When I first conceived this brilliant idea where Leonard Squish stayed dead, I figured I’d make it into a regular thing.
Nah. The strip would still be “Mr. Squish,” and regularly, to justify the name, they’d refer to the late Mr. Squish.
Yeah, dumb idea.
I killed off Leonard Squish in fall 1990, and I meant it. He was honest-to-goodness, no-fooling-around, dead.
Okay, some fooling around.
If you’re familiar with the term “comic book death,” you know when comic books kill someone, they never stay dead. They can always be brought back. Even when bringing ’em back would seriously mess up the storyline. Fr'instance Bruce Wayne’s parents, whose murder caused him to become Batman. If one of the Batman writers decided it’d be awesome to bring ’em back to life, via magic or some convoluted retcon or zombie science or Black Lantern power rings, they’ll be back before you can cry, Zatanna-style, “Srehtaefesroh!” Anyone can be brought back, and nearly everyone has. If you know of any exceptions, give it time. They’ll be back eventually.
In the United States it’s Election Day—one of ’em. According to the Constitution it’s the first Tuesday of November, ’cause they couldn’t make it Monday, ’cause back in the 1780s it might take you a whole day to travel to the polls, and religious folks didn’t wanna travel on Sunday. So, Tuesday. It’d be more convenient on a Saturday, but then again you can vote by mail, y’know.
The previous Election Day was back on 3 June, when we already voted for most of these people. California being a heavily Democratic state, the Democrats won by huge majorities. But the way our state’s elections work, there’s gotta be a runoff between the top two vote-getters in all the partisan offices. (Even if the top vote-getter had such a lead over all other candidates, there’s no point in any runoff. Which happened. Often.) So that’s what this election is: People looking at the ballot and saying, “I thought he lost. Why’s he on the ballot again?”
Hence turnout is expected to be low. Which is dumb, ’cause if enough people skip the election, and the number-two guy can mobilize his supporters, he might win this time around. But he likely won’t. The stats aren’t in their favor. I tell you though, if any of them actually pull it off, it’ll be the last time: Everyone will remember the freak occurrence.
Ran this one in Fall 1991. So yeah, it’s out of sequence, but appropriate for the day.
No, Leonard didn’t mean Linus any harm, which is why I tacked on that line, “Wanna buy a Fisher-Price chainsaw?” It’s Halloween; it’s a trick. The poor kid did need straightening out, in many ways.
Just for fun, let’s read a few things into Peanuts, shall we?
Lucy ran a psychiatry booth. Not the usual thing a little kid would do; put aside the fact Charles Schulz made the Peanuts gang do a lot of things little kids would do. Instead of a lemonade stand, she ran a psychiatry booth. Consider what sort of kid would come up with such an idea. Someone who figured she knew enough about psychiatry to peddle it to her friends, especially gullible ol’ Charlie Brown, right? Clearly someone who spent a lot of time with her own psychiatrist.
The Mr. Squish universe is a Calvinist one. In it Leonard was predestined for wrath.
I had one final strip for Fall 1990. I and Wayne, the cartoonist who produced “Squidman” for the Hornet, had entered a death pact: We were gonna kill off our main characters. His Teenage Martyr would finally succeed at one of his many threatened suicides, and I would have Leonard get whacked. But Wayne reneged.
When I drew this strip, I assumed the Teenage Martyr would hang himself off the Guy West Bridge, as expected, and decided to depict his afterlife. And Leonard’s. As shown above.
Yeah, it’s not even Halloween yet, and we already have a Christmas strip.
Well, I’m going through the strips more or less in order, and this one sets up the next dozen, so here ya go. Merry Christmas.
Now the backstory. Mr. Squish was obviously not the only strip in the Sac State Hornet in Fall 1990. Predating my strip was this fellow named Wayne Kunert, who drew a strip called, at the time, “Squidman.” (It changed names a few times since.) Because both Wayne’s strip and mine had titles with “squi” in them, this managed to completely confuse tons of inattentive, weed-addled Sac State students, who mixed up one with the other, or frappΓ©d them together. “Oh,” I’d hear from time to time, “you’re the guy who draws Mr. Squidman.” So would Wayne. I found it amusing. Not sure Wayne did.
If you haven’t yet given in to the lure of a tablet computer, and are shopping for a laptop, especially round Christmas, check something out first: See how warm it gets.
My church lends me this HP laptop. (Specifically, an HP Pavilion dv4. Yeah, it’s not new. But they bought it new.) I make multimedia presentations, and do a little graphic design, with the thing. No doubt it was bought because it was an inexpensive machine. But you get what you pay for. I don’t know how the current HP designs are, but this one’s a lemon. In 20 minutes, it can heat up to the point it shuts itself off.
I first discovered this some years ago. I set the laptop on my couch, and after a few minutes the screen dimmed to black. I thought it was the screensaver, but I couldn’t wake the computer back up. After another minute, the hard drive spinning like mad, it turned itself off.
Turns out it went into hibernate mode, and backed up the
Last night I was dead tired and went to bed early. This morning I woke up ridiculously early and thought, “Well, now what?” Well, here’s what. I did mention it last week, after all. I fired up the Netflix and started watching Saturday morning cartoons.
No, there’s no Frosted Cocoa Bunches of Honey Golden Pebbles in the pantry. Nothing but various forms of high-fiber cereal. I may as well eat a whiskbroom every morning with how much fiber there is in my diet. So I got out the Shredded Wheat, dumped a bunch of brown sugar on it, and considered that a good-enough substitute for Fruity Maple Peanut Butter Marshmallowy Oaty Sugar Clusters. By which time the Blu-Ray player had finally loaded Netflix. (It’s slow.)
Watched Futurama. Nope, they never showed that on a Saturday morning. That’s the nice part about Netflix: I’m not limited to kids’ programming.
In my first semester at
Every once in a while I tangle with the Oneness Pentecostals. Can’t help it. If you’re a Pentecostal, particularly a Pentecostal on the internet, it’s inevitable.
If you’re not familiar with the Oneness group: Oneness Pentecostals are Pentecostals. Same background, same history, same practices. Significantly different theology. Two things stand out in particular: They believe you must be baptized in the Holy Spirit to be saved (it’s not salvation by grace alone, ergo heresy). And they don’t believe in the trinity; God is One, but not Three (hence the name, and also heresy).
They’re modalists. That is, God’s sometimes the Father, sometimes the Son, sometimes the Holy Spirit. Any time you think you’re seeing the Son speak to the Father, it’s just God talking to himself. The trinity is a doctrine the Catholics made up at the Nicene Council, probably because of that polytheist emperor Constantine’s prompting. (Cue the anti-Catholic rhetoric, even though there was no Roman Catholic Church yet for another seven centuries.)
Last week, the last of the Saturday morning cartoon blocks aired. The CW, which was the only broadcast network still bothering to air ’em, cancelled them and replaced them with live-action educational programming.
So, a bunch of articles on the internet today are boo-hooing the end of an era. Mostly it’s nostalgia. Mourning their lost childhood. Remembering, with glee, how they used to wake up at the crack of dawn on Saturday, pour themselves a big bowl of Sugar Frosted Fruity Cocoa Honey Bunches of Sugar (with crunchy marshmallows!) and watch show after show after show.
Me, I lived with parents who believed too much TV rots your brain, so as soon as they discovered I’d watched more than an hour of the stuff, they demanded the TV be turned off and I do anything else.
If you’ve watched enough comedies, you’re likely familiar with the trope of the idiot manchild.
But one of the common clichΓ©s we find paired with the idiot manchild is the disapproving girlfriend. Or wife, or friend’s wife, or boss, or mom, or some other significant female who rolls her eyes at all the shenanigans, yet loves the idiot manchild anyway. Unless she’s his mom, there’s no discernible reason for it. And when the manchild is also casting the movie, she’s ridiculously pretty; way out of the manchild’s league.
Every time I visit Grandma, she asks me whether I have a girlfriend. This’d be one thing if I visited her once a year, but lately it’s been every week—and she’s suffering from dementia, so it doesn’t matter how many times I tell her, “No I don’t.” She’ll forget and ask again.
“Why not?” she’ll follow up with. “Don’t you like girls?”
“No,” I answered last time, “I like women. Girls? Eww. What do you take me for?”
“Oh,” she’ll say dismissively, “you know what I mean.”
Yeah, I know what she means; she’s from that generation where any woman, regardless of age, is a “girl.” But she’s also from that generation where single men in their forties are weird. So she wants to make sure I’m attached, and on the way to producing her some great-grandchildren.
And one of these days, just for fun, I might invent a wife, kids, and grandkids. Make her an unexpected great-great-grandmother. But no, I don’t make up stories for Grandma. ’Cause dementia is a weird thing: You never know which stories might stick in her head. Next thing you know, she’ll be asking me every week when I’m gonna bring my grandchildren over. Rather than spinning a different yarn every visit, best I stick to the truth.
But the truth is I’m single, by choice. Not that I rule out ever being in a relationship, or ever marrying. It’s just I’m not looking.
The theme is 10 books which have had the greatest impact on me. It’s been bouncing round the internet, and Wednesday I got nominated to share my own list, and of course every book has a backstory. Giving the list without the context made no sense to me, so I got to writing.
Not nominating anyone else to share their 10, because I’d want to know the story behind each selection, and I don’t expect them to write 500-word essays on each of them like I did.
Not counting bible either, ‘cause that one’s way too easy. Any Christian who doesn’t have bible influencing them is asking for it. But any Christian who includes it is trying to escape 10 percent of their thinking.
So here’s the list.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I don’t rule out the possibility the Virgin Mary can, God permitting, appear to people.
This wasn’t new news, but it had just gone viral. (No, the term hadn’t been invented yet in 1990.) It hit the Sacramento Bee and the TV news, and people were starting to make pilgrimages to go see it. In fact, if you still wanna see it, the “sighting” is visible every morning between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m.
I’m very white. Not culturally; I’m not into whiskey, mayonnaise, ironic tattoos, grumbling about people who don’t speak English, and blindly defending all police behavior (except when they shoot white gun nuts). I’m white in that I have very little pigment in my skin. Enough to produce freckles; not enough to keep me from sunburning easily. So if I go outdoors, I either have to slather myself in sunblock, or stay in the shade. And since I find sunblock uncomfortable, shade it is.
So, despite how allergic I am to them, I’m very fond of trees. Big, shady trees. The more the better.
When I was a kid my musical choices were all over the place.
When I started listening to the radio, it was San Francisco’s
In 1990 I was in favor of term limits.
One can argue the Founders were in favor of term limits. After all, congressmen only get two-year terms. And yes, in the case of the House of Representatives, the idea was they would serve for brief lengths of time. But not so the Senate. Six-year terms, longer than that of the president; elected (at the time) by the state legislatures; vacancies immediately filled by the governors; staggered terms; the whole system was set up to encourage incumbency, longevity, and stability. Like Parliament, where the House of Commons could be turned over on a regular basis, but the House of Lords would always have the same lords in it, the idea was one house would be forever renewed, and the other not. Term limits for all? Goes against the intents of the Founders.
I read a lot. I also listen to audiobooks. I get ’em from the public library, for the most part. I listen to them on my iPod or pocket computer. Now, since the library’s collection comes almost entirely on compact disc (they do still have cassette tapes, believe it or not) this means I obviously have to rip the CDs—convert ’em to MP3—before I listen to them. ’Cause I’m not lugging around a portable CD player and a case of discs.
I’m not sure how the library feels about this; I never bothered to ask. But my usual modus operandi is to go to the library, pull the audiobook CDs off the stacks, sit down with my laptop, and rip it right there. Then I put the CDs back. I don’t even bother to check them out. I used to, but that was silly: I’d just go home, rip the CDs, then return them the next time I went to the library. Meanwhile the discs just sat there at home, and any poor schlub who wanted to listen to that book had to wait for me to return it. Seems a waste. Now, no waste.
I figure it’d be piracy if I kept the MP3s, but I don’t. I delete them after I listen to them. Or once I’ve given up on the book.
If you don’t know who Milli Vanilli is, lucky you.
The ironic thing is there wasn’t much true about Milli Vanilli. The band was fabricated by the producers. They hired session artists—the not-so-famous professional artists you hire to play what your band members can't—to play their tunes. Then they hired models Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus to be the frontmen; to look pretty on the cover, to make public appearances, to dance and lip-sync in the videos and concerts. Functionally this makes them no different than The Archies or The Chipmunks, but with live-action guys instead of cartoon characters.
Blockbuster got me in the habit of watching the entire run of a TV show. Back in the ’00s I started subscribing to their video-by-mail service, which they ripped off from Netflix, but the reason they got my business was ’cause if I returned the mail-in video to my local Blockbuster store, I could swap it for a free rental. So, y'know, twice the movies.
But I quickly ran out of movies. So I started watching old TV shows. And binge-watching whole seasons of TV shows is fun. True, you immediately see all the flaws in the storytelling, which you’re much less likely to catch when it’s spread out over a course of 25 weeks, but still: Why spend ten months waiting to see how things on any given show are gonna turn out, when you can find out over the weekend? Why wait two months to see if this show’s ever gonna be any good, when you can find out after a few hours?
I wanted to be a cartoonist
But it didn’t matter if I had my own “Billy” characters. Or later, my own “Lester” characters. Other kids wanted me to draw Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and later Garfield and Odie. They didn’t know who my characters were.
Monday I went to Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. My mom and sister have year passes, and they can bring guests, and Mom has been threatening to bring me as a guest for the longest time, so off we went. I got amusement-parked-out when I lived in Santa Cruz and went to the Boardwalk all the time, and the only parks I like anymore are the Disney parks. Six Flags tries. But I only cared to see the animal shows. Saw a few.
When I was a kid, the park was called Marine World/Africa USA, and located in Redwood City. To build it, back in the mid-1960s, the American Broadcasting Company “reclaimed” some of the San Francisco Bay’s marshy tidelands: They diked it off and filled it in. Probably killing a dozen endangered species in the process. It was a different era, you see: The way people proved they loved and celebrated nature was to build a wholly unnatural enclosure, stick some nature in it, and sell tickets and concessions. Zoos and sea parks still operate on that model, even though they’ve gone to a whole lot of trouble to pretend they don’t.
