Mr. Squish, violent music critic.

If you don’t know who Milli Vanilli is, lucky you. They were a German pop/dance band which had a brief bit of popularity in the late 1980s. Their music was stupid, but as we all know, stupid sells; give it a good hook and strong bass, and people will instinctively hum along to it, and not know why. They even won a Grammy for Best New Artist, on the strength (well, sales strength, likely) of their debut album, Girl You Know It’s True.

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.

Reruns which stand the test of time… and 𝘔𝘶𝘳𝘱𝘩𝘺 𝘉𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘯.

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?

How to draw Mr. Squish.

I wanted to be a cartoonist ever since I was a little kid. I began by ripping off Peanuts. Not by drawing Charlie Brown and Snoopy, although I could. I wanted to draw my own characters. But my characters and plotlines were thinly-veiled plagiarism of Peanuts. “Billy” was about a depressed little boy, a sister who dismissed him, an angry little girl down the street who emotionally abused him, a best friend with his own attachment issues, and a dog who escaped all this tension by mentally projecting himself into a complex fantasy world. (Yeesh, just writing that description gives you a glimpse of how thoroughly messed up Charles M. Schulz was.)

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 at Discovery Kingdom.

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.

ABC built the first Marine World on that land, opening it in 1968. It went bankrupt in four years. It was bought out, had “Africa USA” added to it—named for a southern California jungle park which had been destroyed in a mudslide—and it was a popular destination for local field trips. I must’ve gone there 20 times. The rides were few and far between, but there were animal exhibits and animal shows, and waterskiiers who did stunts. Those were fun. But as I recall, Marine World always had a funny smell to it—one which we blamed on the tremendous piles of elephant dung, but were probably the acres of marshlands outside the park.

Mr. Squish and Greek fraternities.

Before college, all I knew about Greek fraternities was from Animal House, and the fact my dad was in Sigma Nu at San Jose State. (And didn’t talk about it. But that was probably because of all the blackouts. Lots of drinking went on.)

A lot of the college grads I knew from church had gone to Christian schools, which rarely have fraternities; instead they have what they call “Greek-letter societies,” which are basically academic clubs. I later joined one of them, Epsilon Delta Kappa, when I was at Bethany College; I was on its senate for a year, and suffered through some of the longest, most boring meetings ever. Worse than the prayer meetings at a Fundamentalist church. Seriously. But let’s hop off that tangent and go back to 1990.

So when I got to CSU Sacramento, there were the fraternities. Or, as they call themselves, “Greeks"—which, considering their behavior, is nearly as much an insult to ethnic Greeks as "Atlanta Braves” is to Indians. But I digress again. You get the idea, though, that it wasn’t a positive experience.

𝘈𝘵𝘭𝘢𝘴 𝘚𝘩𝘳𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘥, the libertarian bible.

I was asked to repost my old rant about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which I originally posted 28 December 2009. Um… okay. But I reserve the right to update those old essays a bit, and I did so here.

I didn’t actually read Rand’s capitalist version of Lord of the Rings till ’09, when I posted the piece. I’d always been encouraged to. People said it changed their lives. But these were the same sort of people who said Dave Ramsey changed their lives, or Bill Gothard changed their lives, or Francis Schaeffer changed their lives. Naught for three.

So I approached Atlas with the same sort of hesitation I had for the first 12 Left Behind novels: Didn’t really wanna read ’em, but my friends were reading ’em, quoting ’em, and letting their fearful Essene/Manichee scenarios leak into their theology and draw ’em further away from the Light. Same with Atlas; I’d spent years wondering why all the so-called “Christian” conservatives I knew were so heavily infused with social Darwinism, despite Jesus’s compassion for the poor and needy. Time to muddy myself with the source material.

Mr. Squish and useless teachers.

This strip got me in trouble. Not for the reasons you’d think. I figured if I were to get any grief at all about it, it’d be from slacker professors who felt my portrayal hit way too close to home, and who were too dumb to pretend it was some other guy I was making fun of, not them.

No, I didn’t catch—and maybe neither did you—what it was about this strip that profoundly offended people, causing three students to angrily come to the Hornet offices to request my head on a stick, a phone call from the faculty chair of a department, and an official letter in my file. Neither did I.

It’s two little words in the first panel: “RLS 30.”