CSotD: Slowdowns of all sorts
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The Buckets looks at the very deadest week of the year.
I mentioned recently how much I hated doing "Year End Wrapups" when I was in the newsroom, but we needed them because nothing happened in the week between Christmas and New Years, and, if it did, you couldn't find anyone to comment on it because nobody in authority was anywhere near their office.
And, yes, those who were in town were pretending not to be. Coming in sniffling for a few days does set up the five-day New Year's weekend nicely.
Of course, it could be worse: When I was in advertising, everybody disappeared for the entire month of January, or, at least, their budgets did.
Between the elections and the holidays, TV and radio have been slammed with ads for the last six months.
Stand by for several weeks of public service announcements.
Speaking of those days, Free Range brings back memories, because I was there at the birth of Happy Talk News, and actually joked to my boss — the ad director, this being during a hiatus from news-gathering — that we should have a news program in a set that looked like somebody's house, and people would drop by to have a cup of coffee and chat.
Except they'd chat about the weather, or sports, or whatever. Very off-the-cuff and informal and we laughed and laughed.
Forty years later, it's bad enough that they've nearly stolen my proposed format intact, but that it actually increased ratings.
Which would be okay if modern-day Gweneths and Rolfs were presenting news that mattered, but who drops by to sip coffee and chat about interest rates or NATO?
And thank you, Nick Anderson, for skipping the "To Hell With You, 2016" cartoon in favor of pointing out that delusional screwballs are running out of time for all their worst fantasies to come true.
We are currently marooned in the Land of Fear and Loathing, but with a new twist: The lunatics in Nick's cartoon are obsessed with the idea that Obama is secretly planning to do all the things he assured us he would not, while now we're bedeviled by people obsessed with the idea that Trump is secretly planning to do all the things he promised us he would.
But they all do it, so let's not blame anyone for anything.
Ford's in his factory and all's right with the world.
"Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"
Go refresh your memory: It even explains why we're in danger of losing our national parks and monuments.
In any case, assuming Hillary and Obama keep low profiles in the months to come, it will be interesting to see who, and what, the tin-foilers obsess about now.
Though we ought not to assume that all the foolishness is at that end of the scale. Boulet, currently acting as the Tocqueville of the 21st Century, comments on the pop-history he has discovered in Portland, which is, by default, the one in Oregon. (This being a snippet; go read the rest.)
If it were the Portland in Maine, he'd be inundated, rather, with claims that every building with a closet was a stop on the Underground Railroad. It's hard, however, to make that claim even marginally credible in a West Coast town that was less than 20 years old when slavery was abolished.
So Prohibition it is.
Speaking of history, On the Fastrack is very frustrating because it brings to mind — but just out of reach — an old term for the sudden slowdown of access each year when everyone got computers for Christmas and was eagerly assailing the dial-up networks trying them out.
And Googling "internet slow down" with variant terms is pretty useless, so the stupid thing will hang in the back of my mind until someone supplies the term in the comments, dammit.
I also remember that being on-line during the day in general wasn't so bad, but, when school was out, you couldn't even get past the busy signals, which made this week a dead zone even without Santa's help.
In any case, the issue hasn't gone away with broadband, at least outside the major cities, because our ISPs have monopolies and are disinclined to add equipment until they have so many consumers-per-mile that things have, indeed, gone back to dial-up speeds. So you slog along and then — BOOM! — speeds are acceptable again, and then start to degrade.
But you still get on-line ads for how to choose your best Internet provider and none of them mention U-Hauls and Realtors, which is how you know they aren't aimed at you.
I've probably mentioned this before, but Olympia Snowe, back when she was a senator from Maine and I was a newspaper editor there, remarked that high-speed access should be rolled out the way electricity was furnished in rural areas two generations ago, not by waiting for demand but by recognizing it as both a safety issue and an economic development factor.
Well, she's left the Senate and, besides, she had to work so hard because she was frightfully clever.
The one form of year-end wrap-up I enjoy are editorial cartoon portfolios, and Steve Sack has posted his.
Juxtaposition of the Christmas cartoon
Because of yesterday's Very Special CSotD, I didn't get around to reading the actual cartoons for 2016 until later, at which point I was surprised to see that Terry Beatty had also snagged (and colorized) the 1972 Rex Morgan strip I had featured as a flashback for the current Christmas strip.
Great minds.
Great, ancient minds.
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