But I Digress ...

Lisa Moore died today. If you read the comic strip Funky Winkerbean , you already know what I'm talking about. Lisa, one of the main characters in the strip since its inception, had been dying from breast cancer for several months. We knew it was coming; we just didn't know when, or how the strip was going to handle it. But today, Lisa was led into the great beyond by a tuxedo-clad Death. (It was handled much more tastefully than I've just made it sound, trust me.) Tom Batiuk, the cartoonist behind Funky , has caught a lot of flak for bringing such a depressing subject as terminal cancer onto the "funny pages". I can't identify with such criticism. I mean, it's not as though Mary Worth or Rex Morgan or Dick Tracy or (for heaven's sake) Prince Valiant ever had any pretenses toward humor. (Or, for that matter, B.C. But I digress ...) Funky is just the latest funny comic strip to adopt the concept of the Very Special Episode. Heck, the rece

I stopped posting to this blog well over a year ago, for one very simple reason. It wasn't fun anymore. For a year, I had written all the satire I could muster up. Some of it was good, some not so good (hey, I've never been a professional funnyman), but it was all pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek. I was shocked and amazed at the number of people who took not only offense, but nasty offense at some of the things I wrote. My last post, which had to do with the World Cup soccer final last year (and the infamous Zidane head-butt), got me branded a "racist" (I believe the word they were looking for was "xenophobe", but the point was made). All this abuse, for nothing but a small sense of accomplishment and a few complimentary comments? No thanks. Well, the whip marks have faded and the bruises have healed, and I'm back. I don't have nearly the time to devote to this as I once did (and I'm through with that whole trolling-for-traffic-on-the-blog-

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