CSotD: No Time For Travellers
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Candorville is close to being a political cartoon, in that Darrin Bell spends equal amounts of time provoking thought and telling jokes.
Today, however, he is letting his geek flag fly, as he often does.
And — unintentionally perhaps — proving that we will never invent time travel unless we completely and absolutely change our society first. Even on silly days, he provokes thought.
The trigger was when Child Lemont mentions money.
A generation ago, a kid could dream of being an astronaut and getting to go into space.
Today, if you've got enough money, you can buy a trip to the space station, and it's only sensible to assume that the price tag on space travel is going to come down.
And, if you look at what has happened to air travel in the past 50 years, you can project a trend that will further normalize and democratize space travel.
There was a time within recent memory when average people didn't go overseas, or, at best, they didn't do it twice. Today, everybody pops back and forth without hesitation. Or, often, showering and putting on nice clothes.
So it's not that hard to imagine that, by the time my grandkids are grown, tourists will be popping into space stations in flip-flops and stretch pants, toting a McDonald's bag and staring down at their phones.
Which, to further project the normal process of technology, is to say that the cartoons in which some scientist from the future pops in for a visit are all well and good, but that first-wave time traveler, while he might be the first to diverge from the normal flow of time, wouldn't necessarily be the first to show up in the overall continuum.
If he decided he wanted to witness the Lincoln assassination, that might be humankind's first foray into time travel.
But a century or two later, as time travel became affordable, somebody would want to be at the Alamo and someone else would want to meet Jesus and someone else would want to see a real gladiator match and someone else would want to see the first performance of "Romeo and Juliet" at the Globe.
In fact, I daresay Ford Theater could sell out that performance of "Our American Cousin" just on ticket sales to time travelers popping in from several centuries. You might even have group tours and school field trips showing up to witness the historic moment.
Which prompts me to suggest that, either time travel is impossible or else somebody is first going to invent that little shine-it-in-your-eyes amnesia fountain pen thingy from "Men in Black."
And a theater-stretching device of some sort.
Meanwhile, back in this dimension:
The American Association of Editorial Cartoonists recently met in DC and I'm guessing that was the genesis of a series of videos Matt Wuerker has been posting to YouTube. But a look around the Internets didn't reveal much of an explanation.
But it hardly matters why or where this happened. There are, as I write this, nearly two-dozen, some around 15 minutes long, some going over an hour.
There are some "topic" videos as well as individual talks, all featuring people like Tom Toles, David Horsey, Jack Ohman, Matt Bors, Jake Tapper, Susie Cagle, Mike Peters, Roslyn Mazer and Francoise Mouly and a boatload of others.
Like this one, which features Clay Bennett:
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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