CSotD: Selling Out
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If you missed the announcement the other day, Edge City is shutting down at the end of the year, and part of the wrap is that the guys were approached by a rival who made them a generous offer.
The truly fictional part is that the new company agreed not to lay anyone off. If the strip were continuing, I'd want an arc a year from now in which Len confronts the guilt over how that promise fell apart, but, at this stage, a sprinkling of "happily ever after" pixie dust works for me.
I'll follow the strip over this next week with interest and, as said before, regret.
Juxtaposition of the Holiday Season
(Matt)
As someone on a somewhat restricted diet (taking off the weight all but eliminates the Type II Diabetes issue, but the menu is pretty much the same either way), I'm as aware of our obsession with sugar, fats and salts as an alcoholic would be of our obsession with alcohol.
Maybe it's just my choice of virtual company, or maybe this is the same phenomenon as when you're pregnant and you see pregnant people everywhere.
It could just be that I'm more focused on the topic, but it seems like about 97% of the recipes on Facebook are for over-sweetened, fat-filled lardbucket treats.
I really hope the stuff these folks post doesn't reflect what they eat in real life.
I'm already pretty sure that, like the kids in Grand Avenue, an awful lot of people think there is a significant nutritional advantage in eating Nature Valley Granola bars rather than Oreos.
And even more who think a "good diet" has to be as humorless as the one outlined in Reality Check.
However, I'm with the kids in Matt.
Well, not the carrot — save that for Easter — but the idea of smartening up Santa is pretty good.
The latest omgomgomggottahaveits are salted caramel and salted chocolate, which is great because the only thing we need more of in our collective diet than sweets and fat is additional sodium.
This is what One-A-Day multivitamins look like in Bizarro World.
Scanning the heavens
I like today's Frazz because Jef Mallett's capacity for nerdy wonder is infectious, but mostly because he seems to be the only cartoonist whose attempts at poetry actually scan. (Okay, Jimmy Johnson does pretty well. But that's still a short list.)
I'm not a grammar nazi and most of the things that grate on me I recognize as personal tics and nothing anyone else has to abide by. I only really object to grammatical errors that change the meaning of a sentence.
But, goddammit, if you're going to write rhyming poetry, make it scan. Read it aloud. Run it past an English major.
Even doggerel has rules, and good editors should protect cartoonists from sounding like illiterate prats.
Yes, I am very old.
I remember poetry that scanned and rhymed, and I remember good editors who did their jobs.
And now back to that topic
The Clay Brothers rise in support of Ann Telnaes, whose editor not only yanked her work off the site on the grounds that he hadn't bothered to check it out before it ran in the first place, and then apparently approved an op-ed piece or two throwing her under the bus.
Or he didn't read those either, but Ted Cruz didn't call to complain, so he still hasn't. Because why on earth would an editor bother to read the things that are his responsibility?
(Clay Jones has the far superior piece, by the way, because Clay Bennett didn't quote me in an essay accompanying his. WashPo has its standards and I have mine.)
The Washington Post's new building is very energy-efficient, gaining most of its power through the combined spinning of Katherine Graham, Ben Bradlee and Herblock.
Reading the Post these days is like watching poor old aging Willie Mays stumbling around dropping fly balls.
And it's not just them.
Everyone in the business for more than two decades has had the feeling that you were signed to be a chef and now find yourself flipping burgers and cleaning the fryer hoods, but what I find particular dispiriting is the Utter Lack of Getting It among the general public.
First of all, they don't get the distinction between simply having kids, and hauling your kids out as puppets.
For which reason, perhaps, they also don't see that Telnaes was mocking the father, not the kids.
They keep saying, "Well imagine if it had been Obama's kids …"
But Obama didn't stick his kids out there as political pawns, though, did he? Did he?
"Oh, yes, he did: See this commercial?"
And then they post a spot in which the girls are seen, but not heard, over a discussion of how we need healthy families.
In their minds, this is the same as setting up your children as over-programmed little plastic performers at center stage, reciting sarcastic, insulting jokes about opposing candidates.
The reason you don't see other candidates' kids doing little political skits is because, as Bennett suggests, other candidates have better judgment than to shove their children into the meatgrinder.
Maybe you have to have had some exposure to fame and media to understand this, but, even so, an intelligent, fair-minded person would understand it once it was explained.
Which leads to the conclusion that a distressingly large proportion of our fellow citizens are either "hateful" or "stupid."
Or maybe social media has simply been taken over by paid trolls.
We know they're out there. The question is, how dominant have they become?
Social media is becoming antisocial, the way the Learning Channel stopped being educational, the way Arts & Entertainment dropped both elements, the way the Discovery Channel discovered how to pander to loonies.
Maybe social media is over. It's possible.
I'm also old enough to remember when CB Radio was fun and interesting and revolutionary.
And then it wasn't anymore.
At least the radio and telephone industries didn't dismantle themselves trying to keep up with the fad.
How long has it been since anyone thought this was cool?
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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