CSotD: Here: Smell This
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I get a kick out of having a Juxtaposition come up on the page intact, and it just happens that Off The Mark comes just before Lola on my GoComics page. Today the two of them pretty much encapsulate my current feelings about social media.
Facebook, mind you, moreso than Twitter, which is probably because I mostly see original posts on Twitter, while the toxic, mindless comments on Facebook are more easily read and thus unavoidable.
Though that might just be me. There are sure a lot of people who will hit "Share" without seeing the comments pointing out that the original post has been completely refuted.
This is particularly annoying when the OP is doing what I guess we could call a "Smell This" posting.
A "Smell This" posting being the equivalent of someone saying "smell this" and then holding out something fuzzy from the back of the fridge so you can appreciate how much it makes you wretch.
On Facebook, that means sharing something fake and completely hateful, for the pleasure of lowering someone else's opinion of humanity.
"Smell This" postings seem more common on Facebook than Twitter. Or it may be that the format of Twitter tends to make the expression of outrage of equal size as the offending tweet, such that you immediately see that this is a condemnation, not an endorsement.
But I still smelt it.
I'm starting to become a little more aggressive in unfollowing if not unfriending.
If my livelihood didn't require social media, I'd shut the damn thing off, but it's not really an option.
On "Cheers," Sam Malone was a bar owner and a recovering alcoholic and I've even known a recovering alcoholic bartender in real life.
Maybe I should call her when I'm tempted to reply to a "Smell This" posting.
Juxtaposition of More Weight
I don't know quite what's going on with Trump and the GOP and the Democrats (though Gene Robinson seems to).
Maybe the Party of Lincoln needs to read "Team of Rivals" or at least watch the movie or at least stop calling themselves "The Party of Lincoln."
I agree with Wasserman, and Telnaes made me giggle, but the bottom line for me is that I remember a time when bipartisan cooperation was, if not common, at least not unknown and not seen as stunningly disloyal.
I suppose we can blame talk radio and Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist for the fact that voters began sending ideological hardliners to Congress, but it's not like they weren't made welcome there.
And it's not like reasonable people weren't being shunned.
The Granite State lost a pretty good Senator back in 2009, when Obama attempted to assemble a team of rivals and nominated Republican Judd Gregg for Secretary of Commerce, only to have him withdraw his name shortly thereafter and, shortly thereafter that, decide to withdraw from the Senate sandbox entirely.
The mean kids in the GOP said he couldn't be their friend anymore because now he had cooties from talking to a Democrat.
And two years after he decided to hell with it, Olympia Snowe came to the same conclusion. (UPDATE: Plus now this.)
Dammit, it didn't used to be like this.
I was about to say that it doesn't help to say that it was this way back at the start of the 19th Century, but then I thought of Alexander Hamilton and, y'know, maybe if you want to "drain the swamp" we should bring back dueling.
And not just beating each other over the head with canes.
Pistols.
On C-SPAN.
With analysis and instant replay.
Speaking of Betrayals
This article from Paste Magazine, about how Conde Nast took a very profitable website for cartoonists and made it useless, has been getting a lot of play among the aforementioned cartoonists, including Bob Mankoff, whose post caught my eye because Cartoon Bank was his baby.
When Mankoff gave up the reigns (sic), he was succeeded by a string of executives who generally did not last long in the role. None were cartoonists; one was a lawyer, and another used to run Condé Nast’s personnel operations. The current Senior Vice President of Licensing previously worked at the Trump Organization. Their unfamiliarity with the material appears to have combined with structural changes to create an overall absence of institutional knowledge.
The fact that the cartoonists are the ones posting the link doesn't mean it's a technical, insider piece. You'll find it quite understandable.
I was going to say "quite readable" but, at least on my screen, the goddam thing kept leaping up and down as new ads were tossed in and swapped out. However, the fact that Paste Magazine has a crappy interface — while ironic when the article is about how incompetence can ruin the value of good work — doesn't detract from the importance of the piece. And maybe it will behave better for you.
It's an old story, unfortunately: Wall Street button-down wankers who don't value the product but only the profits, and manage to screw up both.
I watched my father go through it in the steel industry in the 70s and I've been going through it myself in newspapers.
Nothing matters but the next quarter, so they cut and slash expenses and people to get that quick blip of positive Profit/Loss and then sell their stock and get the hell out before it falls apart.
And, like Scrooge himself, they rely on the prisons and workhouses to repair the hardships they inflict on workers, while complaining about the taxes they pay to support those institutions.
Let's end with something uplifting
Here's the opening of a Boulet examination of flying dreams, or, as he suggests, that sort of guided floating that the dream usually involves.
I still have those dreams and, in them, it always comes as a pleasant surprise that I can do this amazing, fun thing. He nails it perfectly.
Sometimes the world just looks better when you're asleep.
C'est le weekend!
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