LOA goes EOL

On June 12, the sun will not come out tomorrow. Because after 85 years, Little Orphan Annie will come to an end as a comic strip. It’s inevitable, as will be the eventual deaths of Dick Tracy, Blondie, and other great comic strips that began in the 20’s and 30’s.

I already had something to say about the original run of Little Orphan Annie at this link. As critical as I may be about Harold Gray’s odd mixture of sentimentality and intolerance, I have read several collections from the 30’s, and I enjoyed them a lot, because no other comic strip conveys as much a sense of the Depression. Something I haven’t seen anybody else say, so maybe I’m off-base saying it, is that I think Robert Crumb borrows from Harold Gray in his style of inking and in his depiction of people.

Wall Street cry-baby hates gravity and other laws

Last month, this anonymous letter, supposedly written by a Wall Street type in a fit of sincere pique, was being sent around mailboxes and then onto the blogs.

We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?

There are so many responses to this that could, and have, been made online. The short answer is, “Sorry, buddy, but the party’s over, and you’re going to hurt like everybody else.” The best rebuttal I’ve read to the anonymous nonsense is by Nick Kapur at The Motley Fool.

Chuck redux

I hereby declare Chuck to be one of the three most enjoyable TV shows I’ve ever watched. Is the series ridiculous? Of course it is. But is it excellent? Funny? And very smart? Absolutely.

(Sheesh. Look at that. The episode was available when I embedded it Friday night, and it’s already gone.)

(No! Wait! It’s back!)

(No! It’s gone again!)