Comic for Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

Posted: 6:45 am, Wednesday, July 23rd

Alright, so a mea culpa from the get on the artwork - it's only so-so noticeable, but my computer was being super-crappy last night and it was programming in a two-second lag between entering a line and executing the line in Illustrator. That really made this hard. I think it was just the heat, which is supposed to break today. For instance, it's pouring outside right now.

Second, for anyone interested, the satire lesson went excellently twice and totally off the rails once yesterday. The interesting thing about that was that the two times I taught it to high school seniors in summer school, I got a lot of insight and participation. The time I taught it to a bunch of grad schools behaving like high school seniors, it ran absolutely wild and took me fifteen minutes to get about three minutes into the lesson. So I guess never try to teach satire to kids. ad, I did not get to the difference between satire and just making fun of someone, although I had a comparison ready - I think the kids may have left with the impression that satire is only when you make fun of politicians. Which is probably how they'll get 99% of their satire in this American life. Oh, also, Colbert is bigger with the kids than Stewart, which I find kind of curious.

Two quickies from the Times: this exhibit at the MoMA is pretty cool. 2.0 and I went on Friday, in the opening clutches of the heat wave. None of the houses that have been put up were air conditioned, although the accompanying text makes a big deal of mentioning they're all HVAC-ready.

I'm sure you guys all know this, but there's something of a debt issue in these United States (I don't know why I'm talking like that today). The wildest thing about that article is the little debt calculator in the left-hand column.

Wait, Estelle Getty was only in her 60s when the Golden Girls was filmed? Wow.

Oh, one other thing, and this is old, too, and obvious: Michael Savage should be run over with a truck. (Michael, not Dan.)

bullfrog

ad -- Wednesday, July 23 2008, 08:22 am

Congrats on the satire lesson! Tuck it away for a rainy day.

Nice find on that debt article. I do think it's a little too slanted against the lenders -- though admittedly, credit card companies are pretty much the embodiment of predatory capitalism. But reading about that woman with $228,000 in debt and how she got there? This quote sealed it:

“Eight weeks in bed by yourself is very dangerous when you have a TV and credit card,” Ms. McLeod said. “QVC was my friend.”

Seriously? This is after she was already on a second mortgage and decided to put a $3,000 IRA early withdrawal penalty (another retarded decision) onto a freakin' credit card! How much shit does one person need?

Maybe he got hit by Robert Novack?

Any lesson you can walk away from couldn't have been that bad, I guess... Don't give up on sharing satire with students yet.