For the birds, who are against each other
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Shoe, 3/10/25
Man, it would be concerning if you were a bird parent from a species that primarily ate fish and your son didn’t want to eat fish, especially considering that, bird-wise, the main way you get fish for your kid is to eat it yourself and then barf it up for them. I can see why you’d write a pleading letter to the editor of the local paper, though it’s pretty funny that said editor would just be like “ditch your ungrateful kid and get with a cat instead.” This may be affected by said editor’s species: Shoe is, as helpfully pointed out by a surprisingly comprehensive table on the Shoe (comic strip) Wikipedia article, a purple martin, a largely insectivore species in contrast to his fish-happy employees Cosmo Fishhawk and Loon. Everything else aside, domestic and feral cats are also one of the main predators of bird species, but the purple martin’s current conservation status is “Least Concern,” so I guess he’s not too worked up about that either.
Heathcliff, 3/10/25
Now that I’m returning to Heathcliff on the regular, I must report that it’s still following its late-era dream logic to surprising and disquieting places. Heathcliff hates dogs, sure. The local dogcatchers are a tight-knit society with their own social institutions, I buy that. Said dogcatcher community respects Heathcliff because of his aforementioned hatred of dogs, makes sense. And so they … get lower back tattoos of Heathcliff’s face? To signal all this information to one another, sexually? Yes, the chain of reasoning holds together, but if the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Intelligent Life, 3/10/25
I once cruelly but accurately described Intelligent Life as being “about a number of unpleasant people who are obsessed with ‘nerd’ franchises (i.e., most of modern film and TV entertainment) in the most boring way possible.” I guess I should’ve added a compliment about its one redeeming feature, which is that it’s almost never about pissing and shitting. Too late now, I guess!
Pluggers, 3/10/25
Oh, you’re telling me that a plugger will substitute lower-cost calories when the price of a favorite foodstuff goes up? Are they ever so special and financially rational? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Professor Hal Varian, who’s written extensively on economic substitution effects?
