CSotD: It’s the Penultimate Day of the Year!
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On the Fastrack is a syndicated comic with a pretty lively on-line presence, and Dethany, who began as an odd little goth admin ass't has emerged, as minor characters sometimes do, into a dominant part of the strip, complete with her avian sidekick, Lenore.
Today's strip is a nice meld of the geek-basics of Fastrack with the realities of life as a parent. Nicely done.
Incidentally, even if you do read the terms and conditions and find something that horrifies you, it's not like you're going to be able to negotiate anything you like better. It comes down to this: (A) accept and proceed or (B) don't accept and get nothing.
Otherwise known as "Take it or leave it."
And most of us shrug and opt to accept the terms, knowing we're gonna be screwed if things don't go our way but hoping it will be worth it.
Same thing applies to downloading software and apps.
Shame on us both
Shame on you, Brian Anderson, for drawing this appalling cartoon.
Shame on me for laughing.
Speaking of things we didn't anticipate when we *clicked* on that "I Can Haz Baby" button, this sure was a large part of the little boy/best friend bonding in our house.
Come to think of it, by the time #2 son came along, we were up to four dogs.
We had the shiniest baby in the neighborhood!
Juxtaposition of the Goldilocks:
(Bliss)
This cartoon is too smart!
(Brewster Rockit)
This cartoon is too dumb!
(Ben)
This cartoon is just right!
Actually, there are no intellectual distinctions in humor. There is funny, there is not funny.
Granted, there are jokes that require more background knowledge than others. Harry Bliss is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, and there are people who hate New Yorker cartoons because that type of humor, while funny, doesn't provoke actual out-loud-laughter.
Or perhaps because they don't get the gags, which often require background knowledge, if only of current pop culture.
But everyone gets dumb jokes, and there is a long history of truly brilliant thinkers with a love of truly dumb jokes.
There are also a lot of people who don't like to laugh at dumb jokes because they're afraid it will make people think that they're dumb, too.
Like that's the thing that's gonna give it away.
A Juxtaposition That Isn't Funny
More Best-Ofs
Here's Part Two of Tom Tomorrow's lookback at 2015.
I left the section caption on top of that last sample panel, as evidence of my oft-cited disconnect between political cartoonists and editors. Editors genuinely don't understand the function of political cartoons. See above comments about people who are afraid to laugh at dumb jokes, though, in this case, they're more likely to laugh at jokes even though they don't actually get them.
It's not an intellectual thing, it's perceptual. They self-select to the top of the chain by being obsessed with rules about grammar, layout and so forth, and so the top editors tend to be blind to the spongy forms of thinking required for humor beyond cream pies and selzer bottles.
It's as if you painted a picture using only red and green and showed it to someone who was color blind.
There should be no shame in their saying, "Hey, Charlie! Come over here and tell me what you think!" but there are plenty of people who would also be ashamed to ask a taller colleague to get something off a high shelf.
Not realizing that they look a lot sillier going up on tippy-toes and stretching and jumping and still not getting hold of it.
And, similarly, not realizing how silly they look running a cartoon that, had they shown it to Charlie, would have been flagged as potentially offensive before it was inked, never mind before it actually ran and the switchboard exploded.
This is every newspaper editor I've ever met. And every political cartoonist could tell stories to back me up.
But, placed over the top of this particular cartoon, I found it, well, "hilarious."
Now here's your New Year's on-line intelligence test:
(It's pass/fail.)
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