There are times when a strip hits it so squarely that I have very little to add, like today's the Barn.
I've said in the past that printers were sold as an excuse to sell ink, but it was a joke, because they were still expensive enough that this wasn't quite true.
But I bought a new printer a few months ago and the term "printer" is kind of funny because it was an all-in-one and I actually wanted it mostly for a scanner, which means I had it for quite a few months before I tried printing anything.
Whereupon it failed.
Unfortunately, what I needed to print I really needed to have printed, and on business-card forms, and the ones I had were ink-jet but the local copy shops used lasers, so I was going to have to get new forms which were much more expensive and as I was wishing it were different, I saw a $100 printer marked down to $50.
And it not only printed quite well on the ink-jet forms I already had, but the scanner is also better than the one on the $200 printer I had bought before which is now on a closet shelf as my "midnight emergency" equipment.
All of which could have been boiled down to, "Boy, no kidding."
And today's King of the Royal Mounted, which originally ran August 7, 1941 and which I read mostly for the camp factor, came up with something I hadn't thought of in years.
The thing of binding someone in wet rawhide so it would dry, shrink and slowly kill them used to come up back when Westerns were a big thing, though it was usually employed by Indians as torture, not simply to kill someone.
And I don't think you can "soak them in water" sufficiently by just dipping them for a moment like he does.
Nor can I understand, given that he just shot and killed the man he hopes to masquerade as, why he doesn't just shoot King and the Kid, too?
Which, of course, fits into the overall issue of villains who set up elaborate tortures and then leave the room rather than stick around to watch the fun.
But the point really just comes down to the fact that I hadn't seen the old "shrinking rawhide" thing in such a very long time that, had I said, "Remember this?" most people would answer, "No. No, I don't."
So never mind.
And I really liked and agreed with today's Alex, because the stock market really is just a gambling device almost entirely divorced from the actual costs of doing business.
This is like listening to a pair of bookies talking about how they set the odds on the Super Bowl, which has almost nothing at all to do with the relative talents of the teams but is based, rather, on the passions of the suckers gamblers.
Which is to say that it's kind of insider humor and either you didn't need an explanation or the explanation would make your eyes glaze over.
So never mind that either.
And then I came to Lee Judge's cartoon about Trump and his wall, and I thought it would give me a chance to use a gag I've been pondering that the way Trump will avoid making us pay for the wall is by stiffing his contractors like he does on other projects.
And then I read Tom Toles blog in which he made the same point, and, while I guess it's hard to explain this in a world where everybody who owns a pen -- or, failing that, a Wacom tablet -- eagerly draws dead Mary Tyler Moore tossing her tam into the clouds, I wasn't going to use a gag someone else got to first.
(But you should go read what he wrote, which is about more than just that.)
And I've been holding this Adam Zyglis cartoon for a couple of days and was just thinking that I had to use it or delete it (editorial cartoons having a longer but not inexhaustible shelf life than daily strips), but, when I was reading Toles's piece, I also came across this piece also on the Washington Post site which says what I would have, and already have, said.
The critical factor here being that it was written by Jennifer Rubin, the Post's token rightwinger and someone who, until recently, was somewhat insufferable but has since begun to show a traitorous affinity for truth and the good of the nation, which means that this falls into that category I discussed yesterday of things that might comfort the afflicted but won't reach the deplorable half of the basketcases.
However, it's still a good read and one can hope it will help wear down the GOP's refusal to confront the thing they've allowed to happen.
So go read that, too. It goes very well with the Zyglis cartoon.
And then there's Clay Jones, who writes his own commentary for his cartoons and today offers an insightful and significant twist on something I said yesterday.
I noted then that there are a lot of lazy rightwing cartoonists who seem to listen to half an hour of Limbaugh and then draw whatever he said and go home early.
Jones, who apparently has a stronger stomach for tracking lunatic media than I do, has noted something else and so this isn't a case of "you should read this because he said it better than I might have" because it hadn't occurred to me.
But it sure is on my radar now, and it dovetails nicely with Jennifer Rubin's column.
And it's scary as hell.
I'll try to be equally distressing and depressing tomorrow, but in my own words.
The trick is to find a printer that uses the same ink cartridges that your previous printer did. (Well, good luck with that.) If you run an office, you always have several left over.
Posted by: Paul Berge | 01/27/2017 at 09:11 AM
I love Clay Jones' line "I think they should test that system out and see how much they can make that orange monkey dance."
As for printers, there's a new Brother model that claims (and reviewers back this up) to drastically lower the ink cost per copy. We just got one and it seems to work very well; of course, it'll be a while before I can really tell the operating cost.
Posted by: Ed Rush | 01/27/2017 at 04:05 PM