DUmmie FUnnies 11-06-04 ("For 2 whole days, I layed in the corner drooling & making weird sounds")

I consider the DUmmies to be like my personal ant farm. Every day I look through my computer screen window at my DUmmie Ant Farm and they never disappoint. It is fascinating to stare at my DUmmie Ant Farm because they go though so many interesting variations. Some days the DUmmies are in a state of hilarious despair. Other days they act like drama queens. Since the election they often scream in helpless rage at the lousy deck of cards fate has dealt them. Today’s DUmmie FUnnies is one of the best in the FUN department as DUmmie mopaul describes in hilarious detail the agonies he has suffered since the re-election of the Evil Bush Regime in this DUmmie THREAD. So join me for this entertaining peek at the DUmmie Ant Farm. As usual the droppings of the little critters are in Bolshevik Red while the musings of the keeper of the DUmmie Ant Farm, your humble correspondent, are in the [brackets]:

[Consider yourself lucky, mopaul. Most DUmmies will be drooling and making weird sounds for 2 whole months as a result of the election.]

When I awoke very early Wednesday morning, I remember making coffee and sitting down with a cup at the computer machine....then, everything turned bright white, then completely black. I felt a dull thud, and heard a sound like a pumpkin smashing against a side of beef.

[All typical signs of the coming of the Apocalypse…except that the sound would be more like a pumpkin smashing against a side of hedgehog.]

Every few hours, I would drift back into lucidity, just long enough to realize I was laying in the corner of the living room with spittle running down my cheek and into a large puddle at my chin. and I could hear a weird voice off in the distance. I later realized it was my own voice, but I didn't hear words, only groans and occasional burps.

[These are usually symptoms of a condition that is known in medical circles as “inebriated”…but do continue, mopaul.]

One time when I blurred back into almost consciousness, I saw my dear wife, Mrs. Paul, over at the edge of the room, but she looked like she was 20 miles away, and I remember that the sensation of time passing had vanished, and I seemed to be locked in a ripple between time and space.

[Hmm….I take back my original prognosis of inebriation. This now sounds more like you had a near life experience. Please continue, mopaul. I find this FASCINATING.]

I got the vague blurred impression that I was curled up in the fetal position, and I could see a dust bunny in the corner in great detail, but I knew that dust bunnies didn't talk, as this one did. It kept echoing a phrase or mantra that I couldn't quite make out...'mandate'...'exit polls'....'massive turnout'...'4 more beers, 4 more beers'.....then the silence of the grave.

Then, I began to regret that I hadn't just died, and I felt hot as hell, but shivering like a naked man in antarctica, sweating and trembling violently. I remember dear Mrs. Paul applying a wet towel to my forehead and saying sweet comforting things to me, and I remember she looked like an angel, wings and all. for a while, it looked like I might pull through.

[I remember seeing a video like this once. Only instead of Mrs. Paul, it was Paris Hilton applying a wet towel and saying sweet comforting things.]

But then, the fever dreams began, and I descended into hell, headfirst. I saw all the souls of all the disenfranchised voters in a lake of burning sulpher and I heard their terrible lamentations, and I remember wishing that I'd never been born with ears, or eyes to see their awful suffering.

Deeper, and deeper I fell into the stygian abyss, and I saw off in the distance what looked like a fiery throne, and it came into view and I could not close my offended eyes or rip them out and I saw the beast of stolen elections in all his bloody glory and I grew sore afraid.

[Ah! The River Styx. I made that trip when I took my last Jungle Queen cruise in Fort Lauderdale deep in the heart of a lamentable Red State.]

'O Democratic God of justice, why hast thou forsaken me?' I wailed.
'Why must I look upon this horror of the ages with my mortal eyes?'

[Methinks you are paraphrasing “Jeebus” as mentioned in the previous edition of the Dummie FUnnies. Careful, mopaul, about mixing religion and politics or you may have to forsake your DUmmie membership.]

But I heard no reply to my plea, and no relief for my suffering soul, and I had no cool drink of salvation to quench my damned tongue, and no succor from my candidate.

After this I felt only blackness, cold and empty, where no shadows ever lived because no light had ever shone there. My eyes were open, as I later discovered, but I layed there like a dead man for the last hours of thursday night, stinking, burping, and generally bringing shame to my entire family.

[Full disclosure, please! You were also farting in addition to burping and stinking.]

Slowly, I began to recover from my affliction, my eyes cleared and my head too, but it still felt like spiders had built webs in there. I found the strength to make a pot of joe, and lurched back over to the computer machine. I stared at it for about two hours, motionless, finally grabbing the mouse and braced myself and faced the music. I started to comfort myself, and forget the awful ordeal I'd just been through and the portentous visions I'd had.

[Again we need full disclosure from you, mopaul. Not only did you grab the mouse but you also spanked the mouse. (And Mrs. Paul tells me the name of your mouse is Minnie.)]

And now, I'm gradually regaining my strength and composure, I've showered, put on clean clothes and burned the old ones, and apologized to my wife and my neighbors in the apt. above me.

[Just because you set your neighbor’s apartment afire due to burning your clothes is no reason to apologize to them.]

That's my story, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been down this same road of despair and redemption, and in that, I find solace and strength. Two days lost forever. Two whole days of my life taken, never to be redeemed. Two days of hell, to steel me on my quest for a satisfying election night. Someday, my prince, or princess will come

[And until then you shall remain a frog… Thus mopaul has set forth his sad DUmmie story. Somehow I think I should team up with this character and form a Vegas comedy act. This concludes the DUmmie Ant Farm viewing hours for today.]

End of an era and all that -- New Deal, Democratic Party, Dan Rather.

End of an era in more ways than one.

Vietnam has been dredged up again is a national issue by one of the leaders of the antiwar movement, who claims that he was a hero in a war that shouldn't have been fought, and stood side by side communists who called what Kerry did in Vietnam "oppression". He assailed President Bush's National Guard service but saw no irony in standing on the stump next to Bill Clinton who clearly dodged the draft (and wrote that he "loathe(d) the military").

The skeletons in a lot of peoples' closets came to the forefront again (war crimes, seditious plots to assassinate elected leaders...) that the media was reluctant to investigate.

I doubt that we will be hearing about Vietnam in a national election again. Too many who served will still stand shoulder to shoulder to defend their service and the memories of their compatriots who died their. The media never has understood the outrage about Jane Fonda. Their mistake.

The Nightly News that we are all familiar with on the alphabet networks (ABCBSNBC) is a post-WWII construct as is the 2+hour morning news. TV came into peoples' homes and they needed programming.

SeeBS dabbled with an idea of adding comedy to the morning programming in the 1980s or 1990s (the memory is fuzzy now, I think they were in last place and trying for anything that would boost ratings).

Saturday morning cartoons are a thing of the past, there is no reason to believe that MSM's news blocks will always be on the air.

PBS's "News Hour" doesn't do the "Eye on America" type reports, doesn't do the "here's a new (sponsored) chemical that could stop heart disease/cancer/etc.". They don't do all of the "car wreck", "bar fight", "warehouse fire" stories (or sports/weather) that local news does. PBS's problem as a "news" program is the extended round table discussions. That is editorializing. At least it is clear what it is but for someone who wants "just the facts", it doesn't fit the bill.

I don't have cable television so I do not get the 24 news channels although Houston HAS repeatedly launched 24 broadcast news channels (good to see since we became a one daily paper town under a merger approved under the Clinton administration).

24 hour news channels pad out their programming with a lot of talking head programming as well that is not "news". There are newsworthy interviews (some good damning Kerry quotes came out of interviews he gave the media over the years) on these channels but most of America does NOT watch these programs (if a tree falls in the forest and no one was around, did it make a sound?).

Headline news channels offer some of the canned sponsored news items (new drugs, new movies/tv shows/tours) as well as some less than newsworthy items (they've GOT to keep filling the time) but they do exist to give the view news when (s)he wants it (no point in TiVo-ing the news as it may be out of date when you watch it).

The influence of headline news anchors on the public is not as dramatic as that of Rather, Browkaw, Jennings, Donaldson, Kouric, Laher, Chung. If the headline anchor is replaced, people will still tune in (just another pretty/handsome face reading a teleprompter). Replace any of the "name" anchors and ratings will be in flux as viewers adapt to the new host (just like a comedy entertainment show like Tonight or Late Night).

The pajama people on FR get their news from the wire services and on-line editions of tv, radio, and print news as it is released. We get our news "ON DEMAND" versus queuing up to be served today's helping of yesterday's events.

Print newspapers have the most to do to adapt to the new paradigm. Newspapers are hard copy. You can read them anywhere (radio cannot be heard/received in some places, other times it is rude or intrusive). You can write on them (circle a concert in a calendar that you want to attend, making notes on a sample ballot voter guide pullout section, etc.). You can save them for posterity (historical research, key event headlines, photos you want to put on your wall, businesses frame articles that mention them...). Monitors give you a finite viewing space (hard to get the "whole picture" unless you have a big monitor. Time lines, graphs, and maps can be printed in the newspaper to give people a better understanding of what they are reading (county-wide maps of the country's vote should appear after every presidential election).

A daily newspaper is like a magazine only more disposable (cheaper printing and a shorter shelf life). By the time a newspaper hits the newsstand/front porch, that information is already 6-36 hours old, maybe older. The information gets there quicker by every other possible method. Some people still get their information this way and that's okay (although if the environmentalists really want to address the concept of "disposable" resources they would be advocating other methods of disseminating news). It is a part of some peoples' daily routine (newspapers are the nation's only remaining private home delivery system that runs like clockwork, no milkman, no doctor visits...). You can read it at breakfast, you can read it on/at the train/bus/carpool/street corner/desk/bathroom.

The comics section used to drive which paper people bought. The Houston Chronicle's solution was to keep virtually ALL of the syndicated comic strips when they merged with the Houston Post. They run 4 pages of comics. Those that they don't run appear on their website. That's great, I think that some of the best cartooning going on today appears in the comics section. I particularly favor Mutt's, the heir to Charles Schutlz's cartooning throne although Zippy, Pirannah Club, and Robotman also are great strips that break the mold of domestic life comics, which itself is well done in Foxtrot, 9 Chickwood Lane, and maybe a few others. Comic BOOKS started when Max Gaines decided to try to make use of the Sunday supplement printing presses in the "off season" (midweek). He collected up some old comic strips, bounded them as a "book" (strip collections already existed as hardcover books but this was a cheap magazine). These comic books were distributed to newsstands. They sold well for 10cents. American cartooning would get a boost if the comics section was extracted from the "news"paper and placed on the newsstand under its' own merit. Of course newspapers' circulation figures would drop if people were consuming this weekly comic (as many adults do in Japan); it would be one less thing a newspaper had to offer (even though it falls entirely outside of the realm of news). It seems like a digression but it is a part of what a newspaper "is". These has been a monthly magazine that compiled up some popular strips of the day (like Outland and Calvin & Hobbs) and came out with a month's worth of strips (but you don't get the immediacy).

So maybe what "newspapers" need to become are daily magazines with no expectation of containing "news". They contain articles that can be read anyplace but they are not the "end all/be all" of the story.

Maybe now the press can come to understand why President Bush does not set his clock by holding time in his schedule to sit down at 5:30CST/6:30EST and see "the news" or reading the day's newspapers. There are plenty of ways to get news today.

I don't want to see the world's "alternate history" as discussed here on Free Republic (the behind the scenes work that went into exposing the National Guard memos as fraud, the live reporting of the final fly by of the Space Shuttle Columbia...) disappear forever when the plug is pulled on the servers as the Robinsons' close shop. This should be archived someplace where it could be used for research purposes for generations to come (even if FR were to fold up shop tomorrow).

The MSM has to adapt to the future, they are still living in 1960.

Very thoughtful post, thanks for the item.

As for the comic strips versus comic books, I find the collectanea a useful way to stay up without throwing down shekels for all those newspapers. There is a lot of bass-fishing news and lots of American Hockey League scores (and Marianne Means columns) that I don't need to wade through. I enjoyed, a few years ago, getting the occasional "Dilbert" or Gary Larsen's "Far Side" booklet.

Your taste in daily strips is a lot different from mine. I like the artwork in "9 Chickweed Lane" and the frank but tasteful inclusion of adult topics, I like "LuAnn" and, when I can get my hands on the bloated Sunday edition for free, "Prince Valiant", whose artwork and attention to detail I've enjoyed for years (even if I've discovered, as I've grown older, that sometimes "Val" departs a little from the historical timeline and what life was really like during the Dark Ages).

I also usually check "Dilbert", but the Nicole Hollander's snarky "Sylvia" is too liberal and, well, snarky for me. Some old standbys like "Garfield" and "Beetle Bailey" are usually worth a look, but I won't put up with the new, PC strips like the nastily anti-white, anti-Republican "La Cucaracha". I don't know where the Houston Chronicle overlords got the idea that would be popular. Do pachucos buy newspapers?

Speaking of the Chronicle versus the Post, did you ever get the inside story on the Post's sale from The Houston Press? Bunch of left-wing idiots, but they got the story.....and Dean Singleton really stank. Seems that was his only reason for buying the Post, or any other paper: Turns out his basic business model is to buy the second paper in town, improve it, annoy hell out of the leading paper, and then dangle the never-had-a-chance victim in front of Numero Uno's owners to get Big Bucks. (Insert reference to the goat scene in Jurassic Park here.)

After the sale of the Stump, Singleton threw a lunch at The Houston Club (top floor, 811 Rusk St.) for his fellow Harvard MBA's (by invitation only -- but a Houston Press ink-stained wretch managed to sneak into the kitchen area somehow and stand close enough to the dining-room doorways to take notes), to brag about the sale and let them know he took the Chron's owners for $55 mill above what Singleton thought he could get for the paper.

News delivery has changed a lot, it's true, even from 10 years ago, thanks to the Net. I came online for the first time five years ago last September 23rd (God, time flies!). Now my two television sets are broken (the old color Sony at least lasted through election night, thank God) and I'm relying, if that's the word, on a 40-year-old tube-type 12" portable B&W set that I once inherited from a departed ancestress, which I have to sit close to, absorbing as much RFE as possible in order to be able to bang on the top of the set to "tune it in" about every 90 seconds or so. But I'm not hurting for news, not being able any more to see Tom Brokaw in living color and 32" of diagonal measure.

Television at night has become trash. Reruns of insipid game shows, of the execrable Jerry Springer (I have money for someone's defense fund), of dating shows and daytime soaps only interrupt the march of cheesy infomercials, of which the Paramount/Fox affiliate provides us 4-1/2 hours per day, and 5-1/2 to 6-1/2 on Saturdays. The other stations are more restrained, keeping their offerings of Ron Popeil and other, more forgettable shills down to 2-3 hours per night (and morning, and whenever else programming is slow). I see broadcast TV sliding into an abyss of low-cost talk, dating, cop ride-along, and similar formats, ultimately being preempted by payola broadcasting, in which license-holders simply operate government turnstiles for shills, drummers, and hustlers. And that's regardless of the technology in use -- unless the point of switching to digital technology is to pave the way for over-the-air PPV and conversion of all broadcast TV into a paid medium. (Rank speculation warning.)

My own opinion of infomercials is that they're commercial speech and of course have the right to buy their way onto commercial TV, to convey their valuable offers to a waiting audience. However, I'd still tax the broadcasters 120% of gross receipts for sales of all air time over two minutes -- just so we get our fair share of the ad dollar, from the valuable licenses we confer.

As for PBS, I've been annoyed with them and with NPR in particular as fiefdoms of Blue America, and I want them pulled down. Let them go start their own subscription operation, or sell commercial time, or do whatever. Time for those socialists to get their noses out of the feedbag. I notice that KUHT, Channel 8 in Houston, has recently (very recently) added Tucker Carlson and the WSJ editorial show to late-night Fridays to try to restore a little of the balance that they abolished years ago when they gave former LBJ press secretary Bill Moyers the bully spot in the Friday-night public-affairs lineup, and pushed McLaughlin out of primetime altogether. McLaughlin is consigned now to the after-11pm viewing ghetto; he used to be on at 8 or 8:30. Maybe they saw the election coming and decided to hedge their little Commie bets -- fine, but AFAIC that won't save them. Off with their heads!

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