CSotD: Saturday Morning Apolitical Cartoons
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I was prepared to jump right into this very non-comical story, and the AAEC has released a statement on it, but I didn’t find enough cartoons this morning on the topic, so it’ll have to wait. But Slyngstad dropped two commentaries, this light-hearted iconic one and a more serious one that you’ll see when more editorial cartoonists catch up with matters.
A little more politics: That new blockbuster magnificent movie isn’t being shown in South Africa, but it looks like they’ve found a replacement. I’d rather see this one, and I hope today’s cartoon is not a one-off gag but the beginning of an arc.
Speaking of the news, I’ve been following the Bari Weiss soap opera at CBS, and am dismayed to see the same thing Lalo Alcaraz has seen: A mainstream news channel slide into partisanship.
On the other hand, there’s a “Who cares?” element which she brought up at an all-hands meeting the other day. The Evening News is no longer attracting much of an audience, since anyone who cares about the news is already getting far more of it in far greater depth elsewhere.
Gotta admit, though, this part of the Hollywood Reporter coverage made me laugh:
Weiss delivered a PowerPoint presentation that outlined her view on the state of media and how CBS can remain relevant in a challenging time for broadcast news.
PowerPoint? I thought they hired her because she was hip. I suppose it’s better than overheads.
Still, she’s right: God knows I’m old enough to watch the Evening News, but I had no idea who Tony Dokoupil was despite watching his wife almost every day while I’m doing dishes.
Betty spent the week pondering magazines, and this isn’t a change of subject. Years ago I predicted that Time and Newsweek were doomed, but Newsweek has developed a decent, if not fabulous, on-line presence.
Betty launches a barb at the remaining audience for magazines. They’re not a great demographic except for Metamucil and maybe the CBS Evening News.
My ophthalmologist has the New Yorker in their waiting room, and most of the patients there are smack dab in the middle of the magazine-reading demographic. I like the cartoons, of course, but it’s about a third the thickness it used to be and it has a cover price of $10.99, to which my response matches Bub’s.
Toro is in the New Yorker a lot, so that’s good, but he’s also got a book out which is also good, and he’s right-on with this commentary, but I’m done with politics for the day so never mind.
Noth is also a New Yorker regular. This one made me laugh, but mostly it gave me a nostalgic jolt back to seventh or eighth grade, to Mr. Garbreana’s social studies class, because he taught us that this is pretty close to how fire companies started: You’d purchase a policy from one of the companies and, if your house caught fire, they’d come put it out.
If you didn’t have a policy, a fire company would come and bargain with you just like in the cartoon, either to put the fire out for you, or to buy the house and put the fire out for themselves.
Then the socialists took over and destroyed free enterprise.
A slightly more recent bit of nostalgia touched off by this week’s arc in Monty. When I moved back East in 1987, after nearly 20 years in Colorado, my work-casual uniform was a tweed jacket, tattersall shirt, knit tie, jeans and Frye boots, and, yes, I wore a cowboy hat in bad weather. It was standard gear, I thought.
The deal on jeans out West was that they couldn’t be faded, but the dress code back East was “no dungarees” and the terminology told me all I needed to know. The boots weren’t forbidden, but they drew enough attention that, when I got my first paycheck on the new job, I invested in some Weejuns.
Wore the hat through the first winter. It does keep the snow off, doggone it.
In 2000, I took a job at a paper where the publisher was from Pocatello and so the jacket and tie went on a hanger on my office door. I rarely needed them.
He ran a PRCA rodeo each year, but the contestants were all Easterners. It was the first rodeo I’d been to where the animals consistently had the upper hand.
Juxtaposition of the Day
We seem to be testing a few new limits this week.
It does make me wonder if the people who call editors to complain would even get these two cartoons, but I’ve started seeing F-bombs detonated in non-syndicated cartoons fairly often.
Of course, I’ve long heard them from my grandkids, and it’s not that I have virgin ears or, certainly, a pure mouth, but we were discreet and there’s a generation gap factor in that.
Jeez, whatever that stuff cures would have to be fatal before I’d be willing to take it.
Nice local timing with this one. We had a contest here in which kids were supposed to assemble as many Mr. Potato Heads as they could in a certain time, with the stated proviso that they — the Potato Heads, not the kids — had to be “anatomically correct.”
I have no idea what that means. It seems like it would have something to do with how Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head produce Tater Tots, but given that they only have heads, it just deepens the mystery.
Though, consarn it, I remember when Mr. Potato Head was made of some kind of plastic foam and you could stick his parts anywhere you wanted, until he started shedding crumbs and gaining holes the parts wouldn’t stick in.
Kids still know Mr. Potato Head, but I wonder if they have any idea who this is. Del Monte recently filed for bankruptcy and is greatly scaling back its production of canned vegetables, but the Green Giant still cans them and is huge in the frozen sector. But you don’t see their ads on TV anymore.
Howsoever, I once owned this record:
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