Archive for September, 2007

Like the last comic, this one relates to what I was doing at the time I wrote it. Namely, having a really long bus commute to work, during which I was listening to old time radio shows burned to an mp3 cd. Among them were a bunch of Bob Hope Show episodes. They were quite funny–Bob Hope wasn’t synonymous with comedy for decades for no reason. But some of the funniest jokes for me are the topical ones that don’t make any sense now. I especially remember one joke that was something like:

Earl Warren’s bursting into bars in Washington and shouting “Orange Juice for everyone!”

Now, I know who Earl Warren is. At the time he was the governor of California and had been the candidate for Vice President running with Dewey against Harry S. Truman. I believe the joke was from a few years after that–1950 or so. He would later become the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and, surprisingly considering his previous Republican party loyalty, preside over the most progressive Supreme Court in US history. But none of that can even begin to explain this joke to me.

By the way, I think my output in this period is a strong argument against the idea writing less means writing better, at least for me. I wasn’t making nearly as many strips at this time (shooting for two a week instead of five), and while that was largely because I didn’t have as much time, I still ended up spending more time on each individual comic than I did before. But because I didn’t have any rhythm, any momentum, the comics were certainly not improved by the extra time. Obviously this doesn’t apply the same way to people who actually draw comics, but I tend to find that aside from running through a couple of drafts, laboring over writing doesn’t actually make it better. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it’s pretty much always better to write more faster rather than slower.

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I’ve mentioned in several of these commentaries that at the time that I was writing these comics, I was working a lot. Specifically I was working in a call center taking credit card applications. That’s when I came up with this joke, not realizing that it’s kind of an old one. I’ve since heard this basic joke a bunch of times, and every time it makes me shake my head and sigh.

One upside of that little foray into the belly of the credit industry is it taught me a little bit more about what “pre-approval” means. Actually it’s a pretty brilliant and horribly frustrating use of ambiguity by corporations. See, what most people think when they see the phrase “pre-approved,” they assume it’s being used somewhat like the way rice cooker uses the word “pre-declined.” That is to say, they assume it means “We already went through the whole application process and we know you’re good–you’ve been approved before we sent you this letter.” It’s an added enticement to call: if you’ve already been approved, why not go ahead and accept the card? The companies do nothing to keep people from thinking this. On pre-approved offerers, they call the credit card application an “acceptance certificate,” even though it’s exactly the same as the application that non-pre-approved offers get.

You see, credit card companies can’t get all of the information that they need to actually get you a credit card until they get your application. Which is why “pre-approved” doesn’t mean what most people assume it means. What it actually means is something close to preliminarily approved. You’ve been approved to receive a credit card offer, in essence. The credit card company paid some money to one of the credit bureaus in order to get a list of names meeting certain criteria, probably involving credit score. People who meet these criteria are pre-approved and get the offer, which may or may not be available to anyone. It’s a deeply sleazy use of ambiguity

Still, generally speaking, the pre-approved offers were better deals than their non-pre-approved counterparts. Still, they aren’t necessarily the best deals available–if you are in the market for a credit card, I recommend doing the homework yourself at bankrate.com, rather than responding to offers you get in the mail. Credit cards can be very dangerous, but they can also be very useful tools, if you know how to use them. It’s actually a pretty big problem that people don’t get taught about how to deal with credit cards in school–these days, it’s practically a necessary survival skill.

Anyway, that’s my financial planning lecture for today

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In the school year after the comics we’ve read so far ran, I started semi-regularly sending comics from the Angriest Rice Cooker archive to the Cooper Point Journal, the school newspaper at my college, Evergreen. Since the paper is only weekly, and I had several months worth of backlog, I could pick and chose which comics I thought were the best. This was one of the ones I picked, as were lots of other ones that incidentally dealt with sex. I’m not sure exactly why this ended up being the case, but it probably gave people reading the comic in the paper a markedly different experience than the people who were reading the whole thing online.

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It’s probably pretty obvious that this is another comic that was dredged out of the memory of stuff I used to make fun of in high school, particularly when you consider that the film “Ten Things I Hate About You” came out about six years before I made this comic. I did really love to hate that movie, though, after we watched it once at a camp I went to.

Incidentally, when I went to college I became good friends with a girl who’s in the background of a couple shots of that movie. If I remember correctly, she’s one of the other students in detention in the scene where Julia Stiles flashes a teacher in order to help Heath Ledger sneak out. But I could be wrong.

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Since I wrote about the nominees for the short story category of the Hugo awards earlier, I thought I ought to mention that the winners have now been announced. My favorite of the short story nominees, “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt, pulled out the win. I guess my tastes aren’t as wonky as I sometimes think. I’ve read the winner for best novella, “A Billion Eves,” by Robert Reed. I quite liked it, but I can’t exactly comment on it’s choice, since I haven’t read any of the other nominees. I haven’t read the winner for best novelette, “The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDonald, so I certainly can’t complain about that choice, but I have to admit that I was pulling for another nominee, “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)” by Geoff Ryman. This was a pretty controversial story, but pushed my buttons nicely.

I found it interesting that all three of these short fiction winners were published originally in Asimov’s Science Fiction. In fact, “The Djinn’s Wife” and “Impossible Dreams” actually appeared in the same issue. When I looked at the nominees, I realized that this wasn’t as surprising as I’d originally thought, Asimov’s was the source of four out of the five novella nominees, three out of the five short story nominees, and two out of the five novelette nominees. No other publication was the source of more than one of the fifteen. This says a lot of good for Asimov’s editor, Sheila Williams, especially when you consider that 2006 was only her second year at the helm.

In fact, it makes it almost look a little odd that she lost to Gordon Van Gelder (editor of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine) for best editor. But, hell, I love F&SF and have been reading it for much of Van Gelder’s 10-year run. I’d have probably voted for him too.

Film award went to Pan’s Labyrinth, no shock there, although I think the category was stronger this year than a lot of years–at least judging from the previous winners. I certainly wouldn’t have argued if The Prestige won, although I know a lot of people didn’t like that as much as I did. From what I’ve heard, Children of Men was excellent as well, although I still haven’t had the chance to see it. Guillermo del Toro deserves a Hugo, although I’d probably have given it to him for The Devil’s Backbone ahead of Pan’s Labyrinth. Then again, I suppose the voters might have considered that too much of a horror film to fit into the SF/fantasy paradigm–it wasn’t even nominated, and even if it had been, there was pretty much no way it was going to beat out The Fellowship of the Ring. It also seems that it’s only the second film to win the award that wasn’t made in English–after only Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. It does seem that a lot of the best SF film is being made outside of Hollywood these days, so it’s good to see that the Hugo voters acknowledging that.

At any rate, you can check out all of the winners here, and the nominees here. If you’re reading this sometime later, you’ll probably be able to get all the info at the second link; the winners were just announced in the past couple of days and Locus hasn’t gotten them up yet, but I’m sure they will.