Tag Archives: Opus

Why Berkeley Breathed Needs to Be Poet Laureate

12400519_1114294865267932_1943724592058662228_n

According to Wikipedia, “On July 12, 2015, Breathed posted to his Facebook page a photo with the caption ‘A return after 25 years. Feels like going home.’ The photo showed him drawing a comic strip with the title ‘Bloom County 2015,’ with Opus pictured in the first frame.” Six months later the page has more than half a million likes, in part because Breathed is back with not just on-target political satire, but also, let’s face it, sweet, naïve Opus, our favorite penguin (because yesterday was national penguin awareness day, after all). Also, since he is not limited by a newspaper’s requirements, he can use color whenever he wants, not just on Sundays.

12508702_1119333944764024_6364567554598398377_n

And when he can go from Ziggy Stardust to actual stardust, this man needs to be our Poet Laureate.

12552998_1122593967771355_1522555412812078116_n

Weighing In On the Issues, #1

CP-DsdAUEAADeuL

Before I begin explaining Campaign Issue Number One, I have to explain where it comes from. Hopefully, if you haven’t been living in a cave recently, and/or your cat hasn’t knocked your computer mouse off your desk so that you are incapable of accessing Facebook, then you know that Berkeley Breathed has broken his 25 year sabbatical and brought Bloom County back in time for the 2016 American presidential circus. I mean, election. And of course Opus is running, with Bill the Cat as his Veep of choice.

Now let me get a leetle political here and say that at this point I would probably vote for Opus before any of the Republican contenders and most of the Democratic ones, which is sad. I believe that Opus probably wouldn’t get us into yet another war (not sure about Bill) or try to defund cancer screenings for women. That is just not how he rolls.

However, I must say that the hot-button issue he has chosen as the main plank in his platform is something I simply cannot get behind: reverting to using two spaces after a period.

People talk about how we’ve abandoned our traditional values, rejected the teachings of the Bible (presumably by eating shrimp and not having concubines, because I am pretty sure ancient Hebrew doesn’t actually use punctuation). But what they ignore is the reason we used to have two spaces after the period back in the day when we typed on actual typewriters, manual and electric.

The way I was taught, the letters in the font that typewriters used were of different widths and the space was narrow, so the extra space did something to balance that out. Now, the letters of most fonts are less varied, so the extra space isn’t needed. I don’t know if that is true. What I do know is that should you, gods forbid, justify your writing on both left and right, an extra space could end up giving you a huge hole in the middle of your paragraph as your word processing program works overtime to fix what ain’t broke.

Where do you stand on the debate?