A carnival of technology

Frequent visitors to this site (both of you) may have noticed the recent downtime. Although I’ve long had surge protectors with phone jacks in them, I’ve mostly ignored them. I always plug the power cords of electronic equipment into surge protectors, since power is a strange and dangerous beast that may lash out at expensive devices without a moment’s notice, but telephone is a well-controlled system, polished by decades of monopolistic practices and regulation. This weekend, I got screwed by this combination of laziness and apathy. My Hawking DSL router, provided by Speed Factory, had its wall wart plugged into a surge protector (designed by Michael Graves; it looks totally ridiculous, but it was the cheapest that Target had, and it’s actually very nice), but the telephone jack was plugged directly into the wall. The modem died in a recent lightning storm, and it took a network card with it, leaving only a useless mass of plastic, resetting frequently and lacking a functional ethernet adapter. After a couple of nonworking offers from kind friends, one of which couldn’t hold a sync and another which refused to accept one of the magic ADSL numbers that Speed Factory uses, I’m currently on the Internet using a borrowed SpeedStream 5260 from David Cantrell. Although this particular DSL modem is apparently a pain in the ass to program, it just works once set up, which is good enough for me. I’ve bought one of the same model off of ebay for about the same price as fifty feet of phone cord, and I plan to buy another once that arrives, since this was a game that I hope never to play again. Also, the DSL modem now has a UPS between it and the wall.

And now I’d like to talk about comic strips. There’s something that fascinates me about this short-form artistic expression—perhaps the pursuit of art in a limited arena, or maybe their position in the development of modern newspaper appeals to my fascination with American history. Somewhere around the early part of this decade or the late part of the last I became enamored with the webcomics craze, believing Mr. McCloud’s promises of new ideas in the infinite canvas, spurning the sell-outs distributed by syndicates, but eventually I realized that my favorite webcomic artists sought syndication as a means to pay their bills, and that several of my then favorite artists also published syndicated features. Eventually my disenchantment grew to a point that I gave up comics almost entirely, limiting my webcomic consumption to a handful that are entirely unpublishable in any other form, such as the delightful obscenity of Jerkcity or the sad minimalism of Boxjam’s Doodle, and For Better or For Worse, that unique blend of a gag-a-day strip with a serial storyline, as my only syndicated choice. I’m not ashamed to say that I read For Better or For Worse, regardless of the recent saccharine storylines, or to say that I still hold strong opinions on April based on the death of Farley in 1995. It, Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts are the three strips that really hold my attention as being unique, and two of those have ceased to be. However, two more strips have recently made their way into my daily lineup. One of them, Sally Forth, was because I became a fan of the writer’s other works at drinkatwork.com, and another was a result of my other Internet habits.

There are some who live and breathe comic strips, and I visit a couple of sites maintained by these people. Comicsidontunderstand.com is generally good for a laugh or two at the expense of the nonsense occasionally breaking the monotony of the newspaper funny pages; and joshreads.com is a site with similar intentions, analyzing the absurdity of the Lockhorn’s, the increasingly frequent cries for help by Family Circus’s Jeffy, and offering an occasional synopsis of the soap opera strips, formerly “read[ing] the comics so you don’t have to” until that tagline was challenged by another site with a confusingly similar offer. One of the side-effects of reading about the soap opera strips, however, is that I’ve recently become fascinated with Mary Worth. There are no redeemable qualities about Mary Worth, a comic strip about a meddling old woman, described by the syndicate as being about “a continuing parade of people who enter Mary’s life.” It’s really awful, but for some reason I find myself compelled to follow the story of Rita, a middle-aged drunk whom Mary is currently keeping in her home. The depiction of the dilapidated downtown of wherever it is Mary is supposed be living, the woman’s shelter as a terrible den of horrors that just let Mary walk right in the door to retrieve Rita, and the painfully obvious foreshadowing amidst the stultifying pace (worsened by the need to turn Saturdays into a recap of the previous week, since not all Saturday readers will have Monday through Friday in the same paper, and throw away Sundays, since Sunday comic page layouts are entirely different from the weekday sets) are simply awful, but I just have to watch it, like a train wreck. The strip just screams of class warfare and a total disconnect from society. Today, Mary quoted St. Augustine as part of a bizarre rhyming epigram against the evils of alcohol. It all just makes me so angry. I can live with strips that have outlived their humor, like Blondie or Snuffy Smith, since they at least have interesting histories, but why do pointless soap operas like Mary Worth exist? Why must I read it? Argh!

“Anger is a weed; hate is the tree”