CSotD: Take these chains
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I ran into Steve Artley at the Billy Ireland last month and told him I wished he hadn't quit doing political cartoons about a year earlier, to which he responded that I was in luck, because he was starting back up again. And so he has.
A boatload of cartoonists have done Scrooge cartoons this holiday season, while the rest of them have been riffing on the Grinch and a few have done both. Some have been pretty good, some have been predictable and a couple have been real head-scratchers: To complain about Obama's wild and reckless spending all year long and then compare him to Scrooge is just bizarre.
I really like this Boehner/Marley mashup, though. Granted, we don't yet know how much of a break Boehner will really make with the GOP's lunatic fringe, and, as I pointed out last week, the attempt a few years ago of mainstream Republicans to reject Limbaugh was quickly quashed.
Still, Boehner has rattled his chains and unless the elephant wants to die alone and unmourned, he'll listen. And, by the way, I love those chains.
And chains they are
Tom Tomorrow's piece is a little bit talky (yeah, I know, pot/kettle) but the flow is good and he's dead-on about how the "rebels" are being led around by their masters.
I don't know that there's anything new about this. Persuading the masses to work against their own interests can certainly be traced back, and I really don't know the extent to which the Internet has made them any more effective than they were in the days of the Know-Nothings or when the bigots of Southey were giving the lie to the idea that racism was exclusively a Southern disease.
But that third panel nails the cheerful certitude with which on-line commenters dutifully repeat concepts they have not begun to examine or, lord, understand.
There is an apocryphal story of an English nobleman being asked, a decade after universal education was established in that country, about the impact of the move and responding that "the obscenities scrawled on the wall around my mansion are now written somewhat lower."
It's an elitist story, told often as an attack on educating the masses, but maybe it was elitist to go around saying, "Knowledge is Power" 40 years ago and expecting the concept to catch on as readily as "Every man a king."
Speaking of elitist, to which I will add insufferably pompous, Keith Olbermann nailed this issue almost three years ago.
And we all passed it around and shared it, and … what? We're more convinced than ever of what we already knew and everything we already knew remains just as true today as it was then.
Maybe we're just the real-life equivalent of those strange Luddite intellectuals of Fahrenheit 451, wandering around in the forest reciting Milton and Tolstoy while everyone else sits watching interactive soap operas on big screen televisions.
All it takes is a doofus and a dream …
Speaking of lotteries: Given the turnaround time on most syndicated strips, Anne Gibbons may not have hit the Mega Millions, but she sure stumbled into some excellent timing with today's Six Chix strip, and given her spot in the feature's rotation, she couldn't have gotten any closer to the actual day of The Big Payoff.
I cringe at the free publicity lavished on lotteries, in large part because they are major advertisers for a lot of the media outlets that feature these chirpy "Wow! Everybody's buying tickets!" non-news stories.
I also object to the lie that the money benefits education or open space, because it doesn't increase spending on those things. It simply lowers the spending that comes from taxation, which means it shifts the burden to the gullible. For all the jokes about it being a tax on stupidity, including my own, it really is another tax cut for the wealthy, because, even if the upper crust are silly enough to buy tickets, it's still a much lower percentage of their gross income than the share that the citizens of Lotto Nation are putting into it.
Submitted for your consideration: NBC Nightly News rightly noted the improbability of winning the MegaMillions, while still luxuriating in the "what if" aspects by interviewing people about what they plan to do with the money they aren't going to win, to which they added a totally out-of-nowhere speculation that the winner(s) could donate 20 percent to charity, then actually interviewed charities about what they would do with the money they aren't going to get.
All you need is a dollar, a dream and a spirit of generosity so noble that God and the Lottery Fairy will be touched enough to team up on your behalf.
In deference to those with weak stomachs, I'll post the URL but not the obscene, pandering video itself.
Meanwhile, back on this planet: The noble generosity of Lotto Nations remains unchanged. After the drawing, but before either winner had stepped forward, this news site comment was not all that untypical:
In other words, goddammit, them illegals has got my money!
(Ironically for this patriotic fellow, the Georgia winner is from Stone Mountain.)
Here, read this while I go memorize a Turgenev novel …
The Better Half touches on another aspect of delusional thinking. I will admit that I don't understand the whole thing about shifting Facebook profile photos, but that's largely because I made the mistake of creating one profile for both personal and business reasons. I plan to split them soon and then, while I will maintain a permanent avatar on the comics-related page, I may become playful on the personal page.
Or not.
But the topic was on my mind again because Classic Shirley & Son has cycled back into an arc about dating, which reminds me of an unfinished conversation with the late Jerry Bittle.
Anyone who thinks Facebook is the Land of Deceptive Imagery has never been to Match.com.
I emailed Jerry about a sequence in which Shirley was going to try on-line dating, and said that I actually had a Match.com date lined up but I was a little concerned because she was a graphic artist. Jerry was one of the few people who you could actually hear laughing in an email, and he demanded a full report on my "Photoshopped blind date," but then went off on the vacation from which he didn't return.
Too bad, because, while it turned out she hadn't fiddled her photo, he'd have still loved the report and might have even been able to use it in the strip.
But he would have had to tone down the more ridiculous aspects of the evening. Even a comic strip has to maintain some shred of credibility.
Let me leave you with this depressing information:
When, as noted in the above-linked interview with Jerry Bittle, I reconfigured the comics page for the Post-Star at the end of 2002, there were 20 strips in the paper, which we increased to 21.
Last week, they redid their page again, but this time, they cut the number of strips.
From 10 to 9.
Which is why I think people should pony up the 20 bucks for GoComics and Comics Kingdom despite being able to access them for free.
And maybe do a little last minute Christmas shopping over in my right-hand rail.
Whoops …
Almost forgot to take this earworm from your mind and set you free …
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