What if….

So, we’re sitting around the breakfast table with our chosen sections of the paper (me comics, she metro) and, prompted by Sylvia

my mind wandered until it came to Dan Quayle, who we saw Tuesday for the first time in many years when he and Marilyn walked onto the stage where Barack Obama was about to assume the presidency.   And I thought, what if….   What if Dan Quayle had won the Republican nomination in 2000?   Perhaps Al Gore would have won the presidency more decisively?   What if Dan Quayle had won the election?   Would he have been so quick to go to war?   Would things have turned out as badly as they did?   What if….

sparrow fruit….

Our neighbor has a bush on the wall over by her driveway.   With fall the leaves have dropped off and in the morning when we walk by it appears to be loaded with large apple sized fruits.   Fruits that chirp noisily and scold the occasional cat that dares to approach and look up.   Sparrow fruit, I call them.   Right now there are dozens of them clustered gorging on our porch feeders, getting fat.   Fat sparrow fruit.   Hellooo, lunch….

You’re fired….

Not going to comment on how pathetic the phone call is.   But what kind of executive secretary would volunteer information like that to anyone, even to a close associate like this Charlie fellow?   Speaking of which, I think this is going to be heading for a Biff! Bop! ending with those raccoon fight riggers getting a pop on the jaw from Mark when he shows up and rescues little Sneaky the raccoon in the nick of time.   Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to reveal the ending….

A glimpse of the future….

Taking the long walk home up the hill on election day yesterday I saw a sight I will never forget.   A school bus loaded with children pulled across the intersection and stopped to let several kids out.   Every window of the bus was open with a child leaning out shouting and waving, and from a block away I could hear the kids as it approached chanting “O-ba-ma, O-ba-ma” over and over.  I raised my arms and waved at them.   The chanting never stopped as four or five of them got out and jumped up and down as they ran off, all the time chanting along with the busload as it pulled off down the street.   I pictured several hundred other Boston school buses running their routes the rest of the afternoon, all like that one, loaded with excited dancing children all shouting for Obama.   These kids are growing up in a new world.    It’s going to be interesting, very very interesting…. and beautiful….

Yo, Mark….

Is Mark playing Columbo here?   I mean, Butler Construction, Sue Butler, 2+2=?   Mark?   So is this heading for a teaching moment resolution where maybe Mark helps her come up with a profitable way to salvage her swampland investment while still preserving the ecology?   And what happens when Charley gets wind of their long walks on the beach.  Stay tuned….

back to Mark Trail….

This has been a little bit of a slow developing story so far but I think I know where it may be headed now.   For a few days after Mark rescued Sue Butler from the alligator attack we were side tracked into another plotline about dog and raccoon fights.   Now we are back to Sue making her move on Mark, a plotline which happens to coincide with an identical plotline in the current Judge Parker story as Michael Cavna notes in his great Washington Post blog, Comic Riffs.  So I’m trying to figure out the connection between the raccoon fights and the wetlands issue.  Plus, looking for who Mark is going to Biff! Bop! on the jaw at the climax of the story.   I’m thinking it’s not going to be our conniving CEO Sue.   Maybe her partner Charlie makes bets on the raccoon fights.   Anyway, remember Sneaky, the pet raccoon she met back a couple of weeks ago when she was getting cleaned up after the alligator attack?

Yeah, that cute little rascal.   I bet she has a lot of fun learning more about the animals and the environment from Mark when they take that little drive out to the beach, heh heh.   Cherry had better not find out about this….

Not a trick question, but….

I play with this little band from time to time.  We’re the kind of band that does parades, you know, 4th of July, Patriots Day and the like, holidays, even New Year’s Eve and Halloween parades.   But not your usual marching band with crisp parade outfits and marching in step, playing old Sousa marches.   No, we’re a little looser.   Run by an 87 year old big band sax player and crooner from Saugus, we are the Tony Barrie Band, small, but loud, all trumpets and trombones, no clarinets, no piccolos.   We play without music, and kind of march/walk at our own pace.   We play all the service songs, Army, Navy, Marines, all the flag songs and patriotic songs like Yankee Doodle and It’s A Grand Old Flag.   Then when we feel like it we mix it up with a chorus of Tequila or Mickey Mouse Club March or When The Saints Go Marching In.   We like to get the crowds involved, get them to dance or wave the flag or sing along.   If someone has a birthday we stop marching, pull over to the side of the road and play a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday like that was the only thing we came out for.

But anyway, so today we are marching in East Boston for Columbus Day, and the streets are crowded with people, many waving flags, all sorts of flags, many Italian and Irish among others, but everywhere, everywhere, American flags, big flags, little tiny flags, draped from windows, hanging on buildings, hanging from a pair of ladder trucks straddling the main street.   So at one point I ran out in front of the band and shouted to the crowd, “What’s the greatest country in the world?” thinking that I would get the response, “America!” and then we would roll off and launch into a rousing chorus of It’s A Grand Old Flag.   I got – silence.   No response.    I shouted the question again and receiving still no response, supplied my own answer and we went into the song.   

No response.   No one knew the answer.  Plenty of flags on display.   It is Columbus Day, you know, the guy who discovered “America”.

Needless to say I didn’t try that question again.   So what was it?   Were people not sure what the answer was?   Did they think it was a trick question?   Is there some doubt in people’s minds?   Or maybe it was the classroom syndrome, no one wants to be the first to answer in case they get the wrong answer and look like a fool?   MCAS is supposed to fix that, right?   Anyway, never mind, let’s not get started on that.   Well and it also occurred to me that maybe it sounded “Ugly American” and jingoistic, like implying America is greater because all the others are inferior or something like that.   Which is certainly not what I meant, but who knows?  Maybe I just asked the wrong people at the wrong time.    Makes you wonder, though.

But on the way home I tuned into MIT station WMBR at 88.1FM just in time to hear a song that may change all that.  

Check out www.myspace.com/sambamapangala where there is a recording you can listen to.  Or go to http://drop.io/sambasingsforobama where you can download it.  

The song is Obama Ubari Kiwe by Orchestra Virunga from Kenya.

Maybe by next year’s parade folks will know the answer to the question….

More Mark Trail….

After a sloow start we find the villainess of our latest Mark Trail adventure, a blonde wetlands draining CEO, out inspecting her property.   Someone or maybe some thing has caught her by surprise.   Could it be maybe one of those ‘gators from Gator Alley looking for water????

Ringtones??? I don’t think so….

Okay, so every so often I think, it’s time to replace the old “agency” ringtone on my dilapidated cell phone (the hinge is beginning to crack so I reinforced it last year with some packing tape).   So I google around, foolishly thinking maybe I’ll find Franck’s Symphony in D minor (I love the theme that opens the 3rd movement) or something equally dramatic and arresting.  I mean don’t we all have visions of the other folks in the room being so impressed with our ringtone when it goes off, interrupting the meeting, or the sermon, or the opening bars of the BSO on Thursday night, right?   But okay, all I find is either you find all these pathetic synthesizer ringtones… like I found a set labelled Fats Waller so I think, great, a few bars of Fat’s whaling away on Ain’t Misbehavin’ might be fun, and it turns out to be all synthesizer, and not even synthesizer piano, synthesizer saxophone!  Or, get this, for a mere $9.99 a month you can get supposedly classier stuff.   I’m going to guess that if $9.99 is the minimum entry fee, there’s folks out there paying more for their ringtone than I do for my phone bill.   Duh!   Are we stupid consumers yet?   We wear advertising labels all over our shoes and clothes, and now we sign up to pay the phone company for the ring on the phone too….

That “agency” ring is sounding pretty cool to me….

Saved!

Cherry just doesn’t give herself enough credit.   By the way, where is the mama lion while all this reunion hugging and handshaking is going on?   Hey, notice Mark’s trademark (no pun intended) Clark Gable forehead curl is visible even from the over the shoulder view in the first panel.   Pretty clever drawing, huh.