CSotD: Skip the sublime: Here’s the ridiculous!
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I was just going to stick this Kevin Siers cartoon in towards the end of the posting. It's about the owner of the Carolina Panthers football team being investigated by the NFL for #METOO issues and deciding to sell the team.
Which is interesting, yes, and his blowing town won't stop the team from being responsible for whatever damages might come down, but Siers wonders about the statue of Richardson that stands in front of the stadium.
And, as said, I was thinking of commenting on it, but not at the top of a post.
So I Googled a photo of the actual statue, with the intention of tucking it into a corner to indicate that, yes, there is such a statue.
Because I expected, y'know, a statue of a guy.
I sure as hell didn't expect what I found.
Holy shit. Look what a lot of money, a humongous ego and absolutely no taste will buy yez.
Wow. This tacky monstrosity — I mean, it's not just a monument to ego but not even a well-executed one — reminded me of that hapless gang who stole millions of dollars and got caught because they bought a mansion, pimped it up with a velvet Elvis and leopard-skin pattern stair runners, and basically flashed their cash until someone said, "What's this?"
And so I looked them up and, marvel of marvels, the "Cramer Mountain Hillbillies" were also from Charlotte, North Carolina.
Maybe somebody should check Jerry Richardson's closets for cloth bags that say "Loomis Fargo."
Although, in fairness, his partners paid for the statue. Or, "statues," since this is one of a whole passle of statues of rich guys and scary panthers.
The mind, she boggles.
And I would say "Scary panthers with their eyes painted scary green," except that too many people know I lived out in Colorado for 16 years and nobody who has ever lived there is allowed to mock tacky statues of football mascots.
Behold Blucifer. And if you fly in or out of Denver International Airport, you will. Even at night. It lights up.
But Siers' point is that, with Richardson selling off his team in disgrace, the question becomes what to do with a 13-foot statue that might be him or Mike Ditka or basically any pudgy-faced guy in a suit.
For which I have a solution: We create a park, perhaps at the base of Stone Mountain, Georgia, with a sculpture garden that would feature Jerry Richardson's statue as well as the statue of Joe Paterno which Penn State had to make disappear, then all those Jim-Crow-Era shet-yo-mouf-boy statues of Lost Cause heroes.
Call it "What The Hell Were We Thinking? National Monument."
And let future generations argue over whether the name is about politics or simply aesthetics.
On perhaps a related topic
In case you missed it, San Diego Comic Con won their trademark suit against the Salt Lake Now What Do We Call It, and Heidi MacDonald links to a takedown on what it all means, which boils down to a ruling that the term "Comic Con" is the property of SDCC and everyone else has to pay a fee to use it.
No word on whether "Action Movie Promotional Fest" has also been trademarked, but I think SDCC is falling into Yogi Berra's category: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
In any case, it'll be interesting to see if Comic-Con International: San Diego, Inc, LLC, LSMFT, WGASA, can get editors on side by sending those warning letters you get when you write "kleenex" or "clorox" in a feature story.
Flashback
Retail is about working in retail, obviously, but bad management is a universal and I got a laugh from this one.
At my last paper, we were — despite what I was told when I was hired — on the verge of bankruptcy and at the point of throwing mud at the wall to see what might shift things around.
So my instructions were to have the reporters write more stories covering every town in our distribution area, plus all the schools, and we kept adding towns to our distribution area on the theory that this would increase single copy sales.
Mostly what it increased was the square mileage of the area and number of towns and schools my reporters were supposed to cover more thoroughly.
Without claiming overtime.
One solution the publisher favored was firing people and replacing them with people who … well, we never got around to why it would be an improvement, and I didn't have a lot of luck persuading him that, first of all, new reporters wouldn't be able to find these little crossroads, much less know who to talk to once they got there, and that, given what we paid, we'd be lucky to hire anyone who had written for their high school paper.
We certainly wouldn't find anyone with experience, or, at least, anyone with experience who could stay sober and upright through a shift.
Anyway, I only had to fire one person before they fired me and then folded the paper.
There are worse things than losing a job like that.
Mostly, keeping it.
Marla should be as lucky as I was; she once had plans to open her own place but it's never gonna happen as long as she's still got a job, no matter how pointless and unrewarding it may be.
She's no quitter, more's the pity.
Two bits of advice, kid — one from each of my two favorite books:
“People speak of misfortunes and sufferings,” remarked Pierre, “but if at this moment I were asked: ‘Would you rather be what you were before you were taken prisoner, or go through all this again?’ then for heaven’s sake let me again have captivity and horseflesh! We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins." — War and Peace
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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