I've got nothing to add to today's "Sherman's Lagoon" except that I really enjoy the repeated assault upon suspension of disbelief, as well as Toomey's ability to promote ecological awareness while keeping the strip constantly silly. I've mentioned the Bob Newhart timing factor in this strip often enough that I won't do it again.
Whoops.
Note to cartoonists: Hand me that kind of pun for the headline and your work can be first on these round-up days. Another tip is to unintentionally and coincidentally key into the previous day's topic.
If you're going to misconstrue a childhood favorite, do it right. And for fans of questionable taste (a phrase that works in this context however you parse it), the good news is that Francesco Marciuliano's "Medium Large" is now featured three times a week at GoComics, with different strips at his own Medium Large site. And his book of cat-written poetry, "I Could Pee On This," is on the New York Times Bestseller List.
I don't know that a flashing sign saying "Armageddon!" could make things more clear.
And speaking of apparently unintentional tie-ins, Adam Huber's Bug today is coincidentally linked to a particularly bizarre and depressing mini-meme I've seen on Facebook this week.
It seems that a principal at an elementary school did a training with her teachers in which she reminded them that kids in schools today come from diverse backgrounds and that you have to bear in mind that not everybody shares the same experience you do.
As an example, she said that even something as innocuous as assuming that "we" all eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches can easily be wrong, and so you need to avoid these kinds of unthinking generalities that can make little kids feel that their family's cultural traditions, religious beliefs or overall living situations are bad and dysfunctional and that, as a result, they are bad and dysfunctional, too.
Pretty standard training, along with "Don't blithely assume that all the kids have stay-at-home moms who bake cookies, or that their mothers are the people who sign permission slips. Or that they even have moms."
The Glenn Beck crowd got wind of this, however, and started blasting her for saying that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are racist. And some TV station ran a story about how schools are now declaring PB&J racist.
And now it has begun to move around on Facebook, with a great deal of approval from people I think would be ashamed to realize they were lining up with Beck's "send all o' them dark people back where they come from" crowd.
And quite a few who wouldn't be, which is really depressing.
I like that Bug thought to wonder if Buddhists even eat sandwiches. Though I suspect whether they eat dairy products might have been a more productive question.
Of course, if you asked Glenn Beck, he'd want to know if they ate sandwiches on the right kind of bread, being the sort of person who believes that half a loaf of Wonder Bread is better than naan.
Finally, today, Don Asmussen scores with this installment of Bad Reporter. It's hard to come up with three paste-up gags that each work well, but he nailed it this time. I think he does better when he gives himself permission to not have a unifying theme and just riffs on what's in the news rather than sticking to one topic.
Though I suppose you could say that obsessing over Michelle Obama's arms and thinking that good zingers will make up for bad traction will be as fruitful for Romney's campaign as ...
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.