CSotD: Saturday edition of Friday Funnies

Kieran Meehan couldn’t have known how funny today’s Pros and Cons (KFS) would be when it hit, or, at least, how timely.

We’ve had “news” that someone was caught throwing out ballots, only it turned out he was just discarding a sheet of instructions.

And then we had “news” that dead people were voting in Michigan, only it turned out to be typos and other inconsequential clerical errors.

We’ve had so much “news” that Politifact has a whole page of “False” and “Pants on Fire” claims , including several spread by Republicans and by Dear Leader himself.

My favorite is a Q-anon claim that the Department of Homeland Security watermarked ballots in a sting operation that proved the Biden campaign was cheating. Snopes has a takedown of this claim, but it could be more succinctly refuted by pointing out that ballots are printed locally, not by the feds.

Which is why we’re doing another day of Funnies.

First of all, I believe in Proverbs 26:4, “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him,” or perhaps that more contemporary version about wrestling with a pig, in which you both end up covered with mud but he enjoys it.

Anyway, let’s just let the ballot-counting continue and focus on fun.

To the extent possible.

 

That is, not without saluting the Laughing Redhead (AMS) for apparently slipping one past the goaltender, though I don’t think her panel has enough of a mainstream print presence to trigger any editorial reprisals for her notty langwitch.

It does make me wish I were a fly on the wall in whatever room FLOTUS and POTUS meet, because the rumors were that she wept when he won in 2016, having been promised it was all a publicity stunt. I kind of picture her standing in the White House atrium with her bags packed while he’s bricking up the door to avoid being dragged out of the building.

Anyway, we can go another day without politics, can’t we?

 

Unless you’re going to insist that the Lockhorns (KFS) have won a glorious weekend at the Trump Post Office Hotel or whateverthehell it’s called in DC.

The joke, of course, is that people like the Lockhorns would never be allowed in the place, but we’re still counting ballots anyway.

 

Like this poor victim in F-Minus (AMS), I blame the liberals and their cancel culture.

For everything.

A bit of interesting timing: I happened to pick up a 1969 compendium of columns from “The Playboy Adviser” shortly before Sean Connery died, and it was an interesting trip back, not to the offensiveness of the Mad Men fiction but to the casual real-life sexism of old-school Playboy and old-school 007.

Most of the advice in the Playboy Adviser holds up pretty well, just as most of Connery’s Bond movies hold up pretty well. People give wipipo way too much credit for planning and plotting when, the fact is, we’re just stumbling through life on the same assumptions as everyone else.

And at the point when someone speaks up and asks why, there’s a kind of sleep-walking wake-up moment, at which point you start looking back askance, for instance, at Bond’s assumption that seduction consists entirely of setting out the right wine and turning down the lights.

Which worked until suddenly it didn’t, such that people — men and women — had to either update those assumptions and change the way they went about things, or they could go into a pouty snit about “cancel culture.”

I’d have said “mostly men” about that pouting group, except that, if the desire to preserve those suddenly-stale assumptions were entirely male, entirely white, entirely redneck, we wouldn’t still be counting ballots.

Things have changed for the better, but humanity hasn’t yet changed for the best.

 

We probably shouldn’t assume that this Buckets (AMS) is referencing the claims of a “recovering economy” in which unemployment is down because people who used to make automobiles are now flipping burgers.

But, y’know, it sure could be.

There’s an intersection between my place and the park where I take my dog at which a young (late 20s?) woman is often seen panhandling.

It’s not unusual to see panhandlers holding cardboard “Please help” messages and standing next to “Help Wanted” signs, but they usually seem obviously homeless and clearly unlikely to be able to hold down any job.

But she looks pretty well put-together and always waves cheerfully to people even if they have nothing for her, which is my case since I never carry cash anymore.

But she’s not there every day and my guess is that we’re only seeing her on the days she can maintain.

Although there’s no withholding or FICA on handouts, and it might be that she can do better with her cardboard sign and her friendly demeanor than she could at minimum wage. Or maybe she even has one of those jobs and simply can’t subsist on it.

There are a lot of invisible people who survive on a cash-on-hand basis that economists can’t see, and they’re not all “bums.”

Some of them — a lot older than she is — are people who have no savings and subsist entirely on Social Security and, boy, is that gonna be a growing army before this whole thing shakes out.

In any case, it’s November in New England, so I asked her yesterday if she had a good winter coat, and she said she did, but then smiled behind her mask and did a little dance to celebrate the odd 70-degree weather we’re having at the moment.

If I had more money and an extra bedroom, I’d be tempted to adopt her. As it is, I’ll simply salute her spirit and slip her a buck or two when I can.

i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai

Me, too, kid. Me, too.