Post Content

Drabble and Fast Track, 3/6/06

I’m not sure why tone-deaf technology jokes enrage me so much, but they sure do. Today’s Drabble and Fast Track (two mostly harmless strips I’ve added to my repertoire) represent a painful subset of this joke: the kids who know technology better than their parents! Oooh, edgy!

You know who really knows how to use high-tech better than the average Joe? Deaf people. No, hear me out (ha ha): Once a good friend of mine had his family in town, and they all came over to my place to watch the X-Files. His little sister is deaf, and I started to apologize for not having a TV that did close captioning, but before I could get halfway into a sentence, Asha (my friend’s sister) picked up the remote and BAM BAM BAM there were all these crazy menus on the screen that I had never seen before and hey presto everything was closed captioned. Which was awesome not only because Asha could then enjoy the X-Files with the rest of us, but because throughout the entire creepy whistling theme music, the close captioning put all these little music notes all over the screen. Very charming. Anyhoo, apparently a lot of young deaf kids are super duper tech savvy because the Internet and some hidden features in a lot of home electronics make it easier to get by without hearing. I challenge any and all cartoonists reading this to make humorous hay out of this. Go on. Do it in a classy and funny way and I’ll be deeply impressed.

On this subject (technology, not deaf people), I provide a shameless plug for another off-blog thing I’m doing: I’m supplying a “Geek Comic of the Week” write-up over at ITworld.com every Monday. I’m a darn comics analysis franchise already!

Also: today’s DRMMDGIJ™:

Seriously, there is absolutely nothing I can say that would make this any gayer.