Wednesday is... Mikhaela-toons day

For those of you looking forward to seeing my new cartoon on Monday, I'm sorry to say that it won't be there. For various reasons, I am now the Crimson's Wednesday girl. Which is a Good Thing, since I'm still wracking my brains to try to come up with something intelligent to say about the Middle East mess... it's so much easier to criticize other cartoonists' approaches as racist or simplistic than to come up with one of my own. Another cartoon possibility is of course the mess right here in Boston over Cardinal Law's refusal to resign. But you'll just have to wait and see.

By the way, the above headline comes from the old advertising slogan "Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day." From 1939 on, my hometown of Lowell (Massachusetts) was the headquarters of the Pellegrino family's Prince Pasta company (and the largest pasta mill in the country). There's even an entire section of Lowell surrounded by bridges reading "Welcome to Prince Spaghettiville." But in 1987, the Pellegrino family sold the plant to the Borden company... and ten years later Borden abandoned the plant, leaving 409 unemployed workers (primarily Portuguese immigrants) in its wake. Organizers and members of United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America Local 214 worked hard to save their jobs by getting Boston Macaroni to buy the plant, but to no avail, and it was eventually replaced by the Dutton yarn factory.