This Week's Sneak Peek

Had enough upside-down flag cartoons yet?

Well, tough. 

As it happens, I was out of town for a family wedding over the weekend. An old friend of my husband's lives in the area near the wedding, so I drew this week's cartoon early in case we had the opportunity to stop by for a visit. (The visit didn't work out, but at least it wasn't because I was anxious to get home to my drawing board.)

At the end of every year since 1972, I've taken a photo of the year's front page headlines. One of this year's major front page stories was in Friday's newspapers (you may have heard of it), and I very much wanted to pick up a copy of the local paper.

Couldn't find one.

Not very long ago, one used to find a small stack of newspapers in the lobby of one's hotel, free as part of the cost of one's room. Once upon a time, it would be the local newspaper; then somehow every hotel agreed to stock USA Today. Now they don't even offer that. The young men at the front desk didn't even know where a newspaper might be sold.

Newspaper vending machines are a thing of the past now that the cost of a newspaper is well above the amount of change anyone carries in their pocket. There were no newspapers at the nearby gas station; the clerk told me that they only sold the paper on Sunday. Nor were there any newspapers at the nearest grocery store. The nearby Shoppe-ing Centre had a bookstore; no newspaper there. Maybe I should have checked any of the half a dozen coffee shoppes, but I wasn't in need of half a dozen overpriced cups of coffee.

Yesterday, I saw the premiere post on a new substack by fellow cartoonist Jack Ohman, writing from vacation in Hawai'i about trying to get away from the news. Yet, in spite of that, he apparently had no trouble in paradise coming up with a copy of the local paper.

From https://jackohman.substack.com/p/on-vacation-with-donald-trump

Was it because he was in a Blue State where they get their news from, well, the news, and I was in a Red State where they get their news from Trump Social?