The target of this week's ire is my favourite English-language newspaper in Taiwan - the Taipei Times. Regular readers know that over the last five years I've not been too shy to send a letter or two their way, and for their part they have printed my verbosity word for word, even improving on one missive.
However, aside from changing the crossword authors AGAIN (thereby throwing us all off and making us all feel as dumb as we actually are), they have messed with the very laws of nature, by which I mean their cartoons. Witness here, said cartoon layout and content pre-fail:
EXHIBIT A - TAIPEI TIMES CARTOONS PRE-FAIL (Saturday Sept 11th 2010)
And witness said cartoons now, post-fail:
EXHIBIT B - TAIPEI TIMES CARTOONS POST-FAIL (Monday Sept 27th 2010)
As can be seen, Exhibit A features four reasonable cartoons and one control. Zippy exists so as to identify false positives on customer taste (e.g. if a person says they like Zippy their other responses are eliminated as 'bad data'). Nevertheless, this line up has entertained us literally for years and, I might add, we never needed colour to get the joke.
In Exhibit B, Ink Pen and Pooch Cafe have been replaced with WT Duck (about as funny and interesting as passing a morning movement) and Lio which manages an epic fail in trying to make me emote with another less entertaining version of the Calvin meme. And Zippy is still there! As my friend texted me the other morning on realising what had happened, "WTF? Where is my f*&%$ing Pooch Cafe", or words to that effect.
So come on Taipei Times. Cartoon Fail. Really? Here's some advice for the editors:
Doonesbury
Dilbert
Pooch Cafe
Monty
Ink Pen
Other suggested combinations welcome in the comments ...
