CSotD: Protect yourself at all times
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Judge Parker is my favorite continuity strip precisely for the type of surprise that kick-starts the week today.
Storylines here unfold in soap-opera slo-mo, which is understandable given the four-panel format, and for nearly two years, we've been following Neddy's attempt to start up a domestic clothing manufacturing company, with the combined backing of her own inheritance and the patronage of a rock star/movie star couple.
For the past several months, one thread has been anticipating the Big Story that will announce the project to the public.
And while the reporter seemed sympathetic and interested during her tour and interviewing, today's strip suggests that there has been quite a curveball thrown. Or a monkey wrench, if you prefer.
A cold splash of reality, in any case.
I've been on both sides of this one, and I don't know where Wilson and Manley are going to take it, but there aren't a lot of variations that won't kick off some PTSD-laden memories.
I've given interviews such that, when the story appeared, I wondered if the reporter had even been in the same room, but most of those involved college papers and I'm willing to allow a little slack for amateurs. I offer less understanding for the professional who has pre-written the story in his mind and simply comes to you for a few quotes and doesn't listen to what you're actually saying.
Then again, sometimes the reporter listens too well: I was doing a story on shrinkage — minor theft in business — and had a hotel/restaurant owner tell me about customers lifting not just silverware, ashtrays and towels but artwork and lamps.
Towards the end of the interview, he told me a very amusing story about missing bottles of good wine, a mystery that was only solved when the housekeepers complained that they were finding rooms which had not been marked as occupied but needed to be cleaned anyway.
Turned out the night manager and night maintenance guy were having private celebrations in the wee hours.
The day the story appeared, he called me in anguish, saying that he thought the interview portion was over when he told me that part. I reminded him that the interview is never over when you are talking to a reporter, and that you need to get an "off the record" agreement before you say anything you don't want to see in print.
He sadly admitted knowing that and our relationship went on unaltered, but other people have not been as understanding.
So it goes.
I really want to see where this leads, in large part because, as a reporter, the only "tell" you'd get that I was becoming dubious would be the intensity of my questions. I rarely shifted to a confrontational mode because I was there to get your story, not for a debate.
Though I once was in what should have been a friendly interview with a Big Eight athletic director about recruiting, when he told me that in twenty-some years of college sports, he had never encountered a case of an athlete being given anything that wasn't within NCAA rules. I will admit I was so stunned that I didn't ask the follow ups, "Do you expect me to believe that?" or "How stupid do you think I am?"
But I did run the quote by some other Division I athletic directors, one of whom gave me the money quote we used: "Boy, is he bullshitting you!"
I don't think he enjoyed reading the paper that Sunday. I later heard I was barred from the campus, but since I wasn't a sportswriter, it didn't bother me.
Anyway, I'm sympathetic to Neddy and can't wait to see where this leads us.
Now for some real-world disasters
November's impending disaster is reaching into some unexpected quarters, and even the normally non-political Bug Martini is anticipating the potential chaos ahead.
I think that's a good thing: Political commentators are required to sort through the news to find things to comment on, but it's an interesting development when something becomes so obvious that even the people who don't normally get into that sort of thing bring it up.
Cartoonists, being self-employed, are particularly vulnerable to health care issues, and there are appeals going for help within the cartooning community almost any time you look: Example One and Example Two being current.
Medicare seems to be covering my own medical crisis so far, but there are those who not only want to end Affordable Care but also to cut back on Medicare and Social Security.
Adam Huber manages to get some gallows humor out of it, but it's a level of kidding-on-the-square that I'd like to see more of, because I'm hearing from people who genuinely can't tell the difference between enduring four more years of same-old, same-old and ushering in an age of pure, unsheathed predation.
Worst part is, they think it's because they are insightful.
Pat Bagley lays out the wider implications without attempting humor.
It reminds me of the sad fact that, towards the end of her life, the women's movement was forced to push Elizabeth Cady Stanton out of the spotlight because she was becoming something of an elitist crank, and one of her crankiest, most elitist opinions was that people — men and women — should have to qualify as intelligent enough to vote responsibly.
Theoretically, it's a lovely idea, but you don't have to be much of a visionary to anticipate the abuse to which such a system would be put, and, while she didn't live to see it, the idea was used in the Jim Crow South with absurd "literacy tests" that were specifically set and graded to suppress the black vote.
I hate the choice we're being offered, but I do think it is, in itself, a fair intelligence test: If you think both likely candidates are equally bad, you are not qualified to vote.
Politics is about strategic alliances, hence the familiar saying in Washington:
If you want a friend, get a dog.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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