Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed for June 17, 2022

Nah, they’re not over, just taking a break.

‘Cut off’ funding? He’s lucky if they let him keep the money they’ve already sent.

That was the saddest movie I remember watching while growing up. The Days of Wine and Roses. That last scene was a tear-jerker.

Now it’ just the days of whining.

In this case, wouldn’t it be “The Days of Whine & Neurosis”?

I guess different federal grants work in different ways. A friend of mine was installed in an Asian Lang & Lit department at a major university only to find that some people in a back room were working on a Chinese dictionary and, as is the way with dictionaries, it was overdue and over budget. In fact there was no money left and no dictionary (the dude in charge of the project had, as it were, a light fly-wheel and kept changing his mind about how to go about it). My friend wasn’t at all surprised at that—he never would have taken the job if he knew it came with a dictionary project—but when he undertook to “explain things” to NEH, they were very understanding and said there would be no hard feelings if the university just returned the grant money. Not possible, but it did turn out to be possible to squeeze out the dictionary after all.

Those days are gone forever, Opus. The jig is up. Your bubble has burst. It is raining on your parade. No more Porsches for you!

—Unless, of course, you can tinker together a gizmo by next Tuesday….