Recent Comments

1. about 11 hours ago on Breaking Cat News

   Further than that. More towards Hood.

2. 1 day ago on Breaking Cat News

   I’ve driven in powder snow before. If you have a vehicle that’s weighed down properly & you drive carefully enough it’s not an issue…

   …unless there is credible reason to believe that there’s ice on the road. For me, ice is a no-go, especially at night.

3. 1 day ago on For Heaven's Sake

   Counterpoint: a lot of folks who have private flags on their property raise them and then leave them raised even if tradition calls for them to lower the flag or even stow it.

   I wouldn’t necessarily attribute what you saw to malice.

4. 1 day ago on Breaking Cat News

   The further south you go in Texas, the less often it snows. I’m north of Austin, and around here it snows so rarely (maybe once a year) that few people know how to drive in it, fewer people have vehicles equipped to handle it even if they did, and most communities don’t have dedicated snow removal equipment. The best anyone can do is cover the roads with a brine solution to prevent icing and then scatter gravel or sand as best as they can after the fact if it does happen.

   For obvious reasons, most places either lock down if ice and snow is seriously expected or go “essential only”. Even the post office will sometimes shut down.

5. 3 days ago on AJ and Magnus

   When I first started I’d have a relative read them over, but I got out of that habit rather quickly.

   The relative in question would hem, haw, go on tangents about different things, fixate, and only then actually tell me whether they liked a column or not. By the time they actually gave me the yes or no, I’d be so distracted and confused trying to figure out what they were saying that I’d be unable to focus on editing or revising.

6. 5 days ago on Calvin and Hobbes

   Back under JFK and LBJ, the Democrats weaponized the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in order to target smaller, poorer radio stations with nuisance complaints, the goal being to force them to stop airing right-wing syndicated talk radio shows and thus prevent people in those areas from hearing the other side.

   This led to a flurry of lawsuits in the 1970s that, in turn, caused the FCC to review the Doctrine in the mid-1980s. This review found that there was reason to believe the FCC never had jurisdiction to implement the Fairness Doctrine in the first place and that it was now dealing with a potential legal catastrophe. As a consequence, the FCC’s head honchos unanimously chose to nix the Doctrine.

   Rush was picked up for national syndication the year after the Doctrine was eliminated.

7. 6 days ago on Rose is Rose

   For people looking at this strip in the present -

   As late as the mid-1990s, many retailers did not have their own in-store brands. Instead, they had “generic” products, with minimalistic packaging. Texas-based grocery store chain H-E-B, for example, would pack such products in white packaging with a sketch of the product.

   These “generic” items were typically kept in a single aisle, regardless of what they were, meaning that you could, say, find dog food, shampoo, and cheese puffs right next to each other.

   Once brand names became popular the generic goods aisles disappeared and the store-branded items were stocked in with the national brand competitors.

8. 7 days ago on AJ and Magnus

   US schools have historically not been very good at teaching critical thinking, the result of teaching standards and educational requirements that try to force teachers to teach to the median and to cram students full of a broad cross-section of material.

   This was largely implemented in the 1950s and 1960s in response to reports that students in various foreign countries were outpacing American students on various international standardized examinations, leading to a national panic. What people didn’t realize, however, is that many of the leading foreign countries were only testing the best of the best, with other students having long since been filtered out into trade education or less prestigious academic paths, while we were trying to test every single person in the belief that all kids were all alike.

   Dubya’s push for standardized exams as a way to determine how effective schools were brought the matter back into the spotlight, and over the last few years various groups on both sides of the political divide have been trying to claim that the other side cares more about indoctrinating kids than actually teaching them.

   It’s a flaming mess.

9. 7 days ago on AJ and Magnus

   In all seriousness, you’d be surprised what typos a person can make.

   I write two columns a week for a family of local newspapers, and there have been several instances to where I didn’t catch a typo until it was already in print.

10. 7 days ago on For Better or For Worse

    They’re breeding faster than people can catch them and either get them to rescue shelters or get them adopted out. The catch / sterilize / release group was helping in that regards, but now there’s no curb.