Please explain...

Cathy Guisewite, the creator of the Cathy comic, said Wednesday that deciding to end the comic strip was "excruciating." The comic has won several awards, including a 1992 National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program in 1987, and at its height appeared in 1,400 papers.
"It's just been really unbelievably agonizing to make the decision," Guisewite said in a telephone interview from her home in the Los Angeles area.

Can somebody please explain how this horrible comic strip survived for 30 years - and won awards, too? "Unbelievably agonizing" is how I would describe my attempts to read the Cathy strip over the years. Thirty years of dealing with the same whining, dopey, self-abusing character has taken its toll on readers as well as its creator. My only hope is that newspapers do not choose to run "tribute" strips like they did with great comics like Peanuts and For Better or Worse. Ack!

Can somebody explain how this Steven Slater guy is a cult hero? He's a low-paid drone who got fed up with people not listening to him. If that was heroic, thousands of security guards, ushers and store clerks would be cursing-out customers and drinking beer on their way out the door. The guy is all over the news and the Internet, for some reason, merely because he had a hissy-fit and stormed off the plane. If that's what it takes to achieve cult-hero status, we're in worse shape than I thought.

Can somebody explain how a professional writer like Peter Travers (of Rolling Stone Magazine) can use the sentence: "Wright creates a visual wonderland that is literally a knockout" in his review of "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World?" Literally a knockout. Really? Dude, you should know what the word literally means and stop using it so liberally. Who wants to go to a movie where they'll be unconscious at the end? I thought you liked it.

Back in business. Did you miss me?

After losing my Internet connection due to a bad phone line, I am finally back on the air. Since the good folks at Verizon were going to take 4 days to dispatch a repairman to my home to fix my line, I shitcanned them. Subsequently, I signed up with Clear, but had some problems hooking up the air card to my PC. A quick fix and a few swear words and I'm back on the air. Soon, I'll be mobile-blogging, once my new laptop comes from the gang at Dell who, I'm sure, are busily building it as I type because they know how important it is to me.

Anyway ... what did I miss?

Oh yeah, that oil spill in the Gulf is almost gone - to hear the people at BP tell it, anyway. What happened to the oil? Most of it evaporated, they say. Here's a little experiment you can try in your backyard. Open a quart of oil and leave it on your back porch. Tell me how long it takes for a quart to disappear into the atmosphere. While you're at it, throw in a few shrimp and some fish just to spice it up a little.

I'll think of something better, I promise. Mostly, I've been enjoying the break - much like a cigarette smoker who doesn't realize that his habit is ruining his life, only to find that stopping might have been the best thing he ever did.

Until he has his next cigarette, of course.