Stranger's Day (August 24) -- an idea whose time has come, courtesy of the great Roz Chast

As if one genius idea wasn't enough, this week's New Yorker features Roz on the Satan Sandwich (see below)



"Stranger’s Day has the potential to be the greatest holiday of all, not least for the greeting-card industry. On all other holidays, you send cards only to those people you know, but the number of people you don’t know is in the billions."

-- New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff,

in his weekly newsletter/blog

by Ken



I was happy to see Bob Mankoff getting behind Stranger's Day in a big way, because this Roz Chast cartoon had really grabbed me in this week's New Yorker. Of course I could just have been carried away by the power of the poetry. What would Henry W. Longfellow have given to write:

I don't know you,

You don't know me.

Guess that's how

It's meant to be.

HAPPY STRANGER'S DAY!

Or:

We're both alive at the same time,

So here's a card, is that such a crime?

SORRY TO BOTHER YOU.

There's already a website (strangersday.com), though the content so far is kind of, er, limited. And by "limited" I mean limited to:

[You can click to enlarge this, if you really think that'll help.]

It appears that built into Roz's idea of Stranger's Day is a way of getting rid of stuff she doesn't want. Or, as she puts it:

Hello, stranger. We haven’t been properly introduced, and hopefully we never will be. I’ve got lots of friends—actual ones, and also all these other people that Facebook says are my friends. But even though we may never befriend each other, or even “friend” each other, that doesn’t mean we can’t exchange presents. Here are some items I wouldn’t mind giving to you, stranger, on this very special day:

and on the blog version there's a slide show with no fewer than ten such items.



Here's one that particularly caught my attention:

Sometimes I fantasize that I’m going to have people over for what will be the best dinner party since the dawn of time. My guests will all be the smartest, funniest people in the world, and we will all be laughing and talking and basking in the delight of one another’s company. And when dinner is over, I’ll serve dessert on these lovely sunflower plates. I can’t figure out why I’ve never used them.

And here's another:

Have you ever been mad at someone about something that you know is ridiculous, but you’re mad anyway? What do you do? Do you pick a big dumb fight, knowing that it’s not going to solve anything? Or do you take something that belongs to the person, like an ugly tie he never wears or an old CD he’ll never miss, and stuff it in the bottom of a garbage bag? Or you can give it away to a total stranger.

There are also Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram links that you can get from Bob's post (I don't get mixed up with that stuff), via which he invites you to post pictures of stuff that you’d like to give away. Use the tag #strangersday. He says, "We’ll look through the options and post pictures of the ones that we’d most like to receive from a stranger."





NOW FOR ROZ CHAST'S TAKE ON THE SATAN SANDWCH

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Bob Mankoff pays tribute to James Thurber's decisive role "in shaping the modern 'New Yorker' cartoon"

This is the cartoon with which, Bob Mankoff says, Thurber changed the course of cartooning "in one fell swoop" in 1932.

by Ken

I indicated in my first quick take Sunday night on the celebration of Thurber earlier that evening at the 92nd Street Y ringmastered by Keith Olbermann that I would probably want to come back to it, and even after sort of doing so parenthetically in my Tuesday post about Keith's Rolling Stone interview remarks about Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw, I knew that there was lots of important stuff still left out.

Most importantly, perhaps, I hadn't more than mentioned the presence of New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff. Happily, Bob gives us his take on the event in his Cartoon Desk blogpost this week. As I've mentioned, you can also sign up -- for free! -- to have Bog's weekly blogposts delivered directly to your e-mailbox, and those blogposts are probably the happy-makingest thing I can look forward to finding there. Let me repeat my previous instructions, "On the home page, look down on the right side for a tab that gives you checkboxes for two weekly NEWSLETTERS: "This Week" and "Cartoons," and this time add a link for the home page, newyorker.com. Also, it's been a full four days since I blogged about Bob's blogposts ("The results of The New Yorker's search for a universal cartoon caption").

First let me say that seeing and hearing Bob in person was a treat and an insight. In his blogposts he seems so calm and logical; in person, he's kind of a wild man -- though an extremely calm and logical wild man. I'm delighted to have his account of Sunday's program. More important; he's made it possible for me to share with you the presentation he offered, which I was dreading having to try to characterize in clumsy paraphrase.

"I gave a little presentation," he writes, "claiming that, important as Thurber was to humor writing, he was even more influential in shaping the modern New Yorker cartoon."


AND HERE IS BOB'S PRESENTATION

In the early twentieth century, cartoons were illustrated anecdotes.


The same style was found in the early days of The New Yorker.


Even this refreshingly less stilted and beloved cartoon from 1928 cartoon from 1928 comes from the same template:


Something more refreshing was needed, and James Thurber provided it in one fell swoop in 1932.


That year, Thurber published an astonishing forty-two cartoons in the magazine. Other swoops -- by Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and others -- would follow, but Thurber’s was the earliest and the swoopiest. His minimalist but expressive style, later adopted by such diverse talents as Charles Barsotti, Roz Chast, Bruce Eric Kaplan (BEK), and Michael Maslin, turned out to be the perfect vehicle for delineating the small things in life which loom so large.


It was also suited to permitting the interplay between fantasy and reality that let cartoons go anywhere the imagination could take a cartoonist. Thurber created the prototype for this genre in that annus mirabilis, 1932:

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BY THE WAY, WE'VE HAD BOTH THURBER'S AND E. B. WHITE'S
ACCOUNTS OF THE SEAL-CARTOON -- OR SO I THOUGHT

Thurber's appeared in an "author's memoir" he wrote in 1950 for a new edition of his first published collection of drawings, The Seal in the Bedroom and other predicaments (1932), which I reproduced in this October 2006 post. White's more detailed account appeared in his introduction for a new edition of the book he cowrote with Thurber, Is Sex Necessary?, originally published in 1929. I'm assuming that I reproduced it in the promised follow-up post to the above, but I'll be darned if I can find it, and I'm wondering whether this was one of those follow-up posts I promised and somehow never got around to writing.

I have found a December 2010 post in which I claimed to be linking back to the post that contained the White version, but on checking that link, it turns out to be to the post I've just linked to. So for the moment you'll have to do with Thurber's more limited account. I think we'll have to schedule White's Is Sex Necessary introduction for an "E. B. White Tonight" post. (First I'll have to find the replacement copy for my missing one which I was so thrilled to have acquired online for a penny.)

OH YES, A FOOTNOTE TO THAT THURBER CARTOON
ANNUS MIRABILUS OF 1932

Bob Mankoff is amazed by that year in which Thurber published 42 cartoons in The New Yorker. In Sunday's panel, that great writer Calvin Trillin recalled having discovered in the magazine archives that in one year (if he mentioned which year, I didn't catch it) he published 51 casuals, the magazine's term for what we would call humor pieces. Trillin recalled being impressed with himself the year he topped a fellow writer by breaking their tie and having his sixth published. "One a week?" he mused.

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Confidential to Anthony W. of Brooklyn -- you twit! (Our promise: no puns added)

Plus: NY-er cartoon editor Bob Mankoff has what one might hope is the last word on the subject

Can I assume that no caption is required?

by Ken

So, Anthony, it turns out that the whole brouhaha came about because you screwed up a single character -- instead of typing "D" to send your, er, business as a "direct message," you typed "@," which sent it "to" the designated recipient all right but made it viewable to one and all. Bianca Bosker has all this and much more on Huffpost Tech (The Twitter Typo That Exposed Anthony Weiner), including the reminder, which should be embarrassing all around, that the New York Times dubbed you a "technophile."

If it's any consolation, Anthony, Bianca reports: "Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation.com, which helps people manage their online reputations, says the accidental exposure of messages that were meant to be private happens 'millions of times a day.'"

I'm not going to ask you, "How could you be so stupid?" Casting no aspersions,it seems to come with the territory for certain power-driven personality types. (Okay, it's just possible that a couple of aspersions got cast there. After all, we're all only human.) It's bad enough that you were dopey enough to be carrying on this way online. As Bianca points out:

Privacy experts say that Weinergate underscores the importance of users understanding these social networking sites for what they are: social platforms meant to help people connect with one another, broadcast their ideas and create stores of personal information online. Services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are built for sharing, not secrets.

"Twitter was not really designed for privacy. If you do not want it public, don't put it on Twitter," said Chet Wisniewski, a security expert who writes for a blog run by Sophos, a software provider. "People shouldn't consider social networks a place to communicate private things. ... These services are designed to share, and privacy is a second consideration."

How humiliating is it that you should be hearing this from me, a card-carrying Twitterphobe? But as I say, this is almost the least of it.

Sure, the Twitter screw-up was embarrassing. For a lot of people, though, the sticking point is going to be all the lying that followed, yet another case of a self-important pol violating the Richard M. Nixon Memorial Adage about the killer being not the deed itself but the cover-up.

This morning WNYC radio political analyst Joyce Purnick was recalling how, way back when, when you first sought the Democratic nomination for your congressional district, a strange case developed of virulently racist materials being spontaneously distributed in the district smearing one of the other candidates, and when fingers started pointing at you as the responsible party, you swore just as sincerely as we saw you swearing recently that you had nothing to do with it, only you had to admit eventually that you had everything to do with it, on account of it was proved that you did. For future reference (assuming you have a future), when you're caught with your pants down, as it were, it's too late to come clean.

I know I promised not to ask, but sheesh, how could you be so stupid? Probably it has something to do with the insight of that noted philosopher of the heart, Woody Allen, who so famously explained, "The heart wants what it wants," except in your case the body parts in question seem to be located lower than the heart. Possibly too it has something to do with your impression, conveyed publicly through such feats as your showoffy dating -- prior to your marriage, of course -- that you think women think you're some hot stuff. This is probably not what the legendary producer Max Bialystock had in mind when he declared his philosophy: "If you've got it, baby, flaunt it," but it's close enough.

My gosh, when you find yourself looking up at Harry Reid perched precariously up there on the moral high ground, you know you've dug yourself one heckuva crater.


FINALLY -- OH, IF ONLY! -- NEW YORKER
CARTOON EDITOR BOB MANKOFF WEIGHS IN

Barring unforeseen developments, tomorrow I'm going to be reporting on the just-announced results of New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff's search for the universal cartoon caption. You may recall that two candidates already before the public were:

"What a misunderstanding" (from digital artist Cory Arcangel)

"Christ, what an asshole!" (from Charles Lavoie)

Bob M concludes his "Cartoon Blog" report today on the universal-caption quest:

The submissions came in before the Anthony Weiner scandal broke, but the course of Weinergate can be nicely bookended by our two main contenders. When Weiner claimed his Twitter account had been hacked, you thought, “What a misunderstanding!” But by the time he tearfully confessed you were more likely to think, “Christ, what an asshole!”

Really, is there anything more that needs to be said? Except maybe this --


FINAL NOTE ON THE OUTRAGE RE. ANTHONY W. VOICED
BY REPUBLICAN PARAGONS OF MORALITY (HA-HA!)

Considering what you clowns do to destroy ordinary decency every second of every minute of every day of every year, you're kidding about Anthony W. being some sort of menace to the republic, right? Well, I suppose it's one way of diverting attention from what you've done with every accursed breath you've drawn in your polluted lives.

Assuming it's laffs you're going for, though, why not do it right and make Sen. David "The Diaper Man Cometh" Vitter your point man for this comedy crusade?

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