As reported yesterday by the Sun’s Julie Scharper, City Hall officials are reviewing automatic pay raises slated to be given to them in the upcoming fiscal year, raises which generated some controversy previously when then-mayor Sheila Dixon initially refused to donate her raise to charity, as others alternatively did at the time (“City Hall pay raises up for review today,” March 22, 2010).

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Step 1: Read this comic or any comic from days prior and attempt to laugh.

Step 2: View this parody made by someone else and appreciate how much funnier it is without trying.

Step 3: Marvel at how unfunny these other conservative cartoons are!

For excellent examples of HILARIOUS cartoons from the other side of the coin, go no further than http://www.newstarget.com

So I’m browsing through my bank’s reward-related website so I can cash in my accumulated 15,000 or so bonus points that I’ve hoarded over the past four years or so, in an effort to maybe get something of value. And big shocker, the only thing worth trading those points in for is cold, hard cash at a conversion of $0.008 per dollar spent using the card (not including bonus points or whatever).

None of this matters, what DOES matter is the fact that I happened upon something that you can apparently trade in your bonus points for, something I had heard of but thought was strictly related to lifestyle choices: Carbon Offsets.

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Politico has the semi-hilarious letter from Bob Dole to Scott McClellan, the former White House spokesperson and author of a new book critical of the Bush Administration. McClellan joins a long list of former white house dudes who grew some balls after quitting.

Bob Dole yesterday sent a scalding email to Scott McClellan, excoriating the former White House spokesman as a “miserable creature” who greedily betrayed his former patron for a fast buck.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest–whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories–comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

These words open Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sysyphus, one of the founding texts–personal rather than theoretical, which has always been Camus’ advantage over Sartre–of existentialism. So, if we think perhaps disparagingly about the putative “emo-suicide,” should we consider it misguided and a bit naive? Or a more level-headed perspective, and at the same time less intuitive, acknowledges the desperate nature of all human life: the burden of responsibility; the despair of self. Less intuitive I suspect because popular culture induces a soporific effect. GTA IV is a marvelous game but let us be clear that it precludes a coming to terms with modern life, an excuse to avoid living rather than see life as an experience. The emo culture (and I went and listened before writing to the audio abortion that is My Chemical Romance and that HH band…) is terribly self-indulgent but as a defense mechanism: an internalization and personalization of profound systemic distress. The problems of emo are not emo’s problems but of society in total. We are just less willing to accept the emotional displacement as an excuse for (faux) dissidence. In fact, faux dissidence is all that is left the emo-punk when our post-ironic culture treats all rebellion as a lifestyle choice.

What does life mean? Or are answers to such questions no longer possible especially when the forum is one of glorious homogeneity–a shiny plastic surface from which meaning slides as if oil on a hot griddle–the glorious sameness of the internet?