OK, I’ll shut up about the ‘Be More Dog’ campaign. This is my equivalent of one of those cartoons of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes pissing on the logo of whatever your football team’s arch enemy is.
Category / Smith
The great debate
Just to make it clear, there’s nothing wrong with being a dog, I just resent being told to be more like one. And the big irony about dogs is that most of the breeds are man-made, as frame four shows. The shivering whippet, the bug eyed chihuahua, the basset that is barely able to waddle three steps without injuring a joint, the ridiculously coiffed toy poodle – all selectively bred to the point of malfunction in order to serve man
Sandy, the friendly dog from this summer’s big storyline makes a guest appearance as the dog spokesman.
Cattist discrimination
Cattist discrimination: it’s everywhere in the media. You can in see it in movies like Lady and the Tramp, and Cats and Dogs. And now the advertsiers are moving in. Cats are lazy and untrustworthy, they say, so be more dog.
This campaign is for O2, the mobile phone company. Be more dog, be more sociable, be excited by gadgets, do exciting new stuff with mobile phones, and above all, be subservient to your telecommunications overlords or they won’t throw you any bones.
Incidentally, O2 have a quiz where they determine how dog you are. According to O2’s marketing department I am 42% dog, which is about 40% more than I was hoping for. I’m so cat I don’t even have a mobile phone. Why should I want one anyway? Idiots will only ring me up and woof at me.
Pretty colours
All you need is a foggy night and some fireworks for this happen. As fireworks season is in November – this tends to happen quite often. The primary school a couple of blocks away from us will be having its fireworks display tomorrow – we’ll be watching it from the kitchen as usual, giving us a grandstand view of the proceedings.
I believe this is also what happens if you don’t install Windows 8 properly.
Remember to keep your pets indoors tonight
Please keep your animals indoors tonight folks, it’s not safe for them to be out, and those bangs can be terrifying if you don’t know what they are. Different animals have different responses to fireworks. Smudge used to love them, and would watch them from the window sill, pawing at the starbursts that blossomed in the sky. Bella is unconcerned. Billy hides in the wardrobe for the duration.
Guy Fawkes
It’s Guy Fawkes’ Night on the Fifth, and people have been having fireworks parties all week. We take them really seriously in Sussex, bonfires and fireworks have been taking place all over the county over the past month. The big one happens in Lewes on Wednesday. Hastings traditionally celebrates its own bonfire night on the Saturday nearest the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and this year’s effigy was of a bus, because we don’t want the bus services around town to be cut. Yes. If there’s anyone out there who understands the logic of that please let me know what it is…
Guy was part of a Catholic plot to blow up James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. Yes, even then terrorist nutters were using religion as an excuse for killing people.
Guy (or Guido to use the name he adopted when fighting for the Spanish in the Eighty Years War) has become a romantic figure of late – helped by the film of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. His mask has since become the millennial equivalent of a Che Guevara t-shirt – it’s what you wear when you want to vent a half formed political opinion against the powers-that-be. Well, it’s either that or join UKIP. To be honest I think I prefer the mask…
The dog behind the mask is the perennial activist Beebee from ‘Sooky Rottweiller’. And that’s the last guest star I’ll be using for a while – I feel I’ve been overdoing them lately.
Potted biographies of the pariahs Smith mentions in frame 4:
Scenes from the Sherpa Halloween Party
Mutter mutter… when I was a kid… mutter mutter… commercialisation of Halloween… mutter mutter… racks of flammable Halloween costumes made from petrochemicals in supermarkets… mutter mutter… Haribo bogies… mutter mutter… imported American customs bastardising our perfectly good European ones… mutter mutter… trick or treat… mutter mutter… I blame ET… mutter mutter…
Cats have plenty of connections to Halloween, so it’s fine for them to celebrate October 31st. But there’s no need for them to wear a costume.
Note that Chumley, bless his gentle hearted soul, doesn’t quote get the idea of Halloween and is wearing a pair of Mickey ears, mainly because Alison Ward is wearing them at the Halloween party in her strip.
Typewriter
We haven’t seen Archie for a bit – so here he is, just in time for Halloween. Archie is a cockroach, and like all cockroaches he is a poet who types on an old-fashioned typewriter. Jones would be his Mehitabel if only she realised there was a cockroach typing the messages she finds – but for some reason she thinks it’s a possessed typewriter instead.
Fall backwards
I’ve never quite understood why the clocks have to go back in the winter. Winter is gloomy enough without us having the evenings made even darker by government edict. Even in the south of England we’re on roughly the same latitude as Labrador, so the sun sets at half past three in December. In Scotland it’s even worse – one of the main planks of their independence campaign this year was to have the ability to set their own time zone.
Heccilopters
The seed pods from Sycamore trees have a fascinating aerodynamic profile which causes them to spin in a leisurely fashion down to the ground. I was sitting in on a park bench during my lunch break jotting down a couple of weeks with of strip ideas into my notebook when I noticed that I was sitting directly underneath one and was being bombarded by the things.
So how would Jones cope with one of these in her garden?