When we were reading Hamlet junior year, the professor asked why there was the gravedigger scene, and we all dutifully responded about easing the tension, to which he said, “Shakespeare had a clown in his troupe and had to write something for him.” I don’t know if I accept that, but for either reason, here’s […]
The answer is a lot easier than Walt Handelsman expected it to be. As noted here yesterday, the stock market is largely driven by a combination of rumors and panic, as Kal Kallaugher noted in the wake of the October 1987 crash: The good news is that Wall Street followed its worst day in two […]
An obvious but timely meme, to which I’ll add an old but timely joke: “What is the difference between ignorance and apathy?”“I don’t know and I don’t care.“ In Amusing Ourselves To Death, Neil Postman argued that the model for our dystopia was not Orwell’s “1984” but Huxley’s “Brave New World,” because we were not […]
Joy of Tech comments on the decline of the Internet, and they’re not alone, though this detailed takedown of Facebook’s flurry of AI spam requires free registration. But the gist of it is that much of what you see on Facebook is spam being commented on by bots, and that click farms have essentially taken […]
Arlo and Janis (AMS) make sensible preparations for Tuesday night. My apartment is at the back of the landlords’ house and so I don’t get trick-or-treaters, which is good because my current dog is not used to knocks on the door. But in days of larger dogs and a place with heavier traffic, I had […]
Let’s start the day with a grim chuckle from Wiley Miller, because, while today’s Non Sequitur (AMS) is funny, it’s not. Whatever the lead time for his strip, this was safe commentary, because we’re seeing book after book come out from both former White House apparatchiks and reporters who covered the Trump administration, explaining all […]
Punchbooks has posted this cartoon from April 16, 1919, in which British Prime Minister David Lloyd George cheerfully presents the Paris Peace Agreement, citing the 1895 Punch cartoon which had turned an old joke into a permanent part of the culture: Parts of the agreement that ended the First World War were excellent, but it […]
We’ll lead off today’s revue with Sunday’s Candorville (WPWG), in part because I have a one-week rule for how long I can hold a piece and in part because it made me cast back in my memory. I remember, back when I was maybe three or four, watching my mother paint her nails and asking […]
In this Non Sequitur (AMS), Wiley Miller longs for the world before social media, and whether this would be a lame amusement park or the basis for culture war is open to debate. If it would be war, we could hope enough people would sit around whining about how lame it was that the shock […]
I don’t know how far ahead Jef Mallett works on Frazz (AMS), but he hit this one squarely: Michigan, where he lives, looks to be hovering around freezing for the next week but in no particular danger of snow before Christmas. Here in New Hampshire, we got just under a foot yesterday and it seems […]
“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.” — Robert Wilensky Juxtaposition of the Day (Jen Sorensen) (Tom Tomorrow) A simple start: Sorensen mourns what we tried to have, but which […]
Reply All (WPWG) brings up internships, sparking my memories of interns who did more than collate. I placed two interns in the newsroom, one a high school student and the other a young teacher working on her masters in English. They both dug right in as full-blown reporters, and the high schooler was promptly hired […]
Barney & Clyde (WPWG) has it right, but it’s more complex. I don’t think people are any more stupid than in the past, nor do I believe there are any more stupid people than ever. However, stupid people are far less isolated than they used to be, and that gives them a great deal more […]
Wiley Miller hits a truth in today’s Non Sequitur (AMS): We’ve reached a level of solipsism where not only is everything about me, but everything is a conspiracy against me. My sister expressed it as “Everybody always be’s mean to me,” a cute toddler phrase that was promptly hung on her for the rest of […]
There are a lot of things I don’t understand, but this Non Sequitur (AMS) brings up the most fascinating, at least at the moment. I kind of understand that, since we went off the gold standard, we’ve moved into an element of currency in which we all have to agree upon the value of a […]