Tutored

Gary Larson with his Far Side black humor has always been one of the funniest cartoonists in the business, and possibly the single funniest cartoon of all is this one:

I'm constantly amazed at how much information is available on the internet. I had thought about this Larson cartoon for years, remembering it from a book of his we used to have. So I went looking for it on the internet. I couldn't remember the cartoonist's name, so I simply searched for cartoonists. I was given a list and there saw and remembered Gary Larson. So I did a search for Gary Larson + tutored. Bingo! There it was, just as I had remembered it. And now I'm sharing it with you. Is it really funny or is it just my twisted sense of humor?

A quick comment on television commercials. We watched an episode of NCIS and noticed that the last three segments of the story were really short. We had it saved on dvr, so I went back and timed each story segment and each set of commercials. Sure enough, there were five story segments interspersed with five commercial breaks, the story itself comprising 41 minutes, the commercials 19 minutes. Granted, some of the commercial time was devoted to presentations for other CBS shows, but it still reprsented a ratio of two to one for story and non-story. That's just too much. I then wondered what effect the dvr would have on the value of commercials. I mean, assuming that almost half the viewers in this country have dvr's, that number increasing daily, and those viewers, like us, save shows to the dvr and then fast-forward through the commercials, what does that do to the value of the commercial hype? Makes it considerably less worthwhile. When advertisers realize they're no longer getting much value from their air time and decide to cancel, what will happen to networks relying on advertising revenues? I don't have a clue.