csotd friday funnies because wotthehell

This isn’t a political cartoon. We don’t do political cartoons on Friday.

It’s a New Yorker cartoon, a wry observation by David Sipress on life in the city and its more comfortable suburbs.

And it cracked me up just as if it were a regular cartoon and not political at all, because my social networks are flooded with postings from this woman and her kindred spirits.

When I was a kid, I’d grab the New Yorker as soon as it arrived and read all the cartoons. I didn’t get them all, but I think that taught me that the quality of a cartoon is not entirely based on whether or not I got it.

A lesson with which I’ve seen others on social media continue to struggle.

 

Rip Kirby is not at all funny, so there’s no need to “get it,” but I was impressed with this morning’s offering (from 1960) in that John Prentice made the choice to show the empty shells ejecting from her pistol.

It’s certainly not the first time a hero has (presumably; we’ll know more tomorrow) been saved by the hard-bitten harlot with the heart of gold, but her hard-bittenness is shown by the fact that she shot at least twice.

This isn’t some frail squeezing off a round in desperation. She knows what she’s doing and it’s likely not the first time she’s plugged somebody.

I’d marry her, or at least stick around for a few weeks.

Kirby won’t. Once he’s out of that dive suit, he’ll hurry back to Honey Dorian, his strait-laced fashion-model girlfriend.

Oh well. Rip and I are not cut from the same cloth.

I’ve always thought “Destry Rides Again” would have had a happier ending if he’d wound up with Frenchy instead of that insipid Janice Tyndall.

Janice Tyndall would have easily fit into the New Yorker, though it’s worth pointing out in her defense that the school marm in the prototypical American Western, “The Virginian,” is also an uptight, upscale Eastern transplant.

 

Meanwhile, I’ve really been enjoying the current story arc in Sally Forth because, while the Forths are uptight, upscale suburbanites, this is one of the few times I’ve seen camping and the outdoors portrayed in a positive light in comics.

In most strips, the characters are seen struggling with the sometimes frightening, always uncomfortable, country life. It’s tiresome.

Here, the other campers are perfectly comfortable in the country, while the Forths remain as clueless and annoying as they are back home.

I have camped next to the Forths.

 

And for all the chatter about whatshername and things that bring joy or Swedish death cleansing or whatever, Pickles hits my level of decluttering.

I have a box in my closet simply labeled “Wires” that is full of all sorts of things that fit things they don’t even make anymore, but I know damn well that, as soon as I throw it out, I’m going to need one of them.

For instance, I have a music player thingie that I use on airplanes, and it works just fine but it recharges with an old-school USB instead of one of the slim-line newer ones. So I have to keep an old-school USB cord around. Maybe a couple, so I can find one. Maybe just don’t ever throw one out.

Do I feel guilty? Well, I’ve got a portable disk drive so that, when I get a new laptop now that the sonsabitches don’t put disk drives in them anymore, I can still load up Photoshop and InDesign.

So I can say poo-poo to Adobe, which is shaking down the poor bastards who fell for that bullshit about subscribing to Photoshop in the cloud.

At least until the sonsabitches stop putting USB outlets on laptops.

 

In Reply All, Lizzie knows how to exploit new technologies and, yes, this works. Or, at least, Alexa will count to 10 if you ask her to.

I’ll assume she’d also count to 100, but I didn’t want to hear her do it.

People worry that Alexa is listening to their conversations, but, if she is, she’s also listening to a kabillion other people’s conversations, which is much the same as listening to nobody at all.

Granted, around here, conversations are pretty much limited to things like “Do you want to go out?” and “Would you like to go for a car ride?”

Alexa has never agreed to do either.

 

Meanwhile, BC challenges the balance between compassion and nostalgia, because I suppose we should all be happy that such dangerous equipment is no longer part of playgrounds.

But broken arms and suchlike were part of childhood, and the carousel in this cartoon has grab bars around the edge.

I remember back when they didn’t, and they were way too intense and dangerous for little guys but you kept trying because staying on was a sign that you weren’t a baby anymore.

 

For that matter, I’m just old enough to remember when Hershey Park had a real Funhouse, as demonstrated here by Clara Bow and Antonio Moreno in “It” (1927), before the lawyers came in and shut down all the fun.

My parents didn’t feel I was old enough for the giant slide, but I rode the spinning whatever and walked on the rocking floor and through the rotating barrel about as successfully as Clara and Antonio had, 30 years earlier.

As it happens, I never broke a bone until I took up skiing and they still let you do that.

 

On a related note, Stephan Pastis takes yet another swipe at Frazz-cartoonist-and-triathlete Jef Mallet and it cracked me up. (Also the second time he got “turd” into print in a week. Progress marches on!)

Anyway, I don’t work out, but I’ve echocardiogrammed my heart, I’ve sent a camera up my butt and I’m three years out of cancer surgery without any little bright spots showing up on the scans.

I may not have all my parts anymore, but the ones I have work just fine.

wotthehell arch wotthehell theres a dance in the old girl yet

 

You’ve seen this before. Here it is again: