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The Usual Suspects
Stim is our most polished media
hack to date. The suggestion
that we could better integrate
our technology and natural
systems research by dosing our
UI experts with LSD-25 was
brilliant. Stim is "virtually"
impossible to navigate, and the
wasted brain cycles of the Mutes -
not to mention the inevitable
cell mutations from the
minoxidil treatments that the
Mutes should incur as a result
of their hair-pulling - makes
the planet ripe for a Mutant
takeover from the disoriented
managerial class.
Five years ago today in Suck.
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[click to read answers]
It's a measure of just how meretricious, dishonorable, and self-deluded
the newspaper game really is that only two journals in the United
States bothered to mention the passing of Henry
Boltinoff
this past April
19 at his home in Lake Worth, Florida. Of those two, the Houston
Chronicle dispatched Boltinoff in four short sentences. Boltinoff's
hometown paper, the Palm Beach Post,
did better, revealing in nine
paragraphs that, among other things, the legendary newspaperman had once
drawn a Wall Street cartoon entitled "Stoker the Broker," and that he was,
in the words of a daughter, "just a very, very kind man." No other obituary
section in the country, not even the media-heavy death notices of the New
York Times found room to mourn the death of Boltinoff.
But in a just world, in a world where newspapers, like web sites, could
track exactly which features people actually look at, Boltinoff would be
a household name and Maureen Dowd would be selling pretzels at
FedEx Field. For more than 30 years, in more than 300 newspapers,
Boltinoff kept kids of all ages perplexed with "Hocus-Focus,"
the
legendary two-panel cartoon
that asks the sharp-eyed reader to "Find at least six differences in details between panels."
A dreamscape of exasperated coaches whose striped shirts shifted with barely perceptible
stealth; a parallel universe of boys with disappearing hats and girls with repositioned
arms; a bracing burst of vaguely unsettling Americana in which flowerpots and lamps
could move or vanish without logic or reason — "Hocus Focus" plunged readers into
a world of detail as spare as it was compulsive, with Boltinoff as our
Robbe-Grillet,
arbitrarily twisting the elements to render the whole incomplete, the real unreal.
[click to read answers]
Reading "Hocus-Focus" made better observers of all of us. How many future
crime scene witnesses were better prepared to remember relevant details thanks to Boltinoff's
ministrations? How many students of his minutiae went on to rewarding careers as
art critics or graphic designers? How many trivia buffs were driven stark raving mad by "Hocus-Focus" and its world of endless itemization? We may never know. But none of
us ever spotted the puzzle without
doing it. And few of us ever failed to spot at least four out of six differences.
Unlike the journalistic hoi polloi, we honor Boltinoff and will miss his work. When
the existing collection of Boltinoffs runs out in October, Junior Whirl, and the world,
will be a poorer place. For today, we can only do our best to carry on the tradition...
[click to read answers]
Vive la difference in today's Plastic discussion
courtesy of BarTel d'Arcy
pictures Terry Colon
BarTel d'Arcy
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