tomversation

Surge pricing

Did you see the news recently about Wendy’s adding “surge pricing” also called “dynamic pricing” to their menus? It’s an experiment they may start next year.

I can understand if prices go down at quiet times of the day, but will they go up, too? You know that once Wendy’s starts this and then the other food places will follow, and the what’s next – supermarkets? movie theaters? Mass transit?

I know Uber and other car services do this. I’ve actually seen people at the airport keep refreshing their phones in order to get better pricing, which seems to change minute by minute. I’ve never tried that, I just want to get in the car and get to my destination, but I guess if I remember, I may try it on my next Uber trip, but of course the price can go up, so it might be better to just leave well enough alone.

But I’m imagining the menus at Wendy’s changing every few minutes depending on the store traffic. And what about the drive thru – once you are at the window, that’s it, you can’t just sit there and hope for better pricing in the next minute or two. It might make lunch cheaper to eat after lunch time. It could change the whole concept of our day, instead of noon lunch, we might have lunch at 3 pm.

Anyway, it makes for a good cartoon.

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The haunting

I wasn’t sure if today’s cartoon would be understood by many people. But it makes me laugh.

My father used to always say, “Stop haunting me!” when we were kids if we nagged him about something. It was just a common expression around our house, I guess we “haunted him” a lot, because I remember him saying this often.

I guess there are so many old expressions that will soon be extinct. It sort of reminds me of sounds that will soon be extinct, like the sound of a ringing telephone or a typewriter bell.

I sometimes think of the opposite – of things that we hear today that maybe 100 years ago or so we would never hear – like a plane flying by, or a lawnmower, or any type of motor. If you go outside and listen, you’ll hear all these sounds which seem second nature. Freeways are loud, “Can someone turn down the freeway?” asks cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, as he painted a mural that says, “The future is emission free!”

But imagine 100 years ago when a person would go outside and maybe just hear the clopping of horse feet on the pavement and maybe that’s it!

We have a construction site across the way, and the sound of that non-stop “beep, beep, beep,” of trucks and equipment backing up, is maddening. One of my neighbors called me one day to see if I could do anything about the sound, it was driving him nuts. “What could I do?” I asked him. “You know people, call someone!” was his reply.

I didn’t know who the call, so the sound goes on and on Monday thru Friday. It’s quiet on weekends.

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iPhone SOS

I was one of those people with the dead iphone yesterday. It wasn’t totally dead, I could use the wifi to do things, I just couldn’t make phone calls. Which actually, was a good thing. I don’t like talking on the phone. I prefer texting, which was working.

I woke up early and looked at the phone and I saw some messages regarding my cartoons had popped up on the screen. When people comment, it alerts me. The top comment said something like, “Phone hack.” It was on a cartoon that had nothing to do with a phone or a hack, so I checked the phone again and saw the SOS at the top of the phone where the signal bars should be.

I went to a website and it wouldn’t load and I tried other things and the same thing. I panicked. Was my phone hacked? How was that done? When I went to bed the night before, all was well. If I hadn’t seen that “phone hack” comment, I would not have thought much of the whole situation.

For about an hour I tried everything, I downloaded the latest update and I looked up things on google and You Tube, using my computer. I tried this, I tried that, I tried everything, panicking for an hour.

I’m usually good at fixing electronic or internet problems, but nothing worked.

I then thought that it could be AT&T and not just my phone, but of course I couldn’t call AT&T since the phone was down.

I turned on the 6 am news and there it was – it was a national outage! Phew. Relieved.

I made it through the early morning calmly then, since I knew there was nothing I could do. And before 8 am, the phone was back up to it’s usual self. I suspect many people slept through the whole thing. While many of us went crazy in the dark, needlessly. First world problems.

Someone posted this image on Twitter with the tagline, “AT&T customers this morning.”

I wondered about things like Apple Pay or using the phone’s boarding pass option at the airport. I’ve seen articles that say to download the boarding pass at home or print it out at the airport, rather than just have the app passport, and now that makes sense.

And what about the NY subway, where it’s “tap and pay” with the OMNY system? Will lines back up at the vending machines with people buying metro cards if this ever happens midday?

Also, of course, have cash or credit cards if you are an “only apple pay” user or other tap and pay users, which I suspect many Gen Z users are.

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Cloudy with a chance of faces

I’ve been doing this thing called “Cloudy With a Chance of Faces” since last April. It’s me seeing things in clouds. I posted Lincoln and Washington on Monday for Presidents Day.

It started innocently enough, I would look out my window and occasionally see things. Now I look for the images. The good thing is I only look out my own window usually first thing in the morning. I don’t walk around all day with my head “in the clouds.” I don’t really even think about it once I check out the clouds in the morning.

This Lincoln was caught by surprise. I took a picture of my favorite intersection in NYC, Madison Square, and when I looked back at the picture, there was Lincoln! It wasn’t planned. Unfortunately there is a huge building blocking the Empire State Building now, so the image is not the same, when I’m in NY next I’ll take a picture of the mess that is there now and I’ll show you.

But anyway, when I looked the picture later on, I saw Lincoln staring down at the city!

Now I look outside in the morning and if the clouds are puffy, I can get some nice images. The nice thing about Miami is that the clouds move fast, so if I see something and don’t catch it right away, it morphs into something else, which is also good, because sometimes I can just stand out there for a few minutes and in that short amount of time, I get many images to play with.

I saw an alligator wearing sunglasses the other day when we were driving back from the Renaissance Festival, but I didn’t catch the image fast enough. In New York in November, I saw Washington in the sky, but I didn’t catch that. But the Washington I show here I caught off my own balcony in my own backyard.

Monday thru Friday, I post Cloudy With a Chance of Faces at:
Facebook at: facebook.com/CloudyWithAChanceOfFaces
and at Instagram at: instagram.com/cloudywithachanceoffaces

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Visiting the 16th century

We went to the 32nd annual Florida Renaissance Festival on Saturday. I hadn’t been for years. I went with some of my family this past weekend, but in the past, for many years, I would go with my friends, maybe two or three carloads of us would head to Quiet Waters Park in Deerfield Beach to attend.

It was just as I remembered. You travel back in time to the 16th century, it seems they want a lot of things paid in cash this year, I remember paying with “MasterCard and Lady Visa” in the past.

We ate a lot, we drank a lot, we spent a lot. After having such a cool/cold winter (for Florida), Saturday seemed to be the hottest day of the year.

Vendors for food and items made by artisans who are on site, are set up all over the forested park, around the lake, and there are performances and performers everywhere from horse jousting (my favorite) to archery, a maze, the human flying carrousel, glass blowing, minstrels, magicians and so much more. The king and queen are just a few of the “characters” who wander around the park.

The Festival runs until March 24, weekends only.

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Checking the gifts

Have you ever done this? Or looked up the price of gifts you may have received online?

I got this cartoon idea because I was checking the price of something I bought and it just came to me. It wasn’t a gift. I bought a new mattress and went online to check to see if I got a good price after the fact. It was on sale at Macy’s. I did get a good price.

I’ve done this with a lot of things. After I bought my car a few years ago, I went online and checked the price of the car to see if I did the right thing. I bought a long overcoat recently, a trench coat. I checked that price, too; after the fact.

I did check the price of these things ahead of time, but I wanted to be just check afterwards, too. I’m not sure why, as I wouldn’t be returning anything, but I just get curious that way. I do check reviews ahead of time when buying things online. It’s funny, an item could have 1000 five star reviews, but I dwell on the one negative review and may not purchase the item because of that.

I do that with hotels. If someone leaves one bad review, something stupid, like the elevator noise kept them up at night, I’ll pass up that hotel and go to the next one.

But to be honest, I’ve never ever checked the price of a gift, or looked up ratings or reviews of a gift. After all, you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. There’s a cartoon in there somewhere.

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Digital Van Gogh

I’ve been thinking of going to Paris. And Italy. But this is a perfect reason to visit Paris.

I saw this report on CBS Sunday Morning about Vincent Van Gogh and a new digital feature about him and his art.

The Musee D’Orsay in Paris has a new exhibit of Van Gogh called, “Hello Vincent.” Anyone can go up and ask Vincent anything they would like to know about him.

His replies and his image are AI generated and the answers come from the over 900 letters he wrote in his life, where he told (in the letters) about everything from his health, personal life and art. You just walk up and ask him anything, and he’ll look at you and answer.

*Seth Doane (and Vincent) on CBS Sunday Morning.*

It works along with the art because people ask serious questions of Vincent; things that they really want to know about.

Maybe the exhibit will travel to the U.S. and I won’t have to go to Paris, although I still want to go to Paris. And Italy.

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Labeling the work

Some people call my cartoons memes. I don’t know why, and I’m not crazy about that, but I have been known to use #meme as a hashtag at times. But it’s a comic or cartoon. Not a meme.

I also have been described as having an “old school” or “old fashioned” style of cartooning. It’s called drawing, not A.I.ing or computer generation. I guess the future is that – A.I. generated or some sort of electronic design. Like an NFT-type image.

Then there are the people who don’t get some of the cartoons. That’s a whole different category. But I do find that different gags don’t work in different parts of the world, even if we speak the same language , things come across different or confusing at times.

I mentioned in a previous post that my method was called drawing in an “exposition box.” I looked exposition box up and it says: “An explosion box is an origami box that pops open and “explodes” as soon as the recipient takes the top off, revealing pictures, messages, and even gifts inside. It’s a bigger version of our Explosion Cards project.”

I hardly think I fit into that category.

Must we label it? If so, it’s a cartoon or a comic or a comic panel or a comic strip. That’s it. People used to call online comics “online comics,” now they are just “comics.” But there are categories for them when it comes to awards. The National Cartoonist Society Ruben Awards (like the Oscars for cartoonists) has categories like, “newspaper strip,” “newspaper panel,” “online long form,” “online short form,” “gag cartoon,” and so on.

The gag cartoon is a panel cartoon like mine. Online long form can be a comic strip or longer and online short form is usually a single panel like mine.

Categories and labels all for basically the same thing.

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Throwing soup on the Mona Lisa

I’m sure you saw this in the news. A couple of activists threw soup on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum in Paris over the weekend.

“What is more important?” The one activist asked the shouting crowd. “Art or healthy sustainable food?”

The protest had something to do with France breaking its climate commitments and they want France to give people access to more healthy foods. I’m sure it was a good cause, but it’s a case of alienating the people who are on your side by doing something stupid to bring attention to the cause.

I’m not sure how this involved trying to destroy the Mona Lisa, luckily she is covered with glass. But wouldn’t it make more sense throwing the soup on Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can Art? Which I hope never ever happens. I’m just sayin’.

I remember the first time I saw Starry Night, my favorite painting, so many years ago. It wasn’t covered in glass, as it is now. You could literally put your face right up to it. Luckily it’s protected with glass now.

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The name game

This cartoon makes me laugh whenever I see it. It just really makes me LOL.

I know “Hugh” is pronounced with the “Hush” sound, but it seems to work here.

I redid it, adding “Em” to the group, as a reader suggested that. I also seemed to have left out Mr. T and CeCe. I guess it’s turned into a word game, which I like. And one person in a comment said, “Casey” which is KC, which I like.

I was watching tv one day and the guy says his name is Jay. And thought does he mean the letter J. like people use or does he mean Jay, the actual name. I thought to myself, “It’s confusing when people are named after letters,” and of course that how that came to this cartoon.

I started thinking of the alphabet and the various names that sound like letters and one thing lead to another.

Another way of doing this could have been the actual letters in a bar and have the letters say, “Hello D, hello, B, etc. But I don’t usually like doing inanimate object cartoons and I think it works well the way it is now.

On Reddit, I got lots of comments, many nasty. Apparently people don’t know Bea is pronounced BEE and Hugh is mispronounced U, but that seems to be a U.S. thing, because the cartoon was put down for being “an American thing.”

Other rude people on Reddit didn’t like the drawing style or that it was one panel. And apparently, this gag has something to do with Men in Black, which I’ve never seen.

Some comments from Reddit:

“It’s a shitty premise being in a shitty exposition box, but then it goes and gets greedy with Hugh.” Not sure what an exposition box is, maybe a single panel.

“Hugh has a brother, Double Hugh.”
“Nah, his twin brother would be UE.”
“Hugh is a stretch but passable.”
“What about multiple letter names like Petey and Emilee?”
“I suppose Elle is pronounced L?”
“My friend Ivy is named after two letters?”

And it goes on and on. But people seem to be very hung up on “Hugh” being “U.”

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