I used to go through the Saturday Evening Post and the New Yorker ignoring the articles and looking for the cartoons, but Mad Magazine was the opposite: I'd read the articles while purposely ignoring Sergio Aragones' cartoons in the margins, so that I could then go back and read them all at once.
Wiley recaptures the feel of those this morning, and it's a fun departure from his usual heady approach.
As it happens, I came across several cartoons today that I liked but that don't require much commentary, so I guess I'll abandon my usual heady approach, too, and make that today's theme.
For instance:
Dan Thompson has a flair for the ridiculous, but people who mistake "silly" for "simple" are missing a lot in life, as are people who hate puns. It's perfectly fine to not like puns, of course, but the need to let everyone know how much you hate them reminds me of this guy.
Loosen up, buttercup.
Not everything simple is silly
Like xkcd, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal often gets nerdy to the point of obscurity, but then the next day swings back into social commentary on a simplistic level that makes you wonder why nobody seems to get it.
Granted, a lot of simplistic arguments are simple because -- whether out of deceit or honest ignorance -- they leave out key facts.
Not this one, because he doesn't try to describe much more than the base foolishness that lets people repeat and even extend their folly.
The complexity and missing-the-key-points part would kick in if he tried to describe a solution, because, as he notes, we certainly are invested in that tower.
For instance, as part of the nation's change from building businesses to building portfolios, a lot of companies shut down their pensions decades ago and switched everyone over to 401k's, so most of our retirements are only as secure as the stock market.
But at least we didn't listen to this snake-oil salesman, as depicted by David Horsey back in 2001, though the "let's privatize Social Security" hustlers are still very active.
Still, it's one thing to bristle at the concept of "Too big to fail" and quite another to come up with a way of dismantling the tower without ...
... well, scroll back up to the Non Sequitur at the top of the post.
That's it for today, but don't feel cheated
I'll be more prolix tomorrow. Meanwhile, if you haven't finished your coffee yet, here's Tom Spurgeon's listing of the Eisner awards from the other night.
Some favorites of mine didn't win, some did.
All in all, a nice mix of the popular and the geeky. Which is how you keep the industry healthy.
And speaking of Tom Spurgeon
This may soak up a little more of your day: Spurgeon recently moved to Columbus to begin running conventions at the Billy Ireland, and the kickoff event of this new initiative is pretty massive.
Now here's your moment of mellow, understated zen:
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