Mr. Squish goes to Burger King.

Summer 1990, the summer before I started at CSU Sacramento, I was still working at Black Culture Magazine, but we hadn’t produced an issue in months. I was short on cash, and school was starting. Burger King had a regular help-wanted ad in the Reporter, so I went to Burger King and they hired me immediately.

At the time it was the only BK in Vacaville. It’s the one on Monte Vista Ave., atop “Hamburger Hill,” with McDonald’s next door, Wendy’s and Rax (now Arby’s) and Long John Silver’s (now gone) across the street. Vacaville was still small, and largely undeveloped, and the bus system sucked. (And still does.) I didn’t drive, so it meant pedaling my bicycle over unlit, poorly-paved strips of asphalt in the middle of nowhere (all of which was developed into Factory Outlets and strip malls in the ’90s), at 4:30 a.m., to open BK for breakfast at 5.

Goldbugs.

Goldmember.

This morning I had to give a bit of an economics lesson to someone who is hugely in favor of the gold standard. He believes, as many “goldbugs” do, that if we stopped letting the Federal Reserve control our money, and just went back to gold, we’ll no longer have to worry about inflation: Gold will hold its value, and the government won’t be able to monkey with its value by printing up more of it.

“No,” I said; “instead you’ll have Bond villains who monkey with its value by hoarding it, or after a few years of hoarding it, flooding the market with it.”

He didn’t understand. (Hadn’t seen Goldfinger, or even Goldmember.) So I explained.

Back to blogging on Mr. Squish.

Somehow, Thursdays have become “Throwback Thursdays” for a lot of people, in which they show old pictures of themselves, “back in the day,” which depending on how old they are, was either decades ago, or two years ago ’cause their friends don’t know what they looked like in junior high.

Whereas I have 24-year-old comic strips.

The above (which you can click to embiggen) is the first “Mr. Squish” strip I drew for the CSU Sacramento Hornet. (Not yet the State Hornet.) I’d drawn “Mr. Squish” for the Solano Community College Tempest in spring 1990, and I still haven’t tracked down my copies of it, but I have most of my strips from my Sac State years, so here ya go.

Kurt Cobain has been dead a while.

Today is the 20th anniversary of when musician Kurt Cobain shot himself. Of course the press jumps all over anniversaries like this, even when it’s a busy news day, ’cause nostalgia will steer web traffic just as effectively as actual news.

So, why are all the 30- and 40-somethings making such a fuss about him? Well, he was the first musician who died that we actually liked. We were too young to appreciate John Lennon or Marvin Gaye’s deaths, or feel any great loss at their passing. Cobain was different. We liked his music. True, we were young and dumb and had no taste, but that makes no difference. We liked him, and suddenly lost him.

Yeah, I watch 𝘊𝘰𝘴𝘮𝘰𝘴.

I’m not a scientist. I’m a science buff, in that I read a lot of stuff about science. I read a lot of history, and a certain amount of philosophy. Included in all that would be biographies of various scientists, or the history of scientific theory. When you read a biography of Benjamin Franklin, you’re gonna read a bit about his discoveries in electricity; when you read on Galileo Galilei, you’ll pick up astronomy; when you read on Albert Einstein, relativity. But sometimes I’ve just straight-up read Charles Darwin, or Nicolaus Copernicus, or Aristotle, just to see where these guys were coming from. Never be afraid of the original sources: I found Einstein himself explained relativity much more clearly than his biographer did.

So when I saw the promotions for Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey last year, I was looking forward to it. I saw the original series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, back in 1980, on public television. Dad liked science shows, like Nova or National Geographic, and didn’t mind my watching them with him. Probably because they were “educational.” I found it interesting. Years later I found the companion book to the series and read it; also interesting.

Host and writer Dr. Carl Sagan used it to promote science and scientific discovery: As an agnostic, he’d ruled out the Judaism of his ancestors as an explanation for life in the universe, and the meaning of life. I’ve read enough of Sagan’s stuff to realize he hoped there was a God, but he didn’t care to search for him in temple, or a church. Instead he turned to nature. He looked to astronomy. He got his sense of awe from looking at the biggest things there are. And Cosmos (in both the original and 2014 versions) comes across as quite evangelical: It’s trying to give us that same sense of awe by showing us the wonders of nature, and getting us to be impressed by the science we used to discover it.

On the “Ham on Nye” debate.

So I watched the Bill Nye / Ken Ham debate on creationism.

[Update, 10/20/24: They took it off the Answers in Genesis website years ago, but YouTube still has it. Wanna watch it? Here ya go.

I’m guessing the DVD sales weren’t all that. The original video started with a really long countdown; glad that’s gone.]

Some thoughts.

January fasting and bible-reading.

Two things tend to happen to Protestants in January: Our churches encourage us to fast, and to start a program of reading the bible. The fasting is because we’re ostensibly seeking God’s face for the new year—we want to start it right by showing him we’re really serious about following him, and really seeking some new revelations from him about his upcoming plans—and so we fast. The bible-reading is because, well, we’re Christians; we oughta read the bible. And if you’ve never read the bible all the way through, it’s high time you made it your New Year’s resolution, and start a-reading.

My church calls for a fast every January. And I hate fasting—and so does everyone, ’cause we’re Americans and don’t like to deprive ourselves of anything if we can help it. That’s why, I suspect, so many of us choose to go on the “Daniel Fast,” which is a popular fast-but-not-really-a-fast. You don’t actually go without food. You go without some foods, namely meat and sugar and oil. It’s a diet, really. It’s an exercise in self-control, and frankly a lot of us could use self-control, so in in the end it’s a good thing.