CSotD: Monday Morning Mirth

Best way to shut me up is to draw the perfect cartoon. Too Much Coffee Man has done just that.

Fortunately, the effect is temporary.

Matt Golding usually ends up in political cartoon postings, but this one is purely social, and let’s note that obnoxious people with leaf blowers are blowing leaves Down Under. Up here, they’re blowing dust and grass clippings but the effect on everyone else is pretty much the same.

To repeat a past rant, in a better world, leaf blowers would only operate for half an hour. Then they would be incapable of starting for 24 hours and you’d have to finish up with (gasp!) a rake.

While in a truly perfect world, operators would be required to hand out noise-canceling headphones to everyone in the neighborhood.

Mannequin on the Moon takes on caricatures, which also have rules that apply in an imaginary, perfect world, but in this case it works because they somehow dwell in one.

I like the notion of a caricature artist having to draw Dorian Gray without portraying him as a horrific, wretched old lecher, because real caricature artists face that sort of challenge on a regular basis down at the county fair or wherever they are set up.

Back in the discussion of Gina Whatsherface’s portrait, I cited Cromwell’s famous instructions to a painter to include “warts and all” in his work, but you wouldn’t prosper in caricature work if you drew people that way.

Though there could be a TV game show where they’d show a dozen caricatures and their actual subjects and award prizes to contestants for matching them up.

Big Nate (AMS) kicks off an end-of-school story arc this morning and, as he often does, pings my memories of a younger self.

To get all clinical about it, Francis may be right that Nate can’t goof off all year and then decide to start focusing during finals.

But I could.

It is a true though bitterly unfair fact that attention deficit has two branches. In one branch, additional pressure leads to additional freaking out, so finals go down the tubes along with the grades from the regular year.

But there is also what is known as hyperfocus, in which all that attention deficit magically turns into fanatical, competent drive under pressure. In my case, that meant I could absorb a semester’s worth of work in two or three days leading up to finals, or start a term paper the night before it was due and still pull a B.

It doesn’t work that way for everyone: Other ADD folks fall apart under pressure. But it explains why you find so many of us in fire departments and emergency rooms or covering breaking news.

If Nate is like me, studying with Francis would just slow him down.

And now, the downside of hyperfocus, as Dogs of C Kennel (Creators) discuss a pair of obsessions with dogpark aspects.

I have a smartphone, but I don’t access social media or email with it, because that’s what my desktop is for.

When I go to the dogpark, I bring the phone but only in case of some dire emergency, or, as yesterday, when a conversation floundered because we couldn’t remember the titles of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears or Letter to Brezhnev.

Which doesn’t come up all that often.

My dog is somewhat on the same wavelength. She isn’t big on toys and only chases a ball at the park in order to be first. Once she’s counted coup on it, she’s done.

Meanwhile, she’s got lots of toys at home but rarely touches them.

Though, as seen in this Rubes (Creators), she will entertain a toy long enough to find and destroy the squeaker. Five minutes is, of course, a joke.

She often takes as many as seven.

Dave Blazek is normally very funny, but in this Loose Parts (AMS), he makes a serious point. Some — not all — rescue groups are so eager to place dogs that they are, shall we say, a bit optimistic in their prognostications.

Let’s put it this way: If you adopt a Labrador retriever, you should expect it to leap into water at every opportunity. Not all Labs like water, but you’d be foolish to hope you stumble over one of the exceptions.

Similarly, beagles howl. Not all beagles, no. Huskies are runners and can’t be trusted off-leash. Border collies need a ton of exercise.

Howsoever, I’m not gonna step on the third rail of doggy adoption, so let me just, instead, suggest that an eight-week-old tiger cub is cute and playful and affectionate. There will likely come a point as the little fellow matures where that is no longer the case.

Apply that as you will, but it’s not just the owner or the training.

Do your homework.

Speaking of dogs, poor Spud has leapt to a conclusion in Wallace the Brave (AMS), and I’d be the first to insist that it wasn’t his fault.

I’d like to think I’d also be first up the tree with a pizza, but I’m willing to admit there’s more Spud than Wallace in my DNA.

Perhaps my Spudness is why I so wanted to write novels for so long, and why, now, this Farley Katz cartoon cracks me up.

I think part of my problem was that, while I was overly self-aware at 19, I was insufficiently self-loathing.

There was a lot of that going around, which made it frustrating, because love means never having to say you’re sorry to be as insipid as someone else.

The heresy being that you think it means your self-absorbed drivel should be published, when your question should be more properly directed towards wondering why theirs was?

But I’m sure AI will straighten it all out. Once they’re scraped everything and begun extruding their own work, even James Patterson will be hard-pressed to keep up.

Rhymes With Orange (KFS) brings to mind a friend who hated Paul Simon’s America because taking the Greyhound was so middleclass. He had hitched around the country, and then the world, entirely on his thumb. Fundraising for footloose adventure seems even more bourgeois.

But I like the idea of a GoFindMe fundraiser because search-and-rescue people are mostly volunteers and rescuing these poor wandering ones costs money.