Comics Rant Part 2

As long as I'm on the subject of comics strips, I'd like to get something off of my chest. I'm fast growing fond of the strip "Ziggy". In previous years, I've lumped it into the same category as "Family Circus" or "Born Loser" - execrable, cynically-exploitative strips that shouldn't exist. Boy, was I wrong (about "Ziggy", I mean - those other strips can still rot in Hades).

My roommates mock my "Ziggy" fondness, but I've since grown an appreciation for the little pantsless wonder. Once a week or so I'll see a fantastic, surreal strip - one that tops nearly everything else in the comics. The turnabout came years ago when I saw Ziggy's doctor, smiling manically, say: "First we'll build up your strength for the x-rays", as Ziggy sat terrified on an exam chair.

Yesterday's strip was in a similar vein:


It's so arbitrary, so strange and sad, that I can't help but to love it. That's when I noticed that Tom Wilson's signature looks suspiciously similar to that of famed surreal cartoonist Gahan Wilson. Could there be a connection? (It's only wishful thinking that they're related - Google says no.) Am I wrong for liking Ziggy?

Blessed Are the Easily Offended

Yesterday, my college paper, the Daily Universe, censored "Dilbert". I remembered the strip from a couple months back, and upon checking the date of the strip noticed that it was a rerun from mid-January. I'm sure that the strip was censored the day before (the whole series is being cut - they did the same thing today). The offending strip that the paper did not run:



If you are acquainted with the Easily Offended, you know that they have a problem with ambiguity. I'm not sure if it's a developmental problem or a lack of exposure to varied sources, but they see no difference between a reference to something and making fun of it. Naturally, yesterday's strip involving "Hay-soos", a quirky co-worker whose request for help echoes something Biblical, is a prime target. When most people read this strip, they get the joke: this guy is gonna die, Asok the intern is plainly thinking. The foreshadowing is clear. Asok is terrified at a dangerous situation.

The Easily Offended re-read the strip a couple times before they get it, but even then they haven't "gotten" it. They get as far as the religious reference, narrow their eyes and pick up their pens. Our college paper apparently decided to humor their stupidity rather than to do the right thing and ignore it. Dang it - we do not negotiate with Stu-peds! (I even read an angry letter in The Oregonian claiming that this strip is offensive to Hispanics. Sigh. . .)

Experience has shown that everytime I fire off a self-righteous letter to the editor it gets published. Today was no exception:


Censorship

If you're going to censor "Dilbert," then at least have the foresight to use a strip that's more than a couple months old - one that most of us won't remember. Censorship works best when the people don't know that it's happening.

An even better idea: stop trying to protect us from innocuous stuff that only a small minority of students will take issue with. I'm all in favor of censoring the strip on account of the quality of its jokes, which haven't been funny for years, but today's strip wasn't anything near offensive enough to justify the swap - apparently switched with another strip you still had lying around.

DUSTIN STEINACKER
Elk Ridge

I'm pleased, both at my unusually-punchy writing and the fact that the paper did not feel a need to introduce grammatical errors into my letter (they allowed "Big Brother" to be hyphenated in the last letter), in fact fixing a couple of errors in the original missive. That's why we have editors.

Anyway, in a campus where professors frequently blur out the curse words on important historical slides, I'm not surprised that something like this happened. Not surprised, but still frustrated.

Spontaneous Food Court Musical

Improv Everywhere is no stranger to wonderful, life-affirming public comedy. These are the guys that did the Grand Central Station Freeze, one of the coolest pranks-bordering-on-performance-art that we've been blessed with in recent times.

With the performance shown in this new clip, they may have stumbled into the Best Thing Ever. Am I going too far with this? Suffice it to say that you have to watch this. You can thank me later. Or not.

If your filter blocks the higher-resolution Revver embedding, you can try the YouTube link. If you can't access YouTube then I don't know what to tell you.

Elmo Madness

There's just something compelling about destroying something cute. Provided this enjoyment is limited to inanimate objects, it's a healthy way to let out aggression and bust a gut laughing.

With that in mind, let's all watch through a series of wonderful Elmo doll deaths. These may be lowbrow, but they're nonetheless some of the funniest clips that I've seen in awhile. Kudos to Tyco for making such sturdy products.


A real trooper, this Tickle Me Elmo keeps plugging away until the end. The unsettling way it lunges and throws itself around seems doubly appropriate when you add flames to the mix.


By far the best of the bunch. I won't spoil the moment. Try to guess how much these people have been drinking.


This one's downright artful. I want to laugh, but the tone is far too mournful.

After so much Elmo death, it seems appropriate to post some clips of the thing in an unthreatening setting. Watch six going at once, or Elmo having an apparent seizure. Again, it's lowbrow, but you have to love it.

Free Info Society's Speech Collection

The Free Info Society has a great downloadable audio speech archive consisting of dozens of speeches by many of the great heroes and villains in our modern time, featuring the voices of Einstein, Ghandi, Edison and even P.T. Barnum. This is great stuff, and more than enough quotes for 100 more Ministry albums.

Emotion-Tinged Games That Transcend "Fun"

Lately I've been all agog over a pair of thought-provoking games by designer/artist Jason Rohrer, treatises on life, death, family and priorities. Like the Nifflas's amazing exploration game Knytt Stories the simple graphics and gameplay add to the effect. Rohrer's focus, however, is not gameplay but inward reflection. On a related note, have you ever been "all agog"? It isn't pretty. I may need physical therapy.

Anyway, the first of these games is the excellent Gravitation. I don't want to give anything about this amazing game away, but I suggest that you play it first, then read some of the comments on this page, especially the comment by Apollos.

Passage was the first game, and hits many of the same bases as Gravitude, but in a different way. It's sweet or melancholy, depending on your point of view. Out of context, Passage even seems nihilistic.

Regarding the Alabama "60 Minutes" Civil Rights Footage Cut

I almost don't want to draw more attention to this article (y'know, in case it really was an equipment malfunction), but the circumstancial evidence that Alabama television station WHNT (or some combination of employees therein) cut civil rights footage and tape depicting their former governor out of a Feb. 24 broadcast seems incontrovertible.

Still, the circumstances of the event point toward a single culprit, not toward station culpability. Consider: following public outcry the station re-broadcast the segment twice over the following days. This is whatcha call a "self-correcting problem."

More Revisionist Nonsense - "Moses Was High on Drugs"

I've long been amused by so-called "revisionist" religion scholars, who attempt to explain Biblical phenomena using modern induction, hand-in-hand with a process known simply as "making things up". The latest example is particularly amusing both in terms of the assumptions being made, and the utter anti-scientific nature of it all.

Benny Shanon, a Jerusalem-based drug researcher is apparently dedicated to proving that mindless "intellectuals" aren't peculiar to Western society. In a recently-published, intentionally-provocative article, Shanon claims that Moses was high on psychedelic drugs, when Moses received the Ten Commandments. Oh, and it was drugs, not fire, that made the bush burn. Occam's razor has led Shanon to conclude that Moses and his thousands of followers experienced a shared hallucination (claps of thunder, a booming voice and so on) as a result of these trips. Fun times for all.

I'd like to see this guy chime in on other Biblical events. The Flood? A year-long worldwide drug free-for-all with massive casualties. The Battle of Jericho? More aptly called the Battle of Benzedrine.

The few papers who have published this article have given Shanon a pass on the fact that he's basically a drug researcher. Pretty much everything that he's ever published is on the psychoatric drug ayahuasca. When a researcher publishes a provocative article to draw attention to his or her research, appropriate context should be given in the article.

What's next? " 'Burning Bush a Consequence of Planetary Warming', Gore states."

Students Suspended For Buying Lunch in Pennies

In protest at what they feel was an unfairly short lunch period, 29 New Jersey students paid for their school lunches in pennies last Thursday. They had rolled the coins, but lunch ladies complained that the time spent counting the coins meant that some students didn't get lunch.

So, why the combined 58 days of detention? Apparently the federal government (through the school system) has the authority to enforce the ethereal concept of "respect". Do any of you remember "respect"? It's an attribute demanded by those ignorant, paranoid members of society who deserve it least. And nobody demands it more than public school teachers, for when they have failed to earn their children's respect they must demand it.

This is all a very roundabout way of asking just how on earth a "public" school erected and maintained by the government through public taxes has the right to curtail free speech.

EDIT: . . . and, by extension, the right to do something obnoxious but benign.

YouTube Follies

Has anybody noticed that YouTube has removed "sort by rating" and "sort by views" functionality? They've kept "date" (i.e. "sort from most recent") searching, but YouTube seems to be bucking for their own destruction. What are they gonna do next? Start filtering copyrighted content?

I think at that point we can all expect YouTube stock to start diving, unless YouTube doesn't have its own stock, in which case we all expect our brokers to start handing us null point exception errors.

When I start doing stuff like this, I know that it's time for bed.