Real America Sunday
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Dick Tracy, 8/5/18
Today’s Dick Tracy is brought to you by the tourism board of Minot, North Dakota: the Magic City! Sadly, this nickname is not a testament to its rich heritage of sleight-of-hand artistry, but rather is a reference to the fact that it sprung up almost overnight in the 1880s, as if someone had waved a wand and intoned “Abracadabra!” The real reason was not because of any dark sorcery, of course, but because it was at one point the last stop on the Great Northern Railway as that line was being built across the U.S. The town’s railroading history makes it an appropriate location for this adventure, since Sawtooth escaped from his botched attempt to kill Dick Tracy by hopping on a freight train. According to Wikipedia, another nickname for Minot is “Little Chicago,” which makes sense as well because it’s where Dick Tracy, a lawless cop from Regular Sized Chicago, is going to gun down Sawtooth while he’s “attempting to escape,” Chicago-style.
Pluggers, 8/5/18
The obvious thing to point and laugh at here is of course “pluggers wouldn’t be caught dead spending time in some foreign country where the people probably don’t even speak English,” but let’s not sleep on the fact that our plugger couple is making their vacation plans based on whatever happened to show up unsolicited in their mailbox this morning. You can have your fancy digital marketing campaign with your carefully cultivated Instagram influencers; the way to a plugger’s heart, and wallet, remains direct mail.