I wish I thought Tank McNamara (AMS) was making an off-the-wall joke here, but it seems perfectly on-the-wall to me. My introduction to sports gambling was also my introduction to local mafia, because when I was in college, I knew a high school kid who sold betting slips and his uncle, who was connected but […]
Al Goodwyn (Creators) is a very nice guy, and this is a well-intended New Year’s cartoon. I’m leading with it today because I’ll also feature some less honest commentary, but I believe this to be completely sincere and honest and naive and wrong. Goodwyn is no cynic, but maybe you have to be one to […]
David Rowe, operating with the benefit of being a dozen or so time zones away, comments on last night’s debate, in which five candidates vied for the title of Miss/Mister Congeniality, the main prize having been given away long since. Or perhaps he drew it earlier. Jen Rubin had it pegged several hours before it […]
Brewster Rockit (Tribune) is usually silly, except that on random Sundays it will suddenly take a kind of Mr. Wizard shift and explain something about astronomy. (For those too young to recognize the name, Mr. Wizard was who we watched on TV before we had Carl Sagan or Neil deGrasse Tyson.) This is a nice […]
Alex offers a grim prediction for writers, or at least those who don’t go to the right cocktail parties in the right cities. Publishers already use the term “slush pile” for the vast quantities of unsolicited manuscripts that arrive on their doorsteps, and it’s newsworthy when something from the slush pile gets published. It’s nearly […]
Prickly City (AMS) continues the thread cited here yesterday, on the negative perceptions people attach to politicians. Historical perspective matters: Washington is consistently ranked by historians as one of our best presidents, but he had his opponents at the time and newspaper writers in that period could be vicious. Congress tried to tame opposition voices […]
(Peter Brookes) (Ted Rall — Counterpoint) A little political stuff to begin the day, but we’ll get over it. I thought Peter Brookes was clever to note the death of Cormac McCarthy and tie it in with Trump’s 77th birthday, but it amused me on a different level to see Ted Rall proclaim that Biden […]
Man Overboard provides our only semi-political observation of the day, and I’m sure there will be more to come after Trump has faced Cannon fire. But let’s have a day of silly things while we wait. Though silly is as silly does (or something) and Mr Boffo reminds me of the lessons I learned at […]
A few years ago, I was about 10 miles from Camp Lord O’ The Flies on another mission and decided to go have a look at the place to see if anything had changed. It was off-season and all but deserted, but I did get to see one large change, which is that they had […]
Sunil Agarwal mocks a saying I take seriously, but I’m willing to laugh at the empty cans and bottles that are evidence of the thing this poor fellow loves to do. Yes, indeed, you do have to channel your interest in some sort of positive direction and, no, I’m not sure a love of drinking […]
Man Overboard manages what few cartoonists have, which is to make genuinely funny cartoons on Biblical topics without either being sacrilegious or being wrong about the scriptural references. Or, of course, both. AFAIK, the moneychangers and dove-sellers did not actually look like Laurel and Hardy, but if you assume, as many do, that Jesus was […]
Vladimir Putin has given cartoonists a gift with his long table, which seems to be linked to germaphobia, perhaps a symptom of OCD, perhaps an indication of actual poor health and vulnerability. Rumors about his health abound but are never definitively confirmed nor definitively disputed. Man Overboard takes advantage of the iconic furniture to make […]
This first point isn’t trivial, but it is personal. Greg Kearney notes the looming cuts at UMaine Farmington, a school I had contact with when I was editing the local paper. The school impressed me because I’d lived in another college town and it was nice, for a change, that downtown merchants didn’t have to […]
Mr. Boffo offers a bit of safe harbor for troubled marriages and thank goodness for finicky cats. Our cat ate Friskies kibble every day without a complaint and maybe that’s why our marriage didn’t last: We didn’t have cat food to agree to disagree about. Somebody was kvetching on social media yesterday about how half […]
I sometimes feel that the kids in Baby Blues (AMS) have become a little too consistently bratty, but then I read Carolyn Hax’s advice column in the Washington Post and so realize that, indeed, there are bratty kids who grow up to be bratty adults. Hax is a lot more indulgent about it than I […]