CSotD: Fear and Laughing in the Season of the Witch
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I had to check to see if I had gotten this from among Stahler’s political cartoons or from his humor panel, Moderately Confused, because he seems more intrigued by human nature than by raw politics. His work is somewhat like Berry’s World, which Tom Falco profiles here along with similar work by Ralph Dunagin.
This is my favorite time of year. As it happens, Stahler recently relocated from Ohio to Colorado, where he’s doing plein air work in the Rockies, while I moved from Colorado back East because yellow aspen leaves were hardly an adequate substitute for the fall colors of the Northern Forest.
I’ll start missing Colorado’s climate in about six weeks, but right now I’m enjoying the foliage, the sweater weather and some thick, hearty soups, but, as she says, not the political ads.
My “local” TV station — 100 miles away — covers New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, while my computer thinks I live in Rhode Island, so between broadcast and streamers, I see a variety of political commercials, and you can tell which party is dreading the midterms because their commercials contain fewer glowing promises and more outright nastiness.
It’s a pity that, by November 3 when the political ads stop, the leaves will all be off the trees, but there will be other changes then, most of them, I suspect, improvements.
But we’re not doing politics today.
As it happens, in his other cartoon, Stahler touches on a part of Fall that I find just as obnoxious as the political commercials.
I have nothing against pumpkin spice, and, in fact, I quite like it in pumpkin pie, Indian pudding, bread pudding and in hot cider, though the only type of latte I like is coffee-flavored. However, I find the enthusiasm exhausting and I don’t find a lot of difference between having “pumpkin spice” and “vote for me” plastered all over everything.
It’s a marketing approach: If pumpkin spice were around all year, it would just be one more flavor; like the McRib, it pops up just often enough to spark excitement, and then disappears again.
I saw a headline recently, however, that said pumpkin spice is losing its mojo and that other flavors are becoming more popular, though when I went to find the story just now, I had to plow through a mountain of chipper, excited feature stories no doubt planted by the makers of Pumpkin-Spice Flavored Everything.
And the story turned up in the NYPost, but was written by a London-based feature-story syndicate, which I guess makes it yet another marketing thingie.
And, boy, that syndicate sure does provide some nifty graphics, so here’s the story and you can see the main points in this pull-out, though it’s animated on the actual page.
Juxtaposition of the Day
This Pardon My Planet reminded me of when, many years ago, LinkedIn was touted as the very best way to get a job but seemed more like the very best way to get spammed.
There was someone in my work-based email listings that I stopped hearing from, and I finally discovered that it was because she had her LinkedIn address in her sig file and I had set up a filter to delete everything from LinkedIn because it was never of any value.
Well, except stuff from her, but, hey, you lie down with the dogs, you get deleted with the fleas.
Yes, I suppose you could sign up for it as aversion-therapy to cure an addiction to social media.
German’s political panel references something even more evil, which is the revelation that Facebook’s new AI aide, Muse, creates profiles of you and of everybody you have contact with. The Wired story is behind a paywall, but Futurist’s is not and they report:
“As Wired reports, the AI agent keeps detailed files on people on the periphery of its users’ lives, regularly scooping up new information about them. These updates are reportedly coming once an hour, with an internal instruction for Muse to maintain a ‘page for every person in the user’s life.'”
Nexstar suggests you find out which of your FB friends use Muse and then delete your conversations and defriend them.
Chappatte made me laugh because while I’ve never been a professional ghostwriter, I’ve not only written unsigned “advertorial” material for newspapers but have written things for other people to sign their names to. It’s one of the things you do when you’re in the marketing department instead of the newsroom.
The joke here is that most of that sort of stuff is written with in the same braindead happy-talk voice it would have no matter who or what wrote it. And most of the books written by ghostwriters for celebrities and executives sounds like that as well.
I once collaborated with Sid Couchey to freshen and reissue a cartoon history of the Champlain Valley he had done years before as a series in the newspaper, the booklet being given to schools as part of our educational services. I wrote an intro for it which the publisher signed.
About a decade later, they reissued it, and in this edition, the new publisher signed that same intro.
I’m glad I was getting paid when I wrote the thing, but I don’t know that I put any more effort into it than a machine might have, and not much more time, either. I was proud of the project, but, even there, all the creative work was Sid’s.
Incidentally, in the late 80s, IIRC, but certainly well before AI, somebody developed a program to write local sports. You just fed in the teams, the score and a detail like winning pitcher or MVP and you’d get a short piece that sounded like the 75-word wrap-up some high school intern had cranked out.
Plus ça change, know what I mean, Vern?
I particularly like Toro’s cartoon because the people who would be offended by poor taste wouldn’t get it anyway.
You can’t help offending those people who believe a deep, meaningful history of something that never existed in the first place, but I believe I will go sprinkle cinnamon in a mug of cider and zap it.
It’s that season, you know.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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