Día de los Sneak Peeks

It looks like we've finally fixed the WiFi network at Chez Bergetoons.

It took almost a whole week of being able to connect only the desktop computer to either the internet or the printer, but never both at the same time, and none of our other household devices being able to connect to either one. My better half spent hours on the phone or texting our internet service provider and the company we bought our router from; it was the Filipino technician from the latter who was finally able to get our system up and working.

My iPod, the one device that hadn't been able to find our WiFi network since we had installed the present router last year, may even have located it now. While colorizing this week's cartoon this morning, I was listening to a playlist that is supposed to include "Conquistador" by Procol Harum, one of several tracks that are listed in gray and always skipped. 

This morning, "Conquistador" played.

I'll know for sure when the playlist gets to the third movement of Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto Andaluz, another track that the iPod always skips.

Well anyway, here's a sneak peek at this week's Can't Be About The Election editorial cartoon:

Just in time for the annual stewardship drive!

Eking Out a Sneak Peek

What a nightmare getting this week's cartoon from paper to the internet has been!

Our cable-phone-internet provider was in the neighborhood performing a supposed upgrade last Thursday night, leaving us with no service at all for most of Friday. After the cable and phone were restored, we discovered that we still had no internet.

My better half was unable to fix it himself, so he called the service provider. They sent a guy out here Saturday evening; he spent a couple hours on the computer, in the yard, on the television cable boxes, and ultimately determined that he couldn't do anything with our router because it isn't the provider's. He left us with only the desk computer connected to the internet — no WiFi for the rest of the house.

This morning, I found that the computer and my printer-scanner had no connection. I had the scanner scan my cartoon to USB, then swapped the USB to the computer; but my god, what a horrible scan! Not having been able to adjust the threshold level of the scan, every bit of erased pencil showed up. Worse, all of the lettering (with the inexplicable exception of that on the jersey of the guy on the right) looked as if I had smeared every letter while the ink was still tacky.

I spent a full hour making the text legible again. I should have just cut it out and typed in the dialogue.

Everything about this computer, moreover, seems to struggle much, much, slower than ever before. 

Our provider suggests renting one of their routers in place of the one we bought only a year or two ago. Their router will end up costing more than ours in a matter of months.

I may be cutting back on this blog until we can get somebody to repair the mess wrought by this goddamned Spectrum upgrade. 

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

Somewhat of a mess-up at the church where I'm the musician yesterday. 

Our pastor was on vacation, and the guest pastor wanted to change the Hymn of the Day from what I had originally picked, to go along with an alternate Gospel reading he wanted to preach on. So I had replaced in the overhead projection PowerPoint the hymn I had chosen with the one the guest preacher wanted.

Or so I thought. I had mistaken the hymn he wanted with a hymn the congregation knows well. The hymn he wanted was one the congregation has never sung. And in spite of being in 4/4 time, there is an inexplicable 3/4 measure second from the end of each verse, guaranteed to trip everybody up. Including the lead musician.

Saturday night, my husband and I came home from a family gathering to find a message from the president of the congregation on our land line phone. The guest pastor had come down ill, and there was no second-string guest pastor to fill in.

Then, when I came in on Sunday morning, the computer that runs the PowerPoint wanted to spend half an hour installing an update to the operating system, leaving me very little time to adjust the PowerPoint to match what we worship leaders decided upon. Furthermore, I had forgotten my glasses at home, so I couldn't read what was on the PowerPoint slides as I attempted to move them around.

What's more, the title of the guest pastor's choice of hymn was in the bulletin, but over the score of the hymn I had originally chosen. I had no slides for my choice of the hymn, but I decided that it was better to have the congregation sing the hymn they know rather than the one they didn't. Besides, I couldn't lead the singing if I couldn't read the words.

Meanwhile, the tech guys were having problems getting the live feed to Facebook — a mix-up copying a key code, then the signal deciding to buffer during the service — but at least that was not up to me to worry about.

And to top things off, midway through the service, I noticed that the Sending Song in the bulletin was not the one I had chosen for this week; it was the one I'd chosen for the service two weeks earlier. Oh, well: it was too late to get that hymn into the PowerPoint. We sang the hymn in the bulletin, and I'm sure nobody was the wiser.

(Psst — don't tell them!)

Q Toon: Come On Out Now

Having drawn three cartoons with LGBTQ+ Pride Month themes over the past four weeks, I decided to offer something for my client publications currently assembling their July issues.

Ed here represents all those dogs-in-the-manger who whine "Why isn't there a Straight Pride Month?" (or White History Month, or non-handicap parking spaces) and grouse about all the precious seconds they've lost waiting for "Para español, oprima dos" to be over.

The parades may be winding down, and any pride flags that have been flying over government buildings will soon be folded up for storage. But right-wing attacks on the LGBTQ+ community were going full bore well before June 1, and I have every expectation that they will continue unabated for months to come.

💻

Tech stuff: I decided to go with Epson after all. The rather pricey ET-8550 was the only independently recommended unit I could find that could scan a 9"x12" original (my bristol board will not flip around in a scanner feeder even if I were to trim it to the necessary 8"x12"), print in color, and hook up wirelessly. It takes up a bit more space than I would like, but not as much as a laser unit would.

Rather than those little ink cartridges that tended to gum our previous printer up, it uses those ink bottles you see Shaquille O'Neal hawking on TV, so that will take some getting used to. There are six colors to keep track of instead of four (a black for text, a black for photos, gray, magenta, cyan and yellow). Supposedly, the bottle ink lasts longer before drying up than the ink cartridges do; you just have to be more careful about spilling any.

I've already gotten a bit of magenta on one finger.

It looks fabulous. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

I'm having trouble with my scanner today. After spending hours trying to get past this error message every time I turned it on —

— including searching for scraps of misfed paper; turning it on while simultaneously pressing the Stop/Clear Settings button, the Setup button, the Copy button, the Scan button, and various combinations of the above; unplugging the scanner; uninstalling the printer/scanner from the computer, downloading and installing a new driver; blowing compressed air inside; removing and replacing all ink cartridges; dropping from a two-inch height —

I tried contacting on-line help services, both from Epson and independent of them. They suggested removing any scraps of misfed paper; unplugging the scanner; uninstalling from the computer and reinstalling; removing and replacing all ink cartridges.

Ctrl-Rinse, Repeat.

So I ended up running my cartoon out to the church where I'm the organist, and having the pastor scan it and email it to me. Having to work from a grayscale image rather than a Black/White one made a difference when colorizing it (lots of neither white nor black pixels along every line), and I'm worried that the results in print will not be up to my usual standards.

I had already begun shopping for a new printer/scanner. My better half occasionally has to print charts for work; there is so much data crammed onto every chart that its font size is about 4 picas. Any little gaps in printing can make whole lines illegible, and this Epson is very prone to gapping. Running the head cleaner functions accomplishes little other than emptying the toner cartridges one after another.

Sorry, Shaq, but I don't believe I'll be looking at another Epson.

Anyway, here's this week's sneak peek:

P.S.: The hits from Singapore keep on coming. I read that there have been legal advances in LGBTQ+ rights in the city-state lately, but I can't believe that accounts for thousands of theoretical visitors here every day.

Q Toon: My Convention in Milwaukee

The Democratic National Convention got underway in Milwaukee this week.

My ringside seat is no closer than anybody else's, since even the stars of the show aren't in town for the shindig, thanks to Trump's clumsy handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's a tremendous disappointment to the city of Milwaukee, which had fought for the rights to host the convention in part to remedy Hillary Clinton's having neglected Wisconsin — to her detriment — in 2016. 

There has been a gradual buildup to this week, but no one anticipated the crescendo would be inverted to a major bummer drawing only a few hundred instead of 50,000 people, $200 million in spending and international exposure to the city and state. Even the presumptive nominees, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, along with dozens of other speakers, will be Zooming it in.

Last month, DNC officials announced everyone attending the convention would have to wear a face mask, consent to daily testing for COVID-19, fill out questionnaires and maintain physical distance from other attendees. Those that do attend in person have been required to self-isolate for at least 72 hours before entering the convention and are being asked to stay out of bars. ...

Even the security zone for the DNC has been significantly downsized, leaving many streets that would have been closed in the downtown now open. Protesters and security around the Wisconsin Center are likely to outnumber the official in-person attendees.

That bit about asking attendees to stay out of bars has got to smart. One of the major bones of contention in this state before COVID-19 hit was Milwaukee and the Tavern League lobbying the hostile Wisconsin legislature to relax the mandatory 2:00 a.m. closing time for bars during the convention. Madison Republicans were still refusing to budge on the issue when it became moot.

Broadcast media are covering the convention from their studios in New York; print media are able to report in their pajamas. Nobody is sending their editorial cartoonist to sketch drawings of delegates in all their wacky regalia; there are no delegates and there is no wacky regalia.

This year's non-conventional conventions have the potential to signal a change in how these overblown circuses (circi?) are held. They weren't always the technicolor extravaganzas that they have become. Once upon a time, nominees didn't even attend their national conventions; that only came about as the rise of radio turned these relatively exclusive events into national platforms. Once television became dominant, both parties turned their conventions into flashy, heavily scripted infomercials.

If we make it through the pandemic by 2024, will the parties simply revert back to that sort of thing, or will the parties take this opportunity to change with the times?

Meanwhile, can we please do something about these godawful State of the Union addresses, too?

P.S.: Check back here tomorrow for another cartoon.

Q Toon: Tolerating That Crap

We take a break from the presidential campaign to check what's going on in statehouses around the country:

"We're currently tracking 192 bills, the vast majority of which are anti-LGBT with major themes being trans bathrooms and rfras (religious freedom restoration acts) focused on marriage," Mark Daniel Snyder, spokesman for the Equality Federation, a gay rights group, told ABC News.

South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard (R-Of Course) is poised to sign the first of a wave of bills to keep transgender persons out of public rest rooms. North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory (R-Need You Ask?) wants his state to void the recent anti-discrimination ordinance passed in Charlotte on the grounds that no place in North Carolina should be allowed to be any more progressive than the most backwards backwoods hamlet.

Where established LGBT organizations have dropped the ball, it becomes necessary for tax-paying businesses to pitch in. Tech giants Facebook, Google, Apple and Yahoo have come down solidly in favor of LGBT rights; the pushback from firms such as PayPal and Salesforce were instrumental in getting Indiana to reconsider its "religious liberty" law last year.

Business leaders in Georgia are worried about a loss of film and convention business if the state's so-called "First Amendment Defense Act" protecting antigay discrimination is signed into law. Decatur, Georgia telecom firm 373K recently announced that it would pull up stakes and leave the state over the issue:

“I’m gay, our CFO is gay, we have people from every walk of life working here,” co-founder Kelvin Williams told [New Civil Rights Movement] on Saturday. “I’ve got Muslims, Buddhists, atheists here. We’ve got great Christians working for us. They’ve never thought of not serving anyone – that’s not the message of Christ.”
“We don’t tolerate that crap,” he added definitively.

Q Toon: Who Needs Gaydar Any More?

Leaving aside the serious topics of gays in the military, marriage equality, and non-discrimination in the workplace, this week's cartoon turns to the latest technological fad in the gay community.

Grindr uses the GPS function of your wireless handheld communications unit to track where you are; you can use it to check out anyone else with Grindr who happens to be nearby, and perhaps message whoever strikes your fancy. The other guys with Grindr on their phones are sorted for you according to their distance from you, so you can send messages to the cute guy who is across the room, across the street, or across town; and Grindr will display any messages from horny gay guys you passed since the last time you checked in. For an extra fee, Grindr will alert you to each incoming message as it arrives.

So I hear tell. I'm well spoken for, so I have no need to hunt for gay hookups on my phone. Heck, I have so far resisted the urge to have a phone with me at all times, which practically makes me a Luddite.

Here's how their web site advertises the service:

"Meet Guys Near You With Grindr
"Meet guys at home or on the road for free with Grindr for iPhone or iPod touch. Start chatting with local guys in seconds!
"The go-to place for gay, bi, and curious guys to meet, the location-based Grindr is free, fast, and fun. It uses GPS technology in your iPhone or BlackBerry and Wi-Fi in your iPod touch or iPad to determine your exact location and instantly connect you with guys in your area. Simply launch Grindr to see local guys (the closest appear first) and view pictures, stats, and map locations at a tap. It’s that easy. So come on, see who’s available on Grindr."

So it's a hook-up site -- the hottest thing since Chat Roulette (which is SO last February!). You might be able to locate a gay lawyer or plumber, but it's probably not the easiest way to find someone to draw up your power of attorney or fix your kitchen sink. If you're expecting to find a new free porn site, though, you'll be disappointed. Grindr rules require users to keep their profile pictures PG-13.

Two reporters for the Washington Examiner thought it would be newsworthy to find out how many Grindr customers they would find in the halls of the Senate and House, in the White House press room, and in the parking lot of the Pentagon. I'm not sure what they meant to prove, since there are usually plenty of tourists as well as government employees and lobbyists in and around government buildings -- and the reporters didn't record themselves trying to initiate any chat sessions. At the Pentagon, they may have been trying to suggest a quick way to purge the military of gay personnel while Don't Ask, Don't Tell is still in effect.

So you active service personnel might just want to ignore the incoming chat message from this fellow: