Scott Adams changes his tune?

Another victim of the matriarchy

It was clever of Scott Adams to include his e-mail address in his Dilbert comic strip. The readers are a constant source of grist for the cartoonist's mill, enabling Adams to demonstrate the existence of endless variations on the theme of corporate mis-, mal-, and nonfeasance. I long expected Dilbert to grow stale over the years, but I've been pleased to discover how well it has held up. I make a point of reading it every day.

Last week I picked up a copy of Your New Job Title is “Accomplice,” the latest in an endless stream of Dilbert compilations. Since I'm the kind of guy who always peruses the front matter, I took a minute to skim over the cartoonist's introduction. It contained a passage that took me by surprise:

Eventually, corporate America excreted me. My bosses explained that I was unqualified for any sort of promotion because I had boring DNA and a scrotum. That's a true story, by the way. Reverse discrimination was a big thing in California in the nineties. And for what it's worth, that was not the first time my scrotum had caused me trouble.

This seemed a slight departure from Adams's previous accounts of his departure from Pacific Bell. Consider, for example, what he told Inc. in 1996, a mere year after he received his walking papers:

I'd told all of my bosses I would resign if they ever felt my costs exceeded my benefits. One of the benefits, of course, was the positive PR. I get interviewed often. Anyway, in the spring of 1995 I got a new boss, and I reiterated my offer to resign if asked. A few weeks later he asked. The reason given was budget constraints. I'm pretty sure it was a local management decision, not one from the top.

Adams gives no hint that he was cashiered because of genital deficiencies. Perhaps he was concealing the sexist policies that forced him out of corporate America and now feels that masculine empowerment has freed him to tell the whole truth. I rather doubt that. He has never been too tongue-tied to express himself on such matters in the past. Adams infamously compared women who espouse equal pay for equal work to children who beg for candy. His credentials as a men's rights advocate seem bright and shiny, buffed to a high and slightly belligerent gloss.

I noted in particular the claim that California was a hotbed of women versus men “reverse discrimination” in the 1990s. From my own perspective and recollection, it seems to me that Adams's claim is untrue. In the decade of the nineties I was in the midst of academia, the unapologetic ground zero of diversity and unashamed “political correctness.” Our college president during that period was (gasp!) a woman. She presided over the hiring of six tenure-track faculty members for the mathematics department. Four of them were men. She was doing a remarkably poor job of oppressing the guys.

Proof by anecdote!

A failure of imagination

Non carpe diem

If it weren't Saturday, my reaction would have been different. Cartoonists like Stephan Pastis have confessed that Saturday is where weak comic strips go to die—or at least to be overlooked. If Scott Adams had scheduled the Dilbert strip to run on a Monday, I would have perceived it as the first installment in a promising new story arc, with four sequels to anticipate. Since, however, it appeared in Saturday's newspaper, the strip was evidently considered a dud, or at best a squib with a small pop. Here's the key panel:

Dilbert replies that his pointy-haired boss should not have high expectations for Dilbert's first draft. The reader can now emit a short, dry chuckle and move on. Unless Adams surprises me on Monday, however, this is a missed opportunity. Isn't the creation of content-free responses to awkward questions a significant corporate survival skill? Consider the following hypothetical question, which we can anticipate in general form if not in specific:

Q: What are your plans for NOUN? We can't afford to let our competition get ahead of us on NOUN.

Really, now. How difficult could it be to answer that question? Try this on for size (and impenetrability):

A: I'm glad you asked that. Our planning task force has a subgroup specifically devoted to NOUN and will be rolling out a timeframe for NOUN implementation that will maintain our competitive edge. We have been aware of the importance of NOUN for quite some time and have allocated resources for appraisal of NOUN options from our future projects initiative. We feel that we are ahead of the curve on NOUN and will be able to respond quickly to rival NOUN implementations.

You can't go too far wrong with that, can you?

Q: Are you ready to VERB? Your master plan does not address VERBing anywhere.

You already have the idea now. The answers write themselves:

A: Actually, the master plan has provisions for seizing opportunities for creative departures in new directions, implicitly including VERBing. You may be unaware that [random name] has specialized training in how to VERB and can bring those skills on-line in the near-term to establish our presence in VERBing in a high-profile and significant way. This is especially true because [repeat name] is the nexus of an inter-departmental strategy team that can facilitate cross-division implementation of VERBing options where those options are most appropriately tailored to enhance high achievement relative to our success metrics.

That speaks volumes, no? (No.)

With all of his experience in corporate bureaucracy, Scott Adams could easily have cobbled together a sequence of four superficially responsive non-responses for a series of strips. Alas, it looks like a missed opportunity.

I suppose it would be fun to add a couple of examples with more of an educational orientation, but I used all of those up in our latest accreditation report.

Comics crushed on the wheel of time

Déjà vu with Lucy Van Pelt

In place of the “eternal feminine,” Lucy from the Peanuts comic strip provides us with the “eternal fussbudget.” This week she spoke a truth laden with irony from the funny pages of the newspaper. The irony was new, generated by the fact that Lucy's words were not. Here is the installment from January 2, 2013, where Lucy is fussing about the supposedly “new” year.

The year, of course, is not the only thing that was “used.” For the uninitiated, the giveaway could be found in the label Classic Peanuts, the sign that Charles Schulz may be long gone but his undead comic has been sucked into the endless time-vortex of the modern comics page. Classic Peanuts had plenty of company. Lynn Johnston's For Better or Worse was shocked back into life with a brisk slap of the defibrillator paddles. The rebooted strip went into reruns, recycling the original strips (ostensibly with some modest editorial oversight and emendations by Johnson.)

At least these recycled comic strips are the actual products of the bylined cartoonists. The late Schulz and the retired Johnston really did write those gags and create those drawings. If you're fortunate(?) enough to have The Wizard of Id in your local paper, you'll see that it still carries the bylines of its late creators, Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, although it has long been in the hands of the uncredited Jeff Parker. It's not really a secret, of course, but it's still a little weird that the current Parker prefers to work without attribution. Perhaps he prefers that today's readers blame the original creators for today's pallid and deracinated version.

Johnny Hart's other brain-child, B.C. is similarly being kept alive by a distribution syndicate willing to settle for the imitative work of the creator's descendants. It works, right? Otherwise, we would not be seeing the cavalcade of strips that will not die: Dick Tracy has outlived Chester Gould, Blondie lives forever although Chic Young is gone, Mark Trail continues his trail-blazing without the help of Ed Dodd, Dennis the Menace still bothers Mr. Wilson in the absence of Hank Ketcham, and Frank and Ernest were inherited by the son of Bob Thaves. This is by no means an exhaustive list, even if it is a bit exhausting.

I admit that I usually smile when I see Classic Peanuts, even though I often recall having seen the strip before. The work of Charles Schulz holds up to repeated readings. In fact, it's usually better than the “new” strips cobbled together from the remnants of the work of the original creators. These latter offerings are often vigorless revenants that stalk the comics pages, their Frankensteinian stitches showing. If you listen closely, you can hear their sad pleas: “Brains! Brains!” But those brains are long gone.

Victoria Jackson is not crazy

Not when you grade her on the (extreme) right curve

Depending on your scale of measurement, your conclusions can vary dramatically. For example, suppose you're trying to evaluate the sanity of Victoria Jackson, the Saturday Night Live alumna who has found a new life—if not happiness—as a right-wing pundit. Do you measure her against an absolute scale or a relative one? She comes out a lot better if you gauge her against the fringe-centered standards of Free Republic.

Recently Jackson announced that the Islamic group known as the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated “the highest levels” of government in Washington, D.C., including the White House! When Jackson's claim was posted at Free Republic, the first commenter said, ”I'm inclined to agree with her.”

A dissenter weighed in with a cautionary note: “Umm, don't we usually dismiss the pronunciamentos from Hollywood airheads out of hand?”

He was promptly denounced for his use of a foreign word.

Another Freeper chivalrously leaped to Jackson's defense: “She played an airhead of SNL but she isn’t one in real life.”

Perhaps he has not seen her current act. The crazy seeps right out of the video.

Garfield does math

And so do we

I always look at the comic sections of the newspapers I read, but I don't necessarily look at all of the comics. “Pearls Before Swine” always gets my attention, as does “Bizarro,” but others need to do something special to draw me in—like sprinkle their panels with numbers. “Garfield” did exactly that yesterday. (Is it true, as Stephan Pastis says, that cartoonists prefer to bury their weakest efforts in their Saturday strips?)

Everyone realizes, of course, that a giant mutant 98-year-old lady would be physically impossible, despite such earlier documentary evidence as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Galileo's square-cube law should have put that notion to rest (but Hollywood prefers to honor that law in the breach). But let's allow Garfield the same leeway that movie producers get. Let's accept that a giant 98-year-old lady is driving her 32-story 1965 Bonneville into town, threatening the entire community.

The 1965 Bonneville was a gigantic (in its own way) vehicle over 18 feet in length. Its height was about 4.5 feet (with allowances for tire pressure and passenger load). In the comic strip, the giant old lady's Bonneville is said to be scaled up to 32 stories in height. While architects are allowed quite a bit of variation in what constitutes a “story,” we can use 10 feet as a reasonable mid-range measure. In other words, the giant old lady's car is 320 feet tall, or (divide by 4.5) over 71 times as tall as a regular Bonneville. That's big.

And if your 98-year-old great-grandmother is five foot two, she'd be nearly 370 feet tall if she were scaled up to be the little old lady in the car.

Scary!

Now, about that turn-signal thing. Garfield says it's 16 feet tall (and blinking, of course). A look at the back end of a '65 Bonneville shows us that the rear lights were not quite half as tall as your basic license plate. If we call it 4 inches (being just a little generous—I don't have a Bonneville handy to actually measure), scaling it up by a factor of 71 results in 284 inches—or nearly 24 feet.

But Garfield said 16 feet. Oh, oh! But you know, that's probably good enough for the funny papers. Let's give him this one.

I believe in a higher power

Even Homer nods

The all-knowing Shphinx (a.k.a. Mooch with a towel on his head), sometimes falls just a bit short in his oracular pronouncements. This was quite evident in his declaration concerning the solid, low-temperature state of water.

No, it's not H₂O squared. It's H₂O cubed.

Mooch should have said “to the third power” in the third panel.

Nearly there

I saw this cartoon about teabagger politics on Daily Kos this morning and felt an irresistible impulse. For some reason, I just had to reprint it. (I wonder why.)

Cartoon character replaced?

What is Beck, after all?

Non Sequitur's Danae has dug out Lucy Van Pelt's old counseling booth and refurbished it into a pundit station. She senses an opportunity in the imminent departure of Glenn Beck from Fox News and is offering herself as a replacement. Nature abhors a vacuum, you know. (Is that why Wiley Miller depicts her father pushing around the old Hoover? Subliminal!) Danae's scheme seems fair: One cartoon character for another. She apparently has a good grasp of suitable topics, too, since Beck and science (or, more broadly, “reality”) were never comfortable with each other.

How you say—?

Tongued pickles

I heard one of my colleagues tell a student during office hours that he was “spot on.” It made my antennas quiver. Later I caught him using the word “rubbish.” My suspicions grew. Then he mentioned his brother. That tore it.

According to my colleague, his brother was named “Harry,” but when he said it, it did not sound like “hairy.” No, when he said it, it came out this way: /ˈhær.i/

But true-blue Americans say it this way: /ˈher.i/

See the difference? (I guess I really mean “hear.”) You can listen to the corresponding sound clips at the on-line edition of the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary.

I braced my colleague in the faculty room and demanded to know which of his parents was the British one. He confessed. His father was a son of Albion and the source of the Britishisms that had crept into his American son's manner of speaking. I knew it! (It was either that, or my colleague was excessively fond of PBS rebroadcasts of British comedies.)

I was reminded of such peculiarities of spoken language when reading the comics page this morning. The Frank and Ernest strip gives us an example of three homonyms—or does it?

How say you? Does “Dalai Lama” come out as “Dolly Lama” when you say it? How about Salvador Dali's name? I think I say all of them differently.

But I'm kind of weird when it comes to language. As is that colleague of mine.

Juxtapositional humor

Trailing off in a joke

I don't think of myself as someone who follows the Mark Trail comic strip, although I glance at it when surveying the comics page. Its appeal escapes me and its survival mystifies me. Mark's current adventure involves taking a little boy camping in the woods (not too sure about the wisdom of that) and saving the boy's puppy from poachers who were using it for bait to attract alligators. Oh, and the puppy knocks over a wobbly car jack and traps the little boy under the car.

Note to parents and guardians: Do not let Mark Trail take care of your children or pets.

So now Mark needs to perform yet another rescue. He's desperately hunting for something with which to lift the car and save the little boy. He dashes off to a nearby abandoned store, breaks in, and finds—wait for it—an old jack! (Yay!)

But look at the climactic panel from the strip for December 12, 2009. See the artist's signature bubble? To what exactly is Trail referring when he says “old jack”? This may be the best joke to appear in the Mark Trail strip in quite some time. Is it deliberate? (What do you think?)

Republican logic strikes again

Let's do the Time Warp again!

Like George Herbert Walker Bush confronting a supermarket price scanner in the 1992 political legend, cartoonists live in a bubble of retarded time, only they're acutely aware of it. There's not much they can do about it. The panels they draw today, the dialog they letter today—none of it will appear until having been properly aged. The lag-time is built into the process of cartoon publication.

As the Los Angeles Times reports this morning, Garry Trudeau has cast caution to the winds and declared Barack Obama the winner in his Doonesbury strip for Wednesday, November 5, the day after the election. While comic-page editors at newspapers across the country scratch their heads as they decide whether to run the presumptuous strip, Trudeau is not wringing his hands over his reputation if he turns out to be wrong. As he told the press, “I'd be a lot more worried about the country than the strip.”

Naturally, the news media contacted the McCain campaign for a reaction. The Times published a snarky comment from McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds, who said, “We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame.”

Are you laughing yet? Please recall that this is the campaign spokesperson for John McCain, the candidate who three weeks ago said in Virginia Beach, “We're six points down. The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes.... My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them!” Apparently Bounds is merely reflecting the kind of logic that is pervasive in the McCain campaign. (But who, of course, could blame them? Much of the national media spun every incident as “good for McCain” during the first months of the election year.)

Let's gently parse the statement of Mr. Bounds. He said that the campaign would like the Doonesbury strip predicting Obama's victory to be as predictive as the strip has been “lame.” We can take it as read—can't we?—that Tucker and his buddies really regard Doonesbury as a lame comic strip. Therefore, by Tucker's own statement, lame = predictive. It predicts Obama. Oops!

Nice thinking there, Tucker!

Natura facit saltus

Up, up, and away!

What's your reaction to Tony Carrillo's F-Minus comic strip today? I grinned and chuckled. Yeah, damn that evolution, anyway! Of course, my amusement was derived from the cartoonist's sense of the absurd. Evolution just doesn't work that way. It's funny because it's false.

Now imagine a creationist looking at the same cartoon: “Ha! That's pretty funny! See how stupid evolutionists must be to believe stuff like this?” It's funny because it's true (in its depiction of a creationist's view of evolution).

How nice it is when we can laugh together! Well, at the same time, at least.

Hole in the head

Just as we suspected

Today's installment of Pearls before Swine by Stephan Pastis offers a compelling explanation for an otherwise inexplicable contemporary phenomenon. Pig has been plagued by the rebellion of his brain, which has been fed up in recent weeks with Pig's chronic neglect of its intellectual nourishment. While Pig seems to function about as well without his brain as before, it could be a problem if he ever decides to start thinking again. Pig's brain explains that the problem is not Pig's alone.


Thirty-four percent? Where did Pastis get that number? And why does Goat say it explains a lot? My own brain has a theory. Look at the following list, paying special attention to the CNN and WNBC results. You know, I think Goat is right!

Equal time for idiocy

Teach the contradiction

Once again the San Francisco Chronicle's ace cartoonist Don Asmussen is on the job with his Bad Reporter strip. The notorious Creation Museum may not be as cutting edge as its sponsors would have us believe! Today Asmussen investigates the controversy regarding dinosaurs: Did they coexist with human beings? Did the dinosaurs live long enough to wear extinct fashions?

And what's the big deal about science, when myth is more popular? Are cavemen today's perfect pitchmen? Is the Aflac mascot actually one of the Mighty Ducks? Asmussen homes in on the issue:


Meanwhile, it seems only fair that television commercials be given equal time in school with the crazy “theories” of scientists. After all, which are more interesting to today's students? Now that Geico has a persuasive presentation on the life of early man, we can expect more breakthroughs in the near future. We already know that marauding Visigoths actually just wanted to know “What's in your wallet?” and it seems likely that Alexander Graham Bell's famous words were really, “Watson, can you hear me now?”

Science. It's not just for reality anymore.

An act of superstition

From bad to worse

What is April, that thou art mindful of her?

Psalm 8:4 [redacted]

---

April is unhappy that her parents are going to uproot her by moving into a new house. She is so unhappy that she becomes a regular little drama queen, raging against the unfairness of life and fate. She wishes really hard that the universe would intervene on her behalf. Like any sufficiently myopic egoist, she marvels at the power she possesses when circumstances appear to answer her call to postpone her dreaded relocation.

Now that her wish has come true, at least in part, April is ridden with guilt. Wouldn't you feel guilty if you manipulated the stuff of reality to suit your own selfish ends? Of course. April, however, has a level-headed friend named Eva who counsels her to be of good cheer: “There's no such thing as curses.” That's a comfort, isn't it? Let's cast aside all superstition and rest easy in the face of the odd coincidence or two.

But then cartoonist Lynn Johnston throws us a curve in the last panel (shocking behavior for a cartoonist, of course) by having Eva attribute the intervention to God instead. Let's not be superstitious and speak of curses! Let's invoke the name of God instead!

Is that Johnston's message? Or is it just possible that she is equating belief in God with belief in curses—just another superstition? Johnston has been denounced before as subversive. Perhaps she is subtly working to undermine the privileged position of God by reducing him to just another aspect of irrationality.

I wonder.

Truth with a capital T

Accept no substitutes!

I am in the midst of grading exam papers. As a math teacher, I appreciate that I have an easier job of it than my colleagues in most other departments. Professors of English composition tell me that grading term papers is an extremely time-consuming endeavor. Colleagues in political science frequently encounter the full panoply of logical fallacies while reading their students' essays. By comparison, I seem to have the more straightforward task.

This is entirely reasonable, of course, since I'm a math teacher. We deal in unambiguous Truth and its handmaidens, Right and Wrong (with an occasional visit from the perky sidekicks, Clueless and Ludicrous).

I came across this cartoon at Stoat, where William thanks Hank for the tip. Naturally, I thank him, too.

The King of Id is dead

Long live the king?

Brant Parker is gone now. He was half the brains behind The Wizard of Id, which he created in partnership with Johnny Hart. Parker had already turned the job of drawing the comic strip over to his son and was living in retirement in Lynchburg, Virginia. Reports said he was 86 and suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He died just over a week after the passing of Hart, who was still hard at work when he passed away at his drawing desk.

At the Creators Syndicate website, the Wizard of Id page carries the following announcement:

To our editors and readers: Please note that there will be no disruption of service for “The Wizard of Id” comic strip. Jeff Parker has been the artist and co-writer for the past 10 years and will continue his work with the strip.

He was privileged to work under the tutelage of his father, beloved cartoonist Brant Parker, for 10 years before Brant's retirement in 1997. Jeff Parker and the Hart family look forward to continuing a longtime tradition of comic excellence. Thank you for your continued support of “The Wizard of Id.”

---

For some reason, I am not reassured.

Xtian ComiX

As funny as ever!

Answers in Genesis is busy putting the finishing touches on the Fred Flintstone Hall of Fame, perhaps better known as their Creation Museum, and generating publicity for its grand opening in May. You'll recall that this is the museum that miraculously puts northern Kentucky within a day's drive of two-thirds of the U.S. population. (Of course, it's not as though numbers are AiG's strong suit.)

The latest issue of Answers Update (Vol. 14, Issue 4) devotes a lot of its space to promoting the Creation Museum and commenting on coverage in the secular media of its forthcoming opening. It also contains a new installment of CreationWise, a comic strip that proves once again that the Johnny Hart's B.C. style of moribund humor lingers on.


In the creationist universe, “millions of years” is automatically side-splittingly funny. (That's why the artist drew in “Ha!” several times, so that we would understand.) Imagine the hilarity if “billions” had been cited instead!

Speaking of millions of years, Christians must be wary of this concept. As the CreationWise strip below shows us (click on it for a larger view), the Christian who walks through the door marked “Millions of years” will be assaulted and devoured by some kind of cephalopod. (Do you think PZ Myers might be hiding behind that door?) And then the pages of Genesis are expelled from the portal. Now there's a happy ending for you! (I suspect my interpretation is not the one intended by the cartoonist.)

Is he risen yet?

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

I picked up the Sunday paper and paged through the comics section. Given that it's Easter Sunday, no one could be surprised that Johnny Hart had penned another of his cloyingly Christian comic strips. I had pretty much sworn off complaining about B.C., especially since it had gotten so lame that it just wasn't fun to make fun of it anymore. The Easter Sunday strip, however, tempted me strongly. It had all of Hart's least appealing characteristics: pugnacious proselytizing, pallid humor, and a paucity of invention. And he was supposedly harping on math, so this time it was personal.

Hart devised a goofy joke based on stringing together thirty-three words to signify the age of Jesus Christ when he died on the cross. It wasn't particularly funny and it wasn't particularly inspiring, unless one is already inclined to be thrilled by an extended quotation from scripture. Thirty-three words.

I guess it would be just as clever to try to string together seventy-six words to sum up Hart's career, and his trajectory from an eccentric, off-beat comic wit to a pushy and nearly humorless Bible-thumper. But I haven't the knack or the inclination. This post was originally outlined in my head while driving up California's Central Valley, traveling back home from my parents' residence, where we all met for an Easter luncheon and egg hunt. It was their paper where I first saw today's B.C. and turned up my nose at it (although I can just imagine Mom and Dad nodding their heads in sober agreement with its sentiment and ersatz cleverness).

Most of my thoughts were jettisoned as soon as I got home and checked my blog reader. It was the Comics Curmudgeon who first tipped me off that Johnny Hart had died yesterday, right at his drafting table, doing what he loved best. I guess that's probably the way to go. His legacy will survive mostly in the form of his earlier comic strips, before his religiosity overwhelmed his sense of humor and swamped his off-beat playfulness.

Hart was supremely confident that he had the Truth and that it had set him free. People of his persuasion—anxiously awaiting the afterlife—have one thing that we skeptics lack: They don't risk finding out if they're wrong about life after death. If you're simply extinguished at the moment of death, you get spared all of that stressful disappointment. I think Hart's moment of disappointment has arrived. Of course, he'll never know that (and I, of course, will never know if I'm right), so one could say the disappointment never actually occurred.

I am certainly sincere when I say I hope he rests in peace, but I happen to think it's inevitable.

A Dilbertian conundrum

Everything I say is false

The eternal intern Asok is given a thankless task (that's quite a departure) in today's Dilbert comic strip. He quickly turns it into a paradox.

The pointy-haired boss wants a trophy case for the corporate offices. However, his company has not earned any awards to place in such a case. That is not a problem for a creative manager. He instructs Asok to obtain a trophy case and stuff it with items purchases from a trophy shop. Problem solved!

But Asok's creativity creates a potentially unresolvable situation. He orders a trophy with the inscription “Best Unethical Filling of an Awards Showcase.” It's not specified whether the citation honors Asok or his pointy-haired boss, but that's not the problem. It seems to me to be a legitimate award. Surely the pointy-haired boss's scheme is an excellent example of an unethical solution—perhaps even prize-worthy—as is Asok's creative implementation. Is it still correct, therefore, to consider the trophy case a sham?

Fortunately: yes! As we can see in the last panel, Asok acquired many prizes that must be bogus—unless that scamp managed to come up with truthful inscriptions for all of them. In that case, uh oh!