CSotD: Freya’s Day Funnies

Cathy Wilcox marks International Women’s Day with a grim sense of purpose but a welcome lack of complaining: It’s a good day to recalibrate as the struggle continues.

She makes a valuable list of things to challenge, and doesn’t waste a lot of time and energy on the small stuff: These are all major policies, and their impact varies depending on the country where you find yourself, but there aren’t many places where most of these don’t have some influence.

I like the matter-of-fact way her groundhog digs itself out once more for a look around, and prepares to settle in for the continuing battle.

Toso Borkovic (Cartoon Movement) approaches the day from a related point of view, acknowledging women’s struggles and the futility of recognizing them without offering any sort of meaningful reforms.

It does occur to me that if women would take their day seriously as a holiday, it would have an interesting impact. What if they all took the day off?

There’s the old folk tale of the farmer and his wife changing places, in which she goes off to till the fields and he’s left to deal with the cow and the kids and winds up with the cow breaking through the thatched roof of their cottage and him hauled halfway up the chimney on its rope.

The basis of the story is that farmer’s wives often went out into the fields to help, and so she would know how to do the basic tasks of running a farm, but somehow he’d never paid attention to the daily work of keeping a household in order and was helpless.

Times are changing, and I’ve seen more young fathers with little kids who appear to know each other. The man who can’t change diapers, whip up a good dinner and drive car-pool from time to time is becoming a dinosaur, though not everywhere, certainly, and not fast enough.

It might speed things along if women took March 8 off, but the women whose lives most need the push would be least able to do that.

Ah well. Enjoy the day anyway.

Here’s a flower.

Still on the topic of family matters, this Wallace the Brave (AMS) got an extra laugh here because eldest son did become an apprentice, if not to a wizard, to at least a magical clown, one of whose Amazing Tricks involved employing a 14-year-old without running into legal problems.

Technically, the kid didn’t work at the magic shop. He just hung out there and perhaps helped a few customers get whatever gags and magic tricks they were looking for, but he didn’t get paid, nor was he there to make money.

What he got was mentored, and he came away knowing a number of magic tricks, and possessing the necessary props to make them happen, as well as knowing how to juggle, again having been rewarded with props instead of pay, but his main takeaway was knowing a lot about how to work a skeptical crowd.

Keep looking, Wallace. Every kid should stumble across a magical mentor.

Deflocked (AMS) does a maple syrup story arc each spring, and this year’s is well-timed because, as it happens, the sap ran early and we’ve had people sugaring for a couple of weeks.

Last year, I waited so long that, by the time I drove out to a sugar house, they were cleaning up and just had a couple of half-gallons left. You want to be there while they’re still boiling and the place is full of sweet, smoky steam.

As for harvesting the conifers, something I haven’t seen in general stores in years is spruce gum. It’s sure a different taste than maple, but picking gum used to be another of those budget-stretchers people did out in the woods, with baskets for the gum and long poles with blades to cut it from the trees.

Looks as though maple syrup is easier to find and quite a bit less expensive, though I guess if I missed spruce gum enough, I could go back home and pick some myself.

Or I could go down to Chile and check out all these new marine creatures First Dog on the Moon is on about.

Actually, nobody should go down there, because having a bunch of tourists diving in would probably trash the place. But, since there’s no way I’m going anyway, I can advocate it safely, and if you go and screw it all up, that’s your fault, not mine.

And besides, as First Dog points out, we’ll probably wreck it all through climate change without anybody having to go there. So there might as well be a transparent golden squid.

We’d never know.

In a more practical world, Mr. Boffo solves the problem of dying linear television and cable cutting and whatever else is going on. I gather that, if you live within range of broadcast stations, you can cherry pick what else you see, but out here in the boonies, we need a basic package just to get local news and weather, so you end up with a bunch of channels and services and whatnot.

But he’s right that things are splintering and that there are a whole lot of add-ons. They’re not terribly expensive until you take a look and see how many of them you’ve subscribed to.

Little drops of water
Little grains of sand
Add up in your budget
‘Til you’ve spent a grand

I have seen ads for a budgeting app that cancels forgotten subscriptions on your behalf. I guess if you need it, you should have it, but it seems like one of those things that, if you’re that disorganized, you’d never actually get around to installing it.

As Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Si sic ambulare possem, talci non indigerem.”

I’ll admit that I can’t figure out most of what other people seem to find entertaining, never mind where they find inspiration.

But this Brewster Rockit (Tribune) gave me an instantaneous flash of recognition and then I realized that only a slim demographic slice of former kids remember a guy falling downstairs while carrying cakes, since, after a couple of years of unbridled merriment, CTW purged the funny stuff as non-educational.

We remember, however.