Reply All gives me flashbacks to my days covering local real estate, which included a weekly breakfast of some 300 Realtors and title people, mortgage lenders, movers and such.There were times when the guest speaker actually addressed real estate issues, but, more often, they were motivational speakers of one sort or another.People in sales eat that […]
There was a quick flurry of Sean Penn gags in the political cartooning sector, and I emphasize “gags” because none of them made a coherent point beyond “Hollywood celebrities sure are flaky liberals.”Which ignores the massive number of flaky conservative Hollywood celebrities, but never mind. Signe Wilkinson cuts through that burst of pointlessness to the main […]
I certainly didn’t go to bed last night wondering what today’s topic would turn out to be. Rather, the question was, which cartoon would be the lead?Clay Jones gets the nod, for having combined the central theme of weariness in his cartoon with an essay that tipped the balance in an otherwise dead heat.Not only am […]
Retail provides today’s starting point, taking us to much grimmer but not unrelated areas.On a superficial level, Marla’s right and you can’t win and I got a good laff out of that part. People want to grind axes and be offended. “Happy Holidays” doesn’t necessarily mean “Christmas and Hannukah.”For people living in less diverse communities, it […]
Steve Benson offers a futile reproach to fear, intolerance and bigotry, “futile” because the people who most loudly declare themselves Christians do not follow the man’s teachings.Moreover, they do not simply ignore what he said, but are openly hostile to his message: As Woody Guthrie wrote long ago, “If Jesus was to preach what He […]
Today’s Candorville provides a springboard for all sorts of good rants.One is to ask if people know their IQs these days?It used to be a no-no to publicize those scores, and certainly to let a kid know his own IQ, in large part for the reasons Clyde gives: It prejudices the way people react to […]
Mother Goose & Grimm with a pretty good analysis of how it works.The dog and I walk past a “wealth management” company each day and I always shudder a bit, because, my experience is that, when they talk about “wealth,” they don’t mean yours. I liked them better when they called themselves “financial planners,” probably for […]
There are so many political cartoons now that are based on outright fabrication or deliberate misinterpretation that the Prime Directive is sorely tested each morning, because the part of the mission that says “made me think” is clearly being pinged by them. But, since what they make me think is that either the cartoonist is a […]
Darrin Bell makes the iconic statement. I like Clay Bennett’s declaration that school shootings are the new normal, but here’s the distinction that I see:Bennett’s cartoon suggests that we’re still trying to protect our children.Bell’s says, rather, “Here is where we are.”And, by God, here is where we are.We’re not trying to protect our children. We […]
A modest proposalI think cartoonists should get to take Memorial Day off, mostly because it would be so simple to arrange.Each year, one cartoonist would be chosen to do a cartoon of a small child saluting a gravestone, all the papers could run it, and everyone else could kick back and eat barbecue.I mean, it […]
Darrin Bell isn’t the first cartoonist to address the VA delay issues, but his take is admirable for a couple of reasons besides the graphic chops.One is that “death” here is somewhat metaphorical, and while the media jury has already delivered its verdict, the trial on that is still in progress.That someone in Stage 4 […]
I think the 7 million sign-ups for the ACA takes some of the edge off this Kirk Walters cartoon, which appeared so soon after the deadline that it was probably drawn before. Still, the overall “Young Invincibles” debate goes on.Besides, the projection of 7 million signups was made with the YI factor in mind. A […]
Mike Thompson earns the lead-off spot today with an appropriately dark commentary on the Supreme Court’s official declaration that we are now a plutocracy.It reminds me of an exchange in “The Mikado,” in which Nanki-poo seeks information from Pooh-bah, the Lord High Everything Else (and hence the epithet):NANKI-POO : But how good of you (for I […]
I’ve got a poster Darrin Bell did of Barack Obama’s inauguration in which he is surrounded, not by the current crowd of politicians and bigwigs, but by the iconic figures of black history.And yet here Bell depicts the president as scoring a touchdown by having moved the goal line.I find it compelling because it’s not […]
Donna Lewis’s “Replay All” is a good place to go right after a discursion on New Yorker cartoons, because she has that same, “yep, that’s how it is” approach: Observational humor that doesn’t have a punchline so much as a wry acknowledgement. This particular arc has me laughing because, to start with, a once-noble paper, the […]