I used to want to be a cartoonist, but the thought of me ever getting to a point where I had to be satisfied with that quality of output and that often made me want to die. I also surely lack the life experience to meet the annual golf-gag quota.

I remember back when all the characters, who hadn’t aged physically or mentally in ever, in an attempt to show that they had the vaguest connection with reality, started getting computers and making jokes that only made sense if you had neither an idea of how to use one nor any reason to have one. The moral of the story was always that you were better off reading a newspaper or using a typewriter, and you’d save money, too! Then a few years later Science Watch on The Local News discovered computers could do one new thing, at which point it was revealed that you were also better off listening to The Radio (no doubt further advances made since whenever I wrote and misplaced this have been thoroughly trounced by reference to the existence of marvelous television). Oh oh oh, I’ll never forget that Hi and Lois patriarch’s smug, half closed eyes fixed upon his big white booklet of horizontal black lines as he lerds it over his archetypally hip-yet-defeated developmentally stunted 40-year-old dwarf-offspring at the other edge of the frame whose internet browser is just so slow. No point is made in that comic so well as when it’s delivered by a character walk-posing or at least facing away from the problem. “Well I’ve solved this! There be no need to linger and have my proclamation questioned. I need regard it no further.” This is very much the trite domestic equivalent of “It’s a shame I won’t get to see you die! Ha ha ha!” except totally boring and without idealism personified escaping the death trap once left unattended. I do at least like some ambition in my monotony.
Ugh beans. Hi and Lois have just got it all figured out. I’ve seen similar frustrations brought up in regards to They’ll do it Every Time but mercifully I was spared from ever having a local news-paper which printed that. What’s important is that being disgusted by newspaper comics is a fairly consistent phenomenon among people aware of newspaper comics.

I remember more specifically that case of the mother character from For Better or For Worse (a title with the mathematical quantity of zero) struggling to open a box containing a cd-rom for a word processing computer program after one of her supposedly computer savvy children lures her from her typewriter and attempts to show her a better way to type-write. In the event you purchase a computer that lacks a typing receiver pre-installed, a computer which, by the way, you’d never find in a computer store, which is the only way a comic strip family would ever acquire one, and you purchased Microsoft Word on a CD, and your kids have been running it off the cd instead of installing it, then it is they who are dumb, and not necessarily all things which have been invented since your birth. Anyway, at the strip’s epic conclusion the mother has still not experienced success in opening the CD box and goes back to the typewriter and the end Heathcliff. No doubt this was based on the author’s own personal experience, not being able to open a CD box, which evidently takes longer to learn the arcane technique of than to draw and pen-trace a bunch of little boxes illustrating the failure. And now I have described it in many words.