CSotD: Swinging Saturday
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ICYMI, Rabbits Against Magic has it right: The Democratic Nominee has excellent taste in music, though Mingus is more jazz than swing. But the pun works and we’ll let it slide.
My mother turned me on to swing. She was the first female disc jockey on Harvard’s Crimson Network, then one of the founders of Radcliffe’s radio station, back in the early 40s, which put her in Boston in the midst of a more-than-decent music scene.
She and my dad would go clubbing and hear Harry James and Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, which seems mind-blowing now but was just Saturday night.
And my father used to tease her by pretending to like the Andrews Sisters, whose cheesy nasal harmonies set her teeth on edge.
All of which I mention because someone jimmied the video of Harris coming out of the record store so you could swap in rock albums, which is totally unnecessary because what she really bought was beyond cool.
So, faced with the prospect of a hep president, we’ll forego politics today and have some laffs.
But first this commercial message:
They Can Talk is absolutely correct that squirrels are ingenious thieves, which I wouldn’t mind so much if they were actually eating what they take instead of, as the term goes, squirrelling it away some place they won’t remember. I also object to their chewing the plastic tube feeders to give themselves easier access.
However, the choices seemed to be (A) surrender, (B) spend a fortune or (C) get a Havahart trap and begin endlessly exporting squirrels to Vermont.
Instead, I spend about $30 on a small Squirrel Buster feeder and it worked so well that I spent a little more on a larger model and after about a week, the squirrels gave up and contented themselves with scrounging whatever the birds dropped. You can spend more, but you won’t get more.
Now back to the funny pages.
Non Sequitur (AMS) looks at the present and predicts the future.
If anything good came out of the pandemic, it was the work-from-home trend that control freaks are desperately trying to claw back now.
I worked remotely for the last decade before retirement, making the 2,000 mile trip to the office twice a year. Some people say they miss the interaction of office life, but I found it mostly distracting and, besides, being two time zones away meant that nobody needed me until at least 10:30 and I could walk the dog in peace.
These days I’m joined on those walks by several remote workers who bring the composite age down considerably, since most of the daytime crowd is retirees.
We’ve come a long way from what King Vidor depicted as hell in his brilliant but discouraging 1928 masterpiece, The Crowd:
Not everyone is prepared for life in the wild, as Pooch Cafe (AMS) has noted this past week, or even for life at Jones Beach, which barely qualifies.
Judging from the online chatter, we seem divided between people who are terrified of every little garter snake that wanders by and people who think Yellowstone is some kind of Disneyland and have to be warned that wild animals are not costumed mascots.
I had a friend who worked in Yellowstone one summer and came away with a hilarious collection of stupid tourist questions, which sounded made up until I read this collection of Yelp reviews.
If it wasn’t for half-wits, we wouldn’t have no wits at all.
Juxtaposition of the Day
As Tim Campbell points out, it may be that time of year again, but it didn’t used to be. When my boys were little, we had a brief kerfuffle when the schools changed the calendar to end just after Memorial Day and start up just before Labor Day. Parents kicked up a storm demanding that they give us one or the other.
Well, around the country we’ve mostly lost long Memorial Day vacations, while Labor Day is beginning to seem like Semester Break.
John Cole offers this salute to Pennsylvania’s Fair Funding Act, which guarantees adequate funding for schools but I’ll bet doesn’t actually include air conditioning in each classroom. I visited hundreds of schools in my years doing educational programs, and you could spot the principal’s office from the outside because it was the only window with an air conditioner sticking out.
It wasn’t an issue of privilege but of necessity, since the principal worked through the summer. I’m not against year-round school, but I’m sure against being in a roomful of fifth graders in 90 degree weather if they have developed hormones but not the habit of showering. And, no, Axe only makes it worse.
As for Edison’s shopping list, he’s not that far off, and that’s where Fair Funding needs to step up. I never minded providing pencils and paper, but once scientific calculators appeared on the required list, I wanted to push back. If it wasn’t fair to an underpaid scribbler, it sure wasn’t fair to people making less than I did.
I saw some clown online complaining that he shouldn’t have to pay school taxes because he doesn’t have kids. That attitude only works if your goal is to live among people who try to pet the fluffy cows.
And who vote with similarly self-destructive judgment, but we’re not talking politics today.
Back to the topic of prepubescent boys, the Baby Blues (AMS) team sure picked the wrong superhero for Hammie to obsess over. One of the breakthroughs of Spider-Man — and I was 12 when he debuted — was Peter Parker’s romantic interest in women, which continued into his cinematic existence.
By contrast, the fun of the 1978 Superman movie was that Clark Kent was as much of a wooden klutz with Lois as he’d been in the comics. Yeah, yeah, he was protecting his secret identity.
From himself.
One of the things I lost during an extended period of unemployment was the good china, which we only used at Christmas and that, as explained in this Between Friends (KFS), had to be hand-washed. Selling it paid the rent and ended fretting over its storage and handling.
And gives me a chance to start with swing and end with jazz:
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