Speaking of Hilary Price…

Since reading the Boston Globe Magazine is a great way to depress
yourself by being reminded that you live in a small town after all, I
almost missed this feature article
on one of my favorite cartoonists, Hilary Price, who also happens to be
a local (sort of). The article is chock-full of words but offers little
insight into the creator of Rhymes with Orange. This is a much more informative (and amusing) conversation from 2 1/2 years ago, and of course you could always sign up for Hilary’s newsletter!

Rachel and I keep vowing to visit Hilary’s studio near Northampton, but, well, er… let me get back to you with an excuse.

Hilary Price: a Call to Action

A few Sundays ago (during my inexplicable blogging hiatus), Berke
Breathed ran an “I-dare-you-to-sue-me-for-copyright-infringement”
Sunday strip depicting just about every popular comic strip animal in
history and making the claim that there’s never been a major
female animal character in comic strip history (as “adjunct
girlfriends,” Daisy Duck et.al. don’t count). Message board pundits can
disagree, but I think he’s right (I recall an interview with Peter Molyneux about his breakthrough game Black and White
in which he explained why they dumped the idea of having female
Creatures because of, well, issues with making them look right).

Never one to allow injustice in the comic strip world, Hilary Price (a Massachusetts resident) has introduced, Monty-like, a new (disposable?) character. Bets on how long Ms. Catastrophe will last?

It’s kinda cool when comic strips communicate with each other, like
this past April Fool’s (also back in my blog hiatus) Get Fuzzy, Fox Trot, and Pearls Before Swine all ran the same strip. But the alarming thing is that Hilary reads Rose is Rose

Customer Service as Product Coupon

Recently Rachel’s Treo 300 gave out for the second time (the device’s hinge is a well-known
weakness). After hours of calls to Sprint customer service (the magic
word
turned out to be “design defect”) and “forum shopping” trips among the
different Sprint Stores in our area, she finally wheedled out a
replacement 300 from customer service. (Why it makes sense to
replace a defective product with the same thing is unclear to me). Now,
if our time was worth real money, we’d just plunk down another $coupla
hundred for a replacement phone… but since it’s not, she spent the
time fighting for a replacement phone. So in this case, customer
“service” is just another form of price differentiation: those who can
pay full price do so for the convenience; the rest of us get our
coupons in exchange for hard labor.

In
any event, the happy ending is that the Brookline that supposedly had
300′s in stock didn’t, so Rachel got a replacement Treo 600! Now she’s
well on the path to
Gadget Geekery.