In this case, P.B.S. doesn’t stand for Public Broadcasting System. Sorry Elmo.
Elmo sad. Elmo need hug.
P.B.S. = Pearls Before Swine, a great comic strip. This past Sunday, PBS creator Stephan Pastis went a bit deeper than he usually does, and I loved it.
That’s a pretty profound pig!
Don’t worry, the very next day Stephan — and his character Pig — did a 180:
Now that’s just plain funny. Check out a week’s worth of strips at this link — Pig is just one of the many animal characters in the strip. I think you’ll find yourself laughing more… and maybe you’ll get some food for thought too.
If you’re like me (and heaven help you if you are… seek professional help immediately), you probably spend a fair amount of your workday staring at a computer screen.
This posture is recommended by optometrists and chiropractors… the ones that need business.
And if you’re like most people, you probably still have some sort of default background on your screen all day.
Bill Gates isn’t known for his artistry.
Why not add a smile or three to all that screen-staring, by personalizing your desktop background. I have double monitors (it looks like “multi-tasking” but really it’s just ADHD) and this morning when I logged on, here’s what I saw:
Screen #1: Replacements, circa 1986
Screen #2: Inspiration from Hugh MacLeod
I have an entire album of desktop background photos, ranging from the profound:
… to the ridiculous:
There are 66 photos in the folder now, and the photos rotate every 30 minutes, so every day is a new grab bag of visuals. Bands and artists I love:
A picture of my childhood home:
Deep thoughts (most courtesy of the brilliant Hugh MacLeod):
Nostalgia:
Sports shots:
Goofy photos of my co-workers:
Goofy shots of me with co-workers too:
Screen shot from a buddy cop spoof video we did for a company meeting. I’m “Cheese” but you probably could’ve guessed that.
I still go to a fair amount of music concerts, though not nearly as many as when I worked at a radio station and could get free tickets… and not nearly as many as before kids came along (their “school night” is my “school night” too… 5:45 a.m. alarms don’t mesh well with a rock and roll lifestyle).
My wife and I both like Lyle Lovett and Shawn Colvin. When I saw they were playing an acoustic concert together at the Taft Theater, a downtown Cincinnati venue, getting tickets was a no-brainer.
Except for the Ticketmaster fees. Oh, the horrible, hideous, insidious fees! Tickets in the “cheap” seats were $32. But ordering just two tickets online would cost me another $32 in fees – basically you get two tickets for the price of three… what a bargain!
There’s the service fee – per ticket, mind you – then an order processing fee tacked on for your payment pleasure.
I love how those Ticketbastards put an exclamation point behind the “Free” in the Delivery method. I’m surprised they haven’t figured out a way to charge folks for using their own printer and ink to print tickets, or their own mobile phone for e-Tickets. If I’d chosen the snail mail option, I’m sure they would’ve charged me $4.90 for a 49-cent postage stamp.
It’s ridiculous. It’s outrageous. It’s usurious. And there’s not a darn thing I can do about it. Especially since Ticketmaster merged with LiveNation, a company that owns and/or operates hundreds of concert venues across the country. They own the theater (or at least have exclusivity rights on performances therein). They own the ticket seller. So they have a monopoly on the music (80%+ market share). Wanna see Lyle and Shawn? It’s gonna cost you. Dearly.
Thankfully, I was able to walk over to the concert venue’s box office, which is five blocks away from my work. That 10-minute jaunt saved me $27. I should’ve charged Ticketmaster a “pedestrian fee.”
I love comic strips. Wait, let me qualify that: I love good comic strips. Not the lame, one-tired-joke ones like Marmaduke and Beetle Bailey.
He’s a giant dog who acts human… hilarity rarely ensues.
One of my favorites is This Modern World – it’s a weekly strip that appears in Cincinnati’s weekly alternative paper, CityBeat(as well as 80 other papers, and online at The Nation, Daily Kos and The Nib).
Author Tom Tomorrow (a.k.a. Dan Perkins) typically deals with political satire, and those strips are brilliant – hence such honors as being a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2013 Herblock Prize winner and winning the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Cartooning in 1998 and 2003. But one of his recent ones was about the creative process, and I loved it.
This pretty much sums up how my blog posts are created. And it shows.
My ongoing quest to clean up the basement continues unabated… other than the weeks when I don’t do anything. A couple of days ago, I found this school project from our youngest son, Andrew, from a few years ago. It’s a timeline of his life:
Walk. Sit on a chair. Go on vacation. That sounds really good. Sign me up.
Kevin Sullivan on Life advice from a man who lived it: “A good one Damian. Bring our lens into focus after the long weekend or our long life journey.” Jul 7, 09:38
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