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Comic Strip of the Day Comic strips Editorial cartooning

CSotD: Pop’s New Hairbrush & Other Cautions

2 minutes 24 comments

Jeremy Banx’s old couple welcomes in the New Year with the same attitude I did, having seen it several times. I just went to bed at my usual time and the calendar managed to do its thing without my assistance, as it often has.

So no cartoons today about people falling asleep before the ball drops, because I’ve done that on purpose for the last decade or so.

I do, however, remember one year when I waited for the magic moment and in flipping through the channels found one where the Rolling Stones were playing for the throng.

My reaction — and I am admittedly a Brian Jones loyalist — was that it would be really cool if this were the first time they’d been together in the past 15 years, but, as it was, I couldn’t help remembering a Mick Jagger interview in which he said he didn’t want to be a 70-year-old singing “Satisfaction.”

But there he was.

That may have been the last year I bothered staying up.

I did stay up in 2000 to see if the world would end, which it didn’t. But Ward Sutton has a delightful fantasy here about what if it had?

IIRC, by the time we actually got to the end of 1999, the whole Y2K thing had worn out its welcome, and while a lot of people found work editing computers to eliminate the glitch, I don’t recall doing much of anything to mine. It was, to use a British expression, something of a damp squib.

Reading Sutton’s utopian dream is the first time I’ve wished it had turned out differently, but, as it is, the main difference I can see today is that we have to use all four digits when we input our birth year.

They’ve now announced that children born this year will be part of the Beta Generation, “they” being the Madison Avenue geniuses who invent catchy demographics so they can sell us things.

In “Brave New World,” the betas were the second-brightest folks, but in computer jargon, calling them betas suggests that you’re expecting them to be flawed and likely to be recalled and replaced.

Which seems to sum up everyone’s expectations of 2025.

Andy Davey not only sees 2024 crawling to the edge of a blighted, empty landscape, but doesn’t even posit the existence of a bright young energetic little 2025 ready to take over.

Makes me wonder if he was surprised to wake up this morning at all. Well, here we are, pal.

Rod Emmerson does expect us to be rescued, and his dark vision made me smile, because it’s colorful and he’s right: We were roughly at the end of our supplies and on the brink, so we’ve little choice but to take whatever rescue presents itself.

From what I know of pirates, people who fell into their hands were sometimes killed on the spot, sometimes sold into slavery, sometimes held for ransom and sometimes allowed to join the buccaneer crew.

Though I suppose the poor and homeless will continue to be marooned with little hope of rescue or survival.

I both agree and disagree with Garth German.

He’s right that we must make choices, given the state of things. But I don’t believe one choice eliminates the other, and I’m relying on memory as well as philosophy in saying so.

When John and Yoko ran a full page ad in the NYTimes in 1969, I got a copy of the paper and had that page on the wall of my apartment. And I’d already been playing Phil Ochs’ The War is Over since it was released a year earlier.

“War is over, if you want it” and Ochs’ furious declaration didn’t mean giving up. It meant disengaging in the sense of refusing to accept the war as inevitable, not allowing its presence to mess with your soul. But they remained active in the anti-war movement.

Refusing to believe in the war posed a challenge if you were ordered to fight it. Your remaining choices were jail or Canada or the underground. Ochs had already mocked the contemptible cowards who played along with the system by pretending to have a ruptured spleen, being gay or being blind and having flat feet.

Or, y’know, heel spurs.

Nobody’s gonna draft you this time around, although, in the words of Richard Farina,

Society is never geared
To people who grow a beard
Or little girls with holes in their ears
They’re liable to hunt you down
And dress you in a wedding gown
And offer substantial careers

The world is full of choices, and sometimes you get the chance to join the pirate crew. Think hard before you sign up.

If you’re not sure how to handle matters, follow Rat’s advice in Pearls Before Swine (AMS) and keep your head down while you figure things out. Be calm, not stupid.

Juxtaposition of the Day

The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee — KFS

Frazz — AMS

I’ve never wanted time to go by fast or to slow down, but I’ve always wanted to find out what happens next, and I suspect both Edison and Caulfield are anxious to get on with things.

I like Caulfield’s metaphor, since our speed on the road is largely a matter of attitude.

Robert Herrick counseled young girls to find a spouse before it was too late.

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

His specific advice — about marriage, not flowers — was practical in 1648, given that, while tomorrow is never guaranteed, life was considerably more fragile, but his attitude that it’s foolish to waste time doesn’t just apply to young people, who for the most part these days have a lot of time stretching out before them.

It’s far more important for those in middle age, who shouldn’t waste whatever time they have left being miserable.

I had this Calvin and Hobbes panel over my desk for a couple of months at one job which had become truly miserable, while I worked out an escape plan.

It’s not one of those uplifting birds-and-flowers posters telling you everything is groovy, but everything wasn’t groovy. I wouldn’t accept it. I wanted out. I got out.

Make being happy your New Year’s Resolution.

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Comments 24

  1. Our current dominant political party seems more like the pirates that only let you join if you are willing and able to toss your fellow survivers of the ship.

  2. How can we be three generations past Millennials? If they were born 1983-2000, then Zoomers should be 2001-18, and Alphalphas 2019-36.
    But apparently Millennials end before the millennium, and generations are less than 18 years.
    Wait, didn’t the Alphalphas start in 2012? 13 years? At least they gave 16 to Zoomers.

    1. They started by declaring that the people who listened to Peggy Lee and the people who listened to Elvis and the people who listened to the Beatles were all the same people. It’s just a marketing thing, utterly divorced from reality. My older sister was in the Frankie and Annette demographic and I was British Invasion. Three years apart but completely different.

  3. Quote Investigator: On June 9, 1975 People magazine published an article titled “The Jaggers” that included the following remark from Mick Jagger who was almost thirty-two years old.

    Jagger and the Stones have endured at the top longer than any other rock band, but as for the future, Jagger admits that it could all suddenly end. “I only meant to do it for two years. I guess the band would just disperse one day and say goodbye. I would continue to write and sing, but I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45.”

    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/08/12/jagger-satisfaction/

    1. So he’s almost done it twice.

    2. Is there any record of Mick singing ‘Satisfaction’ when he was 45? Perhaps it was just that age that scared him. Afterwords, as Doc Brown would say…’what the hell’.

      1. Are you seriously suggesting that the Stones have dropped this song from their repertoire? If so, I think it’s on you to present the evidence.

      2. To Mike – no, I think Ben R is suggesting they dropped it from their repertoire for one year, while he was 45, them resumed! Ha ha – not supposed to be serious.

  4. A lot of people put in a lot of work to make sure that Y2K was a big nothingburger. My wife and I worked for Uncle Sam in the 90s. I knew a lot of the IT folks, and they were working like mad for several years to make sure everything went smoothly. My wife was a contingency planner, and they designed procedures for how to keep operating if everything went toes up. That included where to put a morgue (!) They kept the plans because they were also useful in case of a terrorist attack.

    1. I didn’t mean to sound dismissive. It created a lot of jobs, but they took place in the belly of the beast, while the press screamed and ran around with their hair on fire (A) as if it were still gonna happen anyway and (B) as if there was something we should be doing at home.

      It’s not a case of crying wolf, because there really was a wolf, but I still have to wonder if it, along with the swine flu epidemic that didn’t happen, helped undermine public confidence. I wrote and edited a swine flu tabloid, but the publisher and I made sure the words “could” and “might” appeared often and that most of the advice was good advice even without the potential for swine flu. Others were far less restrained in their warnings.

    2. The other big “accomplishment” of the Y2K mitigation effort was that it proved the viability of offshore IT support, from India and elsewhere. There simply were not enough domestic IT personnel available at the time to address the mountains of old code even if they were all 100% dedicated to the effort, and there was no way that clients would accept a shelving of all of the bug fixes and updates that were in the development pipeline. Once the results provided by non-domestic IT professionals were confirmed, the labor cost arbitrage ramped up quickly. I worked for an IT services firm, and every new contract had specific targets for non-US staffing, affecting all pricing and profit calculations. Clients came to expect that those savings would be passed on to them, and the costs of quality control and error-resolution from what were then measurably lower-quality workers were to be borne by us. 25 years later, many of those quality-of-work issues have been resolved, and the red-capped MAGAs are fighting a battle that was lost long ago.

  5. Tomi Ungerer (a genius who could do erotica, kids books AND editorial cartoons!) said “Don’t hope, cope.” Jones and Farina—sigh—how quickly we forget

  6. You wrote, in part, “[W]ith little help of rescue or survival.” Did you mean “hope of,” “help or,” or both? Just curious.

    1. Hope. Probably had help, rescue and survival all in mind. Fixed.

  7. Thanks for including my cartoon, Mike, and for the commentary. I suppose I would argue that staying active in the anti-war movement was not truly disengaging, but rather a mindset towards the coverage of the war (or at worst a PR move against it).

    This commentary is about the folks who seem resigned to what’s going to happen and the reaction to tune out. And we need to push against that urge.

  8. New Years 1969. John and Yoko placed “The War is Over! If you want it.” on a billboard above Times Square just adjacent to the Armed Forces Recruiting Station. A treasured memory.

    1. in 1966, Allen Ginsberg declared the end of the Vietnam War, which inspired Phil to write the song. he first performed it at the “War Is Over” demonstration in L.A. on June 23, 1967. it was released on his Tape from California album and as a single in 1968.

  9. Not a deep comment at, but when I saw the artist’s name, “Banx”, in the upper right corner, I thought it was a subtle political statement:
    Ban X.

  10. I think that the y2k panic and hype was unfortunately necessary. Many people (particularly politicians and those who vote for them) don’t understand the necessity of preventative maintenance.
    If the message had been “this is a potentially serious problem, but we can fix it through hard work that most people won’t see happening but it will cost a lot of money”, then it would never have been fixed.

    I think that without the overblown hype, the public would never have approved spending money on fixing it. Without public approval, the corporations and governments would never have spent the money to fix it before it became a problem.

    PS: The 2038 problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem) has the same potential of causing chaos as the y2k one did. I imagine the news panic will start in 2035, even though the experts have been working on it for many years now.

    1. Here’s where you get me: “(particularly politicians and those who vote for them)”. It may not be necessary to frighten the people, but sometimes that’s the only way to frighten the people who need to be frightened. And since they don’t bother to examine things themselves, you have to motivate them by stirring up general panic. What a world!

  11. At least the overwhelming sense of pessimism for 2025 keeps me from feeling truly alone.

    Sure, we’re all miserable, but we’re miserable together!

  12. Jeez, I was born in 1945 (just before the Boomers) and I’ve listened to Peggy Lee, Elvis, and The Beatles. And Billi Eilish, Taylor Swift, Queen Bey etc etc.

    1. I’m sorry, but you’re part of the Greatest Generation, so obviously you didn’t listen to any of them. Madison Avenue knows you better than you know yourself.

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