Conceptual Variety Pak – The Daily Cartoonist

Wikipedia confirms my hunch that Lucky Charms was the first cereal to start adding candy. My skepticism over the move is likely because I was 14 when they were introduced and so somewhat above the fray. Our mother had a rule that we could only have two cereal boxes open at a time: One sugared, one plain. Granted, a box of Wheaties lasted longer than a box of Cocoa Puffs.

The joke here is that Eddie is fixated on the format of the cereal while his mother is hoping for some sort of nutritional value, but in a world in which you can buy a “special” box of marshmallow candy without cereal, it’s hard to sort the humor from the reality.

I can’t be too snarky about it, having grown up on Sugar Crisp, Sugar Frosted Flakes and Sugar Pops, the latter of which were “shot with sugar, through and through.” They’ve all since dropped the word “sugar” from their names, but not from their list of ingredients.

They’re promoted as “part of a healthy breakfast.” The other part is Pop Tarts.

Juxtaposition of April 15

As noted a few days ago, tax cartoons are mandatory this week, though this year most cartoonists waited until the day itself.

Death and taxes may both be inevitable, but dying before you file won’t get your estate off the hook. However, filling out the forms first is a better parting gift for you family than a case of Rice-A-Roni and a home version of our game.

As for snails claiming mileage, every little bit helps, but mostly if you only take long and occasional trips. This year, I claimed mileage for the Mad Magazine exhibit at the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge and the AAEC Convention in Montreal, but in my newsroom days, the requirement to verify each trip to city hall with contemporaneous odometer readings made it not worth the effort.

And while it would be more fair to let snails deduct the time rather than the distance, they’d have to write down the exact minute they left and the exact minute they arrived.

Moondog is up-to-date, filing on-line. Back in the good old days, we’d assign a photographer to catch the pre-midnight rush at the post office, which meant a late press run, but so many papers have now sold their presses and contracted with some out-of-town paper that the photo couldn’t possibly run until April 17, at which point it’s old news.

Hardly the biggest issue. At least we were still printing in-house the night we started running “Gore Beats Bush” headlines and had to stop the presses. These days, we wouldn’t have any coverage of a race that wasn’t over by about eight o’clock.

Newspapers are committing suicide by a thousand paper-cuts.

I passed over this Kyle Bravo cartoon the other day, but then I came across this monstrosity and suddenly the cartoon became a lot funnier.

Yes, folks, there is now an AI service that will call your parents regularly and chat with them so you don’t have to. I kind of picture an Evil Programmer with Eliza on an operating table in a thunderstorm, triumphantly crying “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

404 Media checked it out and it’s every bit as soulless as you might expect. But, then, consider the customer base: People who know somebody should check in with their elderly parents but it sure as hell isn’t going to be them.

Though that may be a demographic large enough to be worth pitching to.

I’ve almost entirely switched to Kindle, and this Mr. Boffo captures the downside of the technology perfectly. You don’t need a bookmark, because when you fire it up at night it goes right to the spot where you left off, which is handy.

However, if you want to go back and check on something you may have missed, or just want to find a good quote you’d come across a few nights ago, you might as well have torn out the page and tossed it on the floor.

I realize it’s possible to hop back and forth, and to bookmark things, but it’s about as much of a hassle as getting out of bed and sorting through the torn-out pages.

Still on the topic of reading, or, in this case, of not reading. Vero reminds me of an English teacher I had in tenth grade who became frustrated with us for not doing the reading.

She began giving us a daily 10-question multiple choice quiz on the short story we were supposed to have read, so we began assigning the task to one student, taking turns. Then the student who had read the story would touch his forehead for A, his nose for B, his ear for C and his chin for D.

Worked like a charm until it was Randy’s turn to read the story and he forgot. Suddenly a classroom of students who got everything right turned into a bunch of morons.

I don’t know how it all came out, because she expelled me permanently for writing a process essay on how to muck out a horse stall. The same day, she threw out another kid for an overly graphic oral report on “Catcher in the Rye.”

I became a professional writer and he owned a bookstore. Quelle surprise, eh?

I got two laughs at this one. The first is the obvious one, I guess: The government objects to his collecting two of every kind as being entirely too diverse in its intent.

The second is because not only did I take Latin in high school but I became an altar boy back when the Mass was in Latin and I used to be able to rattle off the Creed and the Our Father in that language faster than I could say them in English.

And so when I see “DEI” my inner autotranslator says “of God,” as in “Agnus Dei, qui tolle pecatta mundi,” Latin for “stole my poor heart away.”

“DIE” is who commissioned that ark.

I like to end each blog entry with a profound truth. This’ll do. Thanks, Mr. MacClellan!