CSotD: Friday Short Takes
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First, this note: Editorial cartoonists should submit their "clown in a storm sewer" cartoons by Sunday night. A few of you have not yet turned yours in and there will be fines for late additions.
Baby Blues reminds me that, yes, we did have this game when my boys were small, and it was fun and, for the time, pretty good tech.
But even then, I couldn't figure out what advantage it offered over the way I had played the game at their age, except that stores didn't all stock pads of graph paper anymore.
"Battleship" was like "Hangman," except that you could play Hangman on the back of an old envelope, while, if you ran out of graph paper, you had to try to make some to play Battleship, which took longer than the game.
But, assuming you had graph paper, the advantage of analog Battleship was that you could play anywhere. You didn't need to be sitting at a table. And, by the way, needing graph paper isn't much different than needing batteries.
Somebody surely has made a Battleship app so that two people can play on their phones while sitting comfortably in chairs, perhaps in the same room, perhaps not, and it likely has explosions and stuff, which is how computer people update games.
Which is different than how movie makers update games, because, yes, Battleship became a movie.
Long after Hangman became a TV show.
This, Dear Friends, is how we measure progress.
Now get off my lawn.
The maudlin, but endearing, Harry Bliss
Dunno what Harry Bliss is up to, but there's been a streak of bittersweet in his cartoons lately. Not that he isn't an observationalist to begin with, mind you, and his work often provokes more of a "hmmm" than a "hahahaha," which I like.
This one, however, provokes more of an "ouch," though a pretty funny "ouch."
Funny on account of I'm single and so I don't have to look around before I laff.
And also on account of I've been single long enough that I didn't need a trigger warning.
I'm featuring him today so that anyone who lives in the Northeast will know that he'll be appearing at the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, VT, Monday.
I haven't decided if I'm going, though I'm intrigued by this, from the press release: "His books are inspired by his family dogs, his trips to museums, and his maudlin, yet endearing, sense of humor."
However, while Middlebury is easy enough to get to from Burlington or Albany, it is, from where I live, one of those classic New England "you can't get there from here" places where a drive home in the dark involves 70 miles of local roads and an excellent chance of sudden venison.
Which reminds me of one of my favorite Geech strips, of which I have plenty.
Easier for me to look to the Center for Cartoon Studies presentation the following Saturday on "Comics in World History," which is only 14 miles away and happens in broad daylight.
But I could end up doing both.
There are cartoons all over the place up here, and I should add that the trees are just starting to get purdy, though I think you should hold off another two weeks before you make a leaf-peeping run.
Getting there is half the fun
Boulet does an extensive examination of how he prepares for an early morning departure. (Here's the rest.)
This is one of those wonderful pieces where you laugh because you know exactly where it's going and you keep reading for confirmation that you're not the only meathead in the world and then you keep laughing because the arrows strike so squarely.
I don't often travel by train, but airplanes are much the same. My best panicked run so far was a trip to Logan (Boston) that not only included the oh-jesus-oh-jesus race down the Interstate but then getting there and finding the TSA line stretched all the way down the corridor.
Thank god the planes don't take off on time.
Which reminds me of the best airport rant I ever heard.
It occurred back in the late 80s, when no-frills, low-cost People Express was in a fatal expansion mode that completely screwed up its scheduling. Flights were hours late, and you'd pass the time by all gathering in one boarding area and then being told to go gather in a different boarding area.
So I'm sitting in a boarding area in Newark and this guy comes running up and is told that he missed his flight. He starts yelling at the gate attendant, who politely points out that the flight was scheduled for X o'clock and that was 10 minutes ago and it's gone.
Then the guy goes into a total meltdown, screaming that this was the first goddam time they had ever launched a goddam flight on time goddammitall, while the poor gate attendant is in the bizarre situation of getting chewed out for being competent, and at the same time knowing the guy has a point.
I'd have missed the whole thing if my own flight hadn't been 90 minutes late.
Which in turn reminds me of another People Express adventure, when my first flight was so late that there was no chance of making my connection to Colorado Springs because we'd be landing at 10:30 at night in an empty, echoing airport with all the flights over, the concessions stands closed and the airline handing out vouchers for hotel rooms.
Which would have been a bad thing except that I was sitting with a jewelry designer from Seattle who was also going to miss her connection and we didn't talk about it, because that would be uncool, and the moment required that we be cool.
But then didn't those bastards hold all the late flights after all.
I walked her to her gate, we kissed, I went home.
That's all. I don't think of her that often.
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