CSotD: … aaaaand, to the Ridiculous!
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I like to keep a mix here, and having just devoted two posts to some sublime, insightful strips, we'll just take that single step over to the ridiculous, with a few samples of what made me laff today, starting with the Lockhorns with a quick workshop on how to make a basically silly idea work.
To start with, instruction sheets are a good topic because they are a universal source of frustration and amusement. It's not enough that the actual manuals are no longer printed. In fact, that's okay, because you can download the PDF and keep it on your hard drive, which is better than "at some random spot in the house," which is where they are traditionally kept.
But the current cheapskate practice involves trying to make one sheet of instructions work for a half-dozen models, so that you are not only faced with dubious translations of the instructions, but have to sort through the ones that say NOTE: This only applies to Model T-233SJ2a and either include or exclude the step after you look back at the diagram to find out if you bought the Model T-233SJ2a or the Model T-233SJ3.
And then add the little gooseneck pieces that could — but won't — go on either way and the small pieces that require you to analyze whether they are for the left side or the right side and you've got an afternoon of fun ahead.
But any gagwriter can make fun of instruction sheets. What lifts this silly joke above the rest is the choice of right and wrong objects.
The joke isn't brilliant. What is brilliant is the swap of a charcoal grill and an exercise bike, and John Reiner's rendering of the nearly-finished monstrosity shows why.
Get that girl a Solo cup!
Meanwhile, at the strip formerly known as "Bug" but now renamed "Bug Martini" because, among other considerations, searching for "Bug" didn't return results limited to the comic …
Adam Huber touches on a cultural divide between those who feel photographs are intended to capture a moment and those who feel they are intended to create some kind of time-lapse face study.
I am on the journalistic side of the gulf and 90 percent of the photos I take are candids. But you can't take good candids if some of the people in the group have been conditioned not simply to stop whatever they're doing and grin into the lens but to call out for everyone else to stop and line up and do the same.
Which means they not only spoil the chance for a good candid shot, but also bring a sudden and complete halt to whatever fun and interesting thing was happening at the moment.
I'm not totally unsympathetic, mind you: There was a time when cameras were so slow that everyone did have to stand still. I'm perfectly willing to give anyone a break who hasn't kept up on the ways technology has changed since 1874.
And the culprits are not the millennials. If anything the culprits are the ones who trained the millennials: "Selfies" did not begin with the invention of cell phones. For decades, there have been people with deathly boring vacation photos of their own faces, usually in the form of families lined up and grinning.
"Here we are at Old Faithful."
"Hmm. You all look much the same as you did in the one taken an hour earlier at Mammoth Hot Springs. Did you take any where you were doing something other than blocking the view?"
And, as Huber suggests, these group-selfies also suffer from the fact that not only is a three-week swing through the American West reduced to 250 shots of the same people, but everyone in the family has developed a trademark "photo face," so that it's the same people with exactly the same expressions.
They don't realize how much money they could save by just taking a group-selfie they like and then Photoshopping it onto interesting places rather than paying to actually go there:
"And here we are at the Taj Mahal. And this is us at the research station at McMurdo on Antarctica. Oh, and here we are on the surface of Mars!"
How did you think it worked?
There is much happening at Retail, where Marla recently promoted Cooper to storeroom manager and a rival anchor is opening in the mall that will not only make it harder for her to hit her corporate-imposed sales goals but would probably pay Cooper more than he's now getting. Hijinx and hilarity ensue!
I never stuck around one of the minimum-wage death traps long enough to do any hiring, but I did some as editor of a couple of weeklies so small that the interview process pretty much consisted of finding people who were smart enough to do the work but dumb enough to take the job.
Acceptable reasons for wanting to work for me, in my mind, were either (A) being young and inexperienced or (B) having a spouse with a much better job in the same town.
(A) was a lot more common, but if I got a fairly bright person on the scene, I could train'em up and get two or three years of good work before they got the skills to contend for a job that paid a living wage.
At my last job, however, the publisher favored firing people for making mistakes and then hiring more rookies who didn't know what the hell they were doing. Which is why I really, really identify with Marla, which in turn is why Retail remains at the top of my favorites.
Okay, this one isn't funny …
Rudy Park cuts a little close to the bone. Ironically, one of the reasons for failure on the left is a willingness to self-criticize. So I laft, but then felt I shouldn't have.
Yep. That makes me one of them.
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