Category: Humor

Mike Luckovich of the Atlanta Constitution received two amazing honors in 2006, winning both a Pulitzer Prize and the Reuben award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year. This was the second Pulitzer for Luckovich; his first was awarded in 1995. He had previously received the Reuben award for Editorial Cartooning in 2001, but this was his first time to be named the overall outstanding cartoonist by a group of his peers. The Reuben awards are distributed each year by the National Cartoonists Society and are considered professional cartooning’s highest honor.

Impressive as these achievements are, they are only the latest in a long line of awards for Luckovich. He was a runner-up for the Pulitzer in 1987 before garnering the 1995 win.  In 1989, he won the Overseas Press Club’s award for the “Best Cartoons on Foreign Affairs for 1989,” and in 1991, he was awarded the National Headliners award for editorial cartoonists. In 1994, a Luckovich cartoon was selected by voters in a Newsweek magazine poll as one of the four best editorial cartoons of the year.

After freelancing and selling life insurance to make ends meet following his graduation from the University of Washington in 1982, Luckovich landed his first cartooning job at the Greenville News in South Carolina. After nine months at the News, Luckovich was hired by The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, where he stayed for four years before moving on to Atlanta.

Luckovich’s cartoons, syndicated nationally by Creators Syndicate, appear in more than 350 daily publications, including The Washington Post,The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Denver Post, Newsday, New York Post, The Cleveland Plain-Dealer, The Dallas Morning News, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Nashville Tennessean and the Houston Chronicle, and are reprinted regularly in Time, Newsweek and the New York Times.

Luckovich and his wife, Margo, have four children. His hobbies include exercising and collecting unique ties.

var total = eval(step1) + eval(step2) + eval(step3) + eval(step4) + eval(step5)

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Have you ever been so bored that you get a cardboard box and some toilet paper rolls, and make a poop factory costume for your dog? If your answer is an excited YES!!! then you are not alone. As you can see from the pictures below, it’s a quite popular hobby among dog owners.

Twenty years ago, Stefano Z worked with some Very Smart Very Senior Engineers. These Very Smart Senior Engineers liked to find all sorts of “interesting” solutions to common problems.

For example, they had a module in C++ that needed to send data to other systems. To formalize this messaging, they needed a set of Data Transfer Objects (DTOs). Now, there are many libraries that might make generating these kinds of objects easier, but the Very Smart Very Senior Engineers didn’t want to use a library. So they started out with just large piles of hand coded:

class Book : public DTOCommonBaseClass
{
private:
    string _title;
    string _author;
    
public:
    
    
};

Then, to use them, you’d have to write the tedious:

Book myBook;
myBook.SetTitle(title);
myBook.SetAuthor(author);

No, none of them had a constructor that actually initialized the object, you always had to go property by property.

No one liked this. So the senior dev behind their serialization library decided to take a crack at writing the “Universal Stream” class, a super object that could be all of your DTOs.

Instead of that cumbersome series of sets you had above, you could now do this:

	static const string KEY_TITLE = "KEY_TITLE";
	static const string KEY_AUTHOR = "KEY_AUTHOR";
	static const string KEY_SUBJECT = "KEY_SUBJECT";
	static const string KEY_YEAR = "KEY_YEAR";
	static const string KEY_YEARFIRST = "KEY_YEARFIRST";
	static const string KEY_PAGES = "KEY_PAGES";

	UniversalStream stream;
	stream.AddItem(KEY_TITLE, blahTitle);
	stream.AddItem(KEY_AUTHOR, blahAuthor);
	stream.AddItem(KEY_SUBJECT, blahSubject);
	stream.AddItem(KEY_YEAR, blahYear);
	stream.AddItem(KEY_YEARFIRST, blahYearFirst);
	stream.AddItem(KEY_PAGES, blahPages);

So much easier, right?

And then, instead of doing an ugly title = myBook.GetTitle(), you could write this simple code to get the values back out instead;

StringUniversalItem* pItem = dynamic_cast<StringUniversalItem*>(stream.GetUniversalItem(KEY_TITLE));
if (pItem)
{
    string title = pImet.GetAt(0);
}

So much less boilerplate, right? So much simpler.

At this point, you might be thinking to yourself, “did he just reinvent the map?” Well, sort of. This is much like a map, except the values are only allowed to be either string or int. But it also allowed you to add multiple values at the same time, like this:

	UniversalItem strings;
	strings.Add(blahTitle);
	strings.Add(blahAuthor);
	strings.Add(blahSubject);

    static const string KEY_STRINGS = "KEY_STRINGS";
    
    UniversalStream stream;
	stream.AddItem(KEY_STRINGS, strings);

    	
	

	const size_t TITLE = 0;
	const size_t AUTHOR = 1;
	const size_t SUBJECT = 2;

So, it allows you to have arrays of strings and ints too.

The entire point of a DTO is that you have a simple, clear, and easy to understand arrangement of the fields in the object, so that you can pass them over to other applications without having to share much beyond a simple schema. This offered none of those things, and made nothing easier, and cause many many bugs and much confusion through the entire team.

So of course, it was the standard that everyone used.

Here’s one last usage example from Stefano:

	string someOptionA, someOptionB, someOptionC; 
	

	

	static string OPTION_A_MARKER = "OPTION_A_MARKER";
	static string OPTION_B_MARKER = "OPTION_B_MARKER";
	static string OPTION_C_MARKER = "OPTION_C_MARKER";

	UniversalItem processingOptionsNames;
	UniversalItem processingOptions;

	processingOptionsNames.Add(OPTION_A_MARKER);
	processingOptions.Add(someOptionA);

	processingOptionsNames.Add(OPTION_B_MARKER);
	processingOptions.Add(someOptionB);

	processingOptionsNames.Add(OPTION_C_MARKER);
	processingOptions.Add(someOptionC);

	static const string PROCESSING_OPTIONS_NAMES_MARKER = "PROCESSING_OPTIONS_NAMES_MARKER";
	static const string PROCESSING_OPTIONS_MARKER = "PROCESSING_OPTIONS_MARKER";
	

	UniversalStream stream;
	stream.AddItem(PROCESSING_OPTIONS_NAMES_MARKER, processingOptionsNames);
	stream.AddItem(PROCESSING_OPTIONS_MARKER, processingOptions);
	

	
	UniversalItem* pNames = dynamic_cast<UniversalItem*>(stream.GetUniversalItem(PROCESSING_OPTIONS_NAMES_MARKER));
	UniversalItem* pValues = dynamic_cast<UniversalItem*>(stream.GetUniversalItem(PROCESSING_OPTIONS_MARKER));

	for (size_t i = 0; i < pNames->GetSize(); ++i)
	{
		string name = (*pNames)[i];
		string value = (*pValues)[i];
		if (name == OPTION_A_MARKER)
		{
			
		}
		else if (name == OPTION_B_MARKER)
		{
			
		}
		else if (name == OPTION_C_MARKER)
		{
			
		}
		
		
	}

Making fun of the headlines today, so you don’t have to

The news, even that about Sweden, doesn’t need to be complicated and confusing; that’s what any new release from Microsoft is for. And, as in the case with anything from Microsoft, to keep the news from worrying our pretty little heads over, remember something new and equally indecipherable will come out soon:

Really all you need to do is follow one simple rule: barely pay attention and jump to conclusions. So, here are some headlines today and my first thoughts:

Sweden has a giant-killer military built for one thing: fighting Russia

That’s a lot work for a tiny little screwdriver.

The number of views for Tucker Carlson’s new show on Twitter has dropped by 86% since its launch

Damn, Tucker’s Twitter ratings are dropping faster than Russians falling from Moscow high risers.

Madonna reportedly made her much younger boyfriend sign an NDA

… and his mom a permission slip.

Biden age a factor

Apparently, Biden’s too old to be President while Republicans want everyone else to hit 90 before stopping work to get Social Security and Medicare!

Keke Palmer calls out her boyfriend after he mom-shamed her for wearing a rear-end exposing sheer dress

When people say ‘what an ass’ about Keke Palmer these days, they’re usually talking about her boyfriend.

Tommy Tuberville appears to be a believer in white supremacy

Unless he needs a wide out or an edge rusher!

Disney extends CEO Bob Iger’s contract through 2026

Yup, he made himself an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Barry Bonds says he’s been ‘vindicated’ and argues he belongs in the MLB Hall of Fame

… or, at the very least an invitation to run in the Breeders Cup.

George Santos compares himself to Rosa Parks

Well, yeah, they’re both the same height in heels.

Kourtney Kardashian announces she is pregnant, expecting baby with husband Travis Barker

These people don’t have kids, they have spin-offs.

Ron DeSantis fires roughly a dozen staffers in a campaign shake-up

You’ve just been fired by Ron DeSantis, where are you going? We’re going to Disney World!

83-year-old arrested for parking lot shooting

… Somebody didn’t like being told he left his turn signal on.

Prigozhin met with Putin in Kremlin after Wagnerites’ mutiny

Only thing we know for sure is it was on low floor.

House committee to receive briefing on cocaine found in White House

I’m sure they’re prepared to sniff it out.

One of the most hated individuals in America, Ted “Dracula” Cruz has just been named “The Asshole of The Year” by The US Proctologists Guild.

Cruz joins other assholes of the year such as Donald “The Orange Whale” Trump, Ann “Horse Face” Coulter, Jim “Sidesaddle” Jordan, and Sean “Fred Flintstone” Hannity.

Ted, who claims that he was born in Canada, was actually born in Guatemala, as evidenced by a legitimate birth certificate that was found by information guru Andy Cohen.

Cruz proudly notes that he is proud to have been named by his political idol, Donald J. Erasmus Trump to be his vice-presidential running mate.

Dracula was asked if he had forgotten that several years Trump the pussy grabber had said that his wife was ugly as shit.

Cruz replied that it was just Trump’s opinion and he noted that as far as he is concerned, on a scale of 1 to 10 his wife is a strong 4. ■