CSotD: Sundays Will Ever Be The Same

Rich Powell starts off this panoply of humor with a wordless wonder at Wide Open (Universal), and the best part is that, while the humans are blissfully unaware, the dogs recognize kindred spirits, with perhaps a sense of having been mismatched.

Well, if their people have never heard that thing about people resembling their dogs, at least the dogs have. Or perhaps they just know.

Pickles (AMS) offers a more realistic look at dogs, though they certainly vary in their behavior. I used to refer to my ridgebacks as Rhodesian Roadblocks, but my current girl responds immediately to “Excuse me,” which seems ironic, since she’s only 20 pounds and not much of a barrier.

But maybe that’s why she gets out of the way so quickly.

Someone ought to have some manners, and as Lola (AMS) realizes, it might as well be the dog, if only by default.

And using that strip to segue from dogs to counter help, I am deeply impressed with the innovative idea in this F Minus (AMS).

I reserve tipping for greater service than handing me something or ringing up something I got for myself.

At the last hotel I stayed in, you inserted your debit card for the breakfast buffet and it asked for a tip, apparently for taking your money, since you had to get your own food, coffee, napkins, utensils.

It occurs to me that it wouldn’t be hard to mock up a tip request screen and make it the photo on your phone, but I’m too nice a guy.

Not nice enough to tip an unstaffed screen, but nice.

Jim Horwitz, known for the sweet dog-and-baby strip Watson, has begun posting one-off cartoons on his own Facebook page.

This one made me laugh because I can’t imagine why anyone needs a Phd in English unless the goal is to teach other people to get Phd’s in English and it seems inevitable, given how many professors of English we need, that not all of them are going to find jobs in the field.

Well, some of them may find jobs in the field. Others will find jobs in the coffee shop, like Richard, and some will find jobs in the hamburger stand or perhaps in the orchard, which is better than a job in the field because you don’t have to bend over all day.

I’m hearing rumblings of discontent about parents who encourage their kids to skip college and go to a trade school, but I suspect they’re coming from people who are in the business of cranking out Phd’s.

I also heard about a guy who loaded $500 million in bitcoins on a hard drive, accidentally threw it away and is suing his local town to dig up the landfill and look for it.

Given the cost of sending your kid to college long enough to get a Phd in English, I’m not sure the two moves aren’t roughly equivalent.

Though, as Rabbits Against Magic explains, if you can afford to throw away money, it’s your right to do it however you like. The guitar apparently turned out to be a knock-off and the signature put on by someone not named Taylor Swift, and Clay Jones has a lovely rant on the topic.

Twitter really was of value, though hardly worth the price Elmo paid for it and I’m beginning to think that, if he sold it tomorrow, it would no more rebound to what it was than you could dig up a hard drive that had been buried under tons of soggy garbage and expect to just plug it in and recover its data.

Meanwhile, Willie ‘n Ethel explain the payscale differential. There are graphs and charts and all sorts of documentation that cover the matter, but I think Willie has it down close enough.

Juxtaposition of the Day

Arlo and Janis — AMS

Brewster Rockit — Tribune

Arlo is right: Less was more. My rubber chicken speech when I was seeking support for my media literacy programs was to list the acts on Ed Sullivan the night the Beatles first appeared, and they were much like the list he suggests.

My point was that there was a time when we had one television, and we all gathered ’round the electronic hearth. If we kids wanted to see the Beatles or the DC5 or whoever, we had to sit through a song from a Broadway musical, and the Borscht Belt comedian and the plate-spinner, and it created a community not just in our family but in all the houses watching Ed Sullivan, which was most of them.

Cable expanded the choices just as TVs became less expensive, so we could split up and watch different shows. And then the Internet and technical developments gave everyone their own self-defined inputs, with the result that a 15-year-old in our town knew more about another 15-year-old in Japan than about the 35-year-old who lived across the street.

Pam grew up in that world, and she may criticize her kids for being on their miniscreens all day, but tell me, with 114 choices on her big screen, what is she watching that’s any better than some guy keeping 10 plates spinning on flexible rods?

And we didn’t have to subscribe to anything to watch Ed Sullivan.

Dagnabbit.

I love the smooth move Ben (MWAM)‘s son-in-law makes here. Having a second, younger family to draw on gives Daniel Shelton some nice flexibility to put aside the old-married-couple gags once in a while, without resorting to grandpa-grandkids interactions every time.

He doesn’t dip into it as often as Lynn Johnston did with FBOFW and his characters don’t have the depth and backstories of hers, but it’s still a valuable option.

On a related topic, Will Henry has thus far done an excellent job of not letting his characters in Wallace the Brave (AMS) fall into ruts.

It would be easy to have Wallace always on top of things, to have Amelia always a sourpuss, to have Rose always teacher’s pet, to have Spud a constant schlemiel. But then they wouldn’t be friends, and the advantage of the strip is that, as surrealistic as it can get, it’s strongly realistic in characterization.

Not many strips can hit that balance point.

(Here’s the earworm from today’s headline)