Post Content

1. We’re moving to Seattle soon, and I start to worry that the local newspaper there won’t carry the soap opera comic strips. How will I keep up with Mary Worth? Then I remember that I often download these very strips from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s Web site for use in my blog. I feel a great wave of relief washing over me.

2. The National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup Playoffs are underway, which means that ESPN is running a hockey playoff summary show every night at 9 p.m. This is bad news for me, because it preempts the program that was previously in that time slot: The Comics Roundup. The comics show has been pushed to the lesser-watched ESPN 3 network, which I don’t get. This, I think, is a good reason to pay for more than just basic cable.

Post Content

The Family Circus, 10/2/04

Hey, the dotted lines are back! And in the daily panel, no less! That’s great. It gives you something to latch onto in this panel, in which nothing else seems to have any meaning or purpose. You see, Jeffy goes around the clown because, well, because he doesn’t want a free coupon, I guess. And he’s sweating because … clowns are scary? And he says “Oops!” because … well, I have no idea why he says that. And he’s holding something in his hand, but it’s way too small for me to tell what it is. And when’s the last time you saw a clown in full get-up handing out free coupons? Usually they’re passed out by bored college students/homeless people. Unless there’s a big to-do or something. True story: On the day that Star Wars Episode I premiered, I walked by a theater where it was showing, and among the mob outside was a hapless individual dressed up as a giant cup of yogurt who was passing out free yogurt samples. Poor bastard. My friend and I actually got to go in and see the movie for free because some disgusted nerds who had bought tickets to every show playing that evening refused to see it again after the first time and were just handing them out to people. After we saw it, we understood why. We didn’t take any yogurt samples either. But, back to my point, which is as follows: today’s Family Circus — what the hell? I thank you for your time.

Post Content

Doonesbury, 10/1/04

OK, so let’s see. The U.S. is in the middle of fighting two wars right now, by my count, one of which managed to get almost every other country on Earth to hate us. The current president is one of the most polarizing political figures since Nixon. And we’re a month away from an election that both sides are calling the most important in decades.

And so of course, Doonesbury is spending a week focused on The Apprentice.

I do still like Doonesbury generally, but it’s definitely been getting creakier. It’s hard to do pop cultural commentary when you’re not particularly in touch with pop culture anymore. If you really want your TV watching mingled with political commentary, I guess you have to go to The Boondocks. There at least the characters talk back to the TV, instead of grinning like morons like Zipper here. I’m misquoting what someone else said online here, but: Remember when Doonesbury used college students to make fun of adults, rather than to make fun of college students?