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The Saturday Comics: Henry

19 Mar

March 19, 2011

Newspapers are dying and I blame comic strips like this:

Put yourself in the position of anyone age 8 to 28 reading that strip. An average person’s thought process may go something like this:

1- Why is that kid wearing a sailboat on his head?
2- What the heck does “have your hat blocked” mean? Is it calling him a blockhead?
3- Why does he end up with a paper bag on his head?

Look in the second panel. You can clearly see the 2011 copywrite. And even if it is a classic strip, that wouldn’t matter since it was just reprinted this week. If even the comics page can’t keep up with the times, what hope is there for the rest of the paper? You can make the argument that the average age of the newspaper reader has gone up as youth has abandoned it. That would explain old fossils like Henry and Rex Morgan hanging around, and even Spider-Man is written by an 88 year-old Stan Lee.

I am not sure if newspapers are dying so much as they are committing suicide. They should replace Rex Morgan M.D. with Dr. Kevorkian.

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Picture Postcard Thursday- Staten Island Boat Graveyard

17 Mar

March 17, 2011- midday

You may have heard of this. On Staten Island there is a place where old boats go to die. The inlet is littered with rusty wrecks so thick that at some places you can walk on them.

Google it for more info. It isn’t too easy to get to. On this particular day a friend and I decided to see some S.I. urban decay and of course, as is becoming usual with these stories, we picked the worst possible day. A storm hit that was so severe that parts of Staten Island lost power. Other parts were flooded. During the worst of the storm we were walking around- OK, trespassing in an abandoned insane asylum. I did not make that up. (And for some reason I actually miss her.)

To take the first of these pics we walked into a gravel company yard and after asking for permission, and being told in no uncertain terms to get the Hell out of there, we took a few pictures anyway. Not smart. There were some angry (and wet, it was raining) and very burly men heading our way so I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and valiantly got out of Dodge. The others were taken from an overgrown lot next door.

We never did find the entrance to the graveyard but we made up for it in sheer wet. I was drenched by the end of the day.

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