Jen Sorensen on the imminent demise of the postal service.The USPS faces a combination of factors similar to that which has been so hard on newspapers: Genuine financial issues compounded by fashionable disdain (“snail mail” — Oh, how terribly clever! How whimsically amusing!).Well, except that — as she notes on her blog — the “genuine” […]
Sometimes, there is a coincidental theme running through the day’s strips that calls out for exploitation. Today, everyone seemed to be making jokes about lies, or, well, basing their work on them.Of course, dishonesty exists on several levels. We’ll start with Dan Piraro’s variation on a classic white lie: A jaw-droppingly funny twist on a […]
Kickstarter can solve any problem.In a universe in which the word “any” means “a rather specific type of.”I don’t think, for instance, “being stranded on a desert island” is the sort of problem Kickstarter can solve, despite today’s Non Sequitur.But I do think Wiley’s sarcasm is well-placed, and it’s not often that such a shall-we-say-familiar […]
Brian Duffy wins points today simply for not doing a cartoon of a stranded cruise ship labeled “Congress,” which is sort of like winning a tournament because none of the other teams showed up. But aside from not climbing onto that tiresome and utterly foreseeable bandwagon, and even among cartoonists who have addressed the Olympic committee’s […]
“Freshly Squeezed” brings back a memory of the kickoff to my second bachelorhood. Not a good memory or a bad memory but a “scratch your head” memory. Entering second bachelorhood is a moment of re-orientation, so I suppose it varies considerably, depending on your first bachelorhood and what you learned in the interim, as well […]
The Knight Life, with a Biblical passage that makes the whole argument worthwhile.Fact is, the comparison is not all that far fetched. Funny, yes, but not far fetched.Back when I was doing the “Lookback” feature at the paper where I worked, the issue of registering cars came up in the 75 Years Ago files, and […]
Indeed.The ideal news story today would be if Kate Upton took an unscheduled drink of water while stranded on a cruise ship that was buzzed by a meteorite. And, if none of that happened, we could fall back on coverage of Honey Boo Boo.I gave up on NBC Nightly News when they started doing features […]
Soup to Nutz on the competitive nature of belief.It’s interesting to note that, prior to the Babylonian captivity, the First Commandment did not require the Israelites to believe there was only one god. It simply required them to worship the appropriate one for them. If Moses had come back down the mountain and found everyone bowing […]
I’ve said that I approach each morning as a blank slate, waiting to see what topic the day’s cartoons will prompt me to riff on, but I’ll admit I have been hoping for a good “Papal retirement” cartoon, and with some increasing impatience.Apparently, judging from the cartoons, there appears to have been some sort of […]
One thing that is becoming very clear in the modern, interconnected global village is that the global village is no longer a philosophical concept but a practical reality.I was talking to one of my granddaughters the other day and realized I had to explain that, years ago, when her father was overseas, the longer we […]
Pros and Cons riffs on the line between terminology and jargon and triggers my PNSD (post-newsroom stress disorder).One man’s terminology is another man’s jargon, but you do have to assume some level of shared vocabulary. Unless you are a copy editor.One man’s copy editor is another man’s nuance-destroying, prose-homogenizing, style-book-wielding grammar nazi.I’ve had my rhetorical […]
So let’s extend the discussion of niche-y inside humor from Saturday’s posting with today’s Heart of the City.I’m not a huge movie fan, and certainly not enough of one to know all the directors. I know the ones who genuinely become brands, so a gag like this PBS from 2003 is not lost on me […]
This being the Sunday before Valentine’s Day, the comic pages are full of bow-and-arrow gags and jokes about chocolate. The only strip that struck me as particularly romantic didn’t mention the holiday at all: Judge Parker manages to combine storytelling with classic graphics and a sense of humor that doesn’t involve jokes. And hot, brainy […]
The Comics Page — that is, the collection of syndicated comic strips that appears in your local paper — became twice the topic of insider kerfufflagration this week. For fans of the form, it’s worth a look at them both.Let me start by saying this is not going to be an example of responsible reporting. […]
If you are American, you can probably guess most of what’s going on in this Africartoons contribution by Rico Schacherl: Demands made on schools but no resources provided.Specifically, the African National Congress, South Africa’s ruling party, wants to declare teaching an essential service with the goal of ending teacher strikes. As with all such moves, […]