Recent Comments

1. 25 minutes ago on Kliban's Cats

   That’s great! How about this one, from H. Allen Smith’s The Compleat Practical Joker:

   One of [Fred Hawthorn’s] most famous stunts dates back twenty-five years. It has been said that the man who contributed most to the practical joke was Alexander Graham Bell and this joke involves Bell’s invention. At the time Fred Hawthorn pulled it, the telephones in [his town] were almost all of the stand-up receiver-on-the-hook variety. One Sunday ground noontime Fred telephoned the homes of six of his friends. He is, to be sure, an excellent mimic, so he disguised his voice; he said he was from the engineeringdepartment of the telephone company.

   “I’m calling,” he said, “to warn you that some time this afternoon we are going to clean out the telephone lines. Wewould advise you to cover your telephone—tie a sheet over it, or put a pillowcase over it, or even a large paper bag, because we’re going to blow out the line , and if you don’t have yourinstrument covered, there’ll be dirt and grease all over the house.”

   Having made his six calls, Fred waited an hour or so, and then started a tour of the affected households—just casuallydropping in of a Sunday afternoon. In every case he found the telephone covered. Not only that—the folks were staying in the same room with it, keeping their distance, but watchingit closely, waiting for the hiss or roar or whatever would come when the lines were blown out. Most of them had had phone calls during the afternoon, but they had forborne answering, save in the case of Dr. Gerrity. When his phone rang he took the pillowcase off of it, picked up the receiver and without asking who was calling, roared into the mouthpiece:“Good-God-don’t-call-this-number-don’t-you-know-the-phone company’s-blowing-out-the-lines-this-afternoon!

2. 1 day ago on Doonesbury

   “. . . a panel of independent historians of the presidency rate Obamas the 8th greatest. . .”

   Hey, what do independent historians, or other experts, know? Look up “truthiness.”

3. 1 day ago on Doonesbury

   “After he was driven out of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein attempted to have Bush Père assassinated.”

   As I recall, the alleged intended assassins “confessed” their plot after quite a long time of “intensive interrogation” in a third country. Considering how real the “WMDs” were, I was skeptical.

4. 1 day ago on Kliban's Cats

   Not a unique belief. From James Thurber’s My Live and Hard Times, 1933, talking about (as I recall) his aunt:

   “She had an idea that the Victrola might blow up. It alarmed her, rather than reassured her, to explain that the [hand-cranked] phonograph was run neither by gasoline nor by electricity. She could only suppose that it was propelled by some newfangled and untested apparatus which was likely to let go at any minute, making us all the victims and martyrs of the wild-eyed Edison’s dangerous experiments.

   “The telephone she was comparatively at peace with, except, of course, during storms, when for some reason or other she always took the receiver off the hook and let it hang.

   “She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house. It leaked, she contended, out of empty sockets if the wall switch had been left on.

   “She would go around screwing in bulbs, and if they lighted up she would hastily and fearfully turn off the wall switch and go back to her [popular magazines] Pearson’s or Everybody’s, happy in the satisfaction that she had stopped not only a costly but a dangerous leakage. Nothing could ever clear this up for her.”

5. 1 day ago on Tom the Dancing Bug

   FWIW: I’m a Premium subscriber, and get daily emails from GC. I was able to see the four panels of TtDB in the email, but when I clicked on it (to see the comments) all I saw was three heavy-bordered rectangles, all blank except for the last one, which had a printed yellow-background sign: “COMING SOON…”

   I get a mix of “political” and “non-political” comics; this is the first one so far that has something strange with it.

6. 4 days ago on Luann

   “So does the New Yorker.”

   There’s an episode of the great tv series The Good Place in which the demon Michael is going to be punished by his boss Shawn:

   Shawn: I’m just going to throw you in this unmarked room for the rest of eternity. And since it seems you love humans so much, I’ll torture you like one. All you’ll have for entertainment is that giant stack of New Yorker Magazine.

   Michael: Oh come on. You and I both know I’ll never read those.

   Shawn: Of course you won’t. But they’ll just… keep… coming.

   I bet that rang a bell for a lot of former subscribers.

7. 4 days ago on Luann

   (My DVDs of Mad and NatLamp are from the same publisher (can’t remember), but I also have a 3-DVD set of 40 years of Rolling Stone. I haven’t looked at it lately, and I see online that the reader is obsolete and incompatible with current operating systems, so I have to dig the set out and check it.

8. 4 days ago on Luann

   “I have 30 years of Esquire mags.”

   I am convinced that, for a while in the sixties through seventies, Esquire and Rolling Stone had the best journalism around.

   I never cared much for all the men’s fashion features, but Esquire had Garry Wills and Norman Mailer and Gay Talese and the “Dubious Achievement Awards” and Jacob Brackman and Robert Christgau and those great covers by George Lois and Carl Fischer. Wow—I just saw that every issue ever printed is available on classic DOT esquire DOT com.

   Rolling Stone had Hunter Thompson (and Dr Raoul Duke) and Tom Wolfe on The Right Stuff and Dave Marsh and Matt Taibbi (well, later) and Joe Eszterhas.

9. 4 days ago on Luann

   “I also miss National Lampoon.”

   I was able to pick up a DVD containing all copies of Mad Magazine (post-comic) from 1952 to 2005. I also have (somewhere) a DVD containing National Lampoon’s “golden years.” Both are hard to find, but not impossible.

   One of my favourite NatLamp pieces was a parody of Mad, bemoaning how it had degenerated since the original days. The centrepiece was a spot-on parody of a Mad parody of Citizen Kane—William Gaines dies uttering a single word, and the reporter interviews the usual gang of idiots (e.g., Harvey Kurtzman in the Joseph Cotten role) to find out what “satire” meant to Gaines.

10. 4 days ago on Doonesbury

    “Didn’t some tribes cross the Bering Strait when it was still a land bridge?”

    There was a great National Lampoon poster with a very very deep perspective—what we now call Mexico in the foreground and the Bering Strait in the far far background. A thin line of people were coming across the Strait, dropping their wide conical hats in a pile, and being issued feathered headdresses from another pile.