CSotD: Mother’s Day? Baaaa, humbug.
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Oh, good. I was hoping for a good Mother's Day strip and Jeff Corriveau came through with a Deflocked that emphasizes yesterday's point about character-driven comedy.
Corriveau throws a lot of mud at the wall and it doesn't all stick, but, when it does, it's fabulous stuff.
It's hard to preserve the freshness of the Acerbic Animal, a type that became popular a while ago and then became way, way too present on the comics page. I've dropped a couple of Acerbic Animal strips because of the laziness of the "set up, straight line, mean-spirited comment" format. And when you combine it with the "off-key pickup lines" meme, you're really headed for the dismal swamp.
Somehow, however, Corriveau manages to score with some frequency in that venue, and it may be because, for instance, in this case he lets that gag fall three panels before the end, and then combines the "therapy group" line with the "who raised this jerk?" touch to switch the emphasis off the date and onto the characters.
Or it may be because once you've given a sheep the name "Mamet," you're set for life.
People who don't recognize the literary reference can simply amuse themselves walking around saying it in sheep-talk. Those who do recognize it can still say it like a sheep and giggle to themselves.
Elsewhere in the universe
Jen Sorensen on the futility of paranoia.
Constant readers will know I have two sources of perennial frustration with privacy cartoons: One is the confusion between collecting data and reading emails. Either they're collecting everyone's data or they're reading emails. They can't possibly have the time and resources to do both.
The other is the persistent belief that there's some way to stop a determined snoop from poking through your files. Whether it's the NSA or a hacker, you can take some reasonable precautions but you cannot expect true privacy.
Maybe having been in both print and broadcast has made me cynical, or maybe that just made me more aware of the inevitable screw-ups.
"If you don't want it to go out on the air, don't say it in the studio." Period. End of discussion.
Yes, there is a red light that goes on when there's a hot mike in the room. Unless the bulb is burned out. Or … it just doesn't. Or it does but you don't notice it.
But you're gonna say something stupid in the studio, and it's gonna go out over the air. Everybody has stories to tell.
The print version of that rule is, "If you don't want it to land on every doorstep in town tomorrow morning, don't type it into the computer."
Yes, editors are supposed to see that stuff, recognize it as internal communications or space savers you meant to come back to or stuff you didn't mean to leave in there or whatever and remove it.
And they do.
Except when they don't.
And everyone has stories about that, too.
And those theoretical rules are akin to "Do not actually connect your router to a modem," because, wise and true as it they may be, and much as they are drilled into our heads, hey, life strays from the ideal all the time.
"Theory" is for youngsters who will one day learn and old fools, who will not.
I've said things in the studio that should not have gone out on the air, but did.
I've input words into the newsroom computer that were not intended for publication, but which got published.
And, as noted here before, I've lived in a house where mail was being intercepted — and read — by the FBI. Probably not mine, but what difference does that make? And how would I know? We found out whose mail they were reading, but how do you find out whose mail they're not reading?
As a result of what I have learned, I very rarely bother to lock my car.
I don't leave cameras in clear view on the front seat, but I don't lock the doors. If they're gonna rummage around and steal stuff, I don't want to have to replace the window, too.
And I take reasonable precautions on-line, but if someone really, really wants to hack into my computer, they will.
I'd rather live with that risk than live in a constant state of pointless fear and paranoia.
People with far more interesting experience than mine have learned to accept the limitations of "security."
Sorta Kinda Juxtaposition of the Day
Now here's your moment of self-loathing Celtic zen:
—Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads thinks he has ideas.
Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the words, said with assumed carelessness:
—Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex.
—Pascal was a pig, said Cranly.
(Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
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