Just a quick reminder from Madam & Eve that not everyone is starting to anticipate winter. We’ve just hit apple-picking season up here and winter can’t be far behind, but for those on the opposite side of the Equator, it’s nearly spring.
I’ll be pleased when the pollen ends up here, and, oddly enough, happy if the snow flies, since it increasingly doesn’t anymore.
However, assuming it will, I’d appreciate it if my friends in South Africa and Australia and such places would refrain from posting idyllic pictures of sun-soaked Table Bay and the Gold Coast.
Not that I wouldn’t wish First Dog on the Moon a happy spring and summer. They’ve had some truly wretched weather down in Tasmania this winter.
And he’s right about meteorologists freaking out, because they’re doing it up here, too. The apples are abundant but the monarch butterflies are not and we’re hoping our odd weather has simply put them off schedule and they’ll soon start popping up in larger numbers.
Tommy Siegel’s frog suggests we should just relax and not blame it on anybody.
On a somewhat more realistic level, however, Speed Bump (Creators) reminds us to make sure we stop and smell the roses.
In fact, stop and smell everything.
In this Mr. Boffo cartoon about never ever giving up, Joe Martin appears to be giving up on appealing to young readers.
I got a chuckle out of it, but I was 10 years old when The Millionaire went off the air in 1960, and I doubt I’d remember the name “John Beresford Tipton” if I’d been any younger.
And even if a slightly younger person recognized the name, people 65 and older make up about nine percent of the world’s population. If I were a cartoonist, I might try to cast a wider net.
Then again, I’m sure people 65+ make up a lot more than nine percent of newspaper readers. Sigh.
Age aside, I am all in favor of cartoonists making a few demands on readers, and I’m fine with the Argyle Sweater (AMS) riffing on Romulus and Remus, because people ought to know who they were and that they were suckled, if not entirely raised, by a wolf. And that Rome was not built in a day.
Two more points:
One is that educated people should also recognize Anansi and the Monkey King and Coyote as folkloric characters from other than European culture.
The other is that I assume, since Romulus and Remus were folkloric and their story is not historically accurate, that atheists would conclude that the city of Rome doesn’t exist, nor was there ever anything called “the Roman Empire.”
But I digress. On purpose.
Cultural literacy, however, should not prevent you from laughing at this Jonesy cartoon. No, ostriches don’t really hide their heads in the sand. But that’s okay, because Mr. Prendergast’s secretary is lying.
And, yes, ostriches do have secretaries. Not all of them, obviously.
Just the really important ones.
The Buckets (AMS) explores the depths of what is clearly fiction and what you are required to believe, and I particularly like the father’s explanation at the end.
Speaking of things you have to be old to remember, about 60 years ago, Merle Miller wrote a book that was indeed based on a true story which he called “Only you, Dick Daring! or, How to write one television script and make $50,000,000, a true-life adventure” that was an insider view of all the things that can happen to an idea as it goes from authorial inspiration to final production.
The book is out of print, but this wonderfully readable 1964 review from Time sums it up: “Miller’s book is a vivid and often hilarious account of how TV’s butchers can change any script into hamburger.”
I heard a similar story from a TV writer in 1970, which was shortly before Joseph Heller said of plans to film Catch-22:
I don’t believe that, by the way, but, as it turns out, Mike Nichols made a very good adaptation, and it was fiction in the first place anyway.
Based on adaptations I’ve seen of real events of which I had knowledge, I’d suggest that by the time it escapes into the public — as TV, movie or whatever — your best bet is to either assume it’s been fictionalized or do what journalists are supposed to do and find a second source.
As the editors’ rule goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
Juxtaposition of the Day
I never had a midlife crisis. Instead, I got divorced at 34, which is much the same thing except that it doesn’t allow you to sit around wondering if things are going the way they should. It’s more a matter of reality grabbing you by the lapels and slapping you in the face screaming “Snap out of it!”
But I had a long conversation with my dad when he was 49 and miserable because the company he’d pinned his life to was being taken over by a vulture capitalist intent on wringing out the money and destroying the people. He took it for another year and then threw in the towel, changed careers and became happy again.
So I disagree with Adam’s wife, Laura: It’s never too late. And I’m agreeing with Clyde. If you’ve gotta ask the question, you already know the answer.
As for Katy, it’s too early for her to have a crisis, but if she starts wondering now, she may be able to avoid it entirely.
As it happens, I was just remembering one place I worked to which this Reply All (Counterpoint) applied.
Almost as soon as I got there, I knew it had been a horrible mistake, but I had to stick around until they fired me so I could collect unemployment while I looked for a better job.
The things I said in the department head meetings weren’t stupid, but saying them probably was. Being there definitely was.
I was out of work for nearly a year, but the next gig was a blast and lasted a decade.
OK, I’ve had my morning coffee, I’m fully awake and about to do my morning bicycle ride, and I read “John Beresford Tipton” and immediately remembered the reference. Even though I haven’t thought about the show since about ten minutes after the last episode went off the air. Another dormant memory of childhood brought back in vivid black and white.
But did I remember yesterday to get in touch with the neighbor lady who’s bicycle needs a new front tire and I promised to do it this weekend?
“A question ain’t really a question if you know the answer too.” – John Prine
Does anyone else read this as the best ongoing illustrated autobiographical epistolary nonfiction being written today?
I come for the comics and stay for Mike.
I don’t remember John Beresford Tipton, since I was born the same year the show went off the air, but I have another example from yesterday’s Washington Post. In the Free For All section–letters pointing out grammatical mistakes, etc.–I found this:
“just finding all of these folks” to deport “will be a Sisyphean challenge.” There must be many readers, including the undersigned, who, if they wished to know what constitutes such a challenge, would have to look it up. I did and learned that it refers to a task that can never be completed. Porter is to be complimented on his verbal knowledge, but it would be good if Post articles did not require one to look up what something means.
Shared link: https://wapo.st/47qxAqf
Then I turned to the comics page, where I found this:
https://comicskingdom.com/rhymes-with-orange/2024-09-07
When does explaining something become condescending? (That means talking down to people.)
We are the same age.
I thought his name was “John Bearsfoot Tipton.” Ten year old me thought that would be an awesome name. Later in life I started using John Beresford Tipton as a nom de voyage – for restaurant and other reservations before the era of multiple forms of required ID for everything.
My seasonal alias is always “Saul Invictus.” No one ever seems to get it.
“Having your book made into a movie is like having your ox made into a bouillon cube.” – Bill Neely
And on the subject of things said in meetings, here’s an exchange from what promised to be only the first of many many of them, preparing a presentation to our CEO (6 or 7 levels above me at the time):
Organizer: and the message will be that this new technology will blah blah blah.
Me you expect us to tell him that?
Organizer: yes.
Me: you expect us to tell him that with a straight face?
Organizer: OK, you’re out.
THE MILLIONAIRE was a daily double dose on the Decades channel at 6 AM Eastern long enough that I believe I saw all of the episodes (it wasn’t aired in order, for some reason). It went off the air two years ago when the channel transitioned into the Catchy Comedy Channel, and since only about three episodes of THE MILLIONAIRE had a laugh track, it didn’t qualify as a sitcom or variety show. Otherwise, I’d be able to refer you to a channel that is showing it, since I know you’re up very early.
You might want to make that 70 and not 65. I’m 65 and have no memories of that show at all. But then, I do know other shows that aired pre-1959 because I watched them in reruns: I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Superman, and even Ernie Kovacs. But not The Millionaire.
The Census Dept had numbers for 65.
I’m WAY over 65 and have no memory of the show as I never watched it, so I had no chance at knowing the reference.
Well, that’s it. I wasn’t wondering if anyone got it. I was addressing it as a marketing issue. Which, much as I hate to say it, comic strips are.
Another ostrich? Not a secretary bird? 🙂
What else would a Secretary Bird do ? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretarybird)
Re: “Tommy Siegel’s frog suggests we should just relax and not blame it on anybody.” I interpreted the point to be: we are in an existential crisis here and instead of trying to mitigate it, we are spending critical time arguing about assigning blame.
Once again I maybe old but not even close to 65 yet! Still I have enough cultural knowledge to know there was a popular TV show before I was born. I got the John Beresford Tipton reference.
If we can know about Romulus and Remus (which is a myth thousands of years old) who’s to say we can’t remember the Millionaire?
I was impressed that I remembered the Millionaire TV show (but not Tipton, as Michael Anthony was the actual contact guy, while Tipton’s name was kept from the folks who got the money), as I was awfully young in 1960. However research shows me that the show was syndicated from the 1960s to 1980s, so I was probably watching it in the mid-late 1960s. There were only two TV stations in my viewing area for those of us either too early or too rural for cable TV.
I’m under 65 myself, for a couple years yet, but I did get the reference. Not because I ever saw or knowingly met anyone who ever saw The Millionaire, but because of references to it, in (like) that one Popeye cartoon ( https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/2019/07/24/can-1960s-popeye-be-an-ethical-billionaire/ ) or SCTV or whatever.
But I am also culturally a lot older than my age suggests, in that I know what the heck Fred Allen was going on about with all those jokes about Billy Rose’s Aquacade and also know who the heck Fred Allen was.
There was at some point an alternate title, IF I HAD A MILLION. Maybe one was a syndication title and the other from the original broadcasts.
Wow! Great column, great comics, and great comments. Kudos to all, but especially Mike. I just want to add that 50+ years ago, I was in the last Latin class (so far) taught in my high school. Our teacher was (to our teenaged eyes) ancient. The mythology we created for her was that she was so old, she had suckled the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. Also, well before then, The Millionaire was one of my favorite shows, but I saw it only in reruns, as I wasn’t even in Kindergarten when the last episode first aired.
P.S. re Mitch4’s comment, I don’t recall an alternate title for the TV show, but there is a 1932 movie If I Had a Million; I haven’t seen it, but it’s got a similar plot and a great cast, so it’s on my “To watch” list.