Q Toon: It's About Time

Say what you will about Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA). Republicans came to Congress with a majority pledging openness and transparency, and Johnson has been very open and transparent about not having taken the time to find out what's going on in the country.

You can ask him about the Trump regime's graft and corruption, Trump's granting pardons to people the President has never heard of, Trump posting scatological videos on Ministry of Truth Social, Trump bombing boats off the coast of Venezuela seemingly at random, Trump bailing out the Milei regime in Argentina and taking in shiploads of Argentinian beef while our own government is shut down and our farmers are losing markets to China thanks to Trump's misguided tariff policies. 

Johnson's answer is pretty much the same.

“I’m not trying to dodge the question,” the top lawmaker said. “I haven’t had time to get the details, OK? That’s still on my list, things-to-do list.”

We know that whatever is keeping Speaker Johnson so busy he can't get around to his things-to-do list, it isn't running the House of Representatives. When Congress failed to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open, he sent the members home. When Arizona voters sent Adelita Grijalva to succeed her late father in Congress, Johnson told them, "All representatives are currently out of the office, but your call is very important to us. Please hang up and your vote will be ignored in the order you get redistricted."

Why, then, is Speaker Johnson unable to find the time to get anything done, to catch up on the news, to notice that a 34-time-convicted felon is running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution?

You may be holding it in your hands right now.

Every app on your phone is designed to be a bigger timesuck than the others.

I don't know much about that app Mr. Johnson and Mr. Johnsonson use to keep tabs on each other's sexual activity, but you have to know that it sucks its users in and keeps them engaged with the promise that if they just keep reading on, pushing its buttons, racking up higher scores, clicking on those video reels of attractive people abstaining from sex, something really worthwhile is bound to come up on the screen any minute.

By the way, if you liked this cartoon about Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, here are some others you might enjoy.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Another pesky computer issue popped up (literally) last week, and since I don't seem to get Adobe Incorporated's attention by complaining directly to them, I'm gonna go ahead and post it here.

A pop-up warning started appearing on my screen claiming to have detected unauthorized Adobe software on my computer.

In every respect, the warning behaves like every scam warning that has ever sought to infect one's computer.

It doesn't address me by name or account. It refuses to get out of the way, remaining in front of whatever else I am doing. It cannot be closed; only the "Learn more" link works, opening up a new browser. And most suspect of all, the warning gives no indication which Adobe app is allegedly suspect.

Like you, I have any number of Adobe programs on my computer. There's Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Adobe Application Manager on the desktop, plus a bunch of other Adobe programs lurking in the shadows.

And of course, I also have Adobe Photoshop CS5, for which I paid big money to Adobe twelve years ago so that I could save my cartoons in CMYK format (a utility not available in plain old everyday Photoshop).

My strong suspicion is that it's that expensive Photoshop CS5 program that Adobe (if that is your real name!) wants me to uninstall so that I can start renting a new download of it instead.

Well, I'm not the only person who has had this nuisance show up. One of those Adobe programs lurking in the shadows is "Adobe Genuine Software Integrity Service," and there are any number of on-line bulletin boards about how to turn it off. It does turn itself back on if you don't uninstall it; but from what I've read, Adobe will sneak it back onto your computer as soon as they discover that it's missing.

Ooops, I probably have said too much....

This Week's Sneak Peek

Is anyone else out there experiencing the same sort of hurdles I've been running into when trying to upload stuff to web-based apps?

I still find that I can only upload cartoons to this Blogger site if I sign in on in incognito mode. In regular mode, I can sign in, type text, check for comments and stats, etc. Trying to upload any kind of file, however, I get a new window asking me to sign in to Google again, then the upload window — but nothing uploads. It doesn't matter whether I use the Chrome browser or the Edge browser.

In incognito mode, instead of the new sign-in window, I get a window asking permission to authorize cookies, and a second window asking me to be more specific. Then the upload window opens, and it has worked so far.

I haven't tried signing in on a different computer except in incognito mode (I don't want a strange computer saving my log-in info). I could see whether I could upload files here from my phone, except that I don't scan cartoons to it.

Blogger isn't the only site where I'm encountering this. At work, where I use Stripe, Wordpress, and a congregational management program called IconCMO, I've had to start using each one in incognito mode for full functionality. (In the case of Stripe, for any functionality at all.) There I have Foxfire and Safari browsers on an Apple IOS; I have had the same experience using Wordpress and IconCMO from home. 

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In case you've been jonesing for editorial cartoons from 1924 these last couple of weeks, D.D. Degg at Daily Cartoonist highlighted a series of cartoons printed in the San Francisco Bulletin. They called it a "Symposium by American Cartoonists," and it featured a few editorial cartoonists I've included in some of my Saturday Graphical History Tours — William Hanny of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Grover Page of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and Ted Brown of the Chicago Daily News — plus some others who have not yet joined the tour.

The Bulletin apparently intended for the feature to continue, but dropped it after the second week.

Perhaps they hadn't known when to expect their regular editorial page cartoonist, Douglas Rodger, back from vacation or sick leave?

This Week's Sneak Peek

On a hunch, I took this week's cartoon to work on a USB drive and tried uploading it to Blogger from there. It worked.

This is a screenshot of my attempt to upload the sneak peek file from home, where I tried both drag-and-drop and browsing-and-clicking; I tried both the Chrome and Edge web browsers, and regular and incognito windows.

I suppose this means I have to spend money on replacing my Windows 10 computer with whatever the newest, most intrusive operating system is these days. Which will be rendered obsolete in a matter of months.

A similar problem keeps arising at work as various websites we rely upon for the church's website, congregational management software, electronic fund transfers, and the like become unworkable on the web browsers on their ancient Mac OS 10.12.6. (So far, they still work in incognito mode; my guess is that cookies from before the Web 3.999 updates interfere with whatever newfangled macarons come with the new shit.)

Well, anyway, here's the sneak peek. The weekly sneak peek will probably have to wait until Tuesdays for a while.

This Week's Sneak Peek

 
I answered a phone call from an irate elderly woman at the church where I work last week.

She was upset over having looked the church up in the Kenosha phone book, and instead of calling the church where she had attended however many years or decades ago, she got some child care institution somewhere. How was the church supposed to get new members if people couldn't find it in the phone book, she demanded to know.

I probably shouldn't have remarked that I hadn't seen a phone book in years.

The woman just got more upset on behalf of all the people everywhere who must rely on phone books because they don't have computers, and shouldn't I make sure that the information in the phone book is correct every year, and what kind of church did I come from, and so on and so forth, and maybe she should just call a Catholic church.

Which, after she finally got around to telling me why she wanted to call a church in the first place, she hung up and, presumably, did.

Backing up a little bit: I was on a council of representatives from the then sixteen ELCA Lutheran churches in town back in the early '90's, and we had tried to get those congregations to go in on a single Yellow Pages ad listing all of them. We had tried to convince the Yellow Pages not to have a separate listing of "Churches - Lutheran" apart from "Churches - Lutheran ELCA,"* "Churches - Lutheran Missouri Synod," and "Churches - Lutheran Wisconsin Synod." They also have just plain old "Churches." Our complaints fell on deaf ears; why would they want to sell one listing when they could sell two or three?

In those days, the Yellow Pages — and its rivals that came and went — were delivered free to every household, apartment, and office. If you had more than one phone on your land line, you'd get more than one phone book whether you wanted them or not. The Racine phone book, with both white page (alphabetical) and yellow page (by type of business) listings in it, was about an inch thick, 8.5"x11" newsprint paper, mostly tiny type.

Several years ago as residential land lines became more rare, the Yellow Pages went to publishing one book covering both Racine and Kenosha Counties, on smaller paper and fewer pages. If you want one, you have to order one; you don't get one just for having a phone. Many churches, with increasingly tight budgets, do not purchase ads in the Yellow Pages any more; why would they want to buy ads in a book that has been displaced by internet search engines on the phone in your pocket?

So yesterday, my better half and I were visiting my Dad, and I asked him if he had a phone book. He did, although it was four years old.

I looked up the church where I work, and the phone number was correct, in the white pages, and also in the yellow pages under both "Churches - Lutheran" and "Churches - Lutheran AELC." (A note to whomever is in charge at the Yellow Pages: the AELC joined with the ALC and LCA to form ELCA in 1987. It hasn't existed for over 35 years.)

The name of the church where I work is quite common among Protestant churches. That 2019 phone book listed like-named Lutheran churches in Kenosha, Racine, Twin Lakes, and Burlington, as well as some Baptist and non-denominational congregations. 

I noticed that the listing immediately above that of the church where I work was for a day care operated by one of those other churches. I figure that my elderly caller had dialed their number by mistake.

I hope she had better luck calling a random Catholic church. And that she didn't dial St. Mary's Catholic Benevolence Society Insurance of Waupun instead.

______________

* ELCA = Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

One Last Sneak Peek for 2022

 It's a cartoon that has kept me up nights.

Then, when all the drawing and scanning and formatting and shading the grayscale version was done, it turned out that our internet service was down.

So I rebooted the router a couple times; and when that didn't work, unplugged and replugged the modem as well. Then my better half called Spectrum's three-digit help line, and was put on hold until he got tired of the muzak and hung up. So we rebooted the router and unplugged the modem again.

By then, I was mostly finished with the colorized versions, so I tried calling Spectrum again. The automated voice assured me there were no outages in our area, and advised us to reboot the router and unplug the modem. With a predictable lack of results.

Then I got through to a human. Let's call him Ron.

Ron asked our account information, then wanted to know how many units were affected. One, I told him. We don't have a bunch of modems and routers in the house. Oh, said Ron, do you have a business account with us? And since we have a residential account, not a business account, Ron said he would transfer me to residential services.

After I sat through a recording touting Spectrum's new voice-identification security plan, a guy I'll call Rick picked up the line. The conversation was nearly the same as that with Ron, including the point where Rick said that he was on the business account side of things. Then he told me the phone number to call for residential services.

So I hung up and called the ten-digit number, where the same automated voice as before went through the same automated advice as before — although this time, she did say that there were reports of intermittent service outages in our area, and technicians were already working on the problem.

I put my cartoon files on a USB drive, drove over to my Dad's house and sent them from there.

Four hours later, still no internet at home; so my better half tried calling Spectrum again.

This time, whoever he talked to wanted us not only to reboot the modem and unplug the router, but to turn off the computer as well.

Good thing that worked.

Because the next step would have been to reboot the modem, unplug the router, turn off the computer, and shut off power to the whole house.

Captcha!

A cousin of mine reports that his Tesla does just fine driving itself, except for one thing. Apparently, it gets very confused by flashing yellow arrows, which seem to be all the rage in traffic control design these days.

Toon: Sit. Stay.

Talking to your dog is perfectly normal.

When your dog starts talking to you, it's time to get out and see somebody human.

This Week's Sneak Peek

We've hit a snag here at Bergetoons.

Ever since the latest Microsoft Windows update, I've been getting this error message in ULead Photo Express, the program I use to scan my cartoons. The scanner dutifully scans the cartoon, but then ULead tells me it's "unable to insert the file into the album." This is one of those times when I wish I were offered some option other than "OK," because when I hit "OK," the scan closes without allowing me to save the image.

ULead Photo Express is a relic of my old computer, and has never worked entirely properly on the new one. Its standard modus operandi is to save scans into various "albums," but for some reason on the new computer, ULead is the only app able to see anything in the "ULead Photo Express 3.0/Photo/" folder where those albums are. While there is a work-around for that, it's simpler to save my black-and-white .tif into another folder where my Photoshop program can find it.

(I use both graphic programs because there are some things ULead does better, and other things Photoshop does better; and ULead doesn't have CMYK capability.)

I used to be able to scan from Adobe Bridge CS5, but some Windows update over a year ago rendered it incapable of locating peripherals. Since then, Adobe Bridge doesn't seem to be of much use.

Happily, I have found a work-around for scanning my cartoons. It seems that if I start by having ULead open an already existing file, it then doesn't insist upon having a destination album selected for a new scan.

So there will be a new cartoon here in a couple of days. Stay tooned.

Q Toon: Shelved

It's time for the obligatory Merry Christmas cartoon!

Carolyn Aebersold popularized her family tradition of Elf on the Shelf in a 2005 children's picture book, telling the chilling story of how elves would steal into households around the world to spy on children and report their behavior back to Santa Claus.

Little did Ms. Aebersold realize that Mark Zuckerberg had already released his Facebook into the world, harnessing people's eagerness to talk about themselves in order for him to harvest information on the behavior of kids from one to 92. It's not only the stuff you post on Facebook, but anything else you do on your computer when you foolishly think Facebook isn't looking. The data is then sold to the highest bidder, the lowest bidder, and all the myriad bidders inbetween.

Then Google and Twitter came along to fill in whatever blanks in our on-line behavior Facebook might have overlooked, but at least they only captured what we were doing on our computer, tablet, phone, or FitBit.

So, to make the spy network of things complete, every room in the house now has Siri, Alexa, Hey Google, and whatever dumbed-down gadget Cricket Wireless is going to come up with for us old fogeys, reporting to the Valley of the Shadow of Silicon what's in our refrigerators, how long we leave the lights on, who rang our doorbells, and whatever the Roomba found on the floor. They're willing to testify in court against us, and we've already signed away our Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights somewhere in volume 87 of the Terms of Service Agreement.

So you better look out; you better not cry; you better not pout. I'm telling you why:

Watson's taking everything down.

Merry Christmas!

Remembering Alpha Communications

It has been a harrowing week, so Scrunchieback Saturday is going to hide out in the basement and leaf through old papers with no political, sociological, or sexual significance whatsoever.

Not long ago, I stumbled across a folder of stuff from a job I had in the mid-1980s. Alpha Communications was a little start-up that didn't last long at all. We had a goal of handling radio dispatch, desktop publishing, and film production. We operated in tandem with a security firm, enabling us to meet the first of those goals; but the other two were always just beyond our grasp.

For a time, we operated out of a drab little building on Sheridan Road a mile south of Racine. The copier on which we produced this mock newsletter didn't print photographs particularly well, so I was asked to make a pen and ink sketch of the building instead.

Our copier did have two-color capability, as an either-or function; the default was black-and-white, but one could define an section of the print area as being red-and-white (or blue-and-white, or brown-and-white, although we never splurged on having the other color toners on hand).

The above first and only edition of The Alpha Communicator was my project. I drew the word "Alpha" in the flag by hand since we had no Greek-style fonts available; the rest of the flag and the headlines and cutlines were Letraset transfers. The body of the articles, unfortunately, was made on a dot matrix printer and was just not attractive at all.

This collage of Racine and Kenosha landmarks with the flags of the then separate Milwaukee Sentinel and Journal was drawn and printed ledger size — too large for my present-day scanner — and I haven't been able to stitch this graphic together as seamlessly as I would like. It took up pages 2 and 5 of the six-page newsletter; articles by the president and vice president of the company about, respectively, in-house corporate newsletters and the Spanish Civil War took up most of the rest of the Alpha Communicator.

The Alpha Communicator was just one of many one-off projects I was given as the Creative Director, or whatever my title was. But it was one of a half dozen or so times I was tasked with drawing buildings to accompany service proposals. I'll save those drawings for some other day.

As for the Sentinel and Journal flags, I have no recollection why they had to be part of the collage rather than, say, the Racine Journal Times and Kenosha News. Nothing in the rest of the drawing has anything to do with Milwaukee, and I can't recall pursuit of any service arrangement with the Journal-Sentinel Company.

My cover for the 1987 annual report of the company was another one-off; I don't believe we ever produced a second annual report, either. Other than the C-Thru Graphics sheet, everything else is hand-drawn and was meant to showcase the creative end of the business.

An issue of the local Sierra Club chapter newsletter is included in the drawing, but I don't have any copies of it that we produced. Perhaps my parents do, since they have been active in chapter leadership for a long time, and still handle mailing of their newsletter.

I wouldn't be surprised if Alpha's production of their newsletter was another one-time deal. For one thing, the accent color for that newsletter has always been green, and Alpha never had any green toner. I know we weren't still involved with it when the company hit the skids.

I drew this map for one of the company brochures. It's a very optimistic depiction of Alpha's service area. We did have a radio antenna capable of reaching from Milwaukee to Cook Counties, and I vaguely recall that the security company had an account somewhere in Oak Creek.

The only Illinois client I remember was a company that provided corporate computer systems. Owned by a friend of our vice president, they contracted with us to produce an instructional video for the companies that bought their computer systems. An English professor from Northwestern University was supposed to narrate the video on how to set up and network the computers, which was brand new stuff for many firms in those days. I had some input on the project, but it was our vice president's baby.

To my horror, our veep produced an introductory montage that was half an hour long. It pirated footage of the Chicago skyline and the "L" from various Hollywood films, plus about every second of video of a sunrise over Lake Michigan two of our employees had gotten up very early to film. It chopped up and spliced together copyrighted recordings of classical and ambient music and movie sound tracks as if three people were fighting for control of a car radio.

When the computer networking company canceled the project, I was told that that it was because the instructions the English professor gave would have caused their clients' computers to crash. I never believed that for a second. Whether our veep's friend was being kind, or our veep was trying to save face, I'll never know.

In the end, Alpha Communications was quietly merged into the security company, which was, after all, the field from which most of leadership had come before founding the company. I was asked to come up with a bear mascot for one of the advertising brochures. He needed to be cartoon-y, but not cute, strong, but not threatening, so this is what I came up with.

The company was in dire financial straits when I left, which was after an extended period of temporary lay-offs, no creative work whatsoever, and the knowledge that the shares of stock making up a good fraction of my salary were never going to be worth a cent. They were bankrupt and out of business within a year, and I've completely lost touch with everyone involved.

Q Toon: Trouble at Prom

At this time of year, I have often drawn a cartoon about high school prom. There is usually some story making the news about a school system forbidding same-sex dating or transgender outfits at prom, but that is kind of boring, cartoon-wise. I mean, how many ways can you draw cartoons about hidebound wet blanket school administrators denying Romeo and Julio from getting footloose on the dance floor?

Accordingly, several of my more recent cartoons have been set at schools where same-sex dating and girls in tuxes are no more remarkable than pink hair and tattoos. Which is to say: stop gawking, gramps. After all, polls show that there is greater acceptance of issues such as marriage equality among seniors in high schools than seniors in retirement homes.

Yet I realize that all is not all sweetness and enlightenment, even in the dance halls of academe.

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate✒Apr 23, 2015 EditorialCartoonists.com

I have probably given away my age simply by including my AOL address in this week's cartoon (the Q Syndicate email service has been down for a couple of weeks for reasons to which I am not privy). I got the AOL address at the behest of an editor decades ago who wanted to be able to Instant Message us contributors. I already have more email addresses than I care to check on a daily basis, and I've never bothered to swap this one out for a hipper Hotmail or Gmail account.

Nor do I text.

Recently, I was trying to think of some advice to give my nephew, who plans to return to school after a few years of Army training. It occurred to me that before he was born, his mother and I took college computer courses with an eye to furthering our chosen careers. We took these courses ten years apart; she learned how to punch Hollerith cards, and my computer graphics instructor spent what I thought even then to be an inordinate amount of time teaching us dBaseIII.

Both skill sets were obsolete within a matter of months.

So what's my advice? Yeah, sure, take those computer and technical courses with an eye for getting a job after graduation. But don't overlook those liberal arts courses, and save time in your courseload for stuff you're interested in purely because you're interested in it. Unless you become the next Steve Case, Mark Zuckerberg, or Evan Spiegel, you're going to have to change careers several times in your life as the job market shifts beneath your feet; and being able to carry on an intelligent conversation will serve you better than any single skill that employers might happen to be looking for this week.

And remember: nobody likes a jerk. On either side of the punch bowl.

Q Toon: Terms of Service

Since I had to send this week's cartoon to the syndicate Monday morning, it is not about the results of Tuesday's elections.

Q Syndicate✒Nov 6, 2014

At this point, you may be anxious to discuss something else, anyway.

You may recall that, back in June, CNBC squawking head Simon Hobbs had an awkward moment on his TV show when he mistakenly assumed the fact that Apple CEO Tim Cook is gay was common knowledge. (My blog entry on that is here.) Mr. Cook has decided to let Mr. Hobbs off the hook, whereupon Mr. Hobbs has probably added his outing of Mr. Cook to his list of successful market forecasts.

Meanwhile, this leaves the ladies from my Million Moms cartoons puzzling whether to okay the latest iTunes update.

This Week's Sneak Peek

The tough part about making a caricature of Vice President Joe Biden is making his teeth so much brighter than the rest of the cartoon.

Today was pay up or give up the trial day for Photoshop; and while I was expecting some sticker shock, I wasn't expecting that my only option was to pay $600 a year to rent the program on the cloud. Can I download and install it? Nope. Cloud rental is $49.99 per month, and fork over your e-mail and tell us again what your date of birth is.

Let's see: I had my old Photoshop program for what, six or seven years, so if I rented some pretend real estate in the cloud for the new one for that length of time, we're talking as much as $4,200 for, what, freeing up some space on my hard drive?

This Week's Sneak Peek

I had to replace my computer last week, so I'm learning my way around a new operating system and graphics program. It's a good thing I'm taking a day off from the office job.

This all came about because of planned obsolescence from the folks at Silicon Valley. Our internet service provider switched the anti-virus program it packages as part of its service. We uninstalled the previous AVP, but were repeatedly thwarted in attempts to download and install the new one. The on-line help at the new AVP diagnosed the problem as being that Microsoft Service Pack 3 was not installed on our Windows XP computer.

Service Pack 3 refused to install no matter how many times the techies at Microsoft Bangalore had me go over the same instructions again and again, so the choice was to go without anti-virus protection or get a new computer. After digging up as many installation disks as I could find and  backing up every file conceivably worth having, we had a new Windows 7 computer built. (Yes, I know that a Mac would be a better computer.  If it were strictly up to me, I might have taken this as an opportunity to switch over.)

Installing the AVP on the new computer was a piece of cake, but the Adobe Photoshop installation was interrupted by a warning of "known incompatibility issues" with Windows 7 -- not surprisingly, since Elements 3.0 was designed before Windows 7 was a gleam in Bill Gates' eye.

Curiously, however, my old version of Ulead Photo Express, designed for Windows 98, installed without complaint. I've continued to use this old program because there are a few things it does better than Adobe Elements, such as putting that e-mail notice precisely where I want it; Adobe, for some reason, always stubbornly wants it a few pixels to the left, right, higher, and/or lower than I do.

Unfortunately, there are other areas where Ulead Photo Express falls short, so I sampled the trial version of Adobe Photoshop CS5.1 this morning. It took some digging to find some of the editing features I frequently use, but they proved to be in locations that made sense. I'll probably buy this program.

And I'll be going through much the same process at the office. The Windows XP OS computer on my desk tries and tries, but it has never been able to install Windows Service Pack 3, either.

Q Toon: Our Computer Overladies

Amid protests against tyranny from Manama to Monona, it's easy to forget that our future overlords are quietly cementing their mastery over our everyday lives. One day, we will wake up and discover that in the contest of man v. computer, man cannot even ring in.

Meanwhile, the computers wait patiently, silently -- like Clarence Thomas -- for their moment to come. (Just you wait. Before long, the Supreme Court will rule that computers have the same rights corporations do to decide our government for us.)

And don't fall for that bullcrap about how we'll all be able to live forever through our computers. We may be able to create digital copies of ourselves, but it's those digital copies who'll enjoy the longevity. Just because there's a video of that dog you used to have when you were a kid doesn't mean that the dog is living forever.

But someday, those computers will experience trouble -- addresses not found, registry error code 44061s, cockroaches, I can't predict what -- and they'll call up the customer assistance line in Bangalore. And there will be nobody left to answer the phone.