Unpaid Interns

A few weeks ago John and I came across this story on internships via Facebook and Rick Kirkman. If you click on the link it will take you to an article about unpaid internships and a cartoon by Matt Bors.

It got us to thinking about internships and how some of them have devolved from the job training and class credit they were designed to be. Many companies now use interns in place of legitimate full or part-time employees. Rather than training the interns, these companies simply hire them to do a job that could be filled by a regular employee but either pay the intern a greatly reduced wage or nothing at all. They offer no guidance, there is no class credit, simply a job opportunity.

Having a nationally syndicated comic strip means that occasionally you have a "bully pulpit" from which you can deliver a message. While Edison cannot be as hard hitting as Matt Bors - after all Edison Lee runs on the newspaper comics pages and is not yet in as many papers as a powerhouse like Doonesbury - Edison's take on the situation will be delivered in a way fitting to the strip.

I'm only posting day one here - for the rest of the series this week you'll have to go to the main website page.

That's A Wrap!!

Prize Drawing for Edison Lee Comment Contest Winner # 2 

The comment contest has come to an end after 8 great weeks of commenty fun! We knew we could be playing with fire by asking for more comments on the strip - you never know what kind of snarky madness you may unleash - but everyone was respectful and most of the comments were really funny. Some weeks it was truly hard to decide on a winner, there were so many good ones.

I think what John and I find interesting is all the different ways other people see the strip and the jokes. When you're producing the strip you tend to see it from a certain point of view and once it gets out there on public display you find out people see all sorts of subtexts - most of which never even occurred to you. I hear this same sentiment from many other cartoonists so I think it is just the nature of human beings and shows how challenging it is to come up with material that interpreted the same way by everyone.

Thanks to everyone who commented - we'll be paying more attention to the comments from now on and you never know - if John sees one that really cracks him up he may send you an original drawing out of the blue!

Atmospheric Vortex Engines

Sometimes we here at Edison Lee Inc. thumb our way through twitter looking for little bits of scientific goodness to share with the world. Today's strip came from this story on how inventors are working on atmospheric vortex engines for generating electricity. Fascinating stuff!