#155: Porcupine Acupuncture
It’s snowing in Seattle, which happens less often than a leap year, so the city has come to a standstill. It’s like little white flakes of kryptonite are falling and everyone is just paralyzed. I’m on vacation next week and just hoping my 7:35 out off SeaTac isn’t cancelled tonight. A buddy of mine has a time share in Cabo and we’re going to cram seven into the house for a week. So I thought I’d publish tomorrow’s post a little early. The Caption Committee wasn’t thrilled with this one either, to be honest, but after last week’s fiasco, I think they were just happy to sign off on something without a lot of drama. The Committee is a funny (as in odd, not actually funny at all) group. They’re not comics people, really. They come from Corporate. And to get anywhere at Corporate, you have to do a “rotation” at one of the subsidiaries. A rotation at this particular sub is sort of an “easy A” if you know what I mean. It’s like a class you get full credit for, as long as you show up and nothing terrible happens. So we don’t tend to get the real hard chargers. But after your 6 months, when you get back to the mothership, there is something to be said, I guess, for dealing directly with the “creatives” in the trenches, so every once in a while we do get some eager beavers showing up who want to get back to Corporate with some resume-building PowerPoint presentations to show off. Which is how we got the Slater-Miyazaki Caption Scoring System. Slater and Miyazaki came in two years ago with their MBAs and their spreadsheets and before they left they gave us the S-MCSS, which surveys a focus group of about 100 people and assigns an overall score from 1.0 up to 23.0 for every Inscrutables panel based on a bunch of stuff like how funny it is (natch), but also the conciseness of the caption (shorter is better), the font choice (we only use Love Ya Like a Sister, anyway), the clarity and balance of the image (how closely the layout and proportions of the drawing conform to the Golden Ratio of 1:1.6), things like that. The best S-MCSS score ever was for #122, “That Wasn’t My Meatloaf”, which came in at 21.7 and went on to win the Blue Ribbon for single-panel black-and-white at PanelCon that year. Anything below a 7.5 gets rejected automatically without even a discussion, and above that it’s up to he Committee to make edits and ask Artie for reworks based on the feedback. Artie can’t stand any of this, of course, and so our sleepy little office has turned into a viper pit since Slater and Miyazaki came and went. I heard they’re at the crypto currency division working on blockchain now. It’s a miracle Artie stays, but the health insurance is pretty good, and if you’ve been following, you understand. Anyway, this one came back with an 8.2 on the S-MCSS. But like I said, after last week, they just let it go without edits, probably out of exhaustion. It’s not Artie’s best work, but personally I’d give it more than an 8.2. Then again, as always, you’ll be the judge.
Looks like my flight is still on. The snow is still falling and the sun is just peaking over the Cascades. It’s 23F here and 80+ in Cabo. I see tequila and Vitamin D in my immediate future. DM me if you know Cabo and have recommendations. Nos vemos la promixa semana! ....-Ed.
