Hey! and the market dropped 203 points in the final minutes of trading today. We’re within striking distance of the 7000 range on the Dow. And everything else is hardly going hunky dory. I’ve never heard so many people say things haven’t been so badly off in . . . well, years. The ’70s–the classical 1974 to 1979 range–were far worse, so far. But I have to say so far is the phrase of the day. Because things can always get worse.

But business must go on, and where there’s business, there’s business cards. In the spirit of free things, I’m posting a free business card contest. Three readers will win a set of 1000 doublesided full color business cards from business-cards.com (Free shipping for the prize cards inside the US.) The cards can be printed with a UV gloss coating if desired.

Rules are simple: email me a comic: one page, you choose the topic. My three favorites win.

Send ‘em in!

Even if you don’t win the contest–if you need business card printing, try them out!

no other fish in the sea: #19 run, damn you, run! (april 1997) [page 2], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

This is page 2 of #19. That desolate place is owned by Rockhurst college now. Note again that the phone number is not useful any longer.

I have mixed feelings about coupons. I try to avoid buying things with them, just because usually coupons are for name brand goods that I might not necessarily want, or which I might find a non-name brand substitute that would be less expensive. But sometimes coupons can be useful, especially for online merchants–things that, in any event, you are probably wanting that have no immediate, cheaper replacement. These days, you need to save every dollar that you can, and if you have to spend the money anyway, you may as control what you spend! There’s plenty of coupon sites, but one site that’s come to my attention recently, http://www.1-coupons.com/, has a variety of merchants represented with valuable online coupon codes, discounts, promotions, and clearance sales. Have an eye on that fresh 13-inch Macbook? You might save some money here. Need a new Yamaha bass for the band? This site could help. Do you think the Bugaboo stroller is too expensive? It might not have to be.

One part of the site, www.1-coupons.com/coupons/red-envelope.htm, is devoted to Red Envelope gifts, a source of unique and personalized items for the holidays or any other time. There’s a lot to see there, and www.1-coupons.com has a coupon off orders there right now. Personalized gifts beat things grabbed off the clearance rack on Christmas Eve any day, don’t they?

I don’t advocate spending money if you can’t help it, but if you need to, you need to check out this site to see if you can spend less.

no other fish in the sea: #19 run, damn you, run! (april 1997) [page 1], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

the worst part about a copy machine, other than all the other parts, is the automatic document handler. when it works, it is like magic. stick a hundred pages in it, and it will thunk!-thunk!-thunk! churn through those pages one after the other, lickety-split, and out the other end copies appear, perfect in every way. when it does not work, a page catches on another, and another on that, and soon, wonderful to behold, a pile of paper lobstertails and spills out onto the copier, the floor, and into a pool of the baby jesus’ tears, and all bloody hell is loose. this usually happens when a document is not paginated, and particularly when the pages are obscure charts and random numbers, making it impossible to reorder. if you’ve turned your back–o, you are doomed. the devil-face is pretty apt. but i love the 5090/5690 series! i actually have a record, given me by a kind soul (thank you, jim,) of the sounds of a 5090 running. i think the machine is generally no longer in use. but they were great. except when they didn’t work. at least they never actually physically shot out their fuser units, though i had one come apart in its bracket once.

the first page is ok, i guess, by the standards i held myself to at the time, with mostly coherent panels, but the second is simply bizarro. what’s going on here? why? why did i choose to do this? what was i thinking? i don’t know: it’s illegible, impossible to follow, and really not very entertaining. the whole thing was meant to be contrasting what the animals were up to–nothing–with what christopher had to suffer through. in the very center: forboding signs of christopher’s ultimate death and doom. but you could have assumed that without my wasting your time by drawing a shoddy minicomic of it.

it just sucked.

this is, by the by, a pretty good picture of what it’s like to work in a copy shop. the phone never stops ringing, no one knows what they want, the turnaround times are irrational, and the machines break. by this time, we had left the location we had occupied several years, and moved to state line–hence christopher asking victor if victor ever had the ‘feeling we didn’t actually work there any more.’ they did not. no one, however, ever participated in mortimer easter’s urban development contest; the correct answer would have been blockbuster video. the correct answer now would indeed be empty ruin, because the blockbuster closed down a while back.

i don’t live at that address anymore, nor do i have that phone number. i think i mentioned that before, but i don’t want anyone to get any ideas.

Someone was asking me the other day how they should be best get set up for credit cards at their new small business. I didn’t know then, but having done a little research, I would point the way to onlinecheck.com for credit card processing services. There appear to be no fees or contracts, they give you a free credit card machine, and they have a 1.59% processing rate. It seems a good bargain, particularly when you get the first month free and get your funding the next day. I know little about the business, but it seems a good place to start research. Every penny counts, after all!

–at least so far as my own (and Bonnie’s) intentions go–we are taking the pledge. The handmade pledge, that is. I hate Christmas, which is a damning statement, but it is mostly an attitude that has been fostered by the American-style celebration thereof: ie, wasteful conspicious consumption. Now I have to drag an infant around through it. No thank you. I’ve seen the results of that with other people’s parenting.

I don’t know what this means I’ll be getting anyone. Nothing, likely, which fits into my modus operandi just as well.

My traditional worldview has always focussed on autumn being the New Year. Maybe it’s the Celt in me coming out, maybe because I was born in the fall, maybe because the new year of school begins then. I don’t know: but I have another reason to look at the fall as a new time, particularly October, which I unfailingly now associate with the year I spent working at Brookside. The place was all-over Halloween goods, and the whole place is burned into my mind as another part of my autumnal-new years association.

Nor can I forget the many long hours I spent behind the jewelry counter there, either. Gold and diamond hoop earrings–one may suppose–glass beads, dangling things. Rings, necklaces. Every day I would rearrange them. I’d move the earrings to different arms of the earring trees or space them out as they got sold. There is a modest art to it, arranging the colors to coordinate, or the styles so they don’t overlap and hang over each other like octopi at the fish market. Some resembled this carved red jade and gold set here, which I especially like because it looks like some of the jade pieces in the Chinese section of the Nelson-Atkins Museum. Women (and sometimes men) would come in and take a lot of pleasure in shopping for their special piece of jewelry. I suppose it’s not quite the same doing it on the web, but if you aren’t anywhere near the shop I used to work at, Ross Simons’ site is almost as good (and fun,) with their money-back guarantee. A fifty-year old tradition themselves, Ross Simons Jewelry has literally thousands of designer choices at their online boutique, and all without the trouble of going out in public to deal with the Christmas rush–my least favorite part of any shopping experience this time of year. Their range of prices is competitive too, from the very high end to items that will fit in anyone’s holiday budget, a good things in these troubled economic times.

It wouldn’t be my first choice, going back to that old job (as much as I enjoyed it, I have to support a child now,) but browsing a website like Ross Simon’s brings back fond memories of that time. It just makes you feel good.

no other fish in the sea: #19 run, damn you, run! (march 1997) [page 2], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

The second page of #2. I think it’s really, really plain from this that I really, really liked Jane Lane. The wash is a little better in these panels, I think.

The tribal mice are still an irrational touch.

I talked about debt consolidation in an earlier episode. I am more fond of avoiding the need, to begin with, because much of our current economic problem arises from spending too much money. We live in an era, and have had for some time, where every wish and desire has been made available in tangible form, packaged, monetized, and sold to us, when we had no money. This is true whether it is the poorest family in the saddest ghetto, the wealthiest in Johnson County’s Golden Ghetto, the city government, the state government, or the Federal Government itself. We all have massive amounts of debt hanging over our heads, and no easy means to dispel it. As a nation–increasingly as a global economy, We Need Help.

I do not know what solutions are to hand for this giant metaproblems. So far these seem to consist in the governments of the world taking on trillions of dollars in more debt, to make the losses of the markets disappear. This can’t be a good solution in the long term: it’s akin to going to a payday loan outfit and borrowing money to pay your credit cards. But what strategy should the average American use, lacking a Federal Reserve and a printing press to back them up?

Debt consolidation in a big step which takes discipline (after all, it doesn’t make debt disappear, it just makes it more managable,) and assistance. You have to develop a worksheet that points you in the direction of the best plan for your economic situation. The benefits can include lower payments, combined payments so you don’t run the risk of missing one and paying penalties and higher interest, and getting (potentially multiple) bill collectors off of your back. The resources at bills.com provide a central clearinghouse of information, including definitions, advice, debt-related news, and many options. They also point you in different directions depending on the problem you have. Bad debt? Bill consolidation is one route. Need to consolidate credit cards? This is another path. (I personally recommend consolidating them in ice.) You can even explore the option of consolidating all of your bills together.

For the truly money-troubled, this is something to investigate. Considering the difficult economic times we are facing and the consumer splurge that we’ve enaged in for years now, many people may have to take this step. No matter what your choice, do the math, figure a budget, provide yourself with with outside assistance, and see how much debt consolidation will cost and how much it will benefit. Make sure,above all, that whomever you deal with to aid in debt consolidation is reputable. And once more–stop spending money you do not have!

no other fish in the sea: #19 run, damn you, run! (march 1997) [page 1], originally uploaded by sparrowsfall.

man, some crappy wash and text in this one, right off the bat, and it doesn’t get much better. again, this wasn’t a web-comic, and its illegibility is somewhat explained thereby. it’s not a complete excuse, of course, but it’s part of one. in the content, however, three themes quickly appear, overshadowed by some pertty poor figure drawing of christopher.

first, my love for the show daria. back in The Day, mtv had liquid television, beavis and butthead, daria, the head, downtown, and of course aeon flux. all of these things kicked serious ass, and since mtv and serious ass only get together these days with a one-note wonder like shakira, these shows are gone away for ever. my favorite daria-ite was her friend jane lane. i wanted to meet a jane lane more than anything else in the world, and i chose to publicize the fact here in my ongoing failed attempts to get a date via comic. jane was an artist, and cool, and sacastic, and sensitive–and a god-damned cartoon character.

second, when people ask me whey i complain about tv, newspapers, or godawful movies (such as the lamentable lord of the rings trilogy,) implying that if i continue to see them i have no right to complain about them, i always say, ‘know thy enemy.’ if i do not know what is going on, i can’t understand the society i’m living in. if i shut myself off from reality-as-it-is–if i may be ironic–i’ll end up in a shack building bombs, or flying planes into buildings.

third, chirp, worried about being thought a ferret earlier, goes right over the edge and into therapy. encouraged by his therapist to get into an otterist reading group, he announces that ‘weasel-envy’ is a result of oppression. you may take any of this as you please, but it mostly amused me at the time. i guess everyone else ignored it or maybe got worked into a lather about my insensitivity, but if the latter happened, they never brought it up to me.

yes, those are indeed mice living under the floorboards, enjoying a rather plains indian lifestyle. i slipped in both crow and snake, more death-symbols, on the front page, and, mimicking the layout on the second for some reason, found myself with two narrow slots to fill. so there you go.

the fun fact of the week refers directly to the heaven’s gate suicides.