Home Again

Berke Breathed and Bill Watterson made the comics pages paradise for readers during a brief decade. The creators of Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes had interesting characters, funny stories and good laughs more days than not. Both put and end to their strips well before fans were ready to let them go. With a couple of exceptions, Watterson has stayed retired, but in 2015 Breathed began drawing Bloom County again, with the strip appearing on his Facebook page.

In recent weeks, the County crew has been faced with the task of returning a certain stuffed tiger to his original owner, using all the tools at their disposal to locate the adult Calvin and mail him the lost Hobbes. In a series that surely had Watterson's blessing, Opus the penguin and Oliver Wendell Jones the computer genius teamed up on the project. Breathed has carried off the story with the poignancy and humor that characterized Bloom County in its best moments. For the poignancy, there's the sledgehammer simplicity of the strip that showed how a picture of the adult Calvin had been found:

Then, with an almost unmatched ability to synthesize disparate current events into a funny and unashamedly adolescent punchline, we see the picture the image search found:

And in today's post, the story concludes with the reunion imminent, leaving to the imagination what will happen as the pair "go exploring" as they did in the last C&H panel Watterson drew:

Speculation in the comments is that these panels have been meant to set up Watterson's return to his own strip, or some kind of collaboration between the two. I'd doubt it -- Watterson's well-known disgust with the shrinking comics page in his day would only be magnified when he confronted the shriveled-up remains of the daily newspaper that exist now. And given his immovable stand against merchandising, I can't imagine he'd want to try to produce something in the modern commercial or online environment.

That's OK. These strips have been more fun for a middle-aged guy than a comic strip ought to be and called to mind good days. That'll do nicely.

Big and Gone

Over at Bored Panda, we can find a page where a man uses Photoshop to show ancient extinct animals next to their closest modern-day relatives.

Judging by the sizes of a variety of sharp-toothed beasties, I am left with two observations about the world our ancestors inhabited: 1) I'm glad it wasn't me and 2) How in the heck did our species survive?

Sacrifice

I feel sorry for gymnast Simone Biles, although she won't ever know it and certainly doesn't need it. One of the comments she's made in recent weeks is that she feels like she has the "weight of the world on her shoulders." It's easy to see why. She is clearly the most powerful and gifted women's gymnast of her generation. She has the strength and speed to succeed at moves so far beyond her competitors that her sport's international governing body will refuse to award the difficulty points they merit just to keep the score close.

Competitors accept as justified the pressure of being No. 1 and having everyone gunning for you, Many thrive on it. But our culture has laid much more on Ms. Biles. So many different interest groups make her their hero because of the many roadblocks she had to overcome in her life -- foster care, abuse by USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nasser, the treacherous cover-up of that abuse by the adults running the federation that was supposed to look out and care for her and so on. She was expected to be a voice for persons of color during tumultuous racial times because she was a public figure who was African-American. And sports media's ridiculous obsession with hanging the albatross of GOAT (Greatest of All Time) on certain athletes, blathered (and cared) about mostly by people who only watch the competitions. All of this and more while she is, at 24, simultaneously very very young to handle this load but also approaching that cutoff point for her peak skills. And while she is in a weird Olympics without spectators and staged a year late because of a pandemic.

I feel sorry for Ms. Biles mostly because she may have thought stepping back from competing because all of these different pressures had finally unbalanced her superhuman focus would somehow relieve her of them. She anticipated, I am sure, those who would label her a "quitter," but just as one expects a toddler to make a mess in his or her diaper, one might expect such people to make that judgment.

What she probably didn't anticipate that she would gain an entirely new expectation she didn't ask for: Champion of mental health awareness. Instead of easing out from under the pressure of being the Slay! Queen! of gymnastics she is now also the new avatar of self-care. Everything that has ever happened in the sport will now be re-evaluated in light of the new most courageous person who has ever lived. Rather than value individuals as such, we will now have her as our new paradigm that will let us look with a little bit of sadness and a whole lot of pity on those who may have made different choices at their own crisis points of competition.

I've already seen the first Facebook post that compares her to Kerri Strug, whose vault while injured during the 1996 Atlanta Games has been considered an example of competitive courage. Rather than value each woman for the choice she made when she made it, the post compares Biles' wise decision with Strug's risky one. It blames the tyrannical Bela Karolyi, Strug's coach, for coercing her to make what turned out to be an unneeded vault so the poster can skirt around making a direct judgment of Biles over Strug, but that's certainly the hint the reader is desired to take. Does Simone Biles, born the year after Strug's vault, think of her decision in that way? Who knows? Who cares? We think of it that way, and we will control this narrative too, thank you very much.

I feel sorry for Ms. Biles because with her decision, she may have thought she escaped what everyone else wanted from her and moved into a place where she could do what she wanted when, how and as she wanted. Nope, sorry. This is the 21st century, and when we put someone on the altar of popular culture to sacrifice them to our expectations, we decide when they can get off. Not them.

Reassessment...

For some reason, a new series of ads has been showing up on Facebook, playing video clips from classic television sitcoms.  Some of them are as funny as ever, like Barney Miller, Designing Women and WKRP in Cincinnati. But one show that hasn't aged well seems to be Happy Days.

Fonzie, Richie, Potsie and the bunch gave us the phrase "jumped the shark" when a Happy Days episode showed Henry Winkler waterski-jumping a buoy-outlined patch of water that the script said contained a shark. We knew it did because before the scene that showed Winkler skiiing towards it we saw a fin in the water. And interpolated between parts of the sequence showing Fonzie approaching the ramp (in leather jacket, of course) we saw footage of a shark that was definitely beneath the surface of some water somewhere. Conventional wisdom says that's when the show began to decline, even though it lasted several more seasons.

But watching other clips from the show makes it clear that the silliness that led to its decline began somewhere about season 3, when the characters became caricatures and the every conversation became setup/punchline, setup/punchline, setup/punchline ayyyyy.

So let the shark off the hook, OK? It may be a vicious predator laying waste to hundreds of smaller, cuter and more colorful fish and occasionally attacking a human, but it didn't signal the ruin of Happy Days. That, apparently, had already happened.

Medalist!

One of the reasons to dump so heavily on the corrupt International Olympic Committee and corner-cutting dictatorships is for the times when people like Hidilyn Diaz win a gold medal. Diaz won a gold in women's power-lifting, meaning that for the first time in the history of the summer games, an audience heard Lupang Hinirang sung during the medal presentation. And I mean heard it sung.

Search for video of Diaz's lifts and you'll find a cell-phone video from someone in the Philippines watching from among the limited number of spectators. And when it shifts to Diaz's medal presentation and the hoisting of the flags, the Philippine Air Force sergeant snaps a precision salute as her anthem is played and the sounds of the phone holder and the surrounding people singing their anthem at full volume dominate the feed.

Every time we read about some sticky-fingered IOC official, or some stupid rule that women can't wear shorts in a sport where men can, or some totalitarian regime that will ruin a hundred lives to get one competitor -- or, lately, someone who thinks that Citius - Altius - Fortius adds up to Smarter and Better than You-ius -- we can forget people like Hidilyn Diaz, who was exiled to another country for two years by COVID when she went there to train. Who had to hone her style and strength in a carport because the virus closed the gyms. Who raised money while doing that so food packages could be bought and delivered to poor families locked down and unable to work back in the homeland she hasn't seen in two years.

I'm not unaware that the Philippines are currently run by a strongman-style regime less enamored of human rights than we might wish. I'd rather live here than there because I'm freer here and better off. But one of those blessings here is free speech, which a lot of us say we believe in. So if some athletes significantly more privileged than Diaz want to push the envelope and protest perceived injustices by drawing attention to themselves they should have our blessing.

But when we compare them to someone whose journey to the medal podium was like Hidilyn Diaz's, let's not pretend they should have our respect.

Serendipity

 Serendipity, n.

1. Tuning into the online broadcast of one’s preferred baseball team one pitch before the batter parks one off the wall over the bullpen to cap a seven-run comeback from being down 6-0.

The Cellist, Daniel Silva

Note: Spoilers follow for The Cellist, as well as some minor spoilage of The New Girl and The Order. Should this review have readers, they are cautioned about such.

Daniel Silva's master Israeli spy and assassin Gabriel Allon had an initial career as an artist and premier art restorer before being recruited into his nation's project of vengeance against the terrorists who kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As a restorer, his job is to clean and repair great works of art in such a way that they look as they did when first displayed, with no one the wiser that another's hand has touched them. As Silva has written him, Gabriel brought the same mentality to his espionage missions -- when things went catastrophically wrong for Israel's enemies the disasters appeared to have no origin or perpetrator. Perhaps the targets of his efforts -- those who survived, anyway -- knew their malefactor's name and steady green-eyed gaze. But no one else did, at least not in any way that could ever be proven.

Silva's style helped enhance this quality. Though Gabriel's missions may have featured violence, vehicle chases and episodes of high tension, he writes with a spare elegance that suggests a refined after-action report. Readers might have the impression they are reading the precise and carefully written mission debrief that ordinarily would have been seen by almost no one before being quietly tucked away in the vaults that hold the secrets of nations.

His two most recent outings were clearly subpar -- the ugly onstage fridging of a 12-year-old girl in The New Girl and the Dan Brown-wannabe plot of The Order might be acceptable output from lesser writers, but Silva readers had become accustomed to better work. Up through about chapter 60, he gives them reason to hope that The Cellist may be a return to form.

When Allon friend and Russian expatriate Viktor Orlov is found murdered by nerve toxin, suspicion eventually alights on the journalist who was passing him incriminating evidence that a large German bank was not only crooked through and through, it was a main player in Russian government officials' efforts to launder the profits of corruption and safely store them in the West. Eventually Gabriel, working with counterparts in other intelligence agencies, discovers not only the real actors behind the Orlov assassination but also the source of the insider documents. That source, Isabel Brenner, is turned by Gabriel and his team into the point person of a scheme to disrupt the flow of money into the west and block Russian efforts to destabilize Western economies. The title The Cellist is taken from Isabel's superb talent on that instrument, which she uses to open the door to the inner circle of the Russian schemers and oligarchs. Though Isabel will have the chance to aim at the very highest levels of the Russian government -- and Silva all but names Vladimir Putin -- the danger to her will be exponentially greater. Gabriel and his team will have to wield all of their skills to complete their mission and protect Isabel, and the dual tasks may yet be too much for them.

Over the course of the Gabriel Allon series, Silva has developed his most regular collaborators as a kind of Mission:Impossible squad whose operations write large the former Mossad motto, "By way of deception shall you make war" (a loose translation of Proverbs 24:6). In the onion-like layers of the Allon team's schemes, their foes' own faults burrow them in too deeply to escape -- and when they turn to confront the enemy that brought them there they find only air. The Cellist sets up such a scenario, although repeating some very similar earlier missions involving Sarah Bancroft and Natalie Mizrahi. Still, Silva helps keep the interest in what would otherwise be a familiar plot by exploring Isabel's character and developing her so that readers care about what happens to her. And then it all falls apart.

The first 3/5 of The Cellist cover Isabel's actions as Gabriel's inside agent in the Russian financial scheme. Silva drops in snide drive-by shots at "the American president" who is unnamed but clearly Donald Trump. Spy thriller authors usually create fictional leaders for nations, either to give them the characteristics needed for the plot or to avoid outdating their novel, or to prevent the sometimes jarring comparison between their depictions of events and the way those events are known to have unfolded. Silva's use of Putin as the actual Russian president doesn't really weaken his plot, since the main target and antagonist is a fictional associate. And his turned-up nose at the former president appears intermittently and might slow the narrative, speed-bump style, but only briefly before accelerating back to cruising speed.

But once Isabel's mission is resolved, Silva turns to the real-world events of Trump's loss in November, his unseemly and increasingly unrealistic attempts to prove he really won the election, his ghastly and unpresidential behavior on January 6 and the fever-swamp conspiracy of groups like QAnon. He mixes them to create a second storyline about Gabriel's discovery of a plot to assassinate the incoming president -- an unnamed longtime politician who just happens to be a senator from Delaware "called upon to heal a sick and divided nation" in the "twilight of his life" -- spawned by Russian agents and secret schemes. This choice wrecks The Cellist and moves it from the middle of the Allon books in quality to the bottom tier. It's akin to taking an unspectacular but well-done piece of art and setting it before a class of pre-schoolers while still wet and encouraging them to do whatever they wanted with it.

In his acknowledgments, Silva says he "resolved to include the near death of American democracy in my story of Russia's relentless war on the West" after the January 6 Capitol riots. He replaced his existing ending with an extensive rewrite finished over six weeks, and it shows. It's not impossible to create a story with identifiable but disguised stand-ins for actual politicians and leaders that interprets known events and facts but still entertains while it enlightens. Whether that can be done by Daniel Silva in six weeks or less remains unknown, because it didn't happen in The Cellist. Our narrative of Russian oligarchs and political leaders spinning webs of financial corruption and self-enrichment in exclusive hotels and resorts is suddenly invaded by Silva's assertions of QAnon's machinations and snickering put-downs like "a universally loathed and poorly groomed senator from Texas who had attempted to overturn the results of the election." I have no idea how many people dislike Ted Cruz although I suspect it's a sizable figure and I agree his beard has been a bad look -- but so what? He has no relationship to the story I started to read when Sarah Bancroft happened on Viktor Orlov's body, and neither does any of the other clumsy mix of reportage and speculation that Silva trowels on his modestly successful story of Isabel Brenner's clandestine ensnarement of the Russian kleptocracy.

When we get to the place where Silva broadly insinuates that the unnamed-but-obviously-Donald-Trump-President of the US personally called the unnamed-but-obviously-Vladimir-Putin President of Russia to inform him that Gabriel Allon had placed an agent in his circle, we move from Trump's clueless carelessness about intelligence matters making him a useful meathead for America's opponents to him being an active asset for the same. This sheer wish-fulfillment by Silva lets readers know that they have essentially wasted their time following Isabel and her infiltration because it's all a set-up to inform them Donald Trump is bad. Many people knew that already. Even many of the people who voted for him twice -- your reviewer is not among them -- knew that already. We didn't need Daniel Silva to trash a perfectly enjoyable spy novel to tell us.

Conferencing

At whatever your preferred sports news website, you may read speculation, an actually tiny bit of certain knowledge, opinion and full-throated blatherskite about the idea that the University of Oklahoma and University of Texas might be invited to join the Southeastern Conference. I picked The Athletic, and learned what I could learn here.

What I didn't learn there, and what I wouldn't learn anywhere, was what academic changes this move might entail. Because of course it involves none. Whether either school's athletic programs have competed in the Southwest Conference, Big Eight Conference, Big Twelve Conference or whatever other alphabet combo cobbled together to soak up TV money has made absolutely no difference to the primary reason either school -- if indeed they still desire to be called such -- exists.

The only question about such alignments or re-alignments is which individuals make money off of the efforts of unpaid young people, often members of minority groups. Since the odds that those unpaid young people won't be among those making money, what difference does it make which "athletic conference" an institution belongs to?

"Go Not Like a Ninny..."

Ask the Past recounts some advice from a 1663 publication called Youths behaviour, or, Decency in conversation amongst men about how to behave in public.

It seems the basics have remained unchanged from that day until those when I was told to stand up straight, watch where I was going, and put on clean clothes. As the title of the post notes, some of the details have changed -- although suggesting that people out and about, both in person and on social media, "go not like a Ninny" might be a good practice to re-adopt.

The Men on the Moon

This being the 52nd anniversary of human beings first landing on the moon, and also the day in which yet another billionaire used his money to finance a private flight beyond the edge of the atmosphere, there were of course complaints. These focused on the way that the government spending on the Apollo program was not spent on alleviating poverty and hunger, and that the billionaires spent their money to get themselves into space rather than fixing earthbound problems like poverty and hunger.

Some of these critiques throw figures around that decry the massive dollar amounts spent on space exploration and space travel, although the comparisons usually overlook the fact that the government has spent immensely more money on programs to eliminate poverty and hunger. Which, by the way, still remain. Articles around the internet will counter the comparisons by quoting figures; others will point out that the billionaires both a) spend quite a bit on programs helping folks in need and b) got their money when they created products and services that lots of people wanted to buy and use. In other words, if you don't want Jeff Bezos spending his money to fly into space, don't use Amazon and give your money to him. 

The thing that struck me this time was the idea that the money spent on the space program was somehow unavailable to alleviate poverty seems to treat these funds like they were stuffed into the Apollo 11 capsule and dumped out onto Mare Tranquillitatis. Money spent on the space program was, um, spent on the space program. Things were bought. Things were built. Things were designed. The people who bought things, built things and designed things were all paid for their work -- and as we have been reminded of in recent years, among those people were women from minority groups who played significant roles in the project. I may have it wrong, but I am willing to bet that the money space program employees were paid kept them from being hungry and kept them out of poverty -- and the money paid to those employees today does the same thing.

In fact, those joy-riding billionaires' rocket planes were also designed, bought and built and I'll go so far out on a limb as to say that the people paid for doing so were probably kept from being homeless as a direct result of the money they received. In fact, I think they're probably kept from being homeless right now.

This probably oversimplifies things but it really seems sometimes that the main gripe of people who level their accusations at governments and people who spend their money on traveling to space is that they didn't give any of it to the people griping. But other than in movie reviewing, griping never has paid much.

Wrookie Wreck

Over at the long post blog, a long post on season 3 of The Rookie.

Prediction

When the day comes in which all of human work and achievement is weighed -- in whatever form that may take at the time -- I think it is safe to say that few people will have contributed less to human flourishing than Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

Differentiation

The Who: Rock and roll band consisting of the late Keith Moon and John Entwhistle and the still-living Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey. Signature characteristic: Won't get fooled again.

The WHO: World Health Organization that purchases millions of doses of China's Sinopharm COVID vaccine (79% effective, only studied in populations without comorbidities that make COVID worse) and Sinovac (roughly 50 percent effective, apparently less against some variants). Signature characteristic: Clearly will get fooled again.

Square Kitty

During the 2020 lockdowns, animal psychology researcher Gabriella Smith worked with a number of volunteers on experiments to determine if cats, which will frequently sit in boxes and had been shown to sit in squares taped on the floor, would sit in a square less clearly delineated.

Two sets of four "Pac-Man" figures were arranged on a floor. One set had the open mouths of the Pac-men pointed outward and the other had them arranged to suggest a square inside them relying on the negative space they outlined. Cats were recorded to see if they would prefer the negative space square over the other arrangement, and they did.

Left unresolved is the reason why cats prefer such spaces, with cats themselves displaying the expected attitude of, "Because I damn well please, primate."

Cause and Effect?

When John Cena made his less-than-courageous apology for referring to Taiwan as a country, a number of people speculated that it was the natural result of a well-known side-effect of performance-enhancing drugs that Cena has been rumored -- but not proven -- to have taken.

In a similar vein, when one learns that Hong Kong movie star Jackie Chan said he would like to join the Communist Party of China and that the Beijing government was right to crack down on democracy protestors, one is tempted to remember he has done his own stunts on more than 150 movies and that there is every chance that cognitive-affecting head trauma may have occurred.

Both men, however, share membership in a club of actors that I cannot imagine paying money to watch on screen ever again.

Holding

Sorry, your humble correspondent is tired from church camp. We will attempt a return to posting on the morrow; welcome news indeed for those who have come to rely on my posts as a non-narcotic sleep aid.

I Kind of Did Believe a Man Could Fly

 

Of course, it was Christopher Reeve's performance that made it happen, but it was director Richard Donner's vision and he was the one who made the call to cast Reeve. He also got Gene Hackman to play Luthor, another great choice. Superman has its seams -- it's a little long, Ned Beatty's character is pretty much completely out of place and the Marlon Brando casting proved to be a money sponge that in the end added very little to the movie.

Donner fell awry of Alexander and Ilya Salkind while the first two Superman movies were being shot simultaneously, which resulted in him being fired once Superman was released. Richard Lester directed re-shoots for Superman II, which used some of Donner's footage but not enough for him to get credit. A director's cut of Superman II was released in 2006, which combined Donner's completed scenes, some screen test footage of an important point and the Marlon Brando footage that had been tied up in litigation at the time of the sequel's initial release.

In the meantime, of course, Donner had brought out The Goonies as well as the Lethal Weapon series and cemented his place as a box-office director of zippy action movies.

Although the 1970s special effects don't even come close to measuring up to today's technology, they were some of the best available at the time and something Donner insisted on -- as far as it was possible at the time, it had to look like Superman could fly. What Superman did was show that you could tell a real story with comic book characters when you treated them like real people inside their universe of suspended disbelief, making a modern mythology real.

Donner passed today at the age of 91

Fireworks

Seeing as how the 4th of July falls on a Sunday, the local community is wont to hold its Independence Day celebrations on the 3rd. These include an...extensive...fireworks show, as the ranch workers at a local establishment really like to blow stuff up and shoot stuff into the sky, and they especially embrace the combination of the two.

So when you walk back home from viewing said spectacle, and the city streets have enough expended pyrotechnical smoke that it looks like a London fog bank, you know you have well and truly marked that great day when His Majesty the King of England was told where to get off.