I’m glad you guys e-mail me whenever the site’s down (and it’s been down four times since March ’08). My host sometimes isn’t what you’d call responsive (last time it was down it took three days for them to fix it), but this time they fixed it just five minutes after I submitted the trouble ticket. Of course, before they let me submit the ticket in the first place, I had to ping my site, run a traceroute and reroute the warp drive through the flux capacitors using my Mac’s “terminal” application (a command-line app that always reminds me why I haven’t touched a Windows PC since high school), and paste the results into the ticket. And THAT took about 45 minutes to complete while my readers were greeted with a blank white screen with tiny black letters that wrote “The e-mail could not be sent.
 Possible reason: your host may have disabled the mail() function…”.

During which time, Fox News published a study showing the following:

• 5% of you didn’t think “disabled the mail() function…” was as funny as yesterday’s strip.

•27% of male visitors between the ages of 12 and 109 hit “back” on their browsers to repeat their Google search for “Bush.”

•10% of Candorville readers lost interest and switched allegiance to “Beetle Bailey.”

Right now I’m thinking about one of my client papers. The last time I visited this paper, just a few months ago, was the most depressing visit to a newspaper I’ve ever experienced. The editor asked me to come down to the newsroom to meet a high school kid who might want to be a cartoonist when he grew up. The editor was great. I loved meeting her. The ombudsman I met was great, and we all had a nice conversation.

But the newsroom at this major metropolitan paper – this icon – was a ghost town. Row after row of empty cubicles, with maybe four or five people drifting through the empty room while I was there. I tried to imagine everyone was off covering some huge breaking story. Maybe the mayor had just been caught with an underage undocumented immigrant planting bombs in the reservoir, and the paper needed to cover it from dozens of different angles. It made the echoes and the silence of the cavernous and dimly-lit newsroom a little easier to take.

While I was talking to the high school kid, I couldn’t help but think back to almost a decade earlier, when I’d been invited to that same newspaper to meet its editorial cartoonist. I was just a couple years older than this kid I was talking to. Back then I was worried about getting in everyone’s way because the newsroom was overflowing with intensely focused people rushing back and forth, people in ties and suspenders or in pearls and earrings holding animated conversations with each other or with their cell phones, phones ringing, doors opening and closing, and faxes coming through…

In the few short months since I met the high school kid, my friend at the paper (who’d also been my editor back when I freelanced editorial cartoons) was let go.

Something tells me the bar at the National Cartoonists Society convention is going to be packed this year. I’ll have to bring money, though, because I’m told this year they can’t afford an open bar.