You didn’t think Mr. Biner would be unaware of his powerful voice, didja?
You didn’t think he wouldn’t be crazy proud of it or anything, wouldja?
You didn’t suppose that Kara doesn’t just love her daddy for his unique, ear-splitting ability, shouldja?
Mr. Biner has issues. We know this.
He also has some skills. They don’t often get used, what with having limited application in a world that hasn’t become apocalyptic yet, but they are skills nonetheless.
There’s usually at least one in every crowd, right? The person who worries that everyone is where they should be, doing what they should be, and thinking what they should be.
Donny is that person for this crowd. Everyone else has proven themselves to be pretty dang reckless, so they should count themselves lucky he’s there.
We, as communicators, must consider our audience. That’s what they tell you.
They also tell you not to write to suit someone else, but write what you believe.
They also say, “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
All this is the long way ’round to say, “Tell people what they wanna hear.”
So. Did any of you guys wanna hear all this?
I used to be able to talk about very minute details of whitewater kayaks.
Now, I don’t even know which manufacturers have the hot boats, or which have shut down without letting me know.
But I bet I could talk up a fine, fine cardboard kayak.
You may have heard the old saying “The cobblers children run barefoot” or “The tinker’s family eats from wooden bowls” or any of a half-dozen versions thereof.
It means that if it’s YOUR thing, your clients get better treatment than your family, mostly ’cause you can do family stuff “any ol’ time”, but it’s not that important.
But when it comes to doing something you’d LOVE to trade your career for? Your beloved Hobby? You put so much time into it that it becomes self-defeating anyhow.
And so- Kara and Steven are working hard at pleasing their need to make a fantastic boat, and their need to show how much they know about kayaks and physics around one another. Those two things, added together, means that nobody’s paying attention to the clock.
I think Mr. Biner would have toasted “To Not Hubris” given the chance. But he wouldn’t have been happy about it.
Nobody was surprised to discover that Mr. Biner had been stationed overseas, right?
Do you get the sense that no one has any particular respect for ol’ Steven?
Including Steven himself?
We’ll have to get him to work on that, won’t we?
According to Douglas Adams in ‘Last Chance To See’, it isn’t an author’s job to prop up stereotypes.
Of course, he pointed this out because he and his little group of English gorilla-watchers were being outclassed by German super-efficient, über-confident gorilla-watchers. He pointed out that it wasn’t his job to make them off-handedly arrogant and proficient just because they were German. So he decided that for the sake of the rest of the book, they’d be Latvian.
Maybe Erich isn’t smugly confident (how many people in this comic are smugly confident? Most of them?) and maybe he isn’t German.
Not my job to prop up stereotypes.
Now, about Mr. Biner…
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