DADWAGON

First, before reckoning with any of the posts added to the site this week, I think we have to address something disturbing and a little frightening: Matt chose to take a vacation somewhere that has no Internet access. Now, we all go on vacation from time to time (although why a travel writer needs to go on vacation is a puzzle to me), but in this day and age, to go somewhere wholly cut off from the free flow of memes, useless celebrity worship, and silly poop jokes strikes me as odd and perhaps self-abusive. Matt–it’s one thing to desert DadWagon, but the entirety of modern civilization? How now, my friend, how now.

Christopher was also largely missing in action this week, and strangely pre-Internet in his interests, posting only once, and, of all things, about the end of Cathy Guisewite’s awful comic strip. Actually, I take that back, he did run a short post on twitter-threats from his wife, which, in my opinion, is old news in a new medium.

Nathan, for his part, contemplated vegetarianism, translated Russian profanity, and insisted that he was in fact every bit as much of a douchebag as I am (I agree).

What was on my mind? Nothing of any great importance, really, other than abortion, patriotism, parenting values, and ugly kids.

Before I send you all off on your happy weekends, let’s all just send some good vibes off to Matt, wherever he is: come home soon, buddy–your iPad’s lonely.

As the birth of my second child nears, I’m forced to confront the reality that babies are, in fact, hideously ugly. No point in denying it–little raisin-things covered in poop, screaming at high volumes, clutching the air with sweat-covered claws. It’s not pretty. The only relief comes in knowing that as a parent you will the only one who won’t notice. To you, that bruised up little prune-football is gorgeous, honey–simply to die for!

In that vein, I give you this from the New York Times, selections of ugly pet photos from their readers.

Pets/kids–same, same but different.

“Cathy” is dunzo. The clumsily drawn comic strip that celebrated semi-hapless, semi-feisty single-womanhood (and, more recently, married-womanhood) is, after 34 years of chocolate jokes and man troubles, being retired. Creator Cathy Guisewite is citing creative exhaustion, and I for one think she’s completely correct.

But enough about her. What struck me, as I read about this, was that I can’t imagine caring about the comics page anymore. As recently as the eighties, newspaper comics were still somewhat vital, for adults as well as children. A few strips were genuinely narrative, like those of Berkeley Breathed; others were wildly inventive, like “The Far Side.” Take a look back at “Calvin & Hobbes,” in the comprehensive collection published a few years back, and you will be struck by how good it is. Plus, of course, “Doonesbury,” which continues to operate in its own well-tuned universe.

We in the media tend to forget that the comics page is still a going concern, because our two chief newspapers are The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, neither of which runs comic strips. So it’s a mild shock to take a look at one of the papers that’s still in the game. The remaining strips, setting aside “Doonesbury,” are beyond insipid. The jokes are hoary old things. And, most of all, the panels have been cut down and down and down, to barely above postage-stamp size. Even if a cartoonist wants to say something smart, he has room for only about twenty words. Thus the form today favors broad-stroke visuals, with few lines and less text, and so you get “Rhymes With Orange,” a thin Gary Larson knockoff without the genuine pleasurable oddness that characterized “The Far Side.” Oh, and there is “Mallard Fillmore,” which dispenses Glenn Beckery via a talking duck. (As Groucho and Chico would say, why a duck?)

No kid will find any of this funny, or fun, and that’s not good. Comic strips had one vital function that’s easily forgotten: drawing kids to the daily newspaper habit. “Peanuts,” which loomed large in my childhood, was enough to get me to open our mediocre local paper just about every day. (Mediocre for back then, anyhow; by today’s standards, it was stone-cold serious.) Anything good and smart that would’ve once gone onto that page is now being poured into graphic novels, websites, and, to a lesser extent, the slowly fading world of the alt-weeklies. I can’t exactly blame bad comic strips for the decline of the daily press, but I’ll say this: Somehow I can’t imagine Mike Bloomberg taking to the radio to read us the comics, the way Fiorello LaGuardia legendarily did during a newspaper strike. I wish it weren’t so, but that world is completely dead and buried. Ack indeed.

Via Gawker: An eleven-year-old “movie critic” named Jackson was on the Early Show this morning and he MUST BE STOPPED. Or as a person named Lindsey Weber from someplace called URDB via something else apparently known as Tumblr (can someone out there explain the internet to me?) put it:

This is the opposite of a cute baby video. This’ll make your ovaries (or your testicles) shrivel up & disappear. I literally want to invent a Time Machine so I can go back in time to before LIGHTS CAMERA JACKSON was born and convince his parents not to procreate.

I have watched the video of this little bugger and I agree. Watch it yourself, ye parents, and despair.