Andy Gump in Bronze

We were about to leave the town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, yesterday for a drive around the body of water known as Geneva Lake when I noticed a statute near one edge of the triangular Flatiron Park (and it just occurred to me why the park might be called that). Everyone else was tired from walking around the streets of Lake Geneva, so they waited in the car while I investigated. From the back and a hundred feet away, the thing looked odd, the figure too slender and marked by too many mild protuberances to be a conventional statue of a war hero or politico of old or the like.

The statue faces Geneva Lake (the body of water). It was cloudy yesterday, so the light wasn't that good, especially up toward his head. But I took the picture anyway.

I'd come across the only -- and I'm pretty sure about that -- public statue of the comic strip character Andy Gump. He looked vaguely familiar. I had to read the plaque to remind myself who Andy Gump was. I'm sure I've seen a few examples of the strip he was in, The Gumps, but on the whole the character had made a light impression on me. Until now: I'll remember the statue.

It would have been better if Andy had been placed a little lower, since it loses some of the impact if you can't see his odd, chinless face easily. Oh, well.

Apparently the creator of the strip, one Sidney Smith, lived in the town of Lake Geneva, and at one point the Chicago Tribune had a statute of Andy Gump made for Smith, such was the enormous popularity of the comic. Discontinued in 1959, now it's completely obscure. I doubt that even in the most perverse reaches of Hollywood is anyone dreaming of a modern version of The Gumps, any more than Barney Google and Snuffy Smith are poised for a come back, even though Barney now shares a name with the backbone of the digital age.

But I checked: Barney Google and Snuffy Smith is still being drawn. I guess I don't follow newspaper comics very closely, since I don't think I've seen it in 20+ years. According to King Features (the same comic plantation on which Popeye still toils), the strip is only on its third artist since its creation in 1919, and "this tremendously popular feature boasts clients in 21 countries and 11 languages." Greater longevity than Andy Gump, and of course Barney figured in an immortal pop hit once upon a time, too.

Sunday Funnies Stamps

One more thing about the USPS: I bought a sheet of Sunday Funnies stamps at a post office last week. Five comic strips were selected for the series: Beetle Bailey, Calvin & Hobbes, Archie, Garfield and Dennis the Menace. Not the strips I would have chosen, except for C&H, if the selection criteria were (1) really popular strips (2) beginning after World War II, but not including Peanuts, which got its own stamp, and certainly deserved it. Older strips were covered by a 1995 release.

Archie -- isn't that really a comic book, not a Sunday funny? Dennis the Menace and Beetle Bailey make me shrug, but that one that really rankles is Garfield, which is easy to hate. On the other hand, this version of the strip, Garfield Minus Garfield, actually makes me laugh.

But I have odd tastes. Eyebeam, for instance, should have its own stamp, except that almost no one has ever heard of it. Assuming the choices have to be popular, what of Bloom County? For Bill the Cat, if no other reason. Or Get Fuzzy, for another cat -- that's two comic strip cats that put Garfield to shame. And, though I don't always like it, what about Dilbert, which certainly qualifies as a cultural phenomenon? Or Doonesbury? Its heyday might have been decades ago, but it was quite a heyday.

Grawlixes

But for an aggravating event this morning, I might never have known the meaning of grawlixes, unless my old friend Geof Huth told me, because it’s the kind of thing he would know. Last night snow fell in earnest, filling in some of the lawn’s bare patches. Also last night, air leaked out of one of our tires in earnest, presenting a sad sight on the snowy driveway in the morning. A sight that had to be dealt with. I put on the spare, in the snow.

Later, I wrote this: “Those @#$%&* tires have been nothing but trouble since I bought them about two years ago.” That isn’t entirely true, since it’s an example of how product failure lingers in memory much more vividly than months and even years of reliable use. But it's partly true, since I’ve had more than one problem with them in two years, which seems like too many problems.

Never mind. Since I prefer not to include any profanity at this site stronger than ‘sblood or maybe gorblimey, I used the string of symbols above – grawlixes, they're called. Wiki offers the following definition, taken from The Lexicon of Comicana by cartoonist Mort Walker: "Typographical symbols standing for profanities, which appear in dialogue balloons in the place of actual dialogue."

If you want to split hairs, grawlixes used in standard text like this, as opposed to word balloons, might not really be grawlixes. But I'm not going to put that fine a point on it.

Apparently Walker coined the term about 45 years ago. Fun to know, and as usual that bit of information led to other information, namely that Mort Walker is still alive and is still drawing Beetle Bailey after nearly 60 years. I don't think I've seen it in about 20 years, but I'm fairly certain that if I did, it would be about the same as it ever was. It isn't something that's going to be updated. So it's unlikely that there will be a story arc about Beetle in Afganistan (poor Lt. Fuzz, taken out by an IED).

Thursday Odds

On Tuesday, the first day at Lilly and Ann's elementary school, all the students gathered outside before classes and entered the building with their respective teachers. It was warm and clear that morning, perfect from such a gathering. Later in the day, it was hot -- the essence of a summer day. Very early on Wednesday, rain blew through, lowering the temps and visiting on and off since then, mostly as drizzle. As if to say, "No more summer for you kids."

The persistent rains have also highlighted a couple of silvery, intricate spider webs hanging from plants in the back yard. One of them is just above my car, dangling from two branches of the tree next to the driveway. Last I checked, a spider was still resident. I'll have to point it out to one or both of my daughters soon, to elicit girlish cries of fear or disgust. Which might not be heartfelt in Lilly's case; the web might have some fascination.

We went to three big boxes -- three, that's nearly an overdose for any particular day -- earlier this evening to finish off school-supply acquisition. Locusts had visited each store before we arrived, focusing on the aisles containing the supplies, and had carried off some of the items we were looking for. I will explain this in a note to Lilly's teacher, who reportedly wants all supplies in hand on Friday. But I probably won't mention the locust metaphor.

Received Tunnel Vision in the mail the other day. "A publication for alumni of student media at Vanderbilt University" that shows up occasionally. VU student media alumni Sen. Lamar Alexander, sports journalist Skip Bayless and humorist Roy Blount Jr. are all on the cover, to remind the rest of us how small our achievements are. But I can do that by going out any starry night.

Which reminds me of a Gahan Wilson cartoon I saw long ago. (He's still alive at last report, glad to see it.) I think the cartoon was in his early '70s collection I Paint What I See. We had that book around the house and it probably made me one of the few kids at Woodridge Elementary School who knew his work, which remains instantly recognizable to me. In Wilson's cartoon, an old man is looking out from his balcony at the vault of stars overhead, gesturing defiantly: "You don't make me feel insignificant, fella!"

Not the Roof of the World

On the menu at a place called Everest Cafe on West Queen St. in Toronto, there's a dish called the "Free Tibet Platter," described as Tibetan momos (dumplings) surrounded by chow mien. I didn't order that, but I did have a thing called phing sha (or maybe phing sho or shu, since my notes on it are a little garbled).

I went in hoping for a Tibetan food experience along the lines of Tsampa in New York City (see Oct. 7 & 8, 2004, BTST the Original Blog), but no such luck. The place wasn't bad, but it was terrifically good either. For one thing, the decor was sleek and dark, more like a shot bar in Roppongi than an outpost of Tibet. There were no distinctive Tibetan art or figurines or prayer wheels, and not a single picture of the Dalai Lama, though there might have been one around the corner that I didn't see. In fairness, I don't think the place was supposed to be Tibetan, since only part of its menu was. But still, a nod or two to the Roof of the World would have been nice.

Phing sha is sliced beef or chicken, sauteed with beanthread noodles, sliced potatoes, green peas and moru (muru?) (dried mushrooms), flavored with ginger and emma -- which I understand is a peppercorn-like spice -- and served with basmati rice. Sounded good, from that description, but the noodles were soggy, putting a damper on the rest of the dish. Not bad, as I said, but not worth walking around Toronto to find.

"That was the most politically correct kind of food you could have eaten," joked one of the other people on the tour, when I told him about the place later. Whatever that means. I'm all for a free Tibet, myself. Anything to annoy the tyrants of Beijing. But I also wonder at the selectivity of causes célèbres. I don't know that I've ever seen any "Free Western Sahara" bumper stickers.

On a different note, I didn't know Will Elder, but I will note his passing here. I've known his son Martin for some time. At one time, Martin was the managing editor (in New York) of a magazine I was editor of (in Chicago -- such are the possibilities of e-mail and phone connections). I did know that Martin was the son of the cartoonist back when we were working together, because one time he mentioned that his dad had created "Little Annie Fanny." I wasn't a big fan of that strip, but I knew about it. Until I read some of his obituaries this week, I knew a lot less about the elder Elder's involvement in the early days of Mad magazine, which is detailed in this NYT obit. RIP, Mr. Elder.

Friday Night Notes

Almost all of the big snow of December 1 is gone, melted over the course of this week. That suits me. Snow, of course, is our friend, but its cousin ice reminds that I probably shouldn’t stay in the North into my dotage, if I get any dotage. I’d prefer my obit not to read “died from complications of a fall.”

Browsing in my newish road atlas – a pleasure I have so little time for – I noticed that the Delaware River doesn’t quite separate Delaware and New Jersey; there’s a slice on the New Jersey side near Finn’s Point National Cemetery, and a tip of a peninsula south of there, that belong to Delaware. Information on this geographic oddity is scarce (though I only spent about five minutes looking), but from what I found, my best guess is that in places Delaware got all the river in a separation that’s quite old, perhaps dating back to Colonial times, and that the river has shifted over time, to Delaware’s benefit. Like when the Mississippi moves around to leave river-shaped borders on dry land between various states.

There’s a lot more information about Pea Patch Island in the Delaware River than the Delaware exclaves. Untold sorrow lurks in its Civil War sobriquet “Andersonville of the North.”

In September, as noted in the papers, Iva Toguri passed away. Not long after we moved back to Chicago in 1996, we visited her gift shop on Belmont Ave. not far from the Belmont El station, Ann Sather’s restaurant and other spots. I knew at the time that “Tokyo Rose” owned the shop, but otherwise it wasn’t particularly impressive. An import shop specializing in Oriental kitsch from the time when imports were rarities, long bypassed by other retail, even 10 years ago. But probably it didn’t need updating. My guess would be that there was no mortgage on the place, and that volume business wasn’t a priority.

From reading her death notices, I came away with a conclusion about Walter Winchell, who effectively hounded Toguri, an innocent woman, into prison: what a bastard. Someone who deserves his increasing obscurity.

Dilbert has been unfunny for quite a while now, but Thursday’s strip was incomprehensible, a sign of not only jumping the shark, but getting in the ocean with the sharks. In panel one, Alice (I think that’s her name) says, “And the point of my presentation is that these titanium tubes will…” She’s standing in front of a meeting table at which a male colleague is seated. In front of him is a rectangle with some musical notes emitting from it. I guess that’s supposed to be an iPod or something, but the drawing is so primitive that it’s hard to know.

In the middle panel, Alice viciously smashes the rectangle with her titanium tube. BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM!!! (Five times, three exclamation points.) In the final panel, she hands the tube to the visibly frightened colleague. Something is dangling from the tube. Maybe the electronic guts of the iPod, but who knows. She says to the man, “It’s for you.”

What on Earth does that mean? What’s the gag? Or even the point? Alice smashes a coworker’s iPod, haw haw. Who listens to an iPod during a business meeting? Not even in his ear, but on the table like a transistor radio. This isn’t the first time that he strip has made me think, Huh? Ah well, most days I know better than to even read it.

Pinky and Sam Walton’s Brain

Odds are, I won’t post tomorrow or Wednesday. My attention will be elsewhere. But I’ll be back.

Next: Remember the Alamo. I would have written that yesterday, but yesterday was an amazingly warm day, and a Sunday to boot, so I wasn’t worth a lick of finger-to-keyboard effort all day. No reason to be, either. It was nearly 60 degrees F. and sunny. Even after sundown, it must have been a tolerable 50 for a few hours.

A warm Sunday in March near Chicago is as rare as, say, a funny Boondocks. I tried to link it, but ucomics was being non-responsive. Look for Sunday’s strip. Its centerpiece has a spot-on drawing of Pinky and the Brain, dressed as Wal-Mart employees.

“What are we gonna do today, now that we work for Wal-Mart, Brain?”

“Same thing we do every day, Pinky. Try to take over the world.”

It helps, of course, to know about Pinky and the Brain, which I do because it was popular when my nephews were growing up, and I’d see it when visiting my brother. (Later, I acquired a few tapes myself, or rented them.)

Saturday night wasn’t particularly warm, but we went out anyway to the Spring Valley Nature Reserve at about 9 pm to look through an amateur astronomer’s telescope. One such astronomer is out there almost every month on a Saturday, attracting maybe ten or 12 people to look through his eyepiece. Lilly and I went last summer (see July 12, 2004). This time we all went, and everyone except Ann saw Saturn. Nice resolution: a marble of light, distinct rings, and a handful of moons.