Q Toon: Persona Non Binarii

Timothy LeDuc, who identifies as gay and non-binary, and who uses they/them/their pronouns when talking about themselves in the third person, and their partner, Ashley Cain-Gribble, have made it onto the United States' Olympic figure skating team in Beijing next month.

NASHVILLE — Early Sunday morning, U.S. Figure Skating made official what was clearly obvious the previous night: The pairs skating team of Ashley Cain-Gribble and Timothy LeDuc that won the U.S. figure skating championships Saturday will be going to the Beijing Olympics.

The announcement meant LeDuc, who identifies as nonbinary, will become the first openly nonbinary Winter Olympian.

“It’s really exciting, but I hope that the narrative does not center around me and my journey and my accomplishments but that the narrative switches to queer people having the opportunity to be open and be authentic to themselves and everything that makes them unique and still achieve in sport,” LeDuc said after the team announcement at Bridgestone Arena. “So often queer people have to adjust themselves and sacrifice authenticity to achieve success.”

The singular plural pronouns will undoubtedly pose a challenge to some of the announcers broadcasting the games on NBC and other countries' networks. Sooner or later, someone is going to lapse into the habit of referring to the individual skater as he or him; or someone else is going to be confused as to whether they/them refers to one or both skaters.

English speakers became accustomed centuries ago to the plural "you/you/your" displacing the singular "thou/thee/thy." If this "they/them/their" usage becomes standard, I suppose "they-all" — contracted to "th'all"— will take root in Dixie, and "thinz" in Pittsburgh.

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I will admit that I had some difficulty reaching a punch line for the above cartoon, and I thought that appending a reference to Abbott and Costello's famed "Who's On First" sketch would resonate.

Not, it turns out, with the editor and publishers at the syndicate office, none of whom recognized the reference.

Maybe I should have drawn Abbott and Costello watching the television coverage. Or maybe nobody under the age of Dirt remembers Abbott and Costello any more.

Oh, well. My editor asked for a "tweak" to the cartoon, which is not as easy as "tweaking" a text editorial. Ideally, I could have had the TV announcers veer into the routine: 

Tara: "Okay. Let's say Timothy and Ashley skate out onto the rink together. Who's non-binary?"

Johnny: "Who's on first."

Tara: "Nobody's on first, they skated out together."

And on and on. But I didn't have six more panels to work What, I Don't Know, Tomorrow, Because, and I Don't Care into the mix. For that matter, I didn't even have a whole lot of space in that fourth panel for my television viewers to say much in the first place.

So anyway, here's the change I made to the final panel for my editors and you young whippersnappers out there.

I'm hoping you don't have to be familiar with Spike Jones for this.

Black Mug Shot

"K Chronicles" cartoonist Keith Knight has launched a project to change the way people — or at least our computer algorithm overlords — perceive the term "black mug shot."

“‘Black Mug Shots’ came from my frustration with the proliferation of mugshots, especially of people of color, online,” Knight told Boston.com. “This perpetuation of every Black person that you see on the internet is in a mugshot is harmful.”

So in a cartoon last month, he invited Black readers to post photos of themselves with their coffee mugs, and non-Black readers to post photos of themselves with black mugs, using the hashtag #blackmugshot.

I'm a bit late to the party, but I've got a couple of black mugs in the cupboard... so why not?

This Week's Sneak Peek

Just to be clear about a brief comment I made in Saturday's post, I'm fine. I don't even know if what I came down with over New Year's was COVID-19 or merely the common cold. My husband came down with something, too, at about the same time, but tested negative for exposure to COVID-19. Twice.

With news reports these days of children coming into hospitals for unrelated reasons and then testing positive for COVID-19 — and even newborns testing positive — I do wonder whether exposure to the virus is going to become like having microplastics in our bodies: bad for you, eventually harmful, but universal.

Now, don't mistake me for one of those denialist Pollyannas blithely dismissing coronavirus as something we'll all get herd immunity to. It has been a small blessing that the current omicron variant, while more contagious, seems to be less fatal.

But it could yet turn out to be the lull before pi, rho, sigma, or tau.

A Strange Feeling of '92

It's that strange feeling you sometime....mmmms get ... that you've drawn something thirty years before.

in UW-Milwaukee Post, Jan. 21, 1992

When that election year started out, the sheen was wearing off from Operation Desert Storm, Bush the Elder's splendid little war to liberate the Emirate of Kuwait from the evil clutches of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Drawn, apparently, for a January 16, 1992 issue that wasn't published

Bush entered that election year dealing with renewed concern over the state of the economy, in part due to worries that the balance of trade between the U.S. and Japan had begun to tilt in Tokyo's favor. His highly publicized trip to Japan would be remembered, however, for an unfortunate bout of intestinal flu during a state dinner with Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. 

in UWM Post, January 27, 1992

Dozens of Democrats, meanwhile, were vying for the nomination to run against Bush in November. Leading the pack was one William Jefferson Clinton, a former Governor of Arkansas. When his campaign was rocked by an accusation of an extramarital affair, it seemed to be a replay of the scandal that scuttled Gary Hart's run for the Democrats' 1988 presidential nomination.

in Milwaukee Journal, "Taking Names" column, February 4, 1992

I've rerun that cartoon before, and whenever I do, I have to accompany it with this clipping — the only time I've ever appeared in the Milwaukee Journal and/or Sentinel.

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Okay now, today's post seems to be running a bit short. Christmas was kind of hectic and I topped it off with a mild case of the 'rona — thanks to my being fully vaccinated and boosted, it wasn't any worse, and I'm pretty sure I'm over it. (Although it keeps trying to flare up again after I think it's gone.)  I haven't had the energy to do the kind of research you, dear reader, deserve, so I end up today posting three cartoons from a month when I only drew four.

And I don't have anything to say about that fourth cartoon, so here's one from January, 1982, instead.

in UW-Parkside Ranger,  Somers, WI, Jan. 21, 1982

For those of you not old enough to remember Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State, General Al Haig, you really missed a master of military syntax. It actually earned the neologism "Haigspeak," defined as "Language characterized by pompous obscurity resulting from redundancy, the semantically strained use of words, and verbosity," or "not using one syllable when five would do." 

It's kind of a shame he only lasted in office a little over a year, because satirizing his brusque demeanor and linguistic legerdemain was actually rather fun.

Q Toon: Cisplaining Amy

"Jeopardy" contestant Amy Schneider surpassed Julia Collins's 20 consecutive wins on the show last week, thus making Schneider the woman with the most wins, according to the show and several media outlets. This put the collective noses of right-wing media out of joint, because Schneider is transgender.

“On Wednesday, Ms. Schneider, 42, an engineering manager from Oakland, Calif., became the first woman in the show’s history to achieve 21 consecutive wins,” said the New York Times.

Yahoo! Entertainment credited Ms. Schneider with “the longest winning streak by any female player.”

Days earlier, NBC News declared her the show’s “top female earner” after she passed Larissa Kelly’s total all-time winnings of $655,930 with her Dec. 24 victory. Ms. Schneider also has exceeded Ms. Collins’ regular-season earnings mark, according to the show’s website.

 “Amy Schneider continues streak as highest-earning and longest-winning woman in ‘Jeopardy!’ history,” tweeted “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Right-wingers from Ben Shapiro to Mollie Hemingway to the Babylon Bee are upset that, in the Bee's words, “it is now an undeniable fact that, if a woman wants to claim the title of highest-earning female competitor on this game show, she’s … going to have to beat a man for the title.”

Schneider responded to the criticism by tweeting

I’d like to thank all the people who have taken the time, during this busy holiday season, to reach out and explain to me that, actually, I’m a man. Every single one of you is the first person ever to make that very clever point, which had never once before crossed my mind 🙏

I guess that it is at least somewhat encouraging that, unlike the fella in my cartoon this week, the right-wing whining squad is not claiming that Ms. Schneider's gender gives her some unwarranted advantage in the game.  They're just verklempt that she is usurping titles that rightfully belong to Julia Collins and Larissa Kelly. Whether their clutched pearls are any solace to those two Jeopardy champions remains to be tweeted — but I suspect that the two of them are doing just fine.

Meanwhile, Amy Schneider racked up her 26th win on last night's program, reaching $950,000 in winnings. She also reported having been mugged over the weekend.

Julia Collins and Larissa Kelly have been cleared as suspects.

This Week's Sneak Peek

 
If you're a fan of Jeopardy, you've probably wondered why it has taken me so long to draw a cartoon about Amy Schneider, the transgender contestant who has so far racked up 23 wins on the show.

Considering the fact that I need her to keep winning at least through the end of this week for my cartoon to be relevant by the time it gets published anywhere, I'm afraid I might have just jinxed her.

2021 in Review

It's de rigeur for us cartoonists to ring out the year by bringing out our dead cartoons of the past twelve months. So, here, instead of my usual Saturday fare of ancient history (besides, it's been done), is a collage to remember 2021 by.

So here, with the usual caveats about what makes headlines any more, is my traditional collection of the year in headlines.

With my wishes for a healthier, safer, saner, happier new year,

Sincerely yours,

Paul