CSotD: Monday Warm ups
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We'll start and end with a cartoon-invoked memory today, and Mother Goose & Grimm fits right in with hurricane season, because in the late '90s, a hurricane tore apart schools in Antigua and I ended up leading an effort among newspaper education programs to assist.
My counterpart there was able to skirt the usual security problems of sending things to the Third World by having us send "gently used" school supplies to a USAF base in Florida where they could be bootlegged among the packages on supply planes to a radar installation on Antigua and picked up there, rather than stolen by employees at the regular airport.
But she reported that most of the "gently used" material was unusable, and while we had a couple of very nice stories come out of it, the overall impact was pretty much as seen in today's MGG.
At which point I regretted asking for stuff instead of encouraging money raising, and marked off the whole sorry effort as a learning experience for me and a failure for Antigua's schools.
I also began to be more aware of stories about unneeded teddy bears piling up at relief centers in the wake of disasters and similar examples of wasted efforts and pointless good intentions.
There are times when gifts of things are appropriate, but it takes some doing:
JJ Watt's heroic efforts in Houston including collecting things in his hometown of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, but it was a matter of specifying what was needed based on careful consultation with relief groups in Houston, only accepting new material, soliciting 18-wheelers to transport it there and then making sure he had arranged for someone there to receive and distribute it.
And those efforts were aside from the roughly $30 million he'd raised, which remained the real point of his work to help out.
Send money. The people on site will buy as many teddy bears and as much clothing as they need.
Worth going back
The problem with long story arcs is that you don't always realize how good they are until they're well along, at which point it may seem too late to get people involved. This is a case in point.
Friend-of-the-blog Sean Stephane Martin's Doc & Raider began setting up a Broadway musical based on "Brokeback Beach" back here and it's about to open.
It's possible to jump right in with today's episode, but it's so well-written that you'll really want to start at the beginning of the arc, because there are nuances sprinkled throughout.
You can pick up on who the characters are here, but they pretty much reveal themselves in the context of the story.
That context, and this arc, begin here.
The D-word
I'm not comfortable with cartoonists making jokes about North Korea, because it's not funny.
But Nate Beeler's "dotard" cartoon, I'll admit, cracked me up, and maybe if we could keep Dear Leader occupied searching for new insults, it would keep his tiny little fingers away from the button.
The "dotard" crack also brings to mind, however, that one of the ways to really piss off a bully is to be smarter than he is, and especially a bully who not only doesn't know a thesaurus from a dimetrodon, but who just got smacked down and humiliated by the entire NFL — players and owners — and learned the jocks don't respect him, either.
If we were all 13 years old and in the schoolyard, it would be possible — and, at this moment, not hard — to push his buttons until he burst into tears, at which point his ability to bully other kids would be ended.
That's not a theoretical comment, because I met his counterparts back then, and they are vulnerable to the rapier. The difference being that, once we're all adults, you have to pick your fights, because now they can go cry in their office and then arrange to have you fired.
Or, y'know, blow up the planet.
Stream this
Ann Telnaes sits for an hour-long interview on C-SPAN.
Telnaes is currently president of the Association of American Cartoonists and, while she's been interviewed in the past as both a Pulitzer winner and one of the few women in the trade, she has been getting a lot of ex officio attention over the past year, which is a good thing. Not every artist interviews as well.
I'll be at the AAEC Convention in November, but, given that she and Matt Davies will be busy running the show, I don't expect to get a lot of beer time with either of them.
So you can watch for my coverage then, but you should probably watch this interview now.
And now that other memory
I promised to start and end with a reminiscence, and Mike Lynch set my nostalgia machine in motion with scans from a 1961 Modern Home Laundry Planning Guide.
As he notes, it's an example of really good graphics. Somebody — the artist is uncredited — put some serious work and effort into this, and note that it's not just a kitchen but one that specifically reflects the products of the client who put out the brochure.
And, yes, the ad copy assumes most mothers were housewives, because, in 1961, most mothers were housewives, and how much of that was a factor of the economy and how much was a factor of societal pressure is an argument for another day: The client knew his customer base, and it was Laura Petrie, not Sally Rogers.
I featured the page with the kitchen because my first paying writing jobs were for a kitchen designer in Denver and, while I'm glad I wasn't chained to a desk doing that forever, I found the thought, planning and precision behind his combining efficient function with good design fascinating.
A salute to Mike for recognizing that good artists show up in places other than art museums.
Now here's your moment of commercial zen:
(commissioned for an industrial convention)
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