CSotD: Other people’s insights
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A modest proposal
I think cartoonists should get to take Memorial Day off, mostly because it would be so simple to arrange.
Each year, one cartoonist would be chosen to do a cartoon of a small child saluting a gravestone, all the papers could run it, and everyone else could kick back and eat barbecue.
I mean, it seems silly to have everyone wasting time and effort drawing and inking the same cartoon. Just do a pool cartoon and save the effort, right?
Of course, you'd always have what the Canadians call a "keener" in the crowd, doing something interesting and insightful and ruining the entire thing.
Here, Connie Sun makes a comment about the holiday that brings a completely different shade to a fairly common complaint about picnics and other festive gatherings on a day that was once a great deal more solemn.
She not only failed to draw a small child saluting a gravestone, but she also apparently decided to ignore the memo about how millennials are supposed to be irreverent wise-asses when it comes to history and to past generations.
What a keener.
On the topic of past generations
Friend-of-the-Blog Richard Marcej provides a review of a book that isn't particularly new — it was published two years ago — but that is well-timed in terms of a conversation I had with Eldest Son yesterday.
Our conversation was about Star Wars and how his kids see the movies compared to how he viewed them, given that they unfolded in theaters as he was just the right age to be blown away. He was five, I was 27, we were both blown away, but it was his generation's experience and cultural touchstone.
But, as I've noted here before, I was right in prime-time for Marvel's re-invention of the superhero comic: I was 12 years old and being held at attending an eight-week summer camp when Spiderman, Thor and the Hulk debuted (FF being, by that summer, a few months old). With no TV available, comic books were a prime source of entertainment at Camp Lord O' The Flies and the Marvel brand immediately became of top value in the trades between cabins.
You can go back and read all about it, but it's impossible to recapture the impact of Peter Parker and Ben Grimm when your entire experience of superheros was Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne.
It's equally hard to explain the deflation and "guess you had to be there" shrug evoked in later years, when they keep messing with the franchise.
But maybe there's no need.
Each generation, it seems, must have its Jar Jar Binks in one form or another.
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Reviewing the reviewers
Rudy Park throws a barb at Yelp, which is one of those odd innovations that I think everyone knows doesn't work but nobody seems quite willing to call out as the dismal, useless well of trollery that it is.
Or maybe it's a city thing.
I see city people on Facebook mourning the impending death of Barnes & Noble and I gather from their comments that the stores in major metros are the stores that built the brand and were once places full of, and staffed by, booklovers.
Out here in the hinterlands, you might as well become rapturous over Rite Aid or Wal-Mart. Before Amazon came along, Borders and Barnes & Noble prepared the market for them by slaughtering the small independent bookstores with their Big Box of Books approach, whereby you could get the book you wanted right then off the shelf instead of in a few days by special order.
Amazon may have delivered the death thrust, but Barnes & Noble and Borders were the picadores and banderilleros who sliced and slashed the bull into a bloody, all-but-helpless target.
In any case, I do hear of people turning to Yelp for consumer advice, so I guess maybe in the Big City, there's enough critical mass that it's useful.
Out here, Rudy Park's depiction is pretty spot-on: The thing is dominated by self-serving fake praise on one side and strange people with axes to grind on the other, or else you have 12 reviews and 11 of them are from four years ago when the business was owned by someone else entirely.
This apart from the across-the-board business dictum that unhappy consumers are the ones you hear from.
Yelp at its best has no more credibility than the "Best Of" ratings that alternative magazines hand out in order to burnish their own hipster cred and — oh by the way — give their ad sales reps a little extra edge in the market.
I won't say I haven't sometimes checked Yelp reviews, but, then, I sometimes read the comments on news sites.
As they say in the Marvel universe, 'Nuff Said.
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