CSotD: Sunday Short Takes
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Candorville not only strikes a personal note, but prompts some consumer information.
I'd like to see some kind of action against deceptive use of "pre-qualified," but action against deceptive marketing went out of favor in the Reagan years. Caveat emptor, baby!
Today, as Lemont learns, "pre-qualified" means you have a mailing address.
When I got my first credit card three decades ago, I was "un-qualified," but that was back when men got credit rather than women, so the fact that I was a scrabbling little freelancer and my wife a successful executive meant I could get a credit card on her coat tails.
And since she was about to become my ex, I thought I'd better latch on to them, before my own earnings became the qualifying factor.
It was a scummy company, but dealing with scum got me through a few more years before I finally gave in and took a 9-to-5 job with a regular paycheck.
However, the fact that I'd signed up with predators put me on the sucker list and I was inundated with similar offers.
As a single custodial parent with mid-level child support, I'll confess I took a few, such that, when my last newspaper was shot out from under me, those 28% annual rates had me dug in pretty deep.
But rather than sing my own sad song, I'll direct you to this article on average household credit card debt, which is compensates for its depressing tone with some information and advice.
And I have to admit that this chart is reassuring, since that high point is where my last newspaper went out of business and I ended up unemployed. I wasn't imagining things.
If Dear Leader really wants to offer some tax relief for those of us in the trenches, he might consider re-instating the deduction for all interest, not just mortgages. If we're going to work to keep bankers in business, it seems only fair.
Besides, that deduction would put more money in our pockets which we would then piss away by buying more stuff and further juicing the economy. Win-win!
One more thing on tax reform, brought to mind by this Tim Eagan cartoon: A good way for corporations to lower their taxes is to reinvest income by hiring more people and building up the economy, because that reduces taxable profits.
Lowering their tax rates only encourages them to squirrel it away.
Expecting corporate tax cuts to create jobs defies both logic and history.
Speaking of motivation …
Caulfield was smart to work ahead only in his mind. Today's Frazz brings me back to third grade, when I alleviated boredom by completing my reading workbook in the first month or two or school.
I figured it would give me more time later to doodle or look out the window, but my first round of trying that was interrupted by the teacher asking me why I wasn't working and my telling her I was done and her seeing that, indeed, I was.
She was absolutely furious and gave me a second workbook that was no more intellectually challenging but had more nit-picky, mind-numbing exercises to make a long year seem even longer.
The only thing the Mrs. Olsons of this world teach is compliance, which, happily, is the only thing the Caulfields of this world will never, ever learn.
That optimistic concept is one of the major points of the strip, or Jef Mallet would have named the kid "McMurphy."
Who's Afraid of Agnes Woolf?
Like Caulfield, Agnes manages to float above the fray, but she does it with far more unjustified optimism and far less well-reasoned sense of alternatives.
Which is to say, she's not so much defiant as she is oblivious.
There has always been an understanding in the strip that both her grandmother and her best friend Trout are far more grounded in what life has put upon their plates, but, holy jumpin' Moses, today's strip is like one of those British angry-young-man films from the Fifties, or something by Albee.
I happen to like those things, but it was a surprise to find their equivalent served up with the coffee and donuts this morning.
On the other hand, if Grandma were some uplifting Thousand Clowns type, I'd probably stop reading the strip.
Speaking of refreshing cynicism
The Harvey Weinstein commotion has touched off a lot of hand-wringing combined with societal criticism and it turns out everybody was deeply against this sort of thing all along.
And I don't like the fact that it happens any more than I like the idea that sad, poor little girls like Agnes are trapped in poverty along with their grandmothers.
But, as Gary Clement notes, leave us not fool one another: All this tut-tutting is not only coming from the purveyors of sleaze, but will no doubt be the subject of more.
I'm glad Weinstein has been barred from the Academy and that the Democrats who took his money have contributed it to groups that help battered women and similar causes.
But now let's see how things really change.
The original scapegoating was an annual event, after all, not something that happened once and solved everything.
If the Shoe Fits
I'm not going to tie this to any particular strip, but I just saw another example of a previously well-drawn strip that has clearly gone over to Cintiq/Wacom tablet construction.
Many cartoonists have gone to tablets, and have done so without a noticeable change, and I have nothing against the new technology, beyond a nostalgic whimper over the loss of true "originals."
But I think the next Reubens convention should include a workshop in how to match the line of a tablet with that of pen-and-ink, because there are some strips now that look like the cartoonist switched from ink to charcoal, perhaps briquettes.
Though I suppose the ones who need the coaching wouldn't think the sessions were for them.
Opened this weekend in the US
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