Asparagus

No new panel today, I’ve been re-running the canon through S-MCSS2 all week, Artie’s in Zihuatanejo with Syd recovering from his gum graft surgery, and Inky’s still MIA. The Committee’s here, puttering about, doing I don’t know what. I heard there’s a P&L review at 4:00, but I’m not invited. I’ll still be re-running the first batch, tho there still aren’t as many surprises as expected since the addition of the concision variable. For some reason, Slothrop didn’t want to bring in any engineers from HQ to update the model, and it turns out Hanelore, of all people, knows a little C++ and a little JavaScript, so she took a crack at updating the old Slater-Miyazaki algorithms. Either the change didn’t change anything, or she didn’t do it right. More to come on the policy for making changes to the canon, if we need to make any. Meanwhile , I thought I’d give you a little peek into what Artie’s working on, presumably on the beach in Mexico with pina colada in one hand and Moleskin in the other. If you remember the rambling, patronizing, not-woke cat from #162, you’re in the minority bc that was one of our worst performing panels by all measures. Artie loves it. He’s planning to make a franchise out of it. The cat’s name is Gus, which is short for Asparagus, which I think comes from the theatre cat in Cats (the musical, Artie’s a fan) which I think comes from a book of cat poems by T.S. Eliot. Gus’s next gig is at the Chicken Coop, followed by a gig at the Barnyard. His big hit is an alt-country version of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock & he spends each panel disparaging the audience from the previous panel. My guess is this little sequence is either the backstory to Gus landing the big role in Cats, or a chronicle of the slow decline of his post-Cats career. Either way, it’s got a cat in it, so there’s that. Still, I don’t think the Committee is going to like it. -Ed.