The joke here is that, if I had used pen-and-ink instead of doing this on the computer, the results, given my artistic skills, would be pretty much the same.
The point is more serious, though only my opinion and perhaps more of a kvetch than a critique.
The old guys in the backshop at one of my papers told me stories of the switch from hot lead to offset back around 1972.
While the new building, with its new press, was being constructed, the company took over a conference room at a local hotel and set up typesetting computers in it.
These were the first computers of any sort that these guys had encountered, and quite a change from the mechanical typesetting machinery they were used to working on.
But, like good gearheads everywhere, they were fascinated by the technology and enjoyed learning how to use it.
So each day, their shift would begin at the newspaper offices, where they would, as usual, set up the next day's paper.
Then they would go over to the hotel and do it again, only on the new equipment.
By the time the new building was completed and the move made, they were adept on the typesetting computers and able to work at the pace needed to output a newspaper on schedule.
For them, there was a lot of effort and overtime involved, but, for readers, the switchover was seamless.
I say this because a number of cartoonists are switching from pen-and-ink to Wacoms or similar tablets, and, in some cases, I know this because they talk about it.
In others, I know this because their cartoons suddenly look like the one above.
This, unfortunately, is most obvious when their pen-and-ink work was particularly delicate and detailed, magnifying the loss.
I truly wish -- and I say this with all positive thoughts and in good faith without naming names -- that cartoonists would adopt that practice of doing the same job old-style and then new-style until the two versions are indistinguishable.
Or until you are convinced that you are a good pen-and-ink artist and won't achieve that level of excellence any other way.
There's certainly no shame in remaining an artisan and dedicated to what you do best.
After all, Michael Jordan turned out to be better at basketball than baseball, and, while noone thinks any the less of him for having tried it, nobody thinks any the less of him for having returned to the hardwood.
Speaking of technology
I don't know how things are going down in Lockhorns Land, but people up here seem pretty reluctant to use a lot of technology, which I find curious.
I'm in New England and so you might expect some flinty old Yankees who jest don't cotten to new-fangled gizmos.
But we're home to, and largely dominated by, an Ivy League university and a major medical center, so we've got plenty of people here who work with high tech stuff all day.
Yet I can drive past a line of cars at the teller window of the bank's drive-up and go straight to the ATM, and the same had been true at the grocery store until recently.
Times, however, are changing.
Now, as in the cartoon, there are lines at the self-checkout and it's apparent that the cashiers were hardly the slowdown, and that people who are clueless in the regular checkout lines are no more clueful when left on their own.
Not only do they scan each item as if they were handling an unexploded bomb, but they seem to be taken by surprise at the end when they discover that they need to take out their wallet and pay for their purchases.
The system worked a lot better when nobody used it.
As long as I'm ranting
The Barn touches off an old favorite: The way hardcore originalists get their knickers knotted over the idea that things can be "quite unique" or "somewhat unique."
"Unique means one of a kind!" they thunder, insisting that a thing is either unique or it is not.
Which is nonsense.
Stan is right in that "they say" no two snowflakes are alike, and Rory is right to doubt it.
Snowflakes form one tiny crystal at a time and, given the infinite number of ways those crystals might form, there are an infinite number of shapes a snowflake might take.
Theoretically.
But the concept of infinity itself is theoretical. Although we cannot measure the size of the universe, it does have a limit.
Theoretically.
In the real world, context applies, and, while Stan was speaking theoretically, Rory's pragmatism has its place.
The real world is a line, with the theoretical concept of "infinity" at one end and the theoretical concept of "uniqueness" at the other. Everything in the universe forms a bell curve between, but not tangential to, those points, given that you can't touch something that doesn't exist.
And, yes, each snowflake is unique. Fact is, if you found two flakes that appeared to be identical even under an optical microscope, an electron microscope would find differences between them, just as it would find differences between two pennies or two peas from the same pod.
On that level, everything is unique, and so the word has no real meaning.
Meanwhile, on a far-less-than-subatomic level, when you come home at the end of the day to an aggregation of snowflakes such as this, and must examine it with a shovel rather than a microscope, the flakes are not in the least unique.
Or theoretical.
In the real world, things can only be unique by degrees, and in context, and so to say that something is "somewhat unique" or "quite unique" or "strikingly unique" is the only sensible way to use the word.
And notice that I didn't refer to these humorless, hidebound arbiters of language as "grammar nazis."
This hasn't got a goddam thing to do with grammar.
It's more about the ears.
And not theoretically.
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