Archive for the 'Angriest Rice Cooker Director's Cut' Category

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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This comic…

eh…

whatever.

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Quite a wordy one here, which I suppose is fairly appropriate, considering the subject matter. All joking aside, though, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 is a true must-read if you’re interested at all in American politics. Whatever else he was, Hunter Thompson was a keen observer, and the election he’s reporting on is a very interesting one from a historical perspective. The shadow of the 1968 election–the assination of RFK, the police riot in Chicago, lies heavy on the ‘72 election. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so explodes my unconscious idea of the inevitability of history. Reading the book, I get the feeling that the last 40-some odd years didn’t have to go the way that they did, that it’s all been a collection of events rather than a coherent narrative.

Anyway, it’s a good read, I think especially for people like me for whom this period of time is firmly the domain of the history books. Because where else are you going to find such a drug-addled history book.

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Man, I’m surprised that I didn’t get to this one until this late in the run. This is a quote that I remember discussing in high school Western Civ class. As with many of the half-remembered quotations I later mined for this comic, I seem to recall having a little bit of trouble running this one down to source. The fact that I actually said “Epicurus said…” the quote suggests that I did manage to track it down. A surprising number of famous quotes are actually paraphrases, and ones that I discovered that that is either the case or is possibly the case I tended to have the rice cooker hedge and say that the person is “supposed to” or “reported to” have said something. But then again, this was a time when I was hurrying on these and it’s possible that I just didn’t do that due diligance I sometimes do. Whatever.

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One of the crappiest things about the job I was working at the time that these comics came out was that my bus commute took about an hour each way counting time spent sitting and waiting for the bus. But the good side of that was that I was able to do a lot more reading than usual. One of the things that I finally got around to then was reading “The Divinci Code.” The thing I found strangest about the book was that it’s a book about, among other things, symbolism in art. And yet the book itself is utterly devoid of symbolism. I don’t think I’ve read anything where the form of the book and its content have been less well matched. Very strange.

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I’m not very clear on how well this particular comic works. I tried to mash up two beliefs that tend to be espoused by the same people, and that, to me, are kind of contradictory. In all honesty, I might have killed this one if I’d written it an another time, but at the point that this one was posted I was working a ton and wasn’t about to write a totally new comic once I’d gotten a halfway decent one. I’m afraid that that might be a theme of the next few comics or so.

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Well, here’s a Director’s Cut post that went up late because I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to say. I’m sure that there’s points I could be making about “skeptics” and science and my own complicated feelings about the whole issue. But for once I honestly feel that this comic would be better standing on its own. I feel it does work, although it might skate a little closer to revealing my views on a subject than I really prefer in comics It happens sometime. I guess part of the key for me was not to let it happen so often that people got the impression that every comic expresses myviewpoint–either directly or by mocking views I disagree with. I think I managed to keep to that line most of the time. There are a few examples where I didn’t, but I think this one kept just this side of the line. Mostly because I don’t think you could come up with a coherent idea of what I actually believe from the comic–just a vague sense of things I don’t respect. You Be The Judge:

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