So … what's going on?

No really, I want to know: What's going on?

The side effects of a 9-to-5 life (well, 9 to 5:30, sometimes 11 to 8; it gets complicated; you get the point) have begun to manifest.

I no longer know.

The world gurgles rather obliquely any more. It roars and shakes and drips with blood and anger just beyond my peripheral vision, dully beneath my mittened fingers.

I used to know.

News used to break each day's silence, the fourth task undertaken upon rising: Click on National Public Radio.

All day newspeople revealed and picked at and analyzed and repeated the day's goings on.

Granted, it was not all the news, far from it. Maybe it wasn't always the whole story. But by osmosis, at the end of the day I knew the basic causes of a coup attempt in Thailand, or some of the blunt-force nuances of gun control, or what the heck ALEC is (you really want to know, by the way. Google™® it and be afraid).

No more.

I get the vague impression of unrest having taken place in Baltimore over allegations of police brutality. I think somehow that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat and highly likely to have President Obama's back, is angry with the president instead.

Something bad happened to the New England Patriots, maybe?

Democracy depends on an informed citizenry to participate fully. I barely had the informed part down before this full-time, out-of-home job, and had mused anxiously and sometimes publicly about the participation part. I was on the brink of participation.

Now I'm no longer even informed.

It puzzles me how anyone else can (1) know and (2) act.

If religion is the opiate of the masses (though Karl Marx really said, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.") could work be far removed?

How do we keep the free state moving ahead, how do we see ahead for all the tasks on our desks, on our phone, the matters at the ends of our noses?

Most of this is on me. I did not realize how such a major change in routine would change, in a major way, how I see the world; that's naive, I'll allow.

As part of the change, I got a real mobile phone. I'm one of you now, the last holdout, sold out. I'm supposed to do more with it, though until the weekend it was mostly for looking at facebook®™ on the train and running out the battery (and running up the data, it turns out, because, again, I didn't know).

Since the weekend, thanks to my daughter's information technology sleight of hand and my son's added advice and my wife's wishes and hopes, I have the chance to become a bit better informed: My email works again.

Trying to get email to work on my computer and my phone, I made it so email stopped working on either.

Email is oxygen. It is water, as you know. I was dead for a week.

Also, my newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, took this time to wage a complete redesign. To meet the future before the future showed up, or some such marketing phrase. It asked millions of readers and devoted years to focus groups, and came up with a color-coded product that resembles a newspaper in feel if not in actual form.

I'm inclined each morning to turn The Bee upside down, in case the important news might be at the bottom. That seems so. The top of each section now features a knees-to-head full color shot of some columnist or another, wrapped in the text of his or her column. I'm not sure columns or opinions are news, or that they should be at the top of the page, or on the front of each section.

Nothing is where it used to be; the headline type is huge and whimsical and makes everything look like the features and comics section.

Where everything is now in The Bee doesn't always seem like a good idea.

Which is moot anyway, since I don't have time to read The Bee.

I'm busy color-coding folder tabs for work.

If you get a chance, tell whoever's running the world to be nice.

Don't get around much anymore

What began as this blog's first-ever movie review (!) has morphed into a total-experience review, wrapped around a movie and made complete with a trip (and several falls) down memory lane.

From the last time I entered a contest: A local humor publication inaugurated a
competition. Thinking I had a good shot, and riffing off Madonna's silly expensive
coffee-table book from the time, I entered this. The award went to the professional
cartoonist in town who entered, and I wrote the editor, pissed off about that.
The editor was one of the panelists last night. It's been 23 years but I'm over it.
Really I am.

Oh, and the merest possible excuse to run an old editorial cartoon, which has nothing to do with anything except it's a cartoon.

It takes a lot these days to get me into downtown Sacramento, especially at night. Too much meh going around these days.

The occasion drawing me out of the house last night was "Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy," a French documentary showcasing the work, trials and passions of cartoon satirists from around the world.

Plus, Sacramento Bee editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman was going to be there for a panel discussion, and it was a chance to meet him. After I had complimented him on some work a while back, he unexpectedly invited me to lunch, but we could never get on track. After a while it felt like I was stalking him — "Look! You promised lunch!" — so I dropped it.

(Note to Bob: I tried, man. I really tried.)

The Sacramento French Film Festival hosted the screening in response to the Paris shootings early this month in which staff and veteran cartoonists of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo were killed. The shooters, who died later after taking hostages, said they had done so to avenge offense Charlie cartoonists had committed to Muslims and the Prophet Muhammad.

Though the documentary by Stéphanie Valloatto does not include Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and was finished before the shootings, it captures the palpable tension cartoonists face across the world, and the courage with which they persist.

"Cartoonists" yesterday received a nomination as top documentary for the César Award, the French Oscar.

Hopscotching around the world, the film features cartoonists in Russia, China, Venezuela, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, Palestine, the Ivory Coast and Mexico. The United States is represented by Jeff Danziger, a syndicated cartoonist — one of the nation's most acerbic — who doesn't work for a newspaper. More on that later.

Jean Plantureux, a French cartoonist for Le Monde, serves as the thread running through the documentary. Plantu, as he's called, created Cartooning for Peace, a kind of Doctors Without Borders, except with ink-stained wretches. In the movie he travels to Israel, where the Israeli cartoonist, Michel Kichka, and Palestinian satirist, Baha Boukhari, are friends united in their fight against armed conflict and universal hypocrisy.

"Cartoonists" also introduces viewers briefly to Ali Farzat, a Syrian cartoonist, now in exile, whose hands were broken in 2011 by Syrian security forces for satirizing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad … Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist infamous for depicting Muhammad with a bomb in a turban and igniting violent protests and persistent debate about free speech … and Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and activist whose work critical of government corruption has banned him from being able to leave his country.

OK, one more cartoon. Strike while the rare opportunity arises, right?

How was the movie? As a survey of editorial cartooning and satire worldwide, it's instructive for bursting our bubble that cartooning is only a U.S. or Western medium. Some of the cartoonists featured face constant surveillance, ostracism and death threats. Damien Glez reports news by publishing a cartoon-heavy paper in Burkina Faso for a largely illiterate population.

Too many cartoonists, though, spoiled the broth. The movie should have focused on three or four cartoonists — I was most intrigued by Rayma Suprani of Venezuela, one of too few women cartoonists, who describes the daily oppression of life under presidents Hugo Chåvez and now Nicolås Maduro; and Pi San, an animator whose political cartoons use the Internet to spread word of corrupt practices.

But just as I thought the movie would focus on one cartoonist's approach to a controversial issue, another cartoonist was introduced. Then another, then another. OK, maybe now they'll show the fallout of a particular cartoon and — no, here's another cartoonist.

Watch it on your friendly neighborhood streaming service. And learn French: Though it's subtitled, the text is white and so, it turns out, is the paper the cartoonists use. Too often when a cartoonist made a salient point, it was lost in white letters on a white background as the director showed the cartoonist's work.

Lost to this arrogant imperialist monolingualist, anyway. Maybe the director was sticking it to me.

I'm glad I went, though. The Crest Theatre, a movie palace from another age, just a skinny city block over from the state capitol building, still looks as good as the day nearly 20 years ago when I was minister-for-a-day and presided over the wedding of graphic designers Paul and Julie. The theater is still cuckoo for rococo —great gold-painted plaster torches, uplit in fierce orange and yellow, along the walls, recessed ceiling spaces high overhead, lit in blue above vast gold friezes, like sapphire pools suspended upside down.

And great acoustics! I could easily hear a woodworking, bluegrass banjo playing, horse-hoof clipping, globetrotting man (he told quite the nonstop story!) translate "Je Suis Charlie," which blazed big on the movie screen before the show started, for his date. I couldn't tell if his date was being coy, overthinking it or had just come from under a rock. "I'd like to learn a language," she said.

And I got to meet Jack Ohman. He didn't recognize my name, not that I expected him too. It was late, everyone was tired, and I was following a man who had buttonholed Ohman to draw cartoons exposing the Kennedy assassination coverup ("It's all bullshit," said Ohman, apparently a student of the assassination. "There's no credible evidence."). He was gracious but the energy for a quick visit was gone. And so it went, as it has gone for just about any person of note whom I'd like to meet. It's what I get for being polite.

Ohman was not optimistic for the future of the pen. He is president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, which numbers 50 nationwide. When he started 37 years ago, the United States had more than 250 full-time cartoonists. Editorial cartoonists, he told the audience, are only as good as their editors are brave. Danziger no longer draws for a newspaper.

It was telling that Danziger, the lone American cartoonist in the documentary, said he was too afraid to put his name to one work that went unpublished. It was on par with the salacious work French cartoonists produce regularly. Titled, "Cheney, Dick," it showed a naked former vice president from the back, holding a used condom over a toilet bowl. The condom bears the likeness of George W. Bush.

Robert Salladay, editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, told the crowd he was more optimistic about holding power accountable, though he cautioned that even though the Internet has spread the message, the message itself is getting atomized to smaller and smaller audiences. His center relies on massive donations to do its work.

People have every right to offend and be offended, Salladay said, but no right to violence and murder for their offense. When it happens, all debate must cease, and satirists should redouble their efforts to skewer.

Cartoonist Plantu said the satirists' greatest fear is the people's fear. A people afraid, he said, will not be brave enough to accept the truth and do something about it.

Michael Ramirez also go boom!

Every so often an editorial cartoon educates and enlightens me, which happened with Michael Ramirez' 'toon this week, above.

Though I had no idea the topic, the visual metaphor is lightning quick despite its devastating weight.

(By the way, it's so hard to keep track of what's going in the world, and it gets worse every day even as information builds to a torrent, isn't it? I blame myself almost entirely, succumbing to the beguiling filters and baffles of irrelevant TV and celebrity news, ignoring 10 world events for the sensationalism of one. What news I manage to pay attention dismays and disorients me.)

I had to find out what the hell Ramirez was talking about — to the Internet, Batman!

Gosnell is Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia doctor on trial facing charges of killing babies born alive, and of killing a woman by a drug overdose during an abortion. The jury is deliberating after six weeks of testimony.

Prosecutors say Gosnell delivered babies and then snipped their spinal cords because he didn't know how to perform late-term abortions, while Gosnell's attorney says the doctor performed abortions while the fetuses were in the womb. Gosnell's attorney said the woman died instead from unforeseen circumstances.

A two-time Pulitzer winner, Ramirez 'toons for Investors Business Daily; such is the state of our traditional newspapers that a top award winning cartoonist would now work in the narrow margins of specialty journalism, seen online more than in print.

Ramirez runs far to the right of my opinions, but he wins me by his mastery of art; I look at his stuff even though I know eight times out of 10 it's gonna be about anything-Obama-does-is-bad-because-he's-not-the-second-coming-of-George-W.-Bush.

Few are better than Ramirez at taking advantage of better printing and digital dissemination. The painting effects he applies to his black line art amplify rather than muddy the image, are inextricably woven into the picture. Note that he has even painted the shadow of the barbed wire on the children's faces.

This one surprised me; this one lured me in the way I'd find it impossible to avert my eyes from a car wreck, wondering frantically what happened, what is what.

Right away I saw the visual metaphor for the sign above the gates at Auschwitz, the one promising prisoners Arbeit Macht Frei — work will make you free.

Then I saw the doors to the ovens, the analogy that the babies Gosnell allegedly killed were disposed of dispassionately as so many Jews and other threats to the Nazi state. Then I saw the children; then the shapes (window hatches?) within the ovens, together with the openings forming haunted eyes; I'm guessing it's intentional, maybe even a spectral caricature of the bespectacled Dr. Gosnell.

This cartoon will receive letters of damnation and praise and threats and the usual calls for Ramirez' firing, as happened when last week The Sacramento Bee's Jack Ohman blamed Texas' lax regulation on the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion. Or maybe not; maybe his readership is largely limited to the choir.

Here Ramirez unleashes all the power of his pen, skewering me in the gut. His 'toon is a too-sharp mirror, making me reflect and question myself.

I believe in a woman's right to choose. I also believe in the power of education to make the best of that choice. I hear some of you: How could I have lived this long so naive, eyes half-closed to realities?

If Ramirez' statement railed against this trial alone, it would be an outrageous stretch, equating the Nazi mass extermination with, if the jury convicts, a callous if not miscast and misguided doctor. Given Ramirez' long documentation, though, I'd say he is condemning all abortion, at least late-term abortions.

Still, it's outrageous and raw, and Ramirez did his job expertly. He got my attention. He taught me something. The image lodges uncomfortably in my conscience.

Bang the gun slowly

(I could pick many fitting examples at random, as you can see from today's news … I choose these):

On Saturday, police say, an Iraq War veteran shot and killed two other veterans at a Texas shooting range. They included Chris Kyle, a renowned Iraqi War veteran (author of "American Sniper," an account of his unprecedented success killing the enemy) who had devoted his civilian life to helping other veterans. 

He and Chad Littlefield had apparently been trying to help Eddie Ray Routh, a Marine reported to be suffering from post-tramautic stress disorder. Target shooting can be part of "exposure therapy" for afflicted veterans, affording them the familiarity of guns, and the cacophony — if not the danger and dizzying horror — of battle, to throttle back their anxieties as they return to the world.

Routh allegedly shot Kyle and Littlefield with a semiautomatic pistol, then fled in Kyle's pickup truck before he was captured near his home.

We elect leaders who fabricate causes for war — a tragic habit in my lifetime — and we go along with the plan, calling dissenters un-American. Next we count on a fraction of less than 1 percent of our fellow citizens to prosecute that war; we set it and forget it, forget them. The result not only costs us trillions of dollars we could spend on our crumbling society, but shreds the bodies and minds and hearts of the warriors who fight — and return to fight, time and again — in our stead. But we can't or won't give them the jobs, can't give them the breaks on their financial obligations while they're fighting for us, can't give warriors like Chris Kyle the support he needs to administer true healing to his brothers and sisters in arms — can't give Eddy Ray Routh aid and comfort. We count on Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield to do that for us.

And a gun was supposed to give him comfort.

Last week sometime in a foothill town two hours from here, a man shot and killed his teen son and daughter, then killed himself, sheriff's authorities report. The children were found shot in the head, sitting on a couch, and may have been sleeping.

The father Philip Marshall, had been a pilot who said he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and wrote books describing what he called a Saudi conspiracy behind the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. Divorce and child custody issues with his ex-wife had been contentious.

It's impossible to know the depths and degree of anger, despair, delusion, disillusionment, rage, impairment — impossible to know what unleashed this devastation. Except that it did, and a gun solved it.

On Sunday, The Sacramento Bee wrote extensively about the Lemon Hill section of South Sacramento, telling the not-uncommon account of a community in fear of guns. Residents spoke of hearing gunfire daily … of forbidding their children from playing in parks for fear of gunfire … of school providing brief safe haven from the drugs and crimes and gunfire. 

Several residents told Bee reporters they doubted gun control would help them, because the guns on these streets are likely illegal, stolen, untraced and untraceable. Criminals will still get the guns, these residents said.

[By the way, when we lose newspapers such as The Sacramento Bee, we lose their power to stand up for us in matters that matter. We lose their power to be the Fourth Estate, our watchdog.

[Many readers badmouth The Bee — that's a newspaper's lot — but Bee reporters found suspicious conduct in tests on the safety of the new Bay Bridge under construction … and discovered more than $50 million in taxpayer funds that California State Parks officials squirreled away while parks were closing over budget shortfalls (money, by the way, that individual parks can't get in cash, only in in-kind service, because doing so under state law would constitute an unconstitutional gift. thank you, squirrel-brained parks officials …) … among many other costly secrets that would have remained secrets without the reporters' vigilance.

[But. I. Digress.]

On tour of the Sacramento Underground this week, a fourth grader asked if people in Gold Rush Sacramento had guns.

"Oh yes," I said.

"Oh," he said. "You know what? I'm a hunter."

He wasn't bragging or taking a stand, just relating to a historical discovery. It was the result, I take it, of a family discussion which concluded that reasonable people can own guns.

When it comes to solving the gun crisis — wherever you stand, it's a crisis — I'm well toward the back of the line with a working solution. It isn't long before the complexity of gun use, gun crime and gun ownership in America makes me weary, makes me marvel at those who carry on in hopes of drafting a solution.

What I know — what I've always known — is that if nothing is done, then Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield, a distraught family in the quiet Sierra foothills, a hellish city neighborhood are the prices we will continue to pay for it.

We must ask if that's what we accept.

What I was trying to say …

Oy, did I blow it!

Lord, how I know Stephanie Eisner must feel!

Until last week, Stephanie was a staff cartoonist for The Daily Texan, the campus/city newspaper for the University of Texas, Austin. Then she drew her take on the Feb. 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a teenager in Sanford, Fla, and the newspaper discontinued her services. (Here's another view of her take.)

You know the Trayvon Martin story, because we're all awash in the fallout of its controversy: George Zimmerman, described as a white Latino and a Neighborhood Watch captain in a gated community, told police he shot the unarmed Martin, who is black, in self defense. What really happened remains in dispute; critics say that Zimmerman chased Martin down and shot him, which may have violated "stand your ground" laws designed to protect citizens under attack. Zimmerman says Martin attacked him. Protests demanding Zimmerman's arrest spread across the country.

The incident is a newflash point over race relations, racial prejudice, lingering unresolved issues of institutionalized injustice, and general angst over the safety of children and teens. The hooded sweatshirt quickly became its symbol.

Stephanie Eisner was trying to add a meaningful tangent to the fierce expanding dialogue over the shooting. Her attempt backfired, went viral and public, and only fueled more rage.

The cartoon — which The Daily Texan editorial board approved — depicts a mom (?) reading a story to her child (?) from a book, "Treyvon (sic) Martin and the Case of Yellow Journalism."

"AND THEN the BIG BAD WHITE man killed killed the HANDSOME, sweet, innocent COLORED BOY!!," the mom tells the child, aghast.

Eisner was trying to say — at least, I infer — that many of news and entertainment media went immediately to stereotypes in the early going, typical in a rush to report. Rather than exhibit patience and care, or an examination of nuance and uncertainties, the media made this a simple black-and-white (literally and figuratively), good vs. evil story. Thoughtful, thorough reporting and meta-reporting comes later, as in this case, but often too late to ameliorate the results of the first news.

Pundits opine on the first news, sometimes idiotically, as in this case. Other pundits opine on the idiocy of the first pundits, and so it goes. Anger lingers.

Many readers regarded Eisner's point as endorsing the perpetuation of racist stereotypes and slurs — because she used slurs and stereotypes to make the opposite point.

I know how she feels, having drawn a cartoon for the Mustang Daily, my college newspaper — freelancing after I graduated. The 'toon blew up in my face and embarrassed the newspaper. That's the awful thing at the top of this post.

What I was trying to do — and the fact that I still have to explain it means I could and should have done a much better job — is restate George Santayana's aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it:"

If we don't study the effects of racism that happened before us, if we don't appreciate the harm our discriminatory thought and action — and inaction — can do, then we are not prepared to improve our communities and are apt to continue harm.

That's what I was trying to say.

I even ladled on the irony by having one of the vandals run off to a history test. No specific incident prompted this cartoon; more likely I was trying to employ the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as a spotlight on ever-lingering issues of racial tension and the potential for the college audience to ignore lessons of the past. I trusted readers to realize I was exaggerating to make my point. No one at Cal Poly was burning crosses or painting racist rants on walls at the time.

In my cartoon, Martin Luther King is supposed to be an ethereal figure formed out of the smoke of the burning cross. But the way I drew him, he looks more like a flesh-and-blood giant, inexplicably plugged waist deep into the earth, the smoke sooting his skin and suit.

But the thing that gutted this 'toon — the tiny detail that made its message the opposite of my intent — is the graffiti on the wall. Well, really just n-word.

The newspaper ran the cartoon. Students and faculty wrote letters, all of which I probably tossed long ago. The letters said what you would expect: How dare he! Is this the kind of person we should have at this university? Fire the cartoonist! I'm boycotting the newspaper! Fire everyone involved with this disgrace.

I understood this much about their anger: I hadn't been clear. It's as if the writers saw only those small words at the geographic center of the cartoon, and regarded all the other elements as a doodly, meaningless frame. They received those words — that one word — as my message.

I wrote an apology at the editor's request. The fact that I had to write an apology meant I had not done my job, which was to be so crystalline in my opinion that the work stood on its own. Probably my relationship as a guest cartoonist for the Mustang Daily ended shortly after.

Why did I toss the angry letters? Pain, I guess. But if I was going to become an editorial cartoonist, I had to be ready for rock throwing, and gather up all the rocks thrown. Good editorial cartoonists want people to react to their work, maybe to get angry, maybe to laugh sardonically, but in some way to be moved to act — to write a harsh letter to the editor, to support the candidate or cause, to consider another argument.

Like Stephanie Eisner, though, I wanted readers to react to what I meant to say.

RIP: Rex Babin, editorial cartoonist for The Sacramento Bee, passed away last week at 49 from stomach cancer. He had a unique sketchy, stoccato drawing style, and was adept at exposing President George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for what they were.

Crunching numbers

Maybe I wouldn't have amounted to much of a teacher, after all.

I may not have gone where I intended to go,
but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.*

Maybe this is a bizarro "It's a Wonderful Life" story, wherein George Bailey, granted a chance to see a world without him in it, finds little difference.

Maybe some soothsayer could have talked me out of an expensive four-year rollercoaster ride that dropped me right where I'd started.

I mean, numbers don't lie … ?

Under ideal conditions, I'd be rolling toward the end of my fifth year as a teacher right now, my severalth career.

Hopped up on high stress, I'd be prepping students for the all-important state test (known as STAR in California, for Standardized Testing and Reporting) to which teachers must teach these days, because results mean so much to the future of each school. But I'd accept the stress, just as I had chosen this profession, and its myriad competing expectations.

Right about now, I'd be congratulating myself at the organizational skills I'd amassed in the last five years — and cursing myself for forgetting to photocopy the one worksheet I would need for the morning.

In a few moments I'd be racing to the school, hoping the custodial staff had unlocked the campus so I could be first to the photocopier, praying the machine wouldn't jam mid-job.

Right about now — the Ides of March — I'd receive the letter telling me my services won't be needed for the next school year. It would likely have been the fifth consecutive notice; with receipt of each one, I'd have sweated out the coming months like thousands of other teachers statewide.

Having survived — having had my termination rescinded — like as not I'd been teaching a different grade and at a different school from when I started. Maybe even a different district, where I'd start all over on the seniority ladder. But I'd be lucky and happy for a teaching job. I might have cut my workday to nine or 10 hours, and finally stopped falling asleep on the classroom floor trying to put the next day together and defuse the landmines.

Right about now, I'd dare to entertain a half-thought: I just might get the hang of this teaching thing one day.

These aren't ideal conditions, though, in case you're the last to know. The economy, to use a term economists have employed, sucks. California's economy suffers from its own poison brand of suckage, eating away at the infrastructure to provide for even the most standard needs, especially public education from pre-Kindergarten to graduate school.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, is bracing for $400 million in cuts the next school year, eliminating adult education and cutting 11,000 jobs. That's in addition to millions of dollars and thousands of jobs already cut from the budget since bleeding began in full in 2008.

(More than 20,000 California teachers this month have received their pink slips; it's an annual ritual, more widespread in the last three years. Though many will be able to return to teaching, more and more will not. School districts will wait until November — two months after the school year will have begun — whether voters will raise taxes to prevent a $4.8 billion cut to public K-12 education in Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed budget. Isn't that a fun job, predicting whether or not your school district will have enough money to pay for teachers, staff and resources? Over whose heads will hang the sword?)

Twin Rivers Unified School District in the Sacramento area, where I last worked as a full-time teacher, would be spared cuts under a tax initiative proposed by Gov. Brown for the November ballot. Twin Rivers would get special treatment as a new district, even though it's really four districts swallowed into one and given a new name.

Frustrated by an array of similar initiatives designed to enhance or obfuscate his own proposal, Gov. Brown has been trying to wave off the other initiatives, and just this week agreed to join forces with another initiative, if for nothing else to simplify the ballot.

But maybe all this bleeding is a good thing?

I mean, Del Paso Heights Elementary School, where I last worked, had 19 teachers on staff in 2011, the latest public figures show. Those teachers served 478 students.

In 2008, the year I worked there, Del Paso Heights had 28 teachers, who served … 478 students.

Fewer teachers — nearly a third fewer — the same number of students. I have to conclude that some or all of the classrooms became more populous, that state laws to cap enrollment to 20 students per class from kindergarten through third grade were lifted. I know that the classroom in which I taught was re-fitted the next year to accommodate students with severe disabilities who came from another school, so general education students were consolidated into remaining classrooms.

I may have been one of those 28 teachers in the 2008 figures; I'm not sure. The data released by the California Department of Education, and made available by the news media (in this case The Sacramento Bee) lists staffing by year, rather than school calendar year. So instead of listing 28 teachers in the 2008-09 school year, it lists 28 for 2008. I'm confused, you see.

Five teachers were let go that first year, nine total since then.

The conventional thinking is that a lower student-teacher ratio is best for students; students get more attention, more instruction, more correction, more chances to make mistakes and learn from them. But the STAR results — the results that officially matter — for the same 2008-2011 period suggest the students are doing no worse, and in some instances are doing better with fewer teachers and more crowded classrooms.

(Full disclosure: I'll never be mistaken for a statistician. Glaring poorly thought-out analysis may soon ensue.)

Look at STAR results for the third grade, where I taught, in 2009, the results from the year I taught them (those poor students!) In language arts, only 5 percent were considered advanced, and 18 percent proficient. These are the holy grail levels teachers strive for. A third of third graders tested at the basic level for language arts, 22 percent were "below basic," and 21 percent "far below basic."

Math was far different: A third of the students tested as advanced, 22 percent as proficient, and 18 percent as basic. Seventeen percent finished at "below basic," and 9 percent as "far below basic."

(Why math comes out so much better is a puzzle; maybe numbers are the truly universal language, and since at least six languages were spoken in my classroom, and about a third of the students were learning English as a second language, numbers made more sense to more students; maybe the math lessons of a more experienced colleague enriched we teachers who deployed them in our classes.)

The next year, after five teachers on staff were dismissed, the percentage of third-graders listed as advanced in math dipped to 25 percent, but those labeled proficient ballooned to 41 percent. The percentage for basic students stayed the same, while those for "below basic" and "far below basic" shrunk.

In language arts for 2010 STAR results among third graders, a higher percentage scored in the advance and proficient categories than did the year before — from 5 percent to 17 percent for advanced, and from 18 percent to 29 percent for proficient. The percentages of students scoring basic and below shrank.

By 2011, with four fewer teachers serving the same number of students, STAR scores for third graders moved more into the basic (37 percent compared to 27 percent the year before) and "below basic" levels (25 percent, up from 18 percent the year before). Those "far below basic" held steady at 9 percent.

Math scores held fairly steady, except that a higher percentage of students moved up into the upper three groups. Only 7 percent of third graders tested in 2011 scored "below basic" in math, and only 3 percent "far below basic."

Though I'm not privy to the herculean battle teachers waged to help their students, I don't doubt the remaining teachers and their principal girded up and bonded over the challenge of improving test scores. Their effort, at least in the case third grade, defies conventional thinking. As crowded as the classrooms may have gotten, the teachers found a way for more of the students to grasp the concepts they're supposed to know at that grade.

Results for the other grades show their own vagaries, but nothing to tell me that the loss of nine teachers spelled academic doom for the same number of students.

Getting laid off dismayed and disheartened and discolored me. I had gone back to college (an education in itself, and not just in the classroom) to embark on a new career path, to find I have horrible timing. Since the district did not give me any official credit for time served as a teacher (I was a 0.0), and I was under temporary contract, the teachers' union couldn't do more than bid me, "Good luck with … whatever."

I was lucky to have something else to do to make money. Not so with some of the other students who went to teacher school with me. And since then I have had some teaching opportunities, most recently teaching art to students in special education through a third-party program. I enjoy the challenge, as I had when I was teaching full time. I was committed then to being the best I could be, to figuring out how. I was in it, as they say, to win it.

I was willing then to give up most of what my life had been to that point. Teaching, at least for me, was all or nothing. I would have to give my all to become good at it, and give up freelance drawing, give up swimming regularly, give up the fun of being a tour guide and doing side jobs, give up the lack of a regular schedule, in exchange for good (I thought so, anyway) consistent pay and a career pursuing teaching mastery.

But maybe these are all sweet lemons. Maybe this rocky short-lived teaching career was an elaborate way of demonstrating I was not meant to be a teacher. For all my willingness to become good at teaching, I have to admit I'm not good at it now.

I teach for an hour at a time now, and I look at the second-grade teacher, standing aside for my time, ready to assist, her students wound up from a long day, being second graders, unable to sit quite as still or be quite as quiet as my lessons really need — and me really unable to settle them — their room redolent with their sour playground sweat. And I think: I could not do this all day, day after day, and worry about my shortcomings each summer day until school resumes, and worry about where and whether I'll be when school resumes, to try and do better.

It's hard not to think, based on the numbers I just crunched, that students can get along OK without me for a teacher.

This will not be a post I'll return to for inspiration.

* Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

WWMTD?

Thus ends the Mark Trail, with an abrupt ker-thunk! — and with it my unhealthy obsession over this comic strip.

This is better than "42" as the answer to
the meaning of life! Way better! Plus, talking
birds instead of talking dolphins.

I won't drag you down the jackrabbit hole anymore, because I have found the essence, the headwaters — the sine qua non  — of this decades-old serial strip. It is contained in one unexceptional panel in one of last week's unexceptional installations (left).

Except there ain't no maybe about it. In Mark Trail's world, it's Mark Trail's world — he will tell you what to do. What he says goes, for the birds of the air and beats of the field, and the human-like bipeds. He is right and just.

Mark Trail is God. Step aside a sec, Clapton.

How else to explain what goes on in the strip?

It just finished a five-month episode in which Mark Trail hunted for a story, found it, decided his public didn't need to read about it, and not only didn't write about it — despite mumbling about a good ending for the story he wouldn't write — but stole another reporter's materials so she couldn't write about it either.

Mark Trail told his editor about sabotaging his magazine and a competitor's hard work, and his editor said, essentially, "OK," and "Oh, well!" Mark told his wife, and his wife maligned the other reporter for trying to do her job. Silly other reporter!

In fact, Silly Other Reporter called Mark Trail after she discovered her photos missing, and confessed that he was right not to trust her. To do her job.

In the real world, reporters have written about troves of artifacts left by vanished civilizations, of ancient pristine cave paintings, and simply explained that the site needs to remain a secret to protect the findings from looters and vandals. See how easy that is?

Wise observation …
or is it? Better let
Mark Trail decide.

But Mark Trail's is not the real world. No sooner — no sooner! — does Mark return home to his wife and father-in-law and adopted son, does he get a phone call from an hunting guide friend who's best tracking dog has gone blind.

Mark immediately suggests visiting for a few days to see if he can help!

Back to the real world: What's a guy like Mark Trail going to do? Perform surgery? Heal the dog by faith (well, he is God …)? Explain the obvious or likely: "The dog has plenty of years and activity left, but he just won't be able to track?" Or explain the less obvious: "Don't worry. Blind dogs really can track game?" I don't even know if that's true.

(Turns out that's what the dog owner is now trying to convince Mark Trail about.)

And what does Mark Trail's chicken-liver family think of him leaping from one faraway dead-end deed to another? This one won't even net him a story, and it's been five months at least since he apparently put food on the table for the folks back home.

Why can't the hunting guide figure out stuff on his own? What does he Mark Trail for? The guide leads people out into the woods in the dark, with guns, for f*@# sake; I think he can handle situations without help.

But here Mark comes, to save the day, to save the world, and the hunting guide friend sure is grateful.

It is right and just.

If this was just fodder for sardonic snarking, it would be harmless. But Mark Trail is a mascot for conservation and environmental protection; maybe his star has dimmed since the 1970s, when throwing trash on the ground was something you actually had to tell people not to do.

For better or worse, The Sacramento Bee doesn't carry Mark Trail's Sunday strip, which deviates from the daily storyline to impart lessons and tidbits about wildlife and conservation management. A distinctive, if not popular, niche in comics.

I'm going to say Bee readers are worse off, because the Sunday strips are usually a showcase for what the Mark Trail artist(s) do best, capture wildlife vividly and accurately in pen and ink and CMYK separations. It's people, including the head Person, Mark Trail, that the artists have trouble with, inside and out.

To the extent anybody still pays attention to comics, and Mark Trail in particular — and I'm talking to you impressionable sprouts out there in Blogland — he/she can come away with a twisted view of the world. Well, not Mark Trail's world …

Here I part ways and find another trail.

Thank you, Joel Pett and The Sacramento Bee

The Sacramento Bee last Sunday asked Joel Pett, Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist for the Lexington Herald Leader, to update his cartoon chronicling the history of the U.S. war with Iraq. Pett, one of the precious few cartoonists who try to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, drew the cartoon in 2007, and changed the final panels last month to mark U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Enjoy gazing, like I have, at all the connections, twisted and never-ending and otherwise.

So it goes.

The Mark Trail grows cold

Five things you can count on with the Mark Trail comic strip: (1) Boring stories that take weeks and weeks [and weeks]
to resolve; (2) Comparatively more interesting stories that wrap up suddenly using plot holes and great leaps of logic;
(3) faithfully rendered wildlife; (4) ham-handedly rendered humans, with the same shaped heads, eyes crossed or big as tea saucers, and interchangeable snap-on facial features; and (5) at least once a week, as in this example, a strip composed in such a way that it appears — inadvertently, I gotta believe — the animals or inanimate objects are talking.

Comics are the first order of every day for me, and have been since I could read, which makes me sad when people tell me they don't even subscribe to a newspaper, much less read comics.

I love comics so much, I even read the bad ones, including Mark Trail, which The Sacramento Bee carries.

Mark Trail is one of those serial comics, like Mary Worth, Rex Morgan M.D., Apartment 3-G et al. They're the comics equivalent of TV soap operas. Thankfully, the Bee spares readers this parade, leaving Mark Trail alone to carry the banner of anachronism.

Serial comics had their day, and it was June 18, 1963. Since then the world of multimedia has swept past, and we get all the stories we need from TV, iPhones and every other communications device except newspapers.

Only in the mid-20th Century, without benefit of so many media tools to sate our entertainment demand, would readers have put up with the glacial pace of Mark Trail stories. Yet this comic plods on, as if nothing has changed and time stands still. Which is appropriate, because that's what usually takes place — or doesn't — in this strip.

This story arc in this particular strip, from Oct. 24, 2011, has been going on, honest to God, since at least JULY 28! Three months!! My thanks to Josh Fruhlinger, the Comics Curmudgeon, who produces a hilarious blog I just stumbled upon, offering daily biting commentary on today's comic strips — "Making the Funnies Funnier since 2004" — for tracking this for me.

The current episode shows no sign of ending.

It began, as almost all Mark Trail stories do, with intrepid Woods and Wildlife Magazine writer Mark getting tipped off to a great story, mere moments after he has finished his last great adventure, which often requires Mark to punch someone and to call others "fellows," single-handedly sustaining that usage of the word in the English language. (Even after 41 years of writing essays, I haven't lost the gift for run-on sentences.)

Mark is forever (and I mean forever) stumbling upon poachers, moonshiners, rum runners, drug runners, mad trophy hunters — bad people doing environmental harm, usually to where he lives, Lost Forest National Forest. This is not meant to be funny, like Phil Frank's Asphalt State Park, but it's no less hilarious.

Mark usually gets help from his faithful Lassie-like St. Bernard, Andy, and no help from the meddling reporter named Kelly Welly (weally?), who desires Mark even though he finally married Cherry after a 47-year courtship. Also, their adopted son Rusty often gets kidnapped or roughed up mid-adventure, which slows the already lethargic story pace.

In the current arc, Mark discovers a wounded Canada goose wearing solid-gold tracking band, inscribed with a Bible verse, and decides its source will make a good story. Okaaaaaayyyyy, not the most riveting start. The adventure takes him to the Canadian border, where a Mounted Police officer attempts to throw Mark off the trail (no pun intended, but since I've written it, nice touch from yours truly) by detaining Andy the dog from helping uncover the mystery. What mystery? What does it matter?

The band and a plaque on the Mountie's wall contain the same verse, Genesis 1:20, King James version: “And God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven." The Mountie's in deep!

One Mark Trail "fan" on the Internet points out why this story has taken so long to tell. Week after week, it's been like this:

Mark: I can't figure out why this bird had a Bible verse on its band
Let me ask [ __ ]

Mark: I found a bird with a Bible verse on its band. Know anything?

[ __ ] : Nope.

Mark: I sure wonder why this bird had a Bible verse on its band.
Maybe I'll ask [ ... ]

Mark: I found this bird. It had this Bible verse on its band. Any ideas?

[ ... ] : Nope.

(seemingly infinite loop) …

Having finally wrested themselves from this loop, Mark, Kelly Welly, and Johnny Malotte, a French-Canadian friend who looks a lot like the Golden Age B-list movie star Gilbert Roland, have entered a valley that appears to teem with wildlife that don't usually coexist: A biblical paradise, one might say. An Eden. The Mountie sneaks up on the trio and arrests them, even though they are his good friends.

This week, readers are treated to a looooooong conversation with Mother McQueen, the Mountie's mom, who lords it over this strange valley, her fringed buckskin coat serving as her cape and crown. (Did she dispatch the buck, or talk him out of his skin?) The Comics Curmudgeon publicly doubts whether Mother McQueen and the Mountie are really related, but they bear a close resemblance; then again, everyone in a Mark Trail strip looks alike.

Kelly Welly's first question to Mother McQueen: "Where did you get the gold to make the bands?" That's the first question?! Not, "What have we done wrong to be stuck in this strip?"

Who knows where this is going? Granted, it's different from the usual Mark Trail fare, which would pique my interest were it not for the fear I'll have grandchildren, or artist Jack Elrod — heir to Ed Dodd — will expire before this episode plays out.

For a fundraiser, by the way, Fruhlinger mailed to fans bird bands stamped with "Genesis 1:20" and "Lost Forest;" blog fans responded with photos of the bands on birds real and imaginary, as well as on a cat and a robot.

Writing this has also alerted me to a myriad Websites devoted to the silliness of serial comic strips. I may never resurface.