Recent Comments

1. about 22 hours ago on Tank McNamara

   Typerwriters are still useful for, oh, typing out mailing labels. My label printer has decided that it doesn’t like the latest OSes on my main computers. The typewriter doesn’t care. I might replace the label printer if I get sufficiently annoyed, but until then the typewriter rules.

2. about 23 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   I used to work for a newspaper. A newspaper is a device used to deliver advertising to a mass audience. Any news has to be made to fit around the ads. Anyone who doubts this should merely consult the Sunday edition of his/her local paper… if their local paper still exists, the Internet in general and Google and social media (especially Facebook) and the likes of Craigslist have eaten newspapers’ lunch. Or just look at the local edition of the Yellow Pages. Seriously, when the paper got planned, ad pages were planned first, and news was placed around the ads. We had a seven-unit web press, so color pages had to be planned out. And most color pages were ad pages. A two- or four-page full-color spread in the Sunday edition for a ‘Major Sale’ at ‘Big Department Store’ could be quite expensive. We bought newsprint in 5-ton rolls and ink in 55-gallon drums. That ain’t cheap. There would be no news on the glorious full-color pages except the front page and the lead sports page, and, in hurricane season, the weather map. Full-color was for ads.

   When I was at the paper, in the ‘90s, ads from major department stores and the classifieds paid for the paper, other ads were profit. Major department stores have problems in the Age of Amazon, and classifieds have imploded because of Craigslist & friends. And there simply aren’t enough other ads.

3. about 24 hours ago on Bloom County

   A current candidate for state office in North Carolina has spoken out in favor of slavery. Use the search engine of your choice (I like DuckDuckGo) and look up ‘North Carolina’, ‘Robinson’, and ‘slavery’. (Go Comics won’t let me post URLs. Bah, humbug.)

   Yes, he’s a Trumpanzee, loud and proud.

   You can’t make this stuff up.

4. 2 days ago on Lio

   That’s pretty big for a pterosaur (pterodactyls were just one species of pterosaur, and a smaller one, with a wingspan of about a metre) and most of the bigger pterosaurs, especially including the huge ones with the 10-metre wings, were mostly fish eaters. They were also mostly covered in something close to hair. The 10-metre wingspan pterosaurs were the largest animals to be able to fly and might weigh up to a quarter ton.

   Feeding a large pterosaur, or even one the size of a pterodactyl, by hand is unwise for the same reasons why feeding a tiger or a wolf by hand is unwise. If a quarter ton of hairy warm-blooded reptile-like flying death machine decides that the bald ape holding the food is part of the meal plan, changing his mind would probably involve a .450 or .470 Double Nitro Express rifle. Or a Barrett .50.

5. 2 days ago on Bloom County

   Some wanted, desperately, to be part of the ‘Kool Krowd™’, to be a ‘Rebel Without A Clue’, and to ‘Look Holywood’. Personally, I was a Clint Eastwood fan, and I noticed how there were cigs all over the ‘Dollar Western’ movies (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and the Ugly) but Clint only actually puffed on one for reasons of plot, and even then just a few times, notably in The Good The Bad and the Ugly. Apparently, Clint hated smoking. If not smoking was good enough for The Man With No Name, it was good enough for me.

6. 3 days ago on Stone Soup

   Valium won’t be enough. She needs Thorazine, stat.

7. 3 days ago on Stone Soup

   Then they run Happy News™ until something bleeds, somewhere.

8. 3 days ago on Stone Soup

   If it bleeds, it leads.

9. 3 days ago on FoxTrot Classics

   In this particular case, not long enough.

   It could have been worse. It could have been Episode I: The Phantom Movie.

10. 4 days ago on The Boondocks

    It ain’t the nose that the AIM-9 will lock onto, it’s the other end. Fox Two! Fox Two with Sidewinder!