In light of yesterday's rant, I'd be remiss in not mentioning that former East Hills denizen Bob Braughler shares my interest in the funnies; he deconstructed "Mary Worth" on Thursday over at "Subdivided We Stand."
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Via Daryl Cagle's cartoon blog at Slate, here's a great political cartoon from M.E. Cohen on the Roberts nomination to the Supreme Court.
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From Jan Ackerman in the Post-Gazette comes details of Homestead's 125th anniversary celebration. The events start with a parade and end, of course, with fireworks, because we in the Mon-Yough area do love us some fireworks. Steeler and Homestead native Charlie Batch (who's done some awfully good things for his hometown recently) will be the grand marshal of the parade, while Porky "Bossman" Chedwick will be a featured guest.
There's also going to be a film festival at the Steel Valley Arts Council; among the films to be screened is a documentary about Homestead's late, lamented Leona Theater. What the Memorial Theater was to residents of Our Fair City, the Leona was to the Steel Valley. Given that tomorrow is supposed to be hazy, hot and humid, staying inside for part of the afternoon to watch movies doesn't sound like a bad way to spend a few hours!
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Can someone tell me why there seems to be a Subway on every corner in the Mon-Yough area these days? Are Subway franchises inordinately cheap to start, or are they that profitable? Out in Monroeville, I recently noticed that there are now three Subways about a mile from each other (one on Monroeville Boulevard, one on William Penn Highway, and one just north of William Penn Highway, near the Pittsburgh-Monroeville Airport).
A new one opened recently in the old Begandy Furniture building on Dravosburg Hill, and I'm rather stunned that there would be that much potential business there, other than for the office workers at Bettis Laboratory and the old Harbison-Walker research center.
Anyway, via "The Sneeze," I learned all of the Subway-related gossip I care to know at the website of Thom McGrath, who runs several restaurants for the sandwich chain.
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To Do This Weekend: The Homestead celebration, obviously! Also, Dale Hetrick and The Burgh Big Band play the bandshell at Renziehausen Park, 7 p.m. Sunday. ... "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" wraps up its run at McKeesport Little Theater, Coursin and Bailie avenues, on Sunday with a 2 p.m. matinee. Call (412) 673-1100.
Complaining about comic strips quickly can mark one as the kind of crank who writes letters to the editor when the female news anchor on Channel 2 gets a new haircut. ("Why couldn't they leave well enough alone? Until Jennifer grows her hair out, I'm not watching any more.")
Still, I have so few real pleasures in my life (among them, cold beer with Italian food, and scratching my back with a plastic knife ... ahhhh) that the comics are something I really look forward to each day. (I've often thought that The New York Times would amount to something if it ran funnies.)
Thus, it pains me that One of America's Great Newspapers recently began shrinking one page of its comics section to near subatomic size. Even worse, on the opposite page, they're unconscionably stretching some of the strips, including one of my favorites, "Get Fuzzy." That's strictly bush league stuff.
The Trib, which used to have a terribly weak comics page (anchored by "Marvin" and "The Phantom") has added a number of very good strips and is close to parity with the P-G in funnies, if not a little better; it's a pity they insist on running the (badly) colored versions.
The News has always had a quirky mix of comics, often running strips that I've never seen anywhere else. One recent addition to the News that I really enjoy is "Big Top," and against my better judgment, I've gotten hooked on "Funky Winkerbean," which is a odd mix of a soap-opera strip and a gag-a-day comic.
On the other hand, there are a number of strips that don't run in any of the local papers, and even more that do run locally that are utter krep. It's sad, but there have been many, many days recently when the best comic strip in the newspaper was a 30-year-old "Classic Peanuts."
For instance, has anyone ever even smiled at "Mallard Fillmore"? To quote the liner notes on an old Tom Lehrer album, it seldom has any points to make but obvious ones. Recently, its creator, Bruce Tinsley, has been on a rant about Jon Stewart, who parodied "Mallard" in America: The Book. Tinsley is convinced that his regular readers (all 10 of them) were confused, and might think that he (Tinsley) was actually contributing to a Jon Stewart book.
This proves that Tinsley not only can't write satire, he can't recognize it when he sees it.
Then there's "Beetle Bailey," ostensibly set in the Army, but it's clear that Mort Walker's memories of Army life are becoming increasingly dim, and no one else working on the strip apparently cares enough to do any real research. Thus "Beetle Bailey" now does little more than rehash sight gags that were old and tired when Milton Berle first stole them.
"Garfield" needs to be taken to the vet and put down; it had one joke that has been repeated endlessly for the past 27 years. He's a cat. He's fat. He likes lasagna. He hates Mondays and dogs. And please don't get me started on "Ziggy," "The Family Circus," and the rest of that lot of "family friendly" comics. "Family friendly" need not necessarily equal "unfunny" (see yesterday's Almanac about Bob Newhart), but "Family Circus" is spectacularly unfunny.
Every time I read a "Family Circus" panel, I can actually feel a few brain cells die. Yet there it sits, on the comics page of nearly every newspaper I regularly read. It's impossible to avoid, so I end up reading it, and then I groan. "Well," I think, "there went 30 seconds of my life I'll never get back again."
Luckily, the Internets have liberated me from newspaper tyranny. Not only can you discuss comic strips with like-minded geeks at newsgroups like rec.arts.comic.strips, or read the commentary at sites like "The Comics Curmudgeon," you can now download whatever mix of comics you like using programs like Comictastic.
My current daily reads include some fairly obscure syndicated comics like "Arlo & Janis," "9 Chickweed Lane," "Brevity" and "Barkeater Lake," along with web comics like "Medium Large," "Kevin and Kell," "Sinfest" and "You Damn Kid." And I get them in nice vivid colors, unmolested by stretching or shrinking.
If you're not that computer savvy, visit the website of your favorite newspaper and build your own comics pages. The San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle and Washington Post all have comics page options; most of the major syndicates also put their comics on the web.
Also using the 'net, I can also avoid the comics I can't stand, which means I haven't paid any attention to "Marmaduke" in months. Like "Garfield," "Marmaduke" has one joke. The main character is a big dog who gets into comic misadventures because of his large size. Hilarity, theoretically, ensues. I have never, in my life, even smiled at a "Marmaduke," but unlike "Family Circus," it seems to be easy to ignore.
Thus I missed several recent "Marmaduke" panels that could make you wonder exactly what's going on in the "Marmaduke" family. (Marmaduke's owners are actually named the Winslows. You could, as they say, look it up.)
Here's the first "Marmaduke" in question, which ran on July 9:
Hundreds of papers ran that strip, and yet I can't see any plausible joke there except for the obvious double entendre. I mean, is he trying to make soup? Eh? I've never known a dog to want food heated, and after all, dogs don't really eat bones; they lick the marrow out of them and chew on them. So it ain't funny ... except on the filthy, unintentional level.
Or was it unintentional? Because a few days later, on July 11, along came this "Marmaduke" panel:
Um ... OK. "Woof on my shoulder" makes it sound like he's going to barf on her, and indeed, he's got his mouth (snout? muzzle?) hanging over her back. But the embrace seems fishy, especially given the fact his girlfriend (a poodle, which must make for some interesting ... er, mechanics) just dumped him. Is he looking for a rebound girlfriend?
You may think I just have a sick mind (and I do) but yesterday, this "Marmaduke" ran:
Good Lord! They're having an orgy, and the dog wants in!
This is exactly what conservatives have been warning us about for years. Rick Santorum said that if you allowed gays to marry, the next thing society would endorse was "man on dog." Who knew that it would happen on the funny pages? Paging Dr. James Dobson, stat!
I can find a lot to dislike about public television these days. With its diet of pop culture tributes (concerts by aging Motown stars and "Antiques Roadshow"), threadbare British sitcoms, and thinly-disguised infomercials (Suze Orman, Gary Null, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, et al, ad nauseam), it is increasingly difficult to defend PBS's status as a non-profit organization. In Pittsburgh, WQED is sadly typical of most (but not all) big city PBS affiliates.
One thing PBS does right, however, are its marquee programs. There is nothing on CNN, MSNBC or Fox to match the quality of "Frontline," and I'm not even going to bother counting what passes for "investigative journalism" on CBS, ABC and NBC. "NOVA"'s science segments are 10 times as detailed as anything you'll see on the Discovery Channel, and yet they do a better job of explaining complex topics.
I've just finished (Tuesday night) watching a "NOVA" hour explaining the recent Mars Rover expedition. It was as gripping as a blockbuster movie but gave me a whole new understanding of the technology involved in going to Mars. "The American Experience" should be required viewing for every taxpayer and registered voter.
And note that despite conservative claims to the contrary, there is nothing overtly political about any of these shows. "Frontline" speaks truth to power, but it's just as likely to attack the failures of the Clinton administration as it is to question the war in Iraq.
Another of my favorite PBS programs is "American Masters." An installment I saw a couple of weeks ago about Ella Fitzgerald was both entertaining (how could a program featuring Ella singing not be?) and educational. I had often wondered why Fitzgerald always looked so uncomfortable on stage; "American Masters" explained, in sometimes heartbreaking detail, the emotional pain that she went through off-stage. A&E's "Biography" is sometimes very good, but I have yet to see an episode that matches any given episode of "American Masters."
So I was delighted when I learned on Monday (entirely by accident) that Bob Newhart, one of my all-time favorite comedians, is being featured tonight on "American Masters."
I happen to think that Newhart's comedy albums are some of the funniest routines ever recorded. If you only know him through his sitcom work, you've missed a lot. A great introduction to his sometimes sarcastic, always deadpan comedy is "Button-Down Concert," a fairly recent (1997) performance done in front of a live audience in California.
On the album, Newhart talks between the tracks about his life, and the process of writing the routines, and his commentary is often as funny as the monologues. The audience is also made up of hardcore Newhart fans; at one point, he jokes, "Please stop mouthing the routines along with me, because it really screws me up."
I wouldn't say that Newhart had the societal impact of a Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor, but he was able to be a little subversive simply because he looked, and sounded, so dull and establishment. (He was trained, and worked for a while, as an accountant.) He didn't comment on sexual and societal foibles as graphically as Bruce, or explore racial politics with the passion of Pryor.
Still, there was nothing respectful in Newhart's treatment of the U.S. Navy in "The Cruise of the U.S.S. Codfish" (a submarine's commanding officer lambastes the crew for stealing the door off of his office as the sub is surfacing off of "the familiar skyline of either New York City, or Buenos Aires?") or the rituals of corporate life (an outgoing middle-manager veers away from his prepared retirement speech to complain about the "crummy watch" he's been presented with, then blackmails his co-workers by threatening to sell tapes of the office Christmas parties).
I don't know for sure if Newhart is as important to American culture as Ernest Hemingway, Richard Rodgers, or F. Scott Fitzgerald --- who are also subjects of "American Masters" this year --- but I'm sure the program will make a compelling argument.
I'm not sure if the 10 or 12 hours a week that PBS airs things like "American Masters," "Frontline," "NOVA," "NewsHour," etc. justifies the 20 to 40 hours a week of crud that it runs. But I guess I am grateful that there is still some quality educational programming on PBS. It's hard to find sometimes amid the dross, but it's there.
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In other news, is McKeesport "Fun City, U.S.A.," or Sodom-on-the-Mon?
McKeesport Magisterial District Judge Thomas Brletic said he wants to make an example of two people charged with open lewdness.
Jamar McGriff, 23, of N. Charleston, S.C., and Taren Roberts, 19, of West Mifflin, were arrested earlier this month after they allegedly had sexual intercourse on a picnic table in the No. 5 Pavilion at Renziehausen Park. ...
Brletic said the alleged incident occurred July 10 at 7:42 p.m. "It was in clear view of everyone in the area," the judge said. "We can't have that Sodom and Gomorrah stuff going on here." (David Whipkey, Daily News)
No, there was no Almanac yesterday. Try to conceal your disappointment for a few minutes, and let me explain.
Forgive me if I write about myself today. Over the past two weeks, I have had practically no energy. I might otherwise chalk this up to my general laziness but for the fact that this hot, humid weather is really playing hell with my asthma, and that's left me generally pooped.
I've had asthma since I was very young --- my grandfather had it, too --- and I usually have no problem keeping it under control. Oh, it has discouraged me from engaging in a lot of athletic activities, but not as much as the fact that I am possibly the worst athlete in Allegheny County, and maybe the three-county area. (My spectacularly awful performance in little-league baseball has become the stuff of legend, and is still recounted in hushed tones.)
Anyway, I can go weeks at a time without needing my inhaler, but I've needed it every day since the humidity ratcheted itself up. The humid air traps smoke and pollution, and the resulting mix (besides being unpleasant) makes every breath an adventure. I've got AC at home, in the car, and at work, but any trip from one place to the other leaves me huffing and puffing and exhausted.
Add in hay fever, and I have a combination that leaves me permanently tired, crabby and miserable, and not in much mood to write.
I'm crossing my fingers that the humidity is going to break soon, but I'm not very optimistic. The National Weather Service is saying that a "pseudo cold front" is supposed to move through the region today and tonight, which may help temporarily. But another high pressure center is expected to move in, which will make it hot and smoggy again by the end of the week.
At the suggestion of my pharmacist, I recently changed my allergy medication, and the new stuff has helped my hay fever and sinus trouble quite a bit, so I'm hopeful that I'm going to feel better soon. I should be back on a regular Almanac schedule tomorrow, with all of the poorly-sourced, ill-considered miscellany that you've come to expect.
In the meantime, if you or someone you know has asthma or allergies, here are some resources you might find helpful:
NIH Medline
American Academy of Family Physicians
Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America
State DEP air quality indexes
Southwestern Pennsylvania ozone readings
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