Oh, the end of the day, when it’s time to assess, reflect, and refine your goals for the following morning, right?
You just need a trusted ear, and a moment to bend it a little.
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Posts Tagged Mr. Stuffins
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Honestly? Drawing and re-drawing that goofy green table and chairs is not my favorite thing in the world, but y’know… It makes for a jolly looking cartoon.
Sorry for the delay, troops! Big storm here yesterday (check out the radar animation they put up on Washingtonpost.com- the storm looked like an explosion on the radar. Anyhow, no internet here at Hubris central. I’m doing a workaround by running up giant bills on my cell phone.
I don’t usually use spelled-out harsh language, but I trust I won’t offend anyone today. We’ll see if this cartoon makes it onto GoComics in a month or so. Oh, the times are changing. Fifty years ago, comic strips made fun of national and cultural stereotypes but didn’t use any salty language at all. These days, we try to be sensitive with the social and cultural issues, but ‘ass’ is in common parlance. What’s the world coming to, I ask? What?
If you grew up reading MAD magazine, you have a sense of Nick Meglin, who edited MAD for a long time.
He died a couple of days ago, a week after I saw him last. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would graciously accept glowing words of praise. He was clever and sarcastic and sharp, and I’m dearly, deeply, genuinely grateful to have known him for the last twelve or so years, though I can’t imagine saying that to his face or what his hilarious, dismissive reply would have been.
The best way I’ve thought to express it is that, in the moments when we had his attention, he made us each feel we were kings, that we had such a fine court jester to mock us so perfectly.
And the world is diminished without him.
Why teddy bears, anyhow? I mean, I’ve heard the stories about Roosevelt and whatever, but… Bears. Man, those things are dangerous!
I got one of those audiobooks of the year’s best science fiction. It had a story in it I liked a lot. Now that I look at this cartoon, I think I liked it more than I realized.
In it, a computer programmer had given her sister a beta-version language translation software suite that was ramped up to account for the fact that her sister communicated in a couple of different Sign Languages. The software would translate sign, and whatever other languages it could recognize, or learn, and display a CGI avatar of the person with a synth voice as though it were speaking American English aloud.
All well and good until, through a series of domestic vagaries, the woman’s daughter finds herself going through interminable conversations with someone while the computer flounders to understand the language of the caller involved. The avatar would repeat “Hello” and “I’m hungry”, but the caller never seemed to understand the responses.
Finally over days, the computer breaks the language and conversations get a little better. And, in the end, as you’ve possibly guessed, the avatar had been randomly assigned to a pet crow. The augmented and advanced language software worked like crazy to understand and translate a language, but the avatar imaging software was only concerned with making lips match American English words, and didn’t have a setting for ‘non-human’ face.
Good story.
Welcome back, Mr. Stuffins!
You can never think of those suave and so fisticated retorts when you need them. They only come to you after a bout of self-loathing and a meal. Maybe a nap. And certainly after whoever needed the retort has gone to bed and says he’ll talk to you some other day and to get the heck out of his basement.
