Did they get CUPS from the Wonderland tea party? -Or- AbiWeird

In getting a few ACME items ready for Penguicon I had to print a few things. But I've had rotten luck with getting CUPS to do more than print a test page, so I wound using the PowerBook for that. After a while that began to gnaw at me. OS X has what I consider to be a few deficiencies or at least unnecessary goofinesses, so I went to see if I could get belgian to print.

To my surprise, CUPS seemed to have found all the printers that are available. Getting hopeful, I opened AbiWord and tried to print something. Success! But that was on a Deskjet. No such luck with the Laserjet. CUPS said it was successful. The lights on the printer blinked. And... nothing prints. I tried printing a test page and that worked. Strange. Getting suspicious (or desperate?) I tried printing from OpenOffice. That worked. But I still couldn't print to the Laserjet from AbiWord. I could print to .pdf and then have KGhostView print that.

This is annoying, but less annoying than not being able to print at all from belgian. What, beyond massive size, does OpenOffice have that AbiWord does not? It looked like my choice was to use the oversized and annoyingly slow to open OpenOffice or do a silly work-around with AbiWord.

Even stranger, this morning I tried again and I can print to the Laser printer directly from AbiWord now. I like that it's working, but I'd really like to know what changed overnight. Things that mysteriously don't work, then mysteriously start working bother me. How do I know it won't mysteriously stop working again?

EDIT: My concern was justified. AbiWord isn't printing to the Laserjet now.

Spin Control, part 2

I found I could see the spinning figure going around counterclockwise (as viewed from above) by looking at the image upside down. Then I still see clockwise rotation, but it's flipped. As long I keep looking as I move to right the orientation the counterclockwise rotation holds. But if anything causes a switch to clockwise, clockwise it stays.

I mentioned in reply that I had a look at the individual frames and there was a background frame and deviations. Behind the cut is a modified version, with the background frame removed. This one I can see going counterclockwise without any twisting around.

( No background )