Sunday newspaper comics that I skip

Cathy, Prickly City, Peanuts, Marmaduke, Rose Is Rose, For Better Or For Worse, Family Circus

Why do I mention this? On Sundays I have all the time in the world to read the comics, and I still don't bother finding the time for these. What went wrong?

Cathy lost any relevance to humor or reality back in the Eighties. Prickly City has never been funny and the politics of the strip are only annoying. Since Peanuts and For Better Or For Worse are repeats of old strips I've got a "been there, done that" feeling. I liked them when they first came out, but I'm done with them. I'm not the audience for Marmaduke or Family Circus, they skew to the extremely young or slow. I actually think that Rose Is Rose is a clever strip and I hope that they continue to make it, I just feel sorry for the main character.

I think that there are a lot of great comics out there- important comics that delight me or make me consider different viewpoints on the world around me. Candorville, La Cucaracha, Zits, Baldo & Doonesbury may not hit the mark for me every time, humor-wise, but I like their viewpoints and messages. On the other hand, Pearls Before Swine is the best current comic in any newspaper in the land.

My condensed review of Harper's Island

Wonderfully histrionic.

My condensed review of the first episode of "Justified"

Quirky.

My condensed review of the new products shown at CES this year.

meh.

Quote

"It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide"- Magersfontein Lugg

NaNoWriMo

It's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo to its friends) again and I'm jumping on the bandwagon again this year. It has only been a few days, but I'm keeping up. If you don't know, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel in thirty days- that's 1,667 words per day. There is a strategy involved, to make it easier, which you can find in the book "No Plot? No Problem!" by Chris Baty (the founder of National Novel Writing Month).

By the way, I've done this before, successfully- and by that I mean that I got the word count, but the novel I wrote is utter crap. Just a few days into the latest novel and I can say without hesitation that the new one is crap too. However, I will also say that this one is less crappy then the earlier one. Maybe in ten years, or ten more novels, I'll be writing the greatest novel ever, but I doubt it.

Anyway, the process is fun and I think I'm learning a lot. If you've got access to my Twitter feed (which should be somewhere on this blog page), you can keep up with my current word count this month.

the anti-"jump the shark"

There really needs to be a phrase that's the opposite of "jump the shark".

"Jump the shark", if you don't know, is when something happens that causes you to realize things are never going to be as good as they used to. The opposite would be when be when something happens on a series that makes the series dramatically better.

When Michael Emerson joined Lost, it crystalized and clarified the drama, he gave the show something it needed. At that point, Lost stopped being a rambling drama that didn't seem to be going anywhere. Suddenly, the "Others" stopped being strange weirdos and started being interesting. The "Others" even started dressing better.

In the seventh episode of Fringe, they introduced David Robert Jones (played by Jared Harris). Up until this point, they were vague about something called "The Pattern". It really felt as if the writers didn't have any more idea what was happening then the viewers. The enemy had a face. The writers weren't wandering aimlessly from incident to incident, they had a focal point, a direction. The episodes became markedly better written. The characters were actually striving for something.

The reason that I'm bringing all this up is this- I've just watched the first season of "Lie to me" and I really like the show, but I really think that they need to have a Michael Emerson or David Robert Jones. I really like "Lie to me", but Tim Roth's Dr. Cal Lightman hasn't really found a match- the Joker to his Batman. Somebody to battle through the show's future seasons. I just hope that they don't do a "House" like thing and make his enemy a bureaucrat that battles over petty crud- "Fringe" tried that with Michael Gaston's Sanford Harris and it was utter crap. Nobody ever wants the enemy to be red tape or bureaucracy - unless it's a comedy.