CSotD: Excellent timing for Friday Funnies

Edison’s back in the Kenosha News and all’s right with the world.

Though maybe that’s all that’s right with the world. Between the Alabama abortion law, a pending war with Iran and Mexico burning itself to the ground, there’s plenty to fill the 12 or 16 pages of the Daily Herald.

But never mind, because it’s Friday Funnies.

Though I do wonder — besides if there is a paper in America these days with enough heft that you could throw it from the curb to the porch — if there is a paper in America that still uses kids to deliver it?

About the time, a generation or so ago, newspapers realized their liability in sending juveniles out in the dark, they began consolidating routes into distances that could only be covered by car.

And in recent years, consumers have started making automobile delivery necessary. It used to be that, if you walked your dog around the block at 7 am, you’d see a newspaper in nearly every driveway.

But the per-page price increases have not gone unnoticed, and not only do you only come across a couple of papers on that walk, but, driving down a country road, you can’t tell whose circulation area you are in anymore, those plastic tubes having become pretty damn sparse.

As John Hambrock says in that above-linked article, the future of comic strips in papers is a little dubious. That’s a combination of Wall Street foolishness and people wanting things for free, and the latter can be traced to Wall Street foolishness but not on Friday Funnies Day.

Though if some eejit opened a burger joint where you paid for the food if you ate inside but it was free at the drive-thru …

Never mind. C’est le weekend.

 

I got a kick out of this Strange Brew for personal reasons. One of my tasks as editor of writing by reporters ranging from 9 to 14 — besides replacing “amazing” in their copy — is teaching them that, in book and film criticism, we don’t toss the word “great” around loosely.

I did let a kid use “amazing” last week, but only because she was writing about an exhibit on perception at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and actually using the word to mean stunned and … well, amazed.

But I tell the kids that “great” is only bestowed on a book, movie or author once it has endured for a lifetime or so.

And I don’t like the term “Great Ape” because it puts “Grape Ape” into my head.

 

Arlo and Janis made me smile because, while somehow I let my kids watch “Grape Ape,” we didn’t have hot dogs in the house, except for some non-nitrite-cured frozen ones.

I’ve tried veggie burgers and veggie dogs, too, and my only real objection to them is that eating them makes me complicit in climate change, in which methane plays a major role. Also, they don’t taste very good.

But, like Arlo, I do see the articles about meat being stimulated, rather than simulated, in laboratories and I suppose we’ll see it in stores at some point, but my guess is that, in my lifetime at least, it will make Kobe beef seem cheap.

 

As for roadkill, Arctic Circle is a bit behind the law, at least in these parts, where you can tag and take home any deer or moose you happen to hit with your car, though, if you hit a moose, you’ll probably need a new car to take it home with.

We were discussing this one night after a school board meeting in rural Maine — the impetus being my nearly having hit Bullwinkle on my way there — and the assistant superintendent had a story about a deer hitting her car. That is, it ran into her door as she was driving along.

“Did you take it home?” someone asked her, and she said, “You’re damn right I did. You should have seen what it did to my car!”

The fact that she was in a dress and heels meant the Trooper who tagged it for her also did most of the heavy lifting getting it into the trunk.

Incidentally, in Maine at least, if the driver doesn’t want the venison, the Trooper will take it to a butcher and it ends up at the local food bank. Ditto with any game the Wardens seize from poachers.

 

Juxtaposition of the Week

(Agnes)

(Reply All)

One day Agnes will grow up and become Lizzie. I’m absolutely convinced of it.

 

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Prickly City raises a parallel that hadn’t occurred to me but sure does now and I’d discuss it further but it’s Friday and we don’t do politics on Friday.

 

No, not gonna talk politics, despite this Candorville coming along 24 hours after I commented to someone that Trump should probably endorse this proposal since he seems to be deliberately appealing to thuggish, homicidal maniacs.

But no. Never mind. C’est le weekend.

 

Okay, here’s a political strip I can deal with, because it’s from 1935 and is set in Spinachova, Popeye‘s utopian nation, whose inhabitants are reluctant to join the army in the face of a threatened invasion from a neighbor.

As noted here recently, he’s no longer the dictapator, but that doesn’t mean he can’t get his way.

Arf arf arf.

 

And on a more serious, though no more practical, level, the Nib has a chapter from Andy Warner and Sofie Louise Dam’s book on utopian communities, “This Land is My Land.”

Ford is not the only industrialist to form a model community, though this was pretty elaborate. George Pullman built a company town for the workers on his railcars, but it, too, failed, largely because he cut wages but refused to cut rents.

It’s really only an extension of the company housing common in mining towns, where the company also owned the local store and didn’t mind at all if the price of food didn’t match the level of wages, since keeping miners in debt kept them working.

As has been noted.