CSotD: More Complaints Because I’m Good At It
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Today’s first complaint is simple: Either this is a multi-panel caption contest or GoComics didn’t print the black plate in Barney & Clyde (Counterpoint).
But I scrounged around and found a different version.
When I was doing education work, I ran Short Cuts, a weekly full-page educational cartoon that was sent in two parts for assembly. I’d guesstimate laying the black plate over the color plate and then blow it way up to fine tune the match. The black plate is the larger of the two because it has to be hi-res.
For a deeper dive into how the magic comes together, head over to Frank Mariani’s Substack. In addition to doing political cartoons, Frank colors syndicated comics, and in this episode he uses the late Fort Knox to unveil the detailed instructions under which he works.
I’ll confess that my eyes tend to roll up when cartoonists go on about nibs and such, but I found Frank’s explanation fascinating if only because it’s a bit intimidating to see the precision required.
Though that doesn’t excuse those less careful colorizers who will put brown ice cream in a cone described in the text as “strawberry,” does it?
Speaking of political cartoonists in Western New York or, to be more precise, on the Niagara Frontier, Adam Zyglis kvetches here over schools that close down the night before on what he sees as shaky grounds.
I’m gonna defend the schools on a couple of points. Up in Northern New York, where I grew up, the bus routes are long enough that if you waited until morning to gauge the storm, half your kids would be out in it, if not already on a bus that you’d have to hope wasn’t stuck some place.
Buffalo may not have those extended routes, but, then again, if you watched the Buffalo/49ers game, you saw how much snow can fall how quickly out there, and when I looked that up, I saw that the Bills canceled practice for today’s game because of two feet of snow.
Zyglis is a Buffalo native and I was thinking he should certainly remember the blizzards of 1977 and 1978, the former of which I got caught in, but when I went to confirm his being a native, I realized he wasn’t born until four years later and now I’m just depressed because I was grown, married and the father of two when I found myself under a kabillion inches of snow in Tonawanda.
But I’ll bet they closed the schools Friday, at least in Eden and Orchard Park, if not in Tonawanda or Cheektowaga.
Lake effect snow is astonishingly local. I think Buffalo should just close their schools from November 15 to the middle of March instead of during the summer. Summer driving out there is pleasant.
As for the rest of you, stop saying “upstate” unless you mean Yonkers.
And another thing. In fact, several other things …
He wasn’t, despite this Moderately Confused (AMS) child. He had four brothers: James, Joseph, Simon and Jude, but we don’t celebrate them because we’ve built up that whole Marianist thing and the idea that she and Joseph had a normal relationship would upset the apple cart.
At least they tossed out the Gospel of Thomas.
Juxtaposition of the Day
In case you thought the former Commonwealth was one big, happy family, note that the Australian cartoonists are upset over the government’s use of coal and advocation of nuclear power while these two Brits are inveighing against wind.
Several years ago, I was driving through the countryside from one school to another and spotted a windmill on a ridge near a farm. So I drove up, parked next to it and checked it out. It was turning, but I didn’t hear any whop-whop-whop or humming and there were no dead birds on the ground under it.
Some years later, I covered a meeting to discuss a set of windmills that TransCanada was planning for a backcountry ridge in Maine. The Audubon Society came to dismiss fear of bird killing, stating that birds are far more endangered by buildings than by windmills, then some environmentalists talked about the greater damage from other types of energy generation.
By the time they’d made their presentations, the only objections came from people who didn’t want to see windmills in the distance.
But I haven’t heard a lot of demands that utilities be buried, so the NIMBY argument apparently is that windmills are ugly but telephone poles and power lines are things of beauty.
Up in the Adirondacks, we heard from people — not even residents — who didn’t want the landscape ruined by cell towers, until a few people died because they couldn’t get a signal in an emergency.
Progress sucks, but regress ain’t no bowl of cherries and if you like maple syrup, you’d better quit warming the planet. We’re already screwing up coffee and bananas.
Rhymes with Orange (KFS) echoes another gripe, and I guess I’m glad to see it’s not just my local medical center that has you complete a form on-line at home and then asks you all the same questions when you check in.
I also think they could put a permanent note on your chart to indicate that you haven’t got black lung and have promised to let them know if you take up coal mining between visits.
They Can Talk cracked me up with this one. It also occurs to me that the whole mistletoe thing is profoundly out of date. By the time I was old enough to want to kiss anyone, I realized that those who wanted to be kissed didn’t need mistletoe, while using it as an excuse was likely to get you a slap in the face.
Also I’m not sure how many people even know what mistletoe looks like, and you could pin a sprig of cilantro up there and nobody’d be the wiser. Or any more likely or unlikely to want to be kissed.
While not even the cat is really in need of an excuse.
Scott Hilburn slips one past the goalie in this Argyle Sweater (AMS). I doubt the people who would write furious letters to the editor will even get it.
Here’s a Christmas Special just for them!
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