CSotD: March Forth Unto Hump Day
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Kim is losing her column and we’ll see where that leaves her. But her editor’s comment about not touching the comics is timely, because with Zits going into Mon-Sat reruns, our local paper is down to two current strips, Baby Blues and Pearls Before Swine. It also has six zombie strips and four reruns.
Some zombies are all right: Marciuliano and Keefe breathed life into Sally Forth, for instance, and there are a handful of others that were freshened under new management. But others just rotate the same six jokes that have filled their spaces each week forever.
Newspapers are supposed to be news, and reruns aren’t. When Schulz died, I told our editor the strip was ending, since I knew Schulz said he didn’t want anyone else doing it. We turned out to be part of about five percent of Peanuts subscribers that put in a new strip, and I would still defend the decision.
Maybe a newspaper could reward people who take out a year-long subscription with a Peanuts or Doonesbury or Zits book. Heck, throw in Steve Canyon or Rick O’Shay among the choices.
But newspapers are for news.
Maybe Kim will get a Substack and then she can find out for herself whether her editor made the right choice.
Most successful Substacks had previously built an audience, though there are exceptions. But if you are a niche writer, it had better be a big niche. We have a local news aggregator who requests, but does not require, paying subscriptions and I don’t know how many he has, but he seems to do well.
Noth has a Substack, by the way, and I hope he’s doing well. When I know a cartoonist appearing here has a Substack, I link to it and I’d like to think some of you give them five bucks a month or whatever they ask for.
And the artist geniuses of AI should go do something physically impossible with an inappropriate device.
But I suppose I’m raging at the storm like Lear, and my poor fool died a while ago.
On that topic, don’t wait to do what you want to do, because you never know when the curtain will be drawn and the farce will be over.
I’ve told this story before, but I took a year off between my junior and senior years in college to write the first draft of a novel, and when I came back to campus, I ran into one of my professors who said he envied me, but that he had a novel in mind that he was going to write when he retired.
He died a few months after he retired. I guess it doesn’t matter and that the curtain comes down whether you’ve accomplished anything or not. Still, my attitude towards bucket lists is that you shouldn’t have one: Do it or dismiss it as inconsequential, but, if it matters, do it.
Red Hayes wrote “A Satisfied Mind,” which has been covered by nearly everybody from Porter Wagoner to Mavis Staples to Jeff Buckley, and Hayes said of its origins
The song came from my mother. Everything in the song are things I heard her say over the years. I put a lot of thought into the song before I came up with the title. One day my father-in-law asked me who I thought the richest man in the world was, and I mentioned some names. He said, “You’re wrong; it is the man with a satisfied mind.”
Juxtaposition of the Day
I’ve been downsizing lately, getting rid of clothes I don’t wear and books I’ll never read or will never read again, and I came across a box of negatives and 8 mm home movies. I gave them about two minutes thought and realized nobody was ever going to bother with them.
But most of the photos that matter are on hard drives on multiple computers, so they’re relatively safe.
The home movies are … well, they’re on a VHS tape and even if some future descendant can find a player, they’ll likely have degraded into nothingness.
As will I.
I was involved with a business/education partnership group that met often but never actually accomplished anything except setting our next meeting. Finally the manager of the local Georgia-Pacific paper mill said, “I’m not coming to any more meetings about having meetings.”
When he died — earlier than he should have — I mentioned that in a column and his wife dropped me a nice note in which she thanked me for remembering something that genuinely reflected his personality.
Juxtaposition of Getting It Wrong
The thing about birds flying into wind turbines is a myth spread by the fossil fuel industry. I covered a meeting to discuss the siting of turbines on a ridge in Maine and the Audubon Society assured us that the blades turn so slowly that birds readily avoid them. And I’ve checked out the bases of turbines and found no corpses nor feathers. That’s not to say a bird can’t occasionally fly into a turbine, but they’re in far greater peril from office windows.
I also know that wild fires are often fought with back fires, which is to say, by burning the grass and other fuel in their path. It’s called “fighting fire with fire” and it’s often more practical than cutting a firebreak.
Jack Russells are a coin flip. Some are sociable dogs, some are like this trio. We had a guy at the dog park who had a very congenial Jack that lived a long life, and was then replaced by another Jack and we don’t see Bob anymore because his new Jack hates everybody.
Though even the nice ones are bred to go underground and beat the hell out of badgers and foxes. We’ve got a friendly, funny little Jack at the park named Dasher who found himself at the bottom of a three-on-one play tussle. We break those up before the underdog stops thinking it’s fun, but we weren’t in time for this one, because Dasher broke it up himself. Yikes.
Here’s that song by the fellow who wrote it:
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