Candorville (KFS) pokes some fun at its former hosting site, but, for those who haven’t been following DD Degg’s coverage here, the outage at GoComics seems to have fouled up their ability to receive and process strips, such that they’re featuring a lot of reruns at the moment.
This makes it hard to take a comedy break, which is too bad, since we’re currently in serious debates about how a shortage of photos of Hunter Biden’s penis interfered with the 2020 elections and how we should have left Britteny Griner in a Russian prison rather than leave Paul Whelan behind and how Germany seems to take overthrowing the government more seriously than American authorities do.
I’m thinking of moving to Britain, where life is so idyllic and perfect that they have endless time to piss and moan over a TV show about The Prince Formerly Known as The Prince.
I’ve had to sort through copyright dates to pick out the new stuff, but I made an exception for this six-year-old Moderately Confused (AMS) because it’s ironically as timeless as the Yule Log. I think Jeff Stahler could run this one every year because I’m pretty sure the Yule Log is on a gigantic tape somewhere, or maybe a smaller tape that gets played on a loop.
Though you can also just buy your own faux fireplace and run a fake fire constantly. A carbon-neutral Christmas every day!
This Bizarro (KFS) sneaks in under the one-week rule because the gag works best on this day of the week.
It also works best with someone this visually distinctive, since Georgia O’Keefe was also kicking around the West but basically looked like a generic, if sharp-eyed, little old lady, which (A) is a good thing to look like and (B) I’m sure didn’t matter to her one way or the other.
But a lot of artists make themselves a work of art, not to mention doing a lot of self-portraits, and, in this case, that’s a major factor in making the gag work.
Works even better if you know they divorced and then remarried, which I didn’t. I also had no idea what Diego Rivera looked like, and, for that matter, I still only have a faint impression of Alfred Stieglitz but, then, TGIGOK wouldn’t have worked in the first place.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(The Heart of Juliet Jones — Vintage KFS)
I can relate to this Fastrack, because I once worked in a newsroom where my boss was the wife of her boss, who was the best friend of his boss, which meant there would have had to have been some major chaos for anyone at my level to move upward.
I transferred to a department with less incestual constriction, and then to another newspaper with none at all, and from there to a paper where I was editor and didn’t want to move up to publisher, though even there I wound up as interim publisher for a few months.
Onward and upward indeed, but with this confession: I made that first liberating move after I was empty-nested in my early 40s.
So I have some compassion for people locked into miserable, soul-killing, dream-killing jobs because of family obligations, but, then again, it’s kind of like staying in a bad marriage for the kids’ sake. You have to wonder whether the stability is worth the misery, even for them.
Anyway, this guy has proposed to Juliet, but her look in that final panel suggests maybe “gutless wonder” isn’t on her list of ideal traits.
The season of New Year’s Resolutions is around the corner. Just sayin’
But right now is the season of Christmas Craft Fairs, as seen in Next Door Neighbors (AMS), and there’s nothing better than buying something you could easily have made yourself or gotten for free from your slightly dotty great-aunt and then only put out when she came to visit.
There was an art fair in Colorado Springs that, while not juried, worked to maintain a relatively high level of artistry with some set rules. In their recruiting ad one year, they specified a list of low-level stuff that was not eligible, which was a good start, but the ad also had a typo that transformed the entry fee from $30.00 to $3000.
Then-wife’s boss dropped the clipping on her desk with a brisk, “That ought to keep out the decoupage.”
Graeme Keyes comments on the bitcoin collapse, and I’m reasonably sympathetic to people who bought into it, which means I wouldn’t say to their faces, “What the hell were you thinking?” any more than I would decline to admire a good collection of Beanie Babies.
A “good” collection meaning “some, but certainly not a major investment.”
However, the setting here strikes a different response, because I’ve been wondering how panhandlers — both street people and storefront fundraisers — are able to collect much in the way of spare change in a world in which a lot of people don’t carry cash anymore.
I used to have some change rattling around because I needed it for the laundromat, but now the laundromat takes swipe cards, and I am neither young nor an early adapter.
In fact, I’m old enough to remember when this Visa ad was futuristic.
I also remember making sure my kids had a quarter to call home if they needed a ride or were changing plans. But they have their own kids today, and, while I’m sure those kids know what a pay phone is — they are bright young people — I doubt they’ve ever used one.
Rhymes With Orange (KFS) makes a far more hip gag than the standard “Kids don’t know what pay phones are” joke, because, yeah, we were pretty trusting with personal information in them thar days.
But the explanation is that you couldn’t scan text back then, so, if you wanted to exploit all that data, you’d have to copy it out piece by piece, and, in order to be able to sort it, you’d need an expensive computer the size of a room.
Of course, kids are pretty concrete in their thinking: As a nine-year-old, I couldn’t understand why Charlie’s wife didn’t just hand him a nickel instead of a sandwich.
I wondered about that MTA nickel thing too. I suspected that Charlie’s wife had a little somethin’ goin’ on the side…
When I came back after a 14 year stint in Japan, someone asked me for my social security number. My reaction was, “Are you crazy or what?”
When I got my first driver’s license, my license number was my Social Security number. IIRC, this lasted throughout the 70s. It really was a different time.
Back in the late 70s my social security number was my university I.D. number — and I had it printed on all my checks because you used the I.D. number to cash checks at the university.
Different times, indeed.
The smooth machine promised by that >>> 15 year old <<< visa commercial has yet to come to pass. I use cash at checkout much more often than a credit card. What holds up the line isn't me. It's a person trying/failing to use a credit card — sometimes it's a person who doesn't know how to use it, or the card reader isn't working, or the connection from the card reader to the internet isn't working, or it's a debit card and there's no money in the account, etc. etc.
Granted, the stuff downstream from point-of-sale is much smoother with digital payments than with paper and metal.
GoComics sent me this message in response about the rerun weeks due to the pre Thanksgiving GoComics site shutdown: “In order to ensure there is no disruption of content delivery to you for the week of 12/5 due to our recent network issues, you’ll see a prevalence of daily vacation strips for this time period. We don’t anticipate any further disruption of service and will be back with new content for the week of 12/12.”
Two points about that data breach.
(1) If you didn’t want your information revealed, you could pay to have your number unlisted. Where I lived, that was an annual payment. What I did instead what finagle the phone company into listing me at the wrong street address.
(2) You didn’t personally need a computer to take advantage of that data breach. If you found a reverse directory you could find the name and address for any phone number (that’s one of the reasons I listed at a fake address). Reverse directories were updated every couple years, usually available for viewing at your local government office, and in many towns at your local library.
In reference to coins for the laundromat, one I use, while still taking quarters, takes payment through an app. Connects to the equipment via Bluetooth. Strange new world.
Bob, I’m not sure how a reverse directory would change the need to process one piece at a time rather than scan the entire thing into a computer.
BTW, my talk radio days were before on-line directories or the no-call list, and I once had a phone company publicist on the show. I asked him if we could put an asterisk before our names to indicate that we didn’t want solicitation calls. He said adding a character to a listing would make it longer and might require jumping to a second line, thus adding pages to the directory and making it more expensive.
He had a hyphenated last name.
I think we’re thinking of different attack models. I’m thinking about what a miscreant could do with the directory once they had it in the computer.
For example, I had a friend who suffered from a stalker that had used her phone number to find her home address. This was the early 1990s, and she didn’t realize that was possible. On the other hand he already knew where she worked, so he could have just followed her home to get her address.
I guess a simpler use would be to harvest the street addresses for direct mailings. And for that use, right, it doesn’t make any difference if the directory is reversed or not.
re “He said adding a character to a listing would make it longer and might require jumping to a second line, thus adding pages to the directory and making it more expensive.” — I recall a FEIFFER cartoon in which a telephone company functionary explains to a frustrated and angry caller that making his number unlisted and removing it from the phone book would be very very expensive, because all of the other names following his would need to be moved up by one line.
“Adult Swim” is advertising they will be airing Yule Log.