CSotD: Knowing is half the battle
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Political cartoons aren't required to be funny and it's rare that they go beyond a chuckle, but Jimmy Margulies scores a genuine laugh today.
It's scary stuff if you take it seriously, but that only makes the joke funnier, because it adds to the "oh, what the hell" atmosphere.
Margulies offers one of the few takes on this that is relatively non-partisan, and Trump doesn't come out well in most of them.
I've seen suggestions on social media that they feed Trump something totally off the wall in these briefings so that, when that particular odd slant on reality begins to show up, they'll know the source of the leak.
And Chan Lowe plays upon somebody's utter lack of background with this gag, which is really unfair. Trump does know about Europe, after all.
It's where wives come from.
Too smart for the room
Somehow I sense a disconnect between this gag and the Lockhorns' target audience.
Which isn't to say I didn't find it funny, but it's a kind of a New Yorker chuckle, in which you laugh in part at the gag itself and in part to congratulate yourself for getting the reference.
Because we who are part of the cognoscenti are well aware that the Lockhorns' song is by John Cage.
Philip Glass! C'est a rire!
User Unfriendly
Speaking of playing to your audience, On The Fastrack is a good source of semi-nerdy humor: It often requires you to know how computers work, but rarely gets so deep into the geek that it leaves an average, computer-literate person behind.
Today's made me laugh because I'm so sick of being pestered to be a site's best friend when I just dropped by to read something.
Though that's only part of the annoyance factor, and I wonder if any of these geniuses ever visit their own sites to see what the experience is like.
Besides the fact that whatever they produce themselves is surrounded by scams and semi-porn from the ad generators they sign up for, that is. I've sat in the department head meetings where they cheerfully report on clicks and revenues without mentioning how appalling and vulgar the place has become.
I'm more thinking of the sites that keep fluttering around because they have one more thing they need to load, so that, as you're reading, the text suddenly pops up or down the page because a video has inserted itself somewhere, so that you have to scroll around and try to find what you were there for.
It was once the case that the media companies had fast access while their readers were on dial-up, and you could complain that the decision-makers should go home and take a look at it that way.
But I'm not sure there's all that much difference any more between how a page loads in the office and how it loads at home, or on your phone.
But, then, as I say, I've sat in the meetings and heard the praise lavished on the Emperor's New Website by fearful, clueless yesmen.
And I remember how Knight-Ridder, in its death throes, destroyed some of the most inventive, useful, popular newspaper websites, including that of the San Jose Mercury News, the heart of Silicon Valley, dragging them into a ghastly one-size-fits-all template that was, in fact, one-size-fits-none.
The current award for infuriating, non-functional, horrendous design goes to Gannett and USA Today, and when you follow a link and find yourself on one of their spasmodic, hide-the-story sites, you probably, if you are like me, strongly consider just bailing out rather than trying to read the thing you came for.
Gannett has just put in a bid to purchase tronc, which used to be the Tribune Company, which used to be a respectable media outlet.
Last one out, please turn off the lights.
Ain't none of us getting any younger
The Nib has published a graphic piece by Andy Warner and Jackie Roche on the aging of the world's population.
It's worth reading and it flows well, the latter being a benefit in a medium that sometimes tends to drone on and tell you more than you wanted to know.
Perhaps I'm just put off by what I call "graphic lectures," but I like it when artists and writers have pared things down so that, while they still provide a lot of good information, they aren't simply shoveling everything they know onto the page, and TLDNR is not limited to pure text.
This piece has a lot of information about an important topic, presented in a compelling way that neither sugar-coats it nor becomes hysterical over the implications.
We're living longer, and, for each of us, that's good. As a whole, it's a challenge.
And, as the piece notes, ending poverty and improving the status of women in the Third World has cut down on family size, meaning not just an older average population but a reduction in the working-age cohort.
Reducing poverty and improving the status of women is a good thing, but it, too, creates challenges.
I don't think this is a piece that will drive people to the barricades, but it's one that will get them thinking and may inform their approach to a variety of issues we'll be facing over the next decade or so, which involve decisions we're being asked to make right now.
Valuable stuff. Go have a look, because you can't trust the Powers That Be to operate with this background as a priority.
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