School Daze

According to the LA Times:

A crudely written email threat to members of the Los Angeles Board of Education prompted officials to close all 900 schools in the nation’s second-largest school system Tuesday, sending parents from San Pedro to Pacoima scrambling to find day care — while New York law enforcement dismissed a nearly identical threat from the same sender as an obvious hoax.

The unprecedented districtwide shutdown reflected the tense atmosphere over possible terrorist attacks less than two weeks after two Islamic radicals opened fire at a workplace party in San Bernardino, killing 14.

L.A. Unified School District Supt. Ramon Cortines said he made the decision to order the school closures because he couldn’t take a chance with the system’s 640,000 students. -more

Sony is Backmailed

Nobody seems to be asking the question?!!
Another question is how can we fight the antisemitism and the apathy to the plight of non-muslims in the Middle East!
The answer is simple, join the Dry Bones Team. For details please click on http://igg.me/at/drybones

face it

According to Time:

More Than 11 Million Young People Have Fled Facebook Since 2011

Skeptics of Facebook’s business model have long pointed to anecdotal evidence that the social network is losing its luster with teens as evidence that the firm will ultimately be unable to justify its $140 billion valuation. Indeed, even Facebook itself admitted last fall that it had lost younger users. “We did see a decrease in [teenage] daily users [during the quarter], especially younger teens,” Facebook chief financial officer David Ebersman said during a call with analysts.

But it’s always been difficult to gauge exactly what the magnitude of this lost interest has been. On Wednesday, the digital consultancy iStrategy Labs released a study that draws from Facebook’s Social Advertising platform to glean exactly how many young users have left the social network in recent years. The resulting estimates are pretty staggering. According to iStrategy, Facebook has 4,292,080 fewer high-school aged users and 6,948,848 college-aged users than it did in 2011. -more

Better Search Results

According to Reuters:

Google Unveils Email Scanning Practices in New Terms of Service
April 14, 2014
Google Inc updated its terms of service on Monday, informing users that their incoming and outgoing emails are automatically analyzed by software to create targeted ads.

The revisions more explicitly spell out the manner in which Google software scans users' emails, both when messages are stored on Google's servers and when they are in transit, a controversial practice that has been at the heart of litigation.

Last month, a U.S. judge decided not to combine several lawsuits that accused Google of violating the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of email users into a single class action.

Users of Google's Gmail email service have accused the company of violating federal and state privacy and wiretapping laws by scanning their messages so it could compile secret profiles and target advertising. Google has argued that users implicitly consented to its activity, recognizing it as part of the email delivery process. -more

Too Lazy to Read

Post-literacy is one reason that cartoons are destined to become more and more important in the online world ...along with YouTube and other image-based media.

So my latest plans include drawing a series of digital comics and launching a YouTube channel. Stay tuned for further developments.

Jewish Mother Joke (1997)

July 09, 1997

Today's Golden Odie cartoon was published fifteen years ago in July of 1997.

Back then eMail was cutting edge. If I did the cartoon today it would be a facebook joke.

Test Yourself

I like to think of today's offering as a funny "test yourself" cartoon.

On the other hand it could be seen as being in a new and disturbingly expanding category of Dry Bones cartoons.

It's an "old guy living in the confusing future, trying to keep up" cartoon.

Your thoughts?

Scams

The bogus Nigerian scam emails seem so obviously phoney to us ...now. But outrageous scams often seem silly only in retrospect. Did you ever hear the story of George Parker? No?

According to Wikipedia:

"George Parker (1870–1936) was one of the most audacious con men in American history. He made his living selling New York's public landmarks to unwary tourists. His favorite object for sale was the Brooklyn Bridge, which he sold twice a week for years. He convinced his marks that they could make a fortune by controlling access to the roadway. More than once police had to roust naive buyers from the bridge as they tried to erect toll barriers."

Other public landmarks he sold included the original Madison Square Garden[citation needed], the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Grant's Tomb and the Statue of Liberty. George had many different methods for making his sales. When he sold Grant's Tomb, he would often pose as the general's grandson. He even set up a fake "office" to handle his real estate swindles. He produced impressive forged documents to prove that he was the legal owner of whatever property he was selling. He also successfully sold several successful shows and plays, of which he had no legal ownership.

Parker was convicted of fraud three times. After his third conviction on December 17, 1928 he was sentenced to a life term at Sing Sing Prison by a Judge McLaughlin in the Kings County Court. He spent the last eight years of his life there behind bars. He was popular among guards and fellow inmates alike who enjoyed hearing of his exploits. George is remembered as one of the most successful con men in the history of the United States, as well as one of history's most talented hoaxers. His exploits have passed into popular culture, giving rise to phrases such as "and if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you", a popular way of expressing a belief that someone is gullible." -more

His eMail problem

I use Mr. Shuldig as my alter ego.
To say what I'm thinking.
Today's effort is embarrassingly close to what I'm going through.
Too many email addresses!

Yikes!

P.O. (1973)

July 11, 1973

Today's Golden Oldie cartoon is from 1973. Thirty-nine years ago!! It was the first year of Dry Bones publication.

...And the Israeli Postal Service never really improved. It just got replaced by Fax machines, email, DHL, and Federal Express!

What the ?

In the digital world in which we all are now forced to live, the old rule "if it ain't broken, don't fix it" is no longer honored.

Your thoughts?

the Web (1995)

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon done in July, 1995. That was 15 years ago this month.

These days everyone (including your local Rabbi) is into email, the Internet. etc.

. . . or so I thought! I just spoke on the phone this morning with an international public figure (you'd know his name). He promised to email something to me. But then he added, almost sheepishly, that his assistant would do the actual emailing since he "didn't know how to use email".

YIKES!!

Future Shock

Today's Dry Bones cartoon is called Future Shock. Future Shock was a concept and a book published back in 1970 by Alvin Toffler.

The term refers to the confusion and disorientation which, he claimed, we would all suffer in the future. It would occur when technological advances would come faster than we, as individuals or as societies, could handle. Back then. Toffler was called a "futurist" (as opposed to a sociologist). His simplest definition of future shock was "too much change in too short a period of time". * * * So welcome to the future.
Are you paying attention?
or are you off some place twittering? Hello? Hello? Are you there?
Yikes?! * * * Oh, and there's now a website called "Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook"