CSotD: Procrastination Day & other vague plans

I’m not sure when Brewster Rockit (Tribune) takes place, but it’s not now, or, at least, not here, and even here and now, we’ve outgrown Sadie Hawkins Day, when women were allowed to propose to men or at least to invite them to sock hops.

Any woman still sitting around wishing some guy would take the initiative deserves to sit around, which reminds me of one of my favorite (genuine) Irish jokes, which is about Patrick and Eileen, who used to walk out every evening together.

One evening, they pause on the bridge to watch the water flow underneath, and Eileen says to Patrick, “Do you know we’ve been walking out now every evening these 23 years?”

“I suppose we have,” he replies.

“Well, shouldn’t we think about getting married?”

“Ay, lass,” he replies, “but who’d have us now?”

In any case, if a conservative girl like that can pop the question, sure we need a new way to celebrate February 29, and Procrastination Day sounds like an excellent holiday. For those who skipped Latin class, pro means “for” and cras means “tomorrow” and so the requirements for Procrastination Day couldn’t be more plain.

At the moment, of course, it seems a bit rushed: You’ve only got three days to think about doing nothing on Thursday.

But after that you’ll have four whole years to plan.

If you can’t come up with nothing by then, you’re not trying.

And in four years, they may have improved these new headsets so that they don’t induce headaches and don’t cost several thousand dollars, which means sitting there pretending to be somewhere else will count as doing nothing.

The problem is that “wasting money” counts as doing something, so it’s not in the spirit of the day. However, if you make plans to get a headset by next Procrastination Day, that can be part of the holiday, so long as you don’t actually do it.

Which, by the way, reminds me to remind Yanks planning to attend the AAEC Convention in Montreal this fall that you’ll need a passport, and it’s recommended that you apply six months in advance of your trip, because the State Department celebrates Procrastination Day all year long.

If you’re driving there, you’ll only need a Enhanced Drivers license, but you’d better doublecheck that now, not the day before. Real ID is not the same thing, as you’ll discover when you are turned away.

Juxtaposition of the Tay

Fiona Katauskas

First Dog on the Moon

Taylor Swift has concluded the Australian leg of her tour and I thought you might like to see how political cartoonists behave when a pleasant, talented, very popular musical star visits a place in which not everyone is totally invested in paranoid conspiracy theories.

Another reason to make sure your passport’s up-to-date. November is nine months away.

Not that you have to wait until November to find yourself surrounded by loonies. As Chuck Legge notes, we not only have plenty of lunatics already, but we’ve loosed them on our children.

It’s kind of fun when one of these obsessed moralists gets publicly revealed as a hypocrite and it certainly happens more than once, but given the number of busybodies who make kids lives miserable without getting caught, I think it’s more important to turn out for school board elections than to sit back hoping for another scandal.

Still somewhat on the topic of loonies, David Cohen has some fun with a term that only sort of kind of exists. Back in the bygone days of yesteryear, Jon Stewart came up with “Here’s your moment of zen” as an introduction to some video that would leave you agape, by which I mean “agape” rather than “agape,” the latter being a possible goal of Buddhism, the former being a distraction from sublime contentment.

Or maybe we’re still on the topic of procrastination, since actually pursuing enlightenment takes real effort and is something we plan to do maybe tomorrow.

In any case, you can, indeed, achieve zen and still enjoy a beer, but it takes more than a moment, and this cartoon cracked me up.

Which probably means I’m not there yet.

A local political cartoon by Scott Stantis: The proposed acquisition of Discover by Capital One is a Chicago issue because Discover is headquartered there, and, while they will maintain a separate identity and an office in which to house it, a lot of administrative jobs will be leaving.

I’ve got plenty of mixed feelings. My hometown got the one-two punch of an acquisition of the mines by an early vulture capitalist that gutted and abandoned it, followed by the acquisition of our paper mill by a corporation that only wanted to gain access to some unique, patented papermaking procedures, after which they shut down the mill itself.

And when I had a newspaper shot out from under me and found myself broke and unemployed, it was Discover who wanted their damn money now and Capital One who backed off a little and approached me again, gently, when I was back on my feet.

But my issue in this case isn’t who is acquiring whom. It’s that while I have all kinds of sympathy for Discover Card executives who may find themselves out on the street, I have sympathy as well for miners and millworkers who experience the same thing, and for people who work in local drugstores and corner grocery shops when the big boys come to town and elbow them aside.

This is how it works these days, and I hate it, but let’s not weep over people who carry briefcases unless we’re going to weep just as loudly for those who carry lunch pails.

The alternative is to abandon the creeping meatball and escape from the weight of your corporate logo and all that, but Matt Percival points out that there is a substantial difference between gaining a lot of followers and turning your gig into a living.

Particularly when you have a massive following, but they’re all a bunch of rats.

Though, granted, it’s funnier than when he addressed the lack-of-compensation problem by swapping his rats for small children.

There are many examples of how badly that can turn out, but even the failures can be oddly memorable.