Comic for Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Posted: 1:35 am, Wendesday, March 4th

Man, I am beat, after only one day back on the job. I'm busy trying to put the school lit journal together for printing, and kind of thinking about the projects I'm submitting for the humanities fair that we have coming up (I guess it's like a science fair, but with, like, poetry? it still hasn't been explained to me adequately), the yearbook is due at the end of the month and has about forty pages left to go, and I don't know how we're still less than halfway through Speak. Oh, wait, yes I do, we had to waste a bunch of time on mandated Obama lessons after I already did lessons on Obama under my own volition. Eeks, teachin'.

The crazy-long Times Mag article this week was about Newt Gingrich and his re-emergence. I only read maybe two-thirds of it, because I can't stand that much exposure to Newt, but I love the part where the author meets with Newt and comes away incredibly unimpressed. There's a great bit from that interview...

At one point, I asked Gingrich, now a healthful-looking 65, about his sudden exit from Congress in 1998. “First of all, in the Toynbeean sense, I believe in departure and return,” he told me.

“In the what sense?” I asked.

“Arnold Toynbee,” he replied matter-of-factly, as if no one would walk into his office without having read “Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England.” “I believe in the sense that, you know, De Gaulle had to go to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises for 11 years.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Departure and return. And someone once said to me, if you don’t leave, you can’t come back, because you’ve never left.”

I was still trying to process this nugget when the slouching Gingrich, now onto a point about steel plants closing, jolted upright. “The 1913 Girl Scouts manual!” he said, or at least that’s what it sounded like. “Which I should get a copy of.” He punched a button on his phone and dialed his assistant.

“Yes, sir?”

“Can you get me about four copies of the 1913 Girl Scouts manual, ‘How Girls Can Help Their Country’?” Gingrich asked. There was a long pause on the other end.

“O.K.”

“I think it’s on Amazon,” Gingrich said helpfully. He leaned back and proceeded to explain to me that the Girl Scouts manual contained a recommendation that every girl learn to perform two jobs, just in case one of them went away. What we needed, apparently, were more steelworkers who belonged to the Girl Scouts.

That is a riot. Also riotous, in the meantime, is the ass-kicking Michael Steele seems to be getting from Rush and his legion of - I assume they're still called this - Dittoheads. Good move, GOP, have Rush call the shots. No way that can end badly.

The picture in today's strip is taken from this guy.

As every dork, geek and nerd knows, the Watchmen movie comes out on Friday. I am cautiously optimistic - everything I've seen so far looks great, and the fact that they're releasing an animated DVD of the pirate comic-within-a-comic is heartening, but I remember reading the Watchmen and thinking it was completely unfilmable, and "the visionary director of 300" is not a selling point for me - but the rest of the internet is having a field day. PVP is doing it the best so far. I only kind of liked this first strip from Watchmen week (and my lukewarmness was all my fault - I totally forgot Jon Arbuckle was a cartoonist when Garfield began), but yesterday's installment was excellent. (You may need familiarity with the history of Dagwood as well as the Watchmen to fully enjoy it - I apologize for nothing.)

Stay happy, gang. Conclusion on Friday!

bullfrog

Bullfrog -- Wednesday, March 4 2009, 06:42 am

I need to get movin', but what a bizarre essay on why we need more movies based on bad SNL sketches.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/lorne-michaels-snl-studios-and-the-death-of-hope,24597/

I'm curious -- did the mandated Obama lessons differ from the ones you created? (What do you teach about Obama?) And were they mandated by the school, the district, or the city? Interesting!

I wanted to recommend PROM by Laurie Halse Anderson to you for after you finish SPEAK -- it's a fun read about a group of inner-city teenagers (in Philadelphia, I think) who decide to put on a prom, since the school is too poor to sponsor one. That sounds all cheery and cutesy, but it grew out of LHA's work with teenagers in that area and it feels really real. (I liked it much more than CATALYST.)

Also, I don't know whether to look forward to or dread Friday's strip. . . . On the one hand, both of them are on a precipice (Lissa literally, which is a nice touch), so things could go well if they're thinking of making the same jump. But then Ron said "Mara," which indicates a different jump. And Jen might up and declare herself under pressure or something. And who knows with Pete.

The suspense, she is a killer.

CK, it looked to me that on 2/27 Ron has been to see Mara and CAME BACK before long still looking for Lissa, which points one way, but then what was with the "I love you"?

Did we ever find out why Ron and Mara broke up? I remember a comic where Lissa tried to get Ron to talk and he wouldn't. Ron did admit earlier that he was not supportive at all to Mara at the funeral (how different from the Ron who went to Mena's wedding. Hmm)

TWINS! I figured it out. Please tell me that Ron has an evil twin screwing everything up.

Ted's Head, actually, it's quadruplets.

Billie Holiday, Take All of Me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6YpH236MNQ&feature=PlayList&p=BD391BA855B35018&index=147

Lissa's karaoke choice, when you hear all of it, is a pretty desperate song.

You make many good points, Joe B. Also there was that emphasis on Lissa slightly losing it before that fateful night at the bar -- that she'd been hooking up more often with random guys, etc.

And we never did learn the reason for the breakup . . . Maybe the "I love you" was a friendly "I love you"? Ook.

Bullfrog, are you enjoying us treating your work like it's 2005-era Harry Potter 6?

I'm a little scared because Joe B. seems to be paying much more attention to the strip than I am - secret meanings in karaoke? I *wish* I was that put-together.

But, yeah, this is kind of fun.

By the way, I misspelled the alcohol in panel 2, as our resident editor CK told me yesterday - I just haven't gotten a chance to fix it yet. The version that goes into the permanent record will be correct, I swear!

And *my* lesson on Obama, ktbb, was to actually have the kids listen to "the Obama effect" podcast exclusive of Radiolab, take notes, and write an essay on it. They did really well until the essay. That part they bombed.

(The direct instruction regarded the effect of positive examples on our lives, stuff like that.)