The Tin Lizard

Do 'The Funnies' Tell Us About Ourselves?

The Washington Post carries about 40 or more comic strips daily, which makes it a lot more fun to read than (say) the New York Times, the Kansas City Star, or many others.

This past Monday I was struck by how many of these strips seem to depend heavily on a certain type of character - call him/her the lazybones, the loser, the layabout, or the lout if perchance you crave alliteration - but whatever you call it, it's the person who doesn't seem to have much get-up-and-go.

There are classic portraits like the do-nothing Beetle Bailey, the teen loafer Jeremy in Zits; Garfield the lazy cat, Dagwood the the multi-decade goof-off, and others.  There's Dilbert, where the employees cleverly duck accomplishing anything and their boss does nothing either; Earl Pickles lacks gumption, and Baldo is another mostly-idle teen (though we must give this strip its due, because it offers Gracie, the nine-year-old who loves school and has already tried to apply to Harvard).   And this Monday, even Nate, who at times shows some spunk, was devoting himself to avoiding his dad's urgings to set goals or to plan for the coming school year.

Should we be concerned about this picture of a lazy, unambitious America, where no one seems motivated to get a job done?  Is this really us?  Some may say so, but I hope maybe it says more about cartoonists than about the rest of us.

Like Ads? You'll Love "Enterprise"

OK, I confess to having made a mistake.   I downloaded a program I thought was going to help me with a process, and got a whole barrage of five or six messages, each asking me to click to show that I accepted the "User Agreement."

Each of these, of course, represented an attempt to install bloatware (at best) or malware on my computer.  But I must have accidentally clicked on one of them...

Within minutes, I found my web-browser screen looked different.  Suddenly, ads were popping up all over, many of them without an obvious way to close them.  When I did find a way to close them, another ad would pop up immediately.  Worse, the upper right corner had a tricky little rollback thing, made to look like a page turning.  The corner of it had an "x" on it, suggesting you could cancel it.  But as your cursor approached that "x" it would slide away, and open the ad lurking behind!  There literally was no way to click on that x! 

The name of this colossal invasion is "Enterprise 1.1," a program that installs itself just like your legitimate software, under "Programs" in Windows.   And like other programs, it wasn't too hard to uninstall (I think).

We're all familiar with the way aggressive and unscrupulous use of communications media has made one after another of those media effectively obsolete.  E-mail was exploited to the degree that we all had to find add-on programs to control it before we drowned in it.   Most of us learned a decade or more ago just not to answer the telephone - especially not around 6:00 pm! - and in doing so, we condemned that once-essential instrument - or the land line at least - to a slow death.   Print was never quite as bad, because the ads in a newspaper were fairly easily ignored.  But it's still interesting to speculate whether the Egyptians had this problem with their papyrus scrolls.

What's puzzling is that there could be anyone so stupid as to hope to build a business on selling ads on such an obnoxious platform.  An occasional ad on the margin, which still would allow me to read the page I was on?  Not so bad.  I might not have even given it much thought.  But a constant barrage of ads jumping up every 30 seconds, and standing in the way of the content ?  Well now, that was noticeable, and of course I did something about it immediately.  So what can "Enterprise 1.1" and its advertisers possibly have gained? 

In fact, I'd think that advertisers - if they realize how these ads are being presented -- would prefer NOT to pay Enterprise for this kind of sleazy, intrusive advertising.   Not to name any names, but for example, Kohl's, and Ebay, both of which popped up about 100 times each.

So, yes, avoid Enterprise 1.1 if you can, be very careful downloading freeware, and choose to boycott eBay or Kohl's if you wish -- but above all, reflect with amazement on the idiocy of marketers.

 

P.S. - That downloaded program?  It didn't work as advertised.

 

Nicknames

A recent visit to our nation's heartland reminded me of the old-timey custom of nicknames.  At least, I assume it's old-timey because no one seems to have them any longer.

My mother-in-law had five siblings.  She herself was known in the family as "Mag."   Not so different from her real name, Margaret, so that hardly counts.  But my father-in-law was known to many as "Cy" (or maybe "Si," no one is sure) which bore no relation to either of his real names.   Also nearby in my wife's family are her uncles:  "Bud," "Doc," and "Pudgy" (who isn't).   In my own family, I had a grandfather known as "Deke" (I'm told it was short for "Deacon"), an uncle Bud; another uncle whom everyone called "Johnny" although John was not one of his given names; an aunt nicknamed "Tissy."  And we're all familiar with Ronald "Dutch" Reagan and George "Dubya" Bush.

Most of those names belong to people born in the 1920s or 1930s.  They tried to continue the tradition, I guess, but it didn't seem to stick quite as well with those born in the 40s and 50s.  My brother-in-law will answer to "Pigeon," but he prefers his real name; my grandmother called me "Governor" when I was little but nobody but her picked that up (maybe because we seldom saw her in our army-family peregrinations around the country); I have a cousin called "Skeeter" but I haven't seen him in probably 40 years and I'd be willing to bet he doesn't answer to that name any longer.

So, it's observation based on skimpy evidence, but nowadays I don't hear much evidence that anyone really has good solid nicknames anymore.   Am I wrong?

Useless fact for today:  My dictionary informs me that "nickname" stems from an old English form "eke" meaning "also" - i.e. "an eke name" yielded the word "nickname" that we use today.  (Or that our grandparents did, anyway!) 

That in turn makes me wonder whether other cultures use nicknames; in my experience, they do but perhaps not so widely as we used to.  It also makes me wonder if the practice might have something to do with fooling the devil, as in some cultures children aren't given a "real" name until they're a year old.