you said it was for a show

And what a show it was, Dave!  Anything that ends with barf obviously cannot be a hoax (1).  Have you ever faked barfing, Dave?  Did he otherwise gag himself — were it with a spoon? I don’t think so.  That looks like honest to G_d’s truth to me, Dave.

None of that says, of course, that this isn’t a publicity stunt.  Or stupid.  It is clearly both.  Fortunately, I was down in the basement printing stuff when this whole thing went down, so my first exposure to Balloon Boy was in its more lyrical, vaguely distressed overtones:

I mean, whatever the merits of the situation, we’ll always have the metaphor.

As for the principle of “Whatever” (2) — I was thinking of maybe blowing off the whole morning to blog, half-assing the afternoon, and, then, maybe catching some gay performance art tonite.  Also, I could always just Shit My Pants and write about it on Facebook for good measure.  On second thought…

Yes yes yes.  All of our friends will read this (3).  They may even think less of us after reading — as if that were even possible.

So… What’s up with Andy Capp today?

I mean, the misogyny is right about where it should be — although I think Andy usually directs his hatred of women more towards individuals — his wife or mother-in-law, for example — than articulates it as a general frame of reference for dealing with the world.  What I find really problematic is the insertion of the figure of a marriage counselor into the Fish ‘n’ Chips, Bangers ‘n’ Mash swinging lillipudlian universe of the strip.  At once, it seems to be mugging to a therapy-starved American readership and hardly plausible that whatshername could drag Andy into counseling…