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I like to mix up my postings between cartoons and commentary of Great Social Significance and ones that are more frivolous, in part to force people who take life way too seriously to get dragged into some less portentous areas for a change, and in part to force those of a more chronically whimsical nature to occasionally focus a little.
And also to keep myself from adopting the Voice of God role to an extent where I even annoy myself.
Preserving all the while the flattering illusion that everyone who visits the site reads every golden word thereon. Yes, even the spambots. Yo! Spambot shout out! Bots in the house! Woofwoofwoofwoofwoof!
Speaking of which (Where's the freaking cartoon? We came here for a cartoon!), when your host puts this message up, they're trying to tell you something:
"Missing comments? Check the spam filter in the drop down menu at Comments > Spam Comments to see if they were mis-routed."
I hope it also means "we're working on it," but there were about half a dozen misrouted comments in the spam folder, so, if you were wondering why I hate you and have blocked you, look again. You've been rerouted and all is well.
And now, on with our show:
My choices of vintage comics over at DailyInk include Rip Kirby, which I read because it's a classic combination of great art and good storytelling, and Juliet Jones, which is a combination of great art and inoffensively readable stories.
And then there is Mandrake and Radio Patrol and King of the Royal Mounted that I read strictly for camp value and they never let me down. The above examples, as they happen to fall on my page (click on them for a larger version), were originally published nearly two years apart but both work on the "Evil Twin" principle, which is good enough to amuse me but even better in the case of Radio Patrol.
Mandrake is operating on the level of "To Be Or Not To Be," where Jack Benny (or Mel Brooks, in the excellent remake) has to portray a Nazi by putting on a false beard, with the difference being that the movie was encouraging you to laugh while I think we're supposed to be taking this seriously.
But Radio Patrol is wonderful, first of all because it takes a remarkable level of chutzpah to base a story on not being able to tell two of the characters apart when you can't tell the most of the characters in the strip apart to begin with, and then the cherry on top is the full admission of an idiot plot in the second panel, where our hero — a policeman who looks exactly like the crook with whom he has swapped clothing — explains why he isn't doing the obvious and sensible thing.
Meanwhile, King of the Royal Mounted has just snuck up on two baddies in the dark while carrying a lighted torch because of the wolf pack in the area, a display of woodscraft so breathtakingly inept that it verges on the transplendent. And, yes, I know it was Zane Grey's writing. I hadn't mistaken it for Faulkner.
Getting back to the modern world, I often have nothing to say about "Pros & Cons" because Kieran Meehan covers all the bases and leaves me, well, nothing to say. I hate grammar nazis but I love humor based on inopportune phraseology. Every time that man walks into the room with a wooden leg, I crack up all over again.
I think maybe it's my years of experience as a journalist, where we were rigorously trained not to make such errors.
And then there are the times when a strip reminds me of a story or two or ten that discretion suggests are best left untold, like the story arc currently unfolding in Retail:
This is fascinating, because I've sure seen interoffice romance take a workplace right off the rails, but I've also seen it work out just fine. And I like Val and Cooper and followers of this strip are going to be chilled by today's development.
But most of my best stories on the topic would not be cool to share publicly.
Wait, no, I do have a story it wouldn't be indiscreet to share: I came home from college for a break during freshman year and, in the course of a ski trip with my father, told him there was a really cute girl working at the campus snack bar and I was thinking of asking her out.
He told me of his own college days, back when Catholics had to fast from midnight in order to receive communion the next day. He and a buddy used to go to the 10 a.m. mass on Sunday, and they noticed a really cute girl who was there each week. So they followed her out one week and saw that she went to a donut shop to break her fast, so they also went to the donut shop.
And they nodded to her, and the next week she nodded and everyone smiled and then the next week they sat with her and then my dad went out with her a few times.
And then he realized he didn't want to go out with her any more and it was pretty much a unilateral decision.
"You know what that meant?" he asked me.
"No more going to the donut shop?"
"It meant I had to start getting up for the 8:30 mass," he said. "How far is it to the next hamburger if things don't work out with this girl?"
A wise man, my father.
But I don't think you should need a policy to keep people who meet at church from eating donuts together. In fact, I think most churches sort of encourage that kind of thing. As do temples. And mosques.
It gets trickier in the workplace, but I do know someone who paid for a very nice marriage by adding a very bad commute to her daily schedule, based on a combination of corporate policy and personal good judgment. And I guess if we could count on the latter, we wouldn't need the former, but this is a very sticky swamp and I'm just gonna shut up and see how the gang at Grumbel's handles it.
As for today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, I'm not only going to refrain from telling any stories but I'm not even going to say if it made me think of any. No, more than that: I'm telling you, it didn't.
In fact, you should stop reading right now. All of you. Today's post is over. Go away.
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