OctoBra

Times are tough for a certain single mom of fourteen. As reported on Celebritology and elsewhere, Nadya Suleman, also known as the Octomom, had to hold a yard sale just to raise a little cash for all her little ones. Among the many personal items she sold off was one of her nursing bras. And to ensure its authenticity, she autographed it. While the buyer has decided to remain anonymous, Foma Central has captured an exclusive picture of this unique undergarment.



I just feel sorry for her once the little rascals start teething.

Vampire Weekend

The price for growing up in Florida and having a family that went waterskiing (and one of the verbal quirks that distinguishes me from a native Northener is that I call it snowskiing as if it were an equally likely alternative activity) every weekend. My dad would want to hit the lake about 8 a.m. so that he could get in an hour of skiing while the water was still 'like glass' - the super smooth mirrory texture of calm water. As soon as all the rubes in their speed boats showed up, the water just got too choppy.

We would head home after a picnic lunch and put the boat back in the garage. Meanwhile I would have fried to a deep lobster red crisp. For the next week, if I was bored following my mother around the commissary, I had some built in entertainment. I would play games with my peeling sunburn. The best one was to see how big a piece of skin I could pull off all at once. Sometimes I could do the entire length of my arm.

So for me the risk of developing skin cancer is a 'when', not an 'if'. After years of doing Male Habitual Doctor Avoidance, my wife booked me an appointment with a dermatologist, which is no mean feat. I've gotten a table at Babbo easier than a time slot with a skin doctor.

The appointment included a Full Body Scan, which is far less sophisticated than I thought it would be. The doctor looks over my whole body while a nurse writes down the rapid fire jargon-filled observations. The only thing slowing the doc down from her voluminous tracking of conditions was her stopping to zap scaly areas with her liquid nitrogen gun. A quick peak at my pale white ass confirmed for her that all the skin damage is sun related. Thank goodness I never became a nudist.

All the dry flaky spots on my skin which I thought were just a lack of moisturizing were actually pre-cancerous actinic keratosis conditions. While the cold gun burns off the surface cells, the doctor told be to come back for the Blue Light Treatment, or it's more technical name, Photodynamic Therapy (PDT).

PDT involves applying a chemical that takes away the natural UV resistance of the skin. To get the chemical absorbed into the skin, they wrapped my forearms with cheap Target brand saranwrap and then had me sit in the waiting room for 90 minutes with my arms looking like they were being marinaded, which I guess they were.



After being thoroughly basted, they then stick my arms into an open ended EasyBake oven of lights that put off a preternaturally blue light. During this time the skin gets warm and some spots begin to tingle.



But the most disruptive aspect of this treatment is that you then have to stay out of sunlight for 48 hours afterwards. Like indoors away from windows. My tech even cautioned me against standing in the kitchen with the blinds closed. So that began what I am calling my Vampire Weekend. Normally my house is kept dark enough to meet London Blitz darkout conditions anyways, but I took extra precautions.

Rather than use my desktop computer I set up a laptop in the dining room which is equidistant from the rather sunlit kitchen and the living room which has perfectly opaque vertical blinds. I even turned the overhead lights down on the dimmer.

Normally, having to stay indoors all day on a weekend is not a problem. But when you are told not to do something, it's all you can think off. All day yesterday, I was itching for the sun to go down. Finally, as twilight began to glimmer I begged my wife to go to the movies with me just to keep me from going stir crazy.

Today, as my 48 hours are to expire, the skies are rainy and overcast, but I am going to wear a thick long sleeve shirt just to stay on the safe side. I was given some topical creams just in case my skin gets irritated, but so far all I feel is the warmth of a mild sunburn, which just brings back the memories of those summer days of my youth blissfully ripping the blistered skin from my arms. Now I leave that to the doctors.

And just in case you feel misled by my post title and were expecting some tweeny pop band, here is a link to make up for it.

Pigtown Races

Fall is festival season and one of the cuter small neighborhhood ones is held by the Washington Village Community Association aka Pigtown. It got its name because the trains would offload livestock and run them through the streets to the butcher shops in the area.

So to celebrate the refound heritage of the area, the annual street festival holds pig races. Five times a day they have four heats of races. Two with pigs and two with 'ugly pigs' which closely resembled ducks.



And the losers of the races went straight to the barbecue vendors. Which were delicious. And between races they had a live entertainment stage. The band we saw was The Dutch Cousins who played an energetic country folk mix of originals and covers.



The Pigtown area is now a slowly gentrifying area with luxury townhomes where a housing project used to be, but there is plenty of Charm City character left as well. I love seeing those uniquely Baltimoron formstone faces.



But the slickest house was this rowhome with a trompe l'oeil mural on the side which perfectly matched the preternaturally blue sky.



The perfect day. Good music, fine food, and fast pigs.

Prater Power

Some of the best things we did on our tour of Central Europe were not on the official itinerary. For example, in Vienna we were told about an amusement park. Not having anything better to do that evening we hopped the subway and headed out. We got to the park just before dusk. We weren't really expecting much, but we were quickly overwhelmed. What a blast we had. It was as if Coney Island had been dropped in the middle of Austria.



Our group of five first headed to the large ferris wheel near the back of the park where we got a great overview of the park. It went on for acres and acres.



After a couple more thrill rides, three of us decided to tackle the Prater Tower (or Praterturm in German). We had no idea that at over 100 meters tall it is the highest swing ride in the world. Check out the video. It does tower over everything else in the park.



After a few more thrill rides (including one I was too chicken to try), it was time for some liquid refreshment in the beer garden near one of the many funhouses.



But before we left, I insisted we ride the Riesenrad, a Ferris wheel that dates back to 1897 and which has been featured in several movies including The Living Daylights.

We didn't leave the park until nearly midnight and the fairgrounds were still going strong. So when in Vienna, make sure to take a turn on the Praterturm.

For more picture of the Prater, check out the Flickr set.

BooksFirst - March to August 2010

Books Bought
Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Talib

Books Read
Bonk by Mary Roach
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Grand Idea by Joel Achenbach
Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain
Florida Roadkill by Tim Dorsey
60 Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

Books Heard
Fluke by Christopher Moore
Abba's Abba Gold (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Elisabeth Vincetelli

Commentary

It may came as no surprise to regular readers that I have a deviant streak in me. In middle school I would go down to the base library and read the entire shelf of books in the 612.6 section. I never understood why books on human sexuality were filed under Applied Technology, but after reading Mary Roach's Bonk, I understand that odd categorization a little better.

The book is not about sexuality per se, but rather about the people who study it. Going back to Kinsey and Masters and Johnson and even earlier, she chronicles the researchers who had an uphill battle in even getting the authority to begin legitimate scientific or medical investigations. And not all these researchers come off as disinterested folk in white lab coats holding clip boards. A lot of them have rather colorful personal lives.

While not an explicit theme of the book, the recurring item that I kept noticing was how sparse the research is. There just isn't that much out there. And the researchers that are doing it are still fighting puritanism. At one point, in order to see a particular type of MRI procedure, she had to volunteer herself (and her husband) as subjects because volunteers are so rare.

All of this is written with a great deal of wit and just enough titillation to keep the interest level up.

Far and away the leader in the fiction section of my Which Book Should I Read Next poll was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. That I have never read this book before was a monumental failing on my part. I think perhaps some of avoidance was fear that I would like it more than Slaughterhouse Five, the book most often mentioned in the same breath.

I immediately found that the book does live up to its reputation. It is funny, dark, and subversive. The absurdist humor has withstood the test of time and still accurately skewers the follies of war. Fifty years after its publication, it is not the stunning revelation it was when first released, but it still packs a punch. I do have a few quibbles. It is perhaps about 20% too long. Some of the bits and points seem to be hammered home over and over again. And in a few places it is just a little too over the top. Nonetheless, an amazing work and achievement.

But Kurt Vonnegut has nothing to worry about. Heller really never matched the success of Catch-22 while Vonnegut went on to write on a wide variety of themes with equal wit and insight. But Catch-22 is a legitimate member of the modern canon and one I was remiss to miss for so long.

On the non-fiction side of the poll, The Grand Idea by Joel Achenbach also ran away in the polling. Perhaps plugging the poll in the comments of his blog wasn't the best way to get an impartial opinion. Achenbach is the Washington Post's best reporter to have never won a Pulitzer. You practically need one to be admitted to the WaPo cafeteria and it's a shame he doesn't have one yet.

Achenbach clearly has a love affair with the Potomac River and the book is pitched as a biography of George Washington's effort to develop it. The problem is that Washington never accomplished much of his grand idea and he comes off as a bit of dick trying. George Washington used his experience as a land surveyor to claim large swathes of western territory and then uses his reputation as a war hero to fend off stake jumpers. He also uses his influence to steer the new national capitol to a location just upriver from his plantation, an early example of what George Washington Plunkitt would call 'honest graft.' It doesn't help that the Potomac never quite becomes the road to the west that Washington wanted it to be, regardless of his motives.

As a narrative, the story just fizzles. There is no real drama, intrigue or tension. As a route west, the Potomac just missed the boat. The last third of the book chronicles the post-Washington history of the river. And while the C&O canal did eventually achieve some of Washington's dreams, the railroad and other routes west eventually made even that obsolete. Achenbach does point out that one of the central ironies of Washington's grand idea is that had it not failed, we wouldn't have the wonderful natural resource that we have today.

It's pretty well established that I am an Anthony Bourdain groupie. I've seen him on stage four times. I have his No Reservations show on DVR. And so when he dropped hints that a new book was about to drop, I ran to BigBoxOfBooks to get a copy. Medium Raw is a new collection of essays about food, travel, and life. They don't have any sort of narrative arc, but tend to jump around. But they are beautifully written. When he wants to be eloquent the words just flow; when he wants to be profane, the profanity just flies. Tears will flow either out of laughter or out of sorrow.

One problem is that Anthony is a little ubiquitous, so a lot of this information was not entirely new to me. I'm familiar with all his grudges and feuds but it is good to hear his authoritative take. A lot does also get a little inside baseball-ish. He names names, but unless you eat in New York a lot, you don't really know who he is praising or trashing. But overall this book is great for both the casual fan and the diehard foodie. You will laugh, you will cry, you will get very hungry.

Ever since I read the entire Travis McGee series in one summer, I have been a sucker for the cynical satiric Florida-set thriller. There is just something so absurdist about the state that brings out the best in writers of dark humor. The 1999 debut novel by Tim Dorsey, Florida Roadkill, mines this vein deep and wide. Written very broadly, it is for people who find Dave Barry a little subtle and Carl Hiaasen's characters just too naturalistic.

The writer is a former reporter for the Tampa Tribune. As an erstwhile Tampan, I found the geography and the descriptions hilariously dead on. Every real place he mentioned was perfect in his description. Even the fictional locales were so true to life they should have existed.

There are enough low-lifes, deadbeats and scammers to fill a dozen novels. The shifting points of views are dizzying until about halfway through the book Dorsey starts killing them off in a spree that would make Quentin Tarantino squeamish. Overall, the book is derivative of so much it ends up reading like an homage to every twisted Florida tale ever. By the end I was finally involved enough in the surviving main characters only to have that shot out from under me in a way I wasn't quite expecting.

Dorsey has gone on to write another dozen books. In the meantime I have yet to buy Carl Hiaasen's latest. The rest of the Dorsey oeuvre will have to wait until I have caught up on the real thing and am jonesing for a whacky Florida novel hit strong enough to settle for second best.

Now that I live in the greater (very greater) DC area I should read more books set in that locale. One trilogy that I started a while back by Kim Stanley Robinson concludes in Sixty Days And Counting, the finale to Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below Zero. These books are set in DC against a world undergoing catastrophic climate change. While the first two books were clunky, they at least featured some great disaster movie set pieces, a flood and an extreme cold snap respectively, that added some excitement.

I kept waiting for the grand weather finale in 60 Days and I'm still waiting. The trilogy ends not in fire or in ice, but in endless polemics. Nearly all the action takes place off stage and the heroes just kind of walk around spouting position papers. The smug moralizing would make Al Gore cringe and the over the top technological solutions are well researched but just a little too clever. What little action there is comes from an astoundingly lame romance-suspense subplot about sinister secret government agencies which is excruciatingly bad and simple-minded.

I struggled through this trilogy hoping for a better payoff, but instead of hurricane I just got a fizzle.

Last summer on family vacation, we listened to Lamb by Christopher Moore and the entire family thought it was hysterical. So this spring when I went on a driving trip of the Southwest, I took along one of his earlier novels, Fluke. Set among whale researchers in Hawaii it showed a lot of promise to have some biting satire about phony scientists and ecological zealots.

Instead, about half way through it goes off the deep end, literally. The whole mystery of if and how whales are communicating with the hero is revealed and not in a good way. From there the rest of the book takes a bizarre turn in a direction that aims high and misses wide. The fantasy pseudo-science fiction section is nowhere near as interesting as the more reality based parts of the book.

Christopher Moore is a daring and very very funny writer, so I guess I can forgive the occasional mistake, but I just wish I had picked something a little better this trip out.

Picking audiobooks to share is a tricky proposition. They have to interest all the listeners. I am a bigger ABBA fan than a straight man ought to be and my wife loves them even more. There is a series of books/audiobooks where each volume examines one seminal album. Rather than pick any one album, Elisabeth Vincetelli uses ABBA's Gold as a retrospective on the career of Sweden's greatest guilty pleasure export. She uses each track to illustrate some phase or aspect of their career. While I am a fan, I learned a lot about the band I never knew. I also appreciate the thesis that there is a lot more pain and introspection in the songs than the poppy arrangements would suggest.

One failing of the audio version in particular is the lack of clips that would illustrate the points better. Brief snippets of spoken lyrics just don't cut it. Even worse are the long passages discussing the visual aspects of the many pioneering music videos they made and the painfully 70s outfits they wore. Without a YouTube connection, trying to visualize the segments being described was frustrating.

Another intriguing part of the book was how Benny and Bjorn had musical ambitions beyond pop music. By no coincidence, we went and saw the Signature Theater production of Chess a week after listening to the book. In hindsight, there are a lot of very theatrical clues in ABBA's music that would emerge in their stage writing. This book made me feel a lot less guilty of being an ABBA fan even when it wasn't (and perhaps still isn't) cool to be.

Where Not To Go In DC

According to the Tea Party of Maine, you should not ride the Yellow or Green lines of the DC Metro.

If you are on the subway stay on the Red line between Union Station and Shady Grove, Maryland. If you are on the Blue or Orange line do not go past Eastern Market (Capitol Hill) toward the Potomac Avenue stop and beyond; stay in NW DC and points in Virginia. Do not use the Green line or the Yellow line. These rules are even more important at night. There is of course nothing wrong with many other areas; but you don't know where you are, so you should not explore them.

Rachel Maddow reacts:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Places I have been to recently which are on those lines include Dukem Ethiopian Food on U Street and Oyamel Cocina Mexicana, home of the cricket taco. On the other hand perhaps Tea Partiers are better off not stretching their culinary palate in that way.

From the Official Maine Tea Party DC Tourist Guide, they offer this helpful piece of xenophobia on why DC is so unsafe:

DC's population includes refugees from every country, as the families of embassy staffs of third world countries tend to stay in DC whenever a revolution in their homeland means that anyone in their family would be in danger if they went back.

For those teabaggers who are tempted to try some ethnic food, they do offer this suggestion:

Libertarianish Virginia economics professor Tyler Cowen extensively explores and reviews restaurants, especially Northern Virginia Asian fare, at http://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/

I like the idea that a professor has to be identified as 'libertarianish' so as to remove the taint of taking ethnic food suggestions from an actual member of the educated elite.

So, teabaggers, please by all means avoid anything in DC interesting or tasty. All the more for me.

Standing On A Corner

When I went to Arizona this spring, there were two pictures that I just had to take. One was of me at Four Corners doing the one limb in each of four different states Twister pose. Alas, that was not to be. The place where the four corners is was under renovation. And how do you renovate a geographical fiction? The mind boggles. I had a little WallyWorld moment there as I shook the gate in rage.

The other picture the entire trip was planned around was for me to be standing in Standing On A Corner Park in Winslow, Arizona. This artifact of Americana made famous by The Eagles was also under renovation. They were putting in a new brick sidewalk around it and they were installing in the middle of the intersection a huge island shaped like the Route 66 road sign. Fortunately, by just moving a few orange cones, I was able to make my photographic dream come true.

But my ambitions were even higher. The next morning we went back for more pictures and I wanted to film myself actually singing the song. Now the yellojkt clan is rather infamous for not being able to carry a tune even it came with handles. 'Happy Birthday' in our house has been known to make housepets howl in pain.

My wife who has a much lower threshold of public humiliation than I do refused to even assist in an act that could only result in shame and mockery. This was very painful to me because I had spent much of the vacation rehearsing to the point where I nearly knew most of the words. My plan was to play the song on my iPod with one earpiece in my ear and just sing along a capella karaoke style. Even I knew this performance had the chance of being rather painful. After a heated discussion where the word 'divorce' was never used but clearly implied, my wife went to hide in one of the two catty-corner gift shops that form most of the other corners in Winslow.



That left me to pressgang some poor fellow tourist/Eagles groupie into being the camera crew. One very nice tie-dye clad lady who refused to be identified or photographed (and probably for very good reason) decided to help me out. As I was showing her how to operate the camcorder, the gift shop where my wife had just moments previously disappeared began playing its repertoire of Eagles songs for the day, beginning with 'Take It Easy'.

Taking this as a divine sign of approval for my quest, we quickly started filming. My lyrical knowledge was still a little shaky and if I accidentally hit a right note, it still hasn't recovered. And my little shimmy during the instrumental break is the same not-dance move I have been using since middle school.

I was ecstatic to finally achieve a bucket list level goal of mine. After eight days of travel seeing some of the most fantastic scenery in America, my trip was made by being able to warble tunelessly in a town that if it weren't for the genius of Jackson Browne would have faded off the map like so many other victims of the closing of Route 66.

Was it worth it? Hell, yeah! Because as the song says, "We may lose and we may win, but we'll never be here again, so open up, I'm climbing it. Take it easy."

More pictures here and if you are real glutton for punishment, here is the full three minute and eighteen interminable seconds version in all its glory.

The Weingarten Effect

or Asshat, No More

In order to belie the impression that I am unhealthily obsessed with the career of Gene Weingarten, I try to only blog about him once a year or so. That's been tough lately because he has been ubiquitous in promoting his new comic strip Barney and Clyde (and the allusion to the Beatty-Dunaway codgerflick is intentional). In a Washington Post feature story he tells how the five year gestation of the strip started as a bonding opportunity with his grown son Dan who he feels had been neglected growing up in favor of his daughter and future veterinarian Molly.

The high concept of the strip is "a billionaire befriends a bum". Presumably, hilarity ensues. The Weingartens enlisted the artistic support of David Clark for the actually drawing part of the comic. As part of the media blitz Gene interviewed himself for the Miami Herald which was full of softballs. So the online Washington Post chat he recently held was my opportunity to interview him, albeit stealthily. Since he knows of my blog and my opinions about him, by having twittered about me, mentioning me in his chat, and once suspiciously asking if I had anything to do with his Facebook posts being flagged as being inappropriate (I helpfully suggested that he check with the WaPo webmonkeys if their ill-fated Facebook Direct feature was incorrectly marking him as a spammer), I used a variety of aliases to submit a dozen questions to the chat. He ended up answering seven of them. Here they are with running commentary:

Peanut Gallery: Enough with the stage setting. When does the funny start?

Gene Weingarten: We thought we'd wait a few more months.

The first three weeks of the strip have been a lot of backstory, building to the meeting of the titular odd couple. A nice self-deprecating response to start off the chat.

Kar, MA: What has been the reaction of fellow comic artists, particularly the ones you have abused and ridiculed over the years? Does becoming a published cartoonist make you more sympathetic or less towards the demands of producing a daily strip?

Gene Weingarten: DEFINITELY more sympathetic.

Haven't had any piling on by the cartoonist establishment yet, after a brief, spirited salvo before the strip debuted. I expect some, though. It's not impossible some of the anonymous Commentariat to this story comes from those guys. We'll never know.

When the comic was first announced, the comments on The Daily Cartoonist were fairly rough on both the concept and the execution. Some of the more over the top ridicule may have been tongue-in-cheek, but then again, maybe not. The comments on the above-linked feature article split pretty evenly between fawning and vicious. But with less than fifty comments, by WaPo standards, that counts as complete indifference.

Buggy Whip, PA: With newspapers dying, why are you starting a newspaper comic? Why not do a webcomic where the barriers of entry are so much lower?

Gene Weingarten: Very good question. Dan and I are very bad businessmen: It was either start a newspaper comic or become commercial fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico.

Another nice faux-deprecating comment. Well played, but not a real answer. The more daring choice would be to develop the strip under a pseudonym to see if it would sink or swim without whatever minor cachet the Weingarten name gives it.

yelloj, KT: What rules have you established for the aging rate of your characters? Is that adorable smart-alecked daughter going to stay 13 forever?

Gene Weingarten: Dan and I and David have yet to solidify out strategy here. My vote would probably be to freeze them forever. I'm not sure I want to see Cynthia with breasts.

Gene Weingarten: This reminds me. For years I have had a question that I have never gotten a cartoonist to give me a straight answer to. When they draw something sexy, do they turn themselves on?

Even DAVID CLARK wouldn't give me a straight answer to this. I think there is something dark and disturbing under the surface here.

Gene Weingarten: Oh, and Cynthia is 11, not 13. At 13, she'd probably already have breasts.

This question, which could possibly tip my hand as to who asked it, is a callback to my post two years ago where I call Gene an asshat for his completely illogical theories of Comic Strip Temporal Dynamics. Clearly he has rethought this and backpedaled some.

As for his hypothetical about comics artists in lust with their characters, I have two words: Greg Evans. And let's not even mention the rather fan servicey Brooke McEldowney.

SPP: In two weeks, you have managed to use the Silent Penultimate Panel trope three times. What other comic strip cliches do you intend to repeatedly use in a post-modern ironic manner?

Gene Weingarten: Oh, we are adherents of the SPP. We make no apologies for it.

This poster, possibly a toonist, is referring to the conceit in which the next-to-last panel of a strip is essentially a silent freeze frame. It's a timing thing: a setup has occurred, and this delivers a drawn-out moment of tension -- or a dawning realization -- before the punch.

It's effective. A cliche, but effective. Cliches become cliches because they are effective.

I like that Gene hypothesizes that I may be a cartoonist because I know all the insidery lingo. Nevermind that there was an entire blog dedicated to penultimate panels. And speaking of which, he goes to that well in today's Sunday strip as well.

Tralfamad, Ore.: Gene, When Dave Barry 'retired' (he has a new book out) and you tried to take his place as syndicated columnist of choice, it kind of flopped. How is syndication of Barney and Clyde going vis-a-vis your previous effort?

Gene Weingarten: I like your place name.

No one took Dave's place. Essentially, when he retired his column, 450 newspapers retired their decision to have a humor columnist. I suppose if I had been as funny as Dave, I could have persuaded them not to. But, as I have said often in the past, I don't consider it an insult to be told I am not as funny as Dave Barry.

As far as Barney & Clyde, we'll revisit whether it's a flop in six months.

Didn't think I'd answer this one, did you, Jocko?

This was one of my more caustic questions, so Gene does get points for answering it. Despite having won two Pulitzer Prizes, Weingarten's lasting contribution to newspaper history is 'discovering' and editing Dave Barry while at the Miami Tropic. So there is really no shame in not being able to fill those shoes.

Fo, MA: It's very traditional in the comics industry for sons to take over from their fathers, e.g. anything originally drawn by Mort Walker and/or Dik Browne. Are you two the first case you know of where a father and son have started a strip together?

Gene Weingarten: I believe so. If anyone knows any different, please tell us.

This was just me showing off. From there the chat kind of petered out. Two or three of the questions I asked were answered by similar questions from other readers. You can peruse the whole chat here.

So after three weeks, my verdict is a resounding "meh". Barney and Clyde is hardly the worst strip on the comics page but there is no way it could be. On the other hand, after five years of self-promotion and endless bloviating about the inadequacies of other comics, he has labored mightily and brought forward a mouse.

There are some cute post-modern touches, but there is a decidedly retro feel that reeks of fuddy-duddyness rather than cutting edge. The dense dialog and overtly sloppy hand-lettering is deliberately defying the ever shrinking funny-pages trend. Perhaps evoking nostalgia is the way to go when the age of the average newspaper reader is Dead. Or perhaps the joke is on us and the strip is trying to be as mundane as possible.

There is a phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect where people are incapable of recognizing their inadequacies and they have an excessively high opinion of their capabilities, often to tragic effect. I propose the Weingarten Corollary where one is very successful in one field (because nobody with two unprecedented Pulitzers can be called a failure) but blind to the fact that their talents don't always translate to other areas. It could also be called the Michael Jordan Baseball Effect. The slew of actors who have tried to become singers and vice versa are all victims of it.

Barney and Clyde is a result of a lethal brew of hubris and naïveté mixed with dollops of armchair quarterbacking and topped with a patina of father-son bonding. Much of the hostility towards it stems from the fact that Gene clearly has pull in the newspaper world that the average comic strip writer breaking into the business does not have. Two of the four newspapers carrying it have direct Weingarten connections. And what artist is having his circulation cut or his strip turned down so that Gene can indulge in this retirement-time nepotistic bucket listing?

One thing for sure, the strip does seem to be teaching Gene some small measure of humility. But as the Waitresses sang a couple of decades ago, "I don't want to be somebody's learning experience. Some rich kids way of spending his allowance."

I really wish the strip the best, mostly because Dan Weingarten seems genuinely funny. But keeping his dad from using 'Gerald Ford falls down' jokes and recycling all his old humor columns is probably too big a task to attempt. Let's hope the strip develops and shows some character, not just a bunch of characters.