Burger King Home Delivery

Burger King Home Delivery.

According to USA Today, the nation's thinly entertaining paper of record,  Burger King is attempting a bid to capture the home delivery segment of the hamburger market.

Spending Sunday with the Times-Picayune

I'm going to start a new Sunday feature coincident with one that occurs in the Times-Picayune.  I read the newspaper every day.  It gets delivered amazingly early so it gives me a nice interruption from whatever it is I'm doing at 3:00 AM.   I look forward to Sundays, as I have since I was a child, because I enjoy the big color comics section.

Well, enjoy may be too strong a word.  I do look forward to it but I'm rarely entertained by the comics.  Firstly, there aren't enough of them and secondly, most of the strips don't make good use of the larger space they are afforded.  Comic strips are an indigenous American art form like jazz.  Unlike jazz, improvisation and craftsmanship are mostly missing from newspaper comic strips.   You aren't going to find Little Nemo or vintage Gasoline Alley.

I won't be providing illustrations to go along with my observations.  If you get the Sunday Times-Picayune, you can read along.  All of these strips are nationally syndicated and easy enough to find online if you are curious about the details.  I also won't be indulging in snark or making fun of the contents.  There are plenty of other sites that do that and I don't much need for another.

I went to see King Kong vs. Godzilla at the Prytania last night and it bothered me that some members of the audience wanted to talk to the screen and titter at the special effects.  I went to enjoy the movie, not to listen to someone trying to be clever.  I enjoyed the film: Japanese artistry.  It wasn't as good as when I was in the third grade and I would discuss it in the schoolyard with my chums, but it had its charms.

I am going to review the comics the same way I watched the movie, trying to enjoy them for what they are.  I admit, some of them are hard for me to enjoy and there are days when I skip whole pages.  I doubt I will dissect them, just view them with a critical eye.  You'll soon learn what I like and what I don't as will become apparent shortly.

Rather than take up too much space in the coming weeks, I am going to spend the first few Sundays describing the layout of the pages, and my general impression of the strips, one page a week in the beginning.  So, let's begin...

Page one of the T-P's comics section holds the following:

Down the right hand side, vertically, is "Dilbert."  This isn't a bad strip.  At first, I was put off by the simple and static artwork but it's grown on me and I find it is expressive of the workplace ennui it depicts.  It is well written and clever.  What it lacks in visual interest, it more than makes up for in guile.  This is one of the better strips being put out today.

The rest of the strips on the front page are in horizontal format.  From the top is "For Better of for Worse." The natural lifespan of this strip has run its course.  Rather than let it die a dignified death, the creator is running reprints in chronological order from the beginning.  It isn't bad but it isn't particularly good either.  Someone obviously thinks people can't get enough of it and so here it is, another legacy strip taking up space.  This will become a recurrent theme as we go along.

Next is "Zits."  This isn't bad either and uses the conventions of comics very nicely.  It is based on teenager-parent differences.  While the subject matter holds limited appeal for me, I appreciate the artistry and effort put forth.

"Baby Blues" is a crudely drawn story of a couple with three young children.  I don't usually skip over this one so much as read it to say I've read the whole first page.  I can't recall ever liking an episode.  It's just kind of there, neither adding to nor subtracting from the luster of the Sunday comics (or any other day for that matter).

Lastly is "Drabble," a strip which gets my bile up.  It seems to be drawn with a ball point pen without any preliminary sketching.  The artist is an adult but the artwork is what you would find on elementary school walls or in elementary school notebooks.  I wouldn't be surprised to see blue lines running through the pictures.  Compared to "Drabble" everything else in the Sunday comics seems to have been written by Voltaire and illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.  I don't understand why anyone would be paid to create this day after day after day.

...And that is the first installment of what will be an ongoing feature.  Just laying the groundwork now, folks.  I know it's a bit dry for what should be a dynamic medium.  Perhaps this is a reflection on me or it may be a reflection on the subject matter.

Tomorrow, we bring you a review of Roman Chewing Candy.  I had my first taste the other day.  Bought two sticks for a dollar apiece.  See you then.
WK



    

New Orleans crime statistics

A cup of Confucius or a cup of commercially mixed Hurricane will do you well when trying to figure out what to make of the crime scene in New Orleans, LA.  I investigated the NOPD's crime map to see how many reported crimes took place within two miles of my new address since June 1.  Answer: Zero.

Not a bad track record.  I can walk Ursulines Street and St. Bernard Avenue without a care in the world. The crime map does offer a caveat, however: "The City of New Orleans makes no representation that the information is accurate, complete, confirmed, investigated, timely, consistent, or correctly sequenced.  Users must not consider the information reliable..."  You agree to this disclaimer before you are allowed to check any statistics, such as they are.

I've been monitoring some internet chatter about a rash of break-ins and attempted rapes and robberies in the 7th and 9th wards, around Marigny-Bywater.  I'm quick to dismiss things as alarmist, especially when reports contain bandanna-masked desperadoes kicking in doors.

If it's not on the crime map and it's not in the Times-Picayune, New Orleans paper of record, how much weight should I place on loose talk heard in the street?

Some young women from the Bywater neighborhood came to view our apartment last night.  We made chitchat while they talked amongst themselves about how much more room this apartment would give them over their current half shotgun.  "Why are moving up here?" I asked.  "Because there's a crime spree in the Bywater and we don't feel safe," they answered in triplicate.

I'm more inclined to trust these ladies' gut instinct than I am to trust a crime map that says no crime, no matter how petty, has not been committed across a vast swath of the city for six months.  No news may be good news but sometimes it's just ignorance forced from above.  I can understand the only city-wide newspaper of national repute not wanting to paint the city with a tarred brush, but withholding news is not a newspaper's mission.

I've been reading the T-P the past few days with more than my usual diligence.  I learned today that the film "Black Swan" deserves only three stars.  "Yogi Bear" got a star and a half.  I haven't read the Lifestyle section yet, just the first section, the metropolitan section, and the lagniappe.  Maybe unsafe conditions are in Lifestyle; it is a city lifestyle issue much more than comic strips advice columns and diet advice.

So, is everything rosy in the Crescent City?  No.  It is a city, no matter what the truth may be, bad things happen, distasteful things, the kind of things people try to protect their children from experiencing.  There is so much good in New Orleans that is leavened by the criminal.  Criminals are everywhere.  That is why we make laws.  Some laws are just, others a nuisance.  Breaking and entering no matter what else follows, is a crime.  This is news that should be counterbalanced and outweighed by the positive happenings in a city as big as this with as big a heart.

The T-P and the NOPD are in cahoots, letting pastel be the shade of the day by omitting details.  They do us a disservice.  I'm not moving away.  I just bought a house because I believe in this city. The administration and the media cheat me of making a responsible decision based on the city's character painted as a whole.  Luckily, I don't rely on the NOPD or the T-P to guide my decisions.  I am alive on the streets, I take the good and the bad, weigh each hand-to-hand like Osiris balancing a feather against a cardiac weight.  New Orleans is good no matter how you describe it, warts and all, every facet, every wrinkle, every pock mark, every scar.

I am happy to live here no matter what I am supposed to know.  I know New Orleans is good and I made the correct decision to plant my roots in the Mississippi mud.  I am home and I raise a toast to the Crescent City.  Long may it thrive.  I am onboard for the journey for the rest of the decades I have left to do the deed.

Better comics, please, Times-Picayune.

This is a recent edition of the daily comic strip F Minus.  It appears in many newspapers of national repute, a class in which the Times-Picayune deservedly belongs.  I think it's a pretty good strip, one of the better ones on the market.

The Times-Picayune features a full page of comic strips and for that I'm grateful.  Some of the choices are a bit lackluster, however.  When I was a kid, we called the comics pages "the funnies."  The Daily News (New York) had the best comics pages on Sundays and my grandfather bought that paper.  When the grandchildren would visit on Sundays, we would fight over who had dibs on the funnies and the losers had to settle for the Danbury News-Times.  I doubt anyone is doing that with the Times-Picayune since its the only paper in town.  It's the only "funnies" there are.

The unfortunate thing is that about half (I'm being generous) of the strips featured in the T-P (and I use this abbreviation for all its implications as far as comic strips are concerned) are not funny.  They are not amusing.  They aren't even mildly interesting.  If the comics editor (my dream job) wants to continue Blondie for old times' sake, I don't have an issue with that.  If he or she wants to include Beetle Bailey, Hagar the Horrible, and Hi and Lois...well, this is another regrettable, daily disappointment I face every morning.  One I can understand.  Since they are all created by the same people and they are all as dull as dishwater, I don't see the point, even if all the creators live in my neck of Connecticut and I've met most of them.  More power to them, but I don't think you should be paid to sleepwalk your fathers' creations.

Curtis is probably the worst strip on record and while I understand why it is published, I can't understand why at the same time.  It stinks.  It has always stunk.  If it never gets any worse but it also never gets any better.  The bar for this one is so low, it can't get worse.  I have a two word review for every episode of Curtis: Pee You.

I have a system when I read the T-P's comics.  I start with the worst and I meander over the page in a semi-clockwise direction to do my penance for subscribing to home delivery while looking for a few gems amid the dross.  They're there more often than not but the bad outweighs the good.  The abysmal outweighs the acceptable.  The humdrum counterbalances the brilliant.  I'm left feeling empty rather than amused.

Thanks to Tony Carillo for the strip above.  For anyone looking for a job in this market it is more relevant than the tedious, dead end "hi-jinx" portrayed in Curtis.  The T-P is due for a comic strip revolution in my opinion.

Thanks for bearing with me.
WK