Mr. Squish meets Santa Claus.

Yeah, it’s not even Halloween yet, and we already have a Christmas strip. I’m gonna catch it from all the folks who are pitching a fit, “It’s too soon for Christmas sales! It’s too soon for Christmas decorations! What?—a Christmas strip? How dare you! Bah humbug!” And so on.

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 frappéd 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.

The melting computer.

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 RAM to the hard drive. I haven’t figured out how to program the dumb thing so it’ll just go to sleep. Waking it up from hibernation takes as long as rebooting it. In fact that’s now my usual routine: Whenever the screen dims, I force-quit the thing, wait a few minutes for it to cool down, then reboot it. (I’m in the old habit of saving everything constantly, so I rarely lose stuff in the reboot.) Lately I’ve been cutting down the cool-down time by popping it into the freezer.

Saturday morning cartoons.

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.

End of the semester, Mr. Squish style.

In my first semester at CSU Sacramento, image I had a classmate named Brad who did nothing but work on the school paper. Nothing. Yes, Brad had other classes; he was in the same Newswriting and Reporting class as I. But he barely went, never paid attention, and was forever asking me what he missed. He didn’t care about ethics, news judgment, learning to gather and confirm sources, copy-editing, headline-writing, or any of the nuts and bolts of reporting. He just wanted to see his byline in the paper. Which was seldom, as I recall.

When heretics attack!

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.)

No more Saturday morning cartoons? Says you.

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.

Mr. Squish, lousy date.

If you’ve watched enough comedies, you’re likely familiar with the trope of the idiot manchild. There’s the Brothers Grimm version, which we see in fairytales and folklore and Adam Sandler movies, where by the end of the tale he learns something and grows up a little. There’s the Molière version, which we see in slapstick comedies and Will Ferrell movies, where the idiot learns nothing at all, yet succeeds regardless. And there’s the schlimazel, the luckless fool who learns nothing and wins nothing, who’s usually the bad guy in the Sandler and Ferrell movies, and who Leonard Squish most resembles.

But one of the common clichés 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.