Cartoonic Themes

Hello, my name is Joe and I'm a cartoonaholic. I have always had an obsessive need to read cartoons, no matter how badly drawn, written, conceived, etc. And the a-number-one enabler of my sickness this quarter is my newly-acquired copy of The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker, published at $100, and now widely remaindered. The thing with this baby, see, is that it's not just a vast, big honkin' book, but also a pair of CDs, chock full of every damn cartoon they ever published, up through 2004. All of 'em. Every one. All 64,000-plus of 'em. And like the guy who read the whole OED, I'm gonna have to read every one of these, just because I do. And that means you're going to hear about it, occasionally.

As a start, here's a list of themes that I've noticed cropping up again and again, some of them obvious, others more surprising:

Crawling through the desert, with or without mirage
Desert island castaways
Therapy patients on the couch
Predatory older men and / or younger women
Asking for a raise
Ordering the daughter and her illegitimate child to leave the home
Juries, trial attorneys, and defendants
Pan handlers

Those are pretty unsurprising, but I was puzzled to find lots of panels on these topics:

Women buying liquor and being clueless about it
Cubism and modernism in art, in general (Henry Moore really knocked 'em dead)
Arabs on flying carpets
Muslim women in burkas
Arabs with multiple wives and the hilarious consequences thereof (no mention of Mormons at all)
Losing boxers (fighters, not shorts)
Visualizing members of the opposite sex without their clothes
Perfume counter sales people and customers
Gypsy fortune tellers
The love seat (the now-vanished S-shaped settee for two)
Sandwich board ads and the men wearing them
Convicts saying something ironic
The high cost of groceries (especially prevalent in the WWII and post-war years)
Housing Shortages

Who'd of thunk that a moderately well-dressed women wondering "how many slugs" a bottle of booze contains would be such a hoot?

Anyway, don't be surprised if you get more of this sort of thing -- I'm pretty pathetic when it comes to this.

Best idea I've heard lately

Texas seceding from the Union, that is. Think how much fun it would be to serve on the border patrol, come up with the list of contraband substances and undesirable persons, and so on.

More rubbish about remaindered books

Apologies for yet another compendium of remaindered books, but somehow this stuff strikes me as both funny and significant. This time, the vendor is Edward R. Hamilton bookselling company, offering a large tabloid catalog packed with books that for one reason or another are being dumped. As I think you'll see, many of them have a single, compelling reason.

To begin with, there appears to be a huge sell-off in the self-help and autodidact biz:

• Business Math Demystified
  
• The Internet for Dummies
  
• Free Software for Dummies
  
• Controlling Cholesterol for Dummies
  
• Stretching for Dummies
  
• Chihuahuas for Dummies
  
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Shakespeare
  
• Puppy Parenting
  
• Hedge Funds Demystified
  
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to NASCAR
  
• Macroeconomics Demystified
  
• The Pocket Idiot's Guide to Homemade Dogfood
  
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Being Vegetarian
  
• 30 Minutes a Day to a Better Horse
  
• 101 Things to Do With Tofu
  
• High Blood Pressure for Dummies
  
• Pagan Every Day
  

A few books whose market may have become limited by recent events:

• Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild
  
• The Case For Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office
  
• Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
  
• Ron Paul Speaks
  
• How to Talk to a Liberal (if you must): The World According to Ann Coulter
  
• The Bush Family Cookbook
  
• The Magic of Peanut Butter
  

And then there are those that are just plain hard to categorize:

• Seduced by Bacon
  
• Pat Boone's America
  
• The Best of Windows Vista
  
• American Farm Tractor and Implement Dealerships
  
• The Hooters Cookbook
  

By the way, these are all absolutely real, at least to the extent that they appeared in a catalog. I couldn't make this stuff up.

Just in time for father's day

As another blogger noted, writing about a strange sole-source deal to supply Iraq with Russian helicopters, sole-sourcing seems odd when, as he put it, you can just about buy 'em on-line.

Can you see one of these, converted to a camper?

Three down

In what has to be a resume' negative for him, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner was fired by the US government. "Reason for leaving last position? ... well, um ..."

Two down

The Ann Arbor News is folding. The most poignant, to the point comment on the demise of this bastion of journalistic excellence was provided by one of the many people who posted comments on the on-line edition, reproduced here just about verbatim, including punctuation and capitalization:

"What about the COUPONS??!???!!!"

One down ...

Bello Vino no more.

Surrealism hits restaurant reviews

Francois Simon writes, "...the burata (cow’s milk mozzarella) that will know your socks off ..."

Reminds me of a time, back when I used to have some control over an ad budget, when a hopeful agency rep finished up a sales pitch with the assurance that, "and, of course, we'll just service the heck out of you."

What could possibly go wrong?

Hand up, everyone who knows what the phrase "reactive armor" means. Ok. Ok. Very good. Now, hand up, everyone who would like to wear it.

Recon report

Operating as I am five or more (in some cases, many more) years ahead of most of y'all (age wise, anyway), here's a brief note on something you can expect to encounter in a while: cataracts. All the steroids I took in 2007 and 2008 gave me a big honkin' blur in my left eye, and just last week, I had it dealt with. So far, I'm a satisfied customer. No longer wearing glasses for distance vision, for the first time since I was 12. Near range is another story, but the sheer convenience of wearing just any old pair of non-prescription sunglasses is worth the price of admission.

The procedure is mostly trivial -- expect to blow half a day, plus lining up the usual "responsible adult" to transport you. No pain, briefly sedated, lots of drops in the eye. What you get is the damaged lens removed and a nice new synthetic one implanted -- which of course won't develop cataracts of its own, so barring complications, once you do an eye, it's done.