One of the fundamental philosophies here (obviously) is that a good cartoon makes you think beyond the few seconds it takes to read it. Whether or not you actually "laugh out loud," there's some element of the piece that you identify with or it doesn't work at all.
Between Friends, for instance: I sometimes envy people who can shut down their working selves at five o'clock and go home, because I operate from a command center of sorts, with the computer and TV both within reach of my swivel chair. The TV never comes on before five, but the computer never goes off until bedtime.
I save routine tasks for evening, because, by then, I'm fried enough that assembly-style editing tasks in front of the tube are about all I'm good for. But I can't put on a thriller because my attention will be too divided to follow anything that complex. It's really kind of pathetic.
I console myself by remembering that, back in my 9-to-5 days, I used to go into the office at odd hours anyway. I once asked one of my kids if he thought I was a workaholic and he said, "You mean to the point where it interferes with your social life?" and then just started laughing.
Out loud.
And today's Blabbing Baboon took me back to those 9-to-5 days in the newsroom. When my ex had the kids for Christmas, I'd work and give someone else the holiday.
The duty always included the mandatory "Who else is working?" story, which usually involved the hospital and law enforcement.
But I'd try to get beyond the obvious and just drive around and see who was out there. One year, I dropped in on the local Chinese takeout and included them in the story.
From then on, whenever I went in there, the manager would slip an extra spring roll into my order, which was technically not in line with journalistic ethics, but she was sweet and I understood and it was only a spring roll, after all.
But a few years later, I did a Sunday spread on Chinese immigrants in our community for which I interviewed a Protestant minister, a married couple who were administrators at the local college, and a family that ran a sit-down Chinese restaurant.
It was a fun, interesting piece, but, after that I had to stop eating at that restaurant, because the cultural affinity for expressing friendship went way over the single-spring-roll level.
While I was never kept from paying for my dinner, I'd wind up with so many extras -- like being stopped at the cash register and handed an entire pizza-box sized package of Montreal-style dessert pastries -- that it really did become an ethical embarrassment, particularly since I genuinely liked the people and couldn't insult them by declining their generosity.
Speaking of restaurants, Ed Stein has a new piece up at Sleeper Avenue, recalling a stint on the grill in his younger days and a boss he worked for of the type all young workers should encounter.
Of all the non-writing jobs I've had, my relatively brief time working a grill was my favorite, and he is particularly right-on in this:
"When the orders were piling up on the wire and I was in rhythm, I felt like an orchestra conductor. I was a true artist."
It took nothing to complete orders during slow times, but when there was a rush, it was, well, a "rush" indeed to have a number of orders on the grill at the same time and to be able to push them out with each item on each plate in each order all ready to go at the same time.
One of the fundamental signs of a good cook is coordinating the finish times of each dish, but short order grill work jumps that into hyperdrive.
His story also reminded me of eldest son's summer working the food concession at the beach, where he took pains to not only polish his French but to memorize terminology like the flavors of Slurpies.
This was critical for a 17-year-old boy, because the beach in Plattsburgh is less than an hour from Montreal and, once you became identified as le gars qui parle français, the line in front of your station would fill with girls from a city with a Continental attitude towards beachwear.
Which I mention because, if you read Ed's story, you'll see that some things are universal not simply at grills, but among the young boys who work them.
And to end with a bit of history, Bizarro got more of a wince than a chuckle today, because what Piraro presents as a joke, Czar Nicholas I saw as a way to scare the revolutionary spirit of 1849 out of a group of Russian dissidents, including Dostoevsky.
They were condemned to death, brought out and the first three tied to the posts in front of the firing squad. After a moment, a reprieve was announced and the group was sent to Siberia for several years of hard labor.
Which traumatic experience not only explains Dostoevsky's dyspeptic view of life in general, but his mocking disdain of Turgenev's attempt at journalism, The Execution of Tropmann, in which he faints at the foot of the guillotine.
Dostoevsky responded with Karmazinov, a transparently similar character, in "The Devils," providing comic relief in an otherwise grim novel:
A year before, I had read an article of his in a review ... He described the wreck of some steamer on the English coast, of which he had been the witness, and how he had seen the drowning people saved, and the dead bodies brought ashore. All this rather long and verbose article was written solely with the object of self-display. One seemed to read between the lines: "Concentrate yourselves on me. Behold what I was like at those moments. What are the sea, the storm, the rocks, the splinters of wrecked ships to you? I have described all that sufficiently to you with my mighty pen. Why look at that drowned woman with the dead child in her dead arms? Look rather at me, see how I was unable to bear that sight and turned away from it. Here I stood with my back to it; here I was horrified and could not bring myself to look; I blinked my eyes—isn't that interesting?"
Thank god we've no journalists like that any more.
Now here's your combination commentary on journalism and tribute to George Martin:
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