Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Today's Dilbert hits a new high for colorful imagery and euphemism: "I'm an admin, you steaming log. The only thing that would inspire me is finding your corpse floating in my worst enemy's drinking water." The man has a gift for words, that's for sure.

Having a hard time wrapping your head around the sub-prime mortgage crisis and how mortgage-backed securities work? Scott Adams explains in today's Dilbert.

My esteemed colleague, the The Whited Sepulchre , had a post the other day that continued a chain of discussion around the concept of the Anti-Library: the books you own that you haven't read. The beginning of this was a quote from the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable , by Nassim Nicholas Taleb : Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as (you can possibly afford to) put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. I'll let you read his post to get the background (why bother with my mangled summary when you can go there and see it yourself). After listing his own favorite unread books, he invited several folks (including me) to reveal their anti-library. My unread books fall into the following broad categories: Tech/Computer books I use as reference material but don't rea...

From Dilbert today : It's scary...like the guy lives in the cube next to me or something.

I reset about 150 user passwords last night. Then I got up this morning, flipped to the comics page and read Dilbert : Damn....He's like some sort of Nostrildogmas! Freaky.

Joseph Barbera, the surviving member of the pioneering animation team Hanna-Barbera passed away at 95. It is impossible to overestimate their contributions to the art and (arguably more importantly) business of cartoons. They got their start at MGM in the 1940's, doing the original run of Tom and Jerry cartoons for theatrical release. When MGM shut down the animation unit in 1957 ("Sorry boys, we got enough cartoons already") the pair set up shop cranking out original cartoons for television, developing a method of limited animation that could be produced for a fraction of the cost of theatrical animation. The finished product may have looked dodgy, but they created a gallery of memorable characters, including Yogi Bear, QuickDraw McGraw, Ruff and Reddy and Huckleberry Hound (Oh mah darlin', oh mah darlin, oh mah daaarlin' Clementine). They also created the prime time hit, the Flintstones, a stone-age rehashing of the Honeymooners. I have vivid memories of going...

I confess one of the things I'm thankful for in my undeserving life is that the Morning Snooze carries the bitterly unfunny "comic" Mallard Fillmore only on Sunday, so I don't have to grit my teeth every single day at its grumpy rants at all things Liberal ("Liberal" being anyone to the left of Bill O'Reilly). It's like a train wreck: on Sunday morning I want to avert my gaze but try as I may, I can't help but look at it, thinking "Surely it's bound to be funny sometime ." It's not. Calling it a comic is a stretch -- Indiana creator Bruce Tinsley spews tired Reagan-era babble out of the mouths of talking heads. There is no action, no plot, and not much drawing -- mainly it consists of lots of hand-written screeds masquerading as guffaw-filled dialog. My father probably thinks it's hilarious. Comics Curmudgeon (my new favorite blog) had a brief mention of Mr. Tinsley this morning, who managed to get himself picked up for DU...

When I was nine, I saw a classified ad about "comics for sale." The address was in the same apartment development, so I went over to check this out. I was thinking this would be a cheap way to feed my addiction. Not so. At the time the price of a new comic was 12 cents. This kid (with his dad, natch) pulls out a couple of titles from a box where they were stored and starts quote prices in the range of five and ten bucks. My eyes glazed. I realized I had come to the wrong place. The plastic bags should have been a dead giveaway. I'm not a collector. I don't have file cabinets full of originals encased in archival sleeves. Collectors are interested in the object: the original magazine. For me it's about the content: the drawings, the stories. I'm not a purist, anthologies and reprints are just fine - better in some ways than originals, since I've always liked to pore over the pages, re-reading the balloons, studying the drawings. Brittle newsprint in plasti...

Delivered by Bucky Katt in today's Get Fuzzy : "How ironic -- you eat vegetarian and speak baloney."