I enjoy being a crank. Really.
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Jump Start, 7/29/04
When I got to the last panel of this strip today, I thought to myself, “Uh-oh. Is that my future?”
Then I realized: it’s my present. I hope you all appreciate it.
Archive:
Would a joke about psittacosis now and then kill you people?
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Shoe, 7/28/04
When I read today’s Shoe, my first thought was, “Huh, Shoe’s real name is P. Martin Shoemaker. How about that.” Then I realized that I didn’t know the full name of anybody else in Shoe. Then I realized that maybe the reason finding out that Shoe has a first initial, middle name, and last name surprised me is that he and his cohorts are A BUNCH OF GOD DAMN BIRDS.
A friend of mine in California, sentenced to driving school by a traffic judge, chose to go to “Comedy Driving School,” after which she bitterly reported that “there’s a difference between being funny and being in a really good mood.” Similarly, there’s a difference between having a comic strip built on a wacky premise (like, say, that there’s this newspaper staffed by birds) and strip that uses that premise to generate actual humor. The birds of Shoe live and work in treetops, but for the most part they hate their jobs, drive unreliable cars, flunk in school, make clumsy passes in bars, and wear ill-fitting tuxedos and unfashionable glasses just like normal humans. I know that Shoe has been around for decades, so maybe I should assume that every possible funny aspect of its characters’ talking-bird existence was mined for comedy gold before I was born. But frankly, I’m not feeling that charitable. So here’s my challenge to Cassatt and Brookins: start making bird jokes in Shoe or … or … or face further tongue-lashings in this blog!
Oh, and while I’m making demands: no more “sexy” girl birds. They creep me out. Today’s linkbacks go to the weblog @ interbridge.com and Domestic Psychology, both of whom, I trust, support my anti-sexy-girl-bird stance.
Metapost: The Apartment 3-G saga, Part 3: The wrath of Margo
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Eager readers simply will not let the question of Apartment 3-G‘s swapped panels die. Alert reader Dalton has swapped the art, but not the text, of the second and third panels of Thursday’s Apartment 3-G to reproduce the original author’s intended effect. It’s like the special edition of the original Star Wars trilogy, only significantly less crappy.
“Behold my l33t p40t0s40p ski11z,” says Dalton.