as I sit here typing, so I'll
need to go check my books to get the facts fresh again in my mind. But I
seem to recall that this might have happened after Columbus discovered
America (or perhaps I was once thinking about "what if" it had happened
after that) -- and the upshot of that would mean that if he had left port
later or been delayed so that he had not discovered America until, say,
February 23rd rather than that date (whatever you decide it was) in
October, then we would be saying that Columbus discovered America "in
1492", even though he actually did it well into 1493!
History/truth is *so much more* interesting than fiction! Why base stories
on made up nonsense when you have eons of wonderful facts to work with?





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