Movin' On Up (To Virginia)

The Cricket In Transit

So, I move on the 23rd. It should only take a couple of days to actually get where I'm going, and I've been told I'll have 'net access as soon as I plug my computer in. What this should mean for you, the viewing public, is no interruption of updates. To make sure this is the case, I'm trying to get the next couple of weeks' comics drawn and uploaded before I leave. We'll see how well that works.

Leavin' Betty

It does my heart good to see the Monkey finally bidding farewell to the dreaded Betty. Of course, since he's taking over his mother's job at Ozarks, I'm going to start referring to him simply as "Your Mom." It just seems fitting somehow.

Oh, and Monkey? I don't care how well you think they "rock out" on that Rockstar: INXS show. They're still contestants on a reality TV show, and thus sellouts. Sellouts are incapable of actually rocking out. It's in their contract.

"History Will Teach Us Nothing"

As a history major, there are certain things in popular culture which frustrate and annoy the hell out of me--Jerry Bruckhiemmer "historical" films (such as King Arthur or Pearl Harbor...though Pirates of the Caribbean was fun, mostly because it didn't take itself seriously) and the "works" of Stephen Ambrose are chief among those.

For those of you who don't know, Ambrose was a "historian" who wrote books on popular American history subjects--mostly the Civil War and World War II, in other words. His stuff was very popular with laymen and non-historians for its accessibility and humanity, and many people perceived him as an excellent professional historian.

Thing is, Ambrose was a hack. A well-known hack. See, many of his best-known works--including Band of Brothers--were plagiarized. Heavily. We're talking page after page of text lifted verbatim from other sources and dropped into Ambrose's books without even a citation or by-your-leave. And he apparently never suffered much because of this (mostly because he died of lung cancer not long after it was revealed. I know it's not nice to be joyful at the death of someone else, but I have to admit that I cackled with glee the day I heard he'd kicked it. He did more to set back the profession of history than postmodernism ever did). It really sickens me that some ignorant morons refer to him as "one of the leading historical authors of our time".

But my historical pain does not end there, no. See, there were certain other history majors at my university (and, I'm sure, at most any university you encounter) who were of the opinion that Ambrose was a good historian (I remember one particular dimwit actually using Ambrose as a credible source for a paper. Clif and I only ever cited the guy in an ironic, silly fashion--we knew better than to trust anything that dripped from the hack's pen). These sorts of people (usually guys, I noticed) were history majors of a very different ilk than myself. See, I majored in history because I wanted to be an historian. I wanted to study history for its own sake, understand where we came from and what went before. These gentlemen, though, had other plans--they wanted to be coaches.

Now, virtually every one of my high school history teachers was a coach. I guess coaches usually focused on history in their degree program because they thought it would be easy to "teach" when they got to a school. I mean, you just throw the book in front of the students, make them answer questions at the end of the chapter, give them a multiple choice exam every so often...how hard could it be, right? You could get on with what was really important (i.e., sports) and leave the unimportant stuff (i.e., history) to itself.

And it's crap like that which destroys the fabric of society. Without an understanding of history, we end up with guys like Bush telling us how things went and should go, rewriting things as it suits him in the moment, running the country into the ground.

"But I'm not bitter. No, not at all. Just alot" (Minus 5, "I'm not Bitter").

So yeah, that's where the comic for the 1st of July came from. More crazy hijinks and wacky shenanigans on the 4th.