Cowabungled

Covid variants, including the new and improved "Mu" strain, continue to burn through the Greek alphabet when acquiring names. Which seems appropriate, considering we're all taking the pandemic Greek-style, if you catch our drift.

Fortunately, Mu isn't really prevalent yet because its much-more-popular cousin Delta is pretty much infecting the world right now. It's so infectious that virtually all serious scientists have agreed on the conclusion that we're all going to get it. Fortunately, vaccination seems to make it much less likely that you'll be hospitalized or have serious symptoms, but Covid has been added to the "Death and Taxes" list as something that will now always be with us.

As manmade achievements go, that's pretty damn impressive and is worthy of commemoration. Specifically, we're fatasizing about something that "escapes from a lab" and is accidentally dropped on the Wuhan Institute of Infectious Bat Viruses and Screen Doors. Nothing flashy, really - just something big enough to make the residents of Hiroshima say "Holy crap, I'm glad they didn't drop that on us."

FROM THE VAULT: LABOR DAY PAINS

Today we observe Labor Day, a celebration of the unions which gave new freedoms, wealth, and dignity to peons who previously suffered under the cruel oppression of capitalist bastards. Nowhere is this more the case than in the editorial cartooning industry, which has come so far in the past century.

Once considered a "job that Americans won't do," 100 years ago editorial cartoons were farmed out to Irish immigrants and Chinese coolies who were functionally little more than slaves, working at crude drawing tables in return for a weekly ration of potato peels or fish heads.

Later, when the Irish turned to police work and the Chinese turned to ruining SAT scores for everyone else, the greedy editorial cartoon barons put women and children (as young as four years old) into forced servitude, penning cartoons in dingy, airless factories. Their work shifts were 24 hours long, every day except Sunday - when they got 15 minutes off to pee and whimper.

Some died of ink poisoning, others died violently in the process of collecting the ink by milking octopuses, while many simply lost the will to live after being forced to look at grim news items every day.

But then the unions entered the scene and changed everything. The sweatshops were closed, women went back to prostitution, and children were again free to be beggars and pickpockets. But actual editorial cartoonists, now holding the reins of collective bargaining, became the masters of their own fate.

Today, editorial cartoonists are among the most highly paid and respected professionals in our nation, loved by all, desired by beautiful women, and universally sought after for their wit, intelligence, and dashing good looks.

Not to mention their vivid imaginations...