Frazz by Jef Mallett for March 04, 2021

If you say so.

He’s obviously never ventured down to the comments section of THIS site. ;)

Some of us DO take our comics seriously.

One of the “perks” at a place I worked was “all the coffee you want”. The programmers began pushing for an espresso machine, which eventually did happen. One of my coworkers, a skinny guy who had one of those “some part of my body is always moving” things would come in and make himself a quadruple shot that he put into his coffee mug, and then went off to drink it as he worked. He had another after lunch… and often yet another before the drive home.

I always wondered what he’ be like without the near-lethal dose of caffeine.

The Fourth Wall is dented but still stands.

That tinkling sound you hear is Mallett shattering of the third wall. Which is good because that’s where the humor in this strip lies. The “joke” isn’t about coffee at all.

I make coffee in a rarely seen for sale and now antique 5-cup dripolator. One cup at a time with rounded scoop and a cup of water. Tastes just fine. No need to start cutting into my car payment to pay for commercially bred alternatives or the hype that seems to be necessary to assure a line of buyers that they are on the upward escalator of life. There’s a lot to be said for the comfort of old habits when one reaches a certain time of life.

coffee is not a joke, unless you buy it at starbucks: then you are the joke.

I drink 600 ml of coffee a day. It says so right there on my coffee mug. It also has the molecular diagram for caffeine on it. I also made this comment on Andertoons today. It’s good to recycle.

Over on the food page, they try to keep the coverage fare and balanced.

My take is that to some degree excess is a matter of opinion. As an example – I tend to do most of the cooking in my house (to the degree such gets done vs. Freshlys or take out or whatever in a typical busy household) and I prefer to work with really sharp kitchen knives. So, probably once every 6 weeks or so, I start the cycle again of sharpening them all. I do it by hand, and get all the way to a polished edge that can free slice onion skin paper. That may seem to be excess to the typical amateur cook who is chopping vegetables – but when they use one of mine they appreciate that it is sharp. Is that excess? Perhaps it is in the eye of the beholder.

How about the opinions on these comic “pages”, Frazz ?

Learned about making coffee in the service. All the younger Airmen (and women) would be volunteered to man the coffee bar for a week at a wack (my first assignment was in a big shop). We’d have two of those 30 cup percolators going all the time.

I learned to drink coffee when I did my first mid shift. And I quickly went from adding a ton of cream and sugar to drinking it black.

Spent a couple of years in Italy and the first time I hit a coffee bar I noticed large bowls of sugar every where I looked. When I got my coffee it came in a little tiny cup, what we Americans call espresso. They didn’t call it espresso, they just called it coffee… anyway, I took a sip and promptly added as much sugar as there was coffee. That stuff will kick your ass if you aren’t paying attention. At work I continued to drink American style coffee and laughed with my Italian coworkers as they teased me for drinking that watered down brown stuff.

These days I don’t work anymore but still brew up a bit a coffee most days. The pot says it holds 5 cups, but it only fills my regular coffee cup twice… and I still drink it black. No Starbucks for me.

He doesn’t make coffee, who cares. Neither of you idiots make coffee, either. Also, you’ve both never made what I would call a “joke”.

Extreme opposites on the opinion page are not a balance, rather it means one or more of them is very misinformed.

Jef Mallet’s Blog Log

Oh, now, that took a grim turn, didn’t it?

History time: I was finally able to get a foothold in editorial cartooning just as my style of it was turning into the last thing the newspaper industry wanted: thought-provoking and expensive. The days of a newspaper having a guy on staff who just did those cartoons were clearly numbered as they figured out that they could save a lot of money using syndicated stuff, and save a lot of grief by not taking a real stand on anything. Better yet, they could select two syndicated cartoons representing opposite extremes and call it “balance,” much like weaving all over the road on your Schwinn and calling it “riding in a straight line.” To make things worse, cartoonists who still wanted to make a living were figuring this out, and started courting syndication to supplement their dwindling income and/or hedge their dwindling security. And possibly feed their dwindling egos with a more national audience. And the market was in the extremes. It was hard to blame them, or even fault them — I don’t know if it sped us into the situation I’m griping about or if they were simply hopping a ride on the faster lemming. Either way, the result was fewer cartoonists and, OK, we won’t say worse cartoons, but I will say the ratio of cartoons provoking thought and cartoons reinforcing existing biases shifted somewhat tectonically.

That’s a sad ending, isn’t it? No, it is not. It’s not an ending, anyway. Because sometimes it seems like an awful lot of media outlets aren’t even bothering to try and fake balance anymore.

On the other hand, I got to do editorial cartoons my way for a few years as part, not all, of my job with a small and very good chain’s state capital bureau. When I could see my bureau was doomed for corporate reasons, then I turned my attention to syndication, but for a different type of cartoon, and that seems to have worked out well. I’m still at it, and I might even provoke some thought once in a while.

I never drank coffee during my editorial-cartooning years; I discovered good coffee three years after Frazz debuted. I don’t know if that’s relevant, but it’s weirdly symmetrical.