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The attitude of most American corporations is, “If the customers are accustomed to it … we’ve got to muck it up to keep them off balance!”, and Dallas Morning News. For the past couple of weeks they’ve been running some badly animated TV commercials that we’re so vague, with a very general “quality of life” message, that the real point of the ads — that we’d never be able to find anything in the newspaper, ever again — was hopelessly obscured.

That seems odd, especially since they sprung for Candace Bergen to do the voiceover, but in retrospect I can see why they wanted the true message to be less than clear.

What they did was to change the “Texas Living” section (which had only had that name for about five years, which shows their penchant for changing things) into the “Lifestyles” section and somehow mashing that up with a print version of their parent company’s (Belo Corp) GuideLive.com.

Translation: That one section is now in tabloid form, and the comic strips that were once found on three large pages have now been scattered over six or more pages.

ANYWAY: All of that has little to do with my original point which is this: In addidtion to the usual puzzles, we now have a new one, called Sudoku.

A Sudoku puzzle is a 9 by 9 grid, dividied up into nine 3 by 3 grids, with some of the blanks filled in with numbers. Your goal is to fill in the rest of the numbers so that each line, row, and 3 by 3 section contains all the numbers one through nine inclusive.

It sounds harder than it is (or maybe it doesn’t), but it’s really quite addictive. I usually work the Friday and Saturday New York Times crosswords, since I’m a word geek, but Sudoku appeals to the number geek in me; I get a true enjoyment out of figuring out the numbers by process of elimination.

But don’t take my word for it: Go get a puzzle and try it for yourself. You can find puzzles here, here and here.

The comic strip Blondie celebrates its 75th anniversary today; the above strip shows the culmination of several weeks of incorporating other comic strip characters into the lives of the Bumsteads, and vice versa (here’s a list of some of the crossover action).

I’m personally not that fond of the strip, since (except for the anniversary buildup) it’s a gag-based strip, as opposed to story-based; that is, each day’s installment is based on a “gag”, unrelated to the subject matter of the day before or the day after.

Contrast this to the excellent Fox Trot or Heart of the City strips, that usually develop a single storyline for a week or two.

When it first started out in 1930, though, it was thoroughly story-based: Dagwood was a goofy young playboy from a wealthy family (with a father who looked remarkedly like Dagwood’s present-day boss, Mr. Dithers), and Blondie was a poor but stunning flapper girl, and is told early on by the elder Mr. Bumstead that no son of his is going to be dating a cheap speakeasy floozy. Here’s a panel from the 1932 New Year’s Eve strip:

As you can tell from the dialogue, her dance partner is not Dagwood, but rather just some rebound boy-babe that she’s using for cheap sex until Dagwood grows some … courage … and tells his dad where he can stick his trust fund.

Now, 72 years after their marriage, they’re in the suburbs, with two kids who were teenagers even when I was growing up, and living from day to day on one disconnected joke after another. There’s never any mention of the fortune that Dagwood had to forsake in order to win the love of his life, and I think it’s sad that the cartoonists are squandering the opportunity to give the strip some depth and continuity by drawing on the characters’ backgrounds.

Anyway, Blondie might seem like just another resident of the comics pages today, but the strip was “quite the bee’s knees” toward the middle of the previous century, with 28 live-action movies inspired by the strip, including Blondie on a Budget, Blondie for Victory, and Beware of Blondie.

More resources: Blondie according to Wikipedia; another perspective on the occasion here; the 1968 CBS sitcom Blondie (co-starring Jim Backus as Mr. Dithers!); a history of the strip as posted in the India Daily; Blondie items on Ebay.

One more thing: Somebody wrote in Wikipedia that Dagwood currently works for the J.C. Dithers company as a webmaster. Can anyone corroborate this? It’s the first I’ve heard of it, and I do think that it’s something I’d remember. From what I’ve seen, Dagwood has always just done some highly unspecific work with “contracts” (when he does any work at all), which is in keeping with the tradition of ultra-vague work skills of fictional dads going back at least to Ozzie Nelson and Ward Cleaver. This is one of the dangers of the open-source nature of Wikipedia: Somebody can slip in what may or may not be a half-baked guess at a factoid, and since no one has seen proof that it’s not true (an elusive prey at best), then they just assume it’s right.

But not me. I put a comment on the Wikipedia discussion page; let’s see if we can stir the pot a little and get an exchange of ideas going …

It was the hottest day of the year (so far) today — much too hot to even thing about having a coherent post subject.

So here’s a bunch of different stuff:

I don’t usually link to most of the online comic strips, but this one, Chris & Smith, is done by a friend of Unfinished Business, a blog that his been linked to me for a couple of times now, so it’s the least I could do.

Plus, it’s not a bad little strip, over the long haul, so check it out.

This is for my own future reference: Amazon is selling exclusive digital short fiction — that is, stories that were written only for them to sell for download, and not in print form. At 49 cents each, this might be worth checking out.

Since it has to be short, it might also be worth writing for — it matches my attention span.

So what was Buddy Holly carrying in his overnight bag on that fateful flight out of Clear Lake Iowa? Click here to find out!

So anyway, there I was at Arby’s finishing my Market-Fresh Sandwich … and I looked down and it and leaked all over the front of my shirt.

Orange dressing-and-tomato liquid, all over the front of my white golf-style shirt.

My worst workday food-to-shirt disaster ever, in all of my years in the workplace.

When picking out my shirt this morning, I knew that white could be a problem, but I thought, well, we’re having barbecue at lunch today, so I should be okay.

But then the barbecue thing fell through (more on that later), so I thought, hey, I can eat at Arby’s, because that’s pretty safe stuff.

So that’s the pathetic part: I was mindful of the danger all along, and I still fell into the trap.

So: On the way back to work, I weighed my options. I could wear my lined windbreaker the rest of the day.

The hottest day of the year.

Two: I could wear the windbreaker — and no shirt — while I (hopefully) washed the stain out, AND waited for the shirt to dry.

Not an attractive option.

At that point, I started hoping and praying that maybe we had a spare company-logo golf-shirt lying around, and with that thought in mind, entered the building with my Wired magazine across my chest and went straight to the boss’ office.

As it turned out, he didn’t think we had any spare logo shirts — but he did have a spare red golf shirt he could loan me, which was the best news I’ve had all day.

The depressing thing is that only one personin the office — my receptionist — noticed that I had gone from a white shirt to a bright red one. Am I really that invisible?

Anyway, about the barbecue: One day each month, our sister company — that is, we’re owned by the same parent corporation — brings in barbecue, and the people whose birthdays are that month are recognized.

Usually the boss arranges the luncheon, but since it’s his birthday month, one of the other managers took the reins and booked it for today, the boss’ birthday.

Ass-kisser.

NO JUST KIDDING …

Anyway, it turned out to be not a very good ass-kissing job, because they didn’t show up with the barbecue for some reason or other.

So of course, I was the one who had to go around, about one minute before everybody was about to eat, and announce that the deal was off, the jig was up, Elvis had left the building … in short, that the barbecue birthday luncheon was not to be.

The reason I bring this up is: People were having trouble believing me.

They thought they were being punked. Pranked. Hosed. Snookered.

Joked up one side and monkey-shined down the other.

And twice on Sunday.

And it got me to thinking: Am I really perceived as being the kind of person who would do that?

My dad would be so proud.

Look out, fellow bloggers, we’re under attack: Today’s Doonesbury was a full-out assault. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau (through his characters, of course) said blogging is “for angry, semi-employed losers who are too untalented or too lazy to get real jobs in journalism”.

Basically he’s saying that he wishes thousands of people weren’t getting the chance to trespass on his private little treehouse club; that if we weren’t already here for years, and we’re not going to go through the club initiation (journalism school) and get a job at a major dead-tree newspaper, then we’re all losers.

The funniest part is that Trudeau is talking about real jobs in journalism. Dude — you draw CARTOONS. You’re not a journalist — you’re barely even an artist.

This illustrates the tunnel-vision of people in Old Media: They can’t imagine anything outside of their own little world — therefore, if people are writing things, then they must be pretending to be journalists.

Yes, Garry, the whole world wants to be like YOU. We think of little else.

See, here’s the deal, cartoon boy: We blog because we enjoy it. We like having a voice after having grown up in a world where we’re force-fed the prespectives of a handful of professionals — particulary when those “professionals” include the likes of Jayson Blair, Diana Griego Erwin, Jack Kelley and others who are free to invent stories and juggle the facts to arrive at whatever conclusions they want.

We bloggers don’t think we’re Woodward and Bernstein. We’re just having our say … and apparently Trudeau’s not happy about that. Maybe he’s feeling threatened and ignored, and feels like he needs to lash out at a whole class of people who are just trying to contribute our voices.

But apparently it’s not easy for a lifelong “professional” to understand why people would do something just to be doing it, especialy when that pro has been taking money for it for so long.