CSotD: Friday Lockdown Laffs

I try to avoid politics on Friday, but when La Cucaracha, working in advance, manages to hit the timing jackpot, it’s worth a mention.

The latest bit of presidential quackery seems almost as if someone at Fox & Friends was working for the opposition: “I know! Let’s say shooting up bleach will cure it!”

Sure enough, Ruprecht repeated it on national television and Twitter exploded:

 

Not that Martina was a fan of Trump to begin with, and I’m sure she isn’t any moreso now that he’s cutting off immigration.

After all, she remembers back when this country was willing to cache Czechs.

 

While we’re momentarily on the topic of politics and satire, Kal Kallaugher has a weekly podcast or Facebookcast or some kind of -cast on the topic, and it’s worth adding to your media diet.

“Satire Can Save Us All” goes live every Tuesday at 3 EST but you can watch the episodes later on that Facebook page. I was a little leery of a 20-minute commitment to video but, intending only to check it out, found myself addicted, particularly since he was interviewing an overseas cartoonist I’d never heard of and who had fascinating things to say.

 

 

 

And while I’m distributing plugs for cartoonists, Mike Lynch offers a selection of sketches for cartoons on the topic of the lockdown, and they’re very much worth a look.

I’m featuring the one set at the post office because our local post office has had to put up a sign over the automatic door buttons for the disabled, asking people not to kick them with their feet.

(The buttons, not the disabled people. One assumes.)

What with presidents recommending poisonous injections and nitwits trying to kung-fu the door openers, it’s getting hard to be more ridiculous than reality.

 

Meanwhile, Moderately Confused comments on the new reality. The joke is that he’s wearing pants, which one doesn’t do during the work day.

Nicolle Wallace had an expert on last night whose interview was video-bombed by his Great Dane puppy. My take is that we should just convert offices into storage units and have everybody work from home, because I think you get a bigger audience if you can hold out the possibility of sudden chaos.

 

And who needs meetings anyway? This isn’t how the technology works, but Strange Brew cracked me up anyway.

Not only reminiscent of the apocryphal story of the professor who gave a tape-recorded lecture because his students were setting up their own recorders and skipping class, but of the new version, of kids making videos of themselves looking attentive to patch into their distance learning classes.

 

Getting off the semi-political but sticking with the technical, Brewster Rockit triggers an old rant that really shows the difference between having been a kid and having been a parent when that movie came out.

The kids were entranced. I was sitting there thinking, “Damn. I’m paying to have my kids watch a 90-minute toy commercial.”

Long before we get to the question of why it had to be so tall and top-heavy, we have the question of why a civilization with the technology to create landspeeders and X-wing fighters would even need to make something that stomped through the snow instead of just skimming over it?

 

Fortunately, the Norm was hip to my issues and spoke to them eloquently, if only for the next movie.

But the At-Ats only made me suspect I was being snookered.

The soles of my feet still bear scars from stepping on random, scattered pieces of that damned Ewok Village.

 

While over in Adam@Home, the parents are worried because little Katie has been reading “The Godfather,” and now you’re triggering a rant I take more seriously than Ewoks and At-Ats.

First of all, if Katie is reading at that level, you need to either encourage it or at least back off. Yes, “The Godfather” is violent. So she should read Harry Potter or Treasure Island instead?

And have you seen what is published for middle-school kids? Teachers and publishers adore what I recall someone calling “trouble books,” in which the characters face societal issues and make Holden Caulfield seem downright giddy with joy.

I’m all in favor of including gay, transexual, disabled, autistic kids and minorities in literature — I genuinely am — but I’m not sure you have to pack a minimum of at least three of those factors into the protagonist of every single book you publish and if you think I’m exaggerating, it’s not by a whole lot.

The Corleone family is like the Five Little Peppers by comparison to current kidlit.

(A kid asked me once why kids in books are so often orphans. I said it was so they’d have to solve their problems on their own. But it’s also so they can read “The Godfather” if they want to.)

 

Between Friends has been on an arc that you should go back to the start and read.

Maeve has always shown an ability to screw up her love life, but this time around, it doesn’t look like the disaster is going to be her fault.

Much of it brings up one of those sexist stereotypes that, excuse me, seem to be true. As one of two men in a workspace largely filled by women, I used to hear my fellow workers moan and complain about their husbands endlessly.

I won’t say men never badmouth their wives, but not at that rate. I wanted to scream, “Either get over it or divorce him!”

And, by the way, men’s “locker room talk” pretty well ends when real experience begins, though I did work with a perpetual adolescent who would sit in the bar and say, “Hey, check out that blonde!”

Finally I told him he reminded me of the shavetail lieutenant in the Westerns who’d declare, “I saw something back there!” to which the scout would reply, “Yep. Cheyenne. Been follerin’ us for three days.”

 

More Happy New Years strips

Now it’s Vintage Buz Sawyer who couldn’t make the leap from 12/31/56 to 01/01/57.

This should keep you up-to-date until King Features fixes their website.

 

(And they read “the Godfather,” too.)