CSotD: The Friday Follies
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The doctor is correct: There’s a lot of bad news going on and not a lot of good news, and all sorts of mostly depressing things to cartoon about. The problem is that the political cartoons don’t have much impact if you don’t pause once in awhile.
So here we are, and I’d remind you that taking a walk in the park doesn’t mean you don’t care.
I once showed my bad collegiate novel to a younger person whose response was that somehow she had thought my generation spent our college years protesting the Vietnam war and she was relieved — but upon reflection unsurprised — to see that we also worried about who was sleeping with whom and whether we were going to get to sleep with anybody. Which we certainly did.
And we all need a chuckle now and then, if only to add impact to the screaming.
This, too: Life is short.
And while you need to put in enough effort to keep food on the table and to have a table upon which to put food, time is the stuff of which life is made and you oughtn’t to waste it. To put a twist on the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, friends will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no friends.
Case in point. Though three out of four morons recommend writing an executive order rather than a press release.
Eddie’s not only right, but he’s pointing to a large clue as to how we’ve gotten to where we’re at. (Did you really think I wasn’t going to be political today?)
As noted here before, we used to be awash in Westerns, but after the Kennedy assassination, producers cut way back on the gunfights and violence. For awhile.
Now we’re awash in police dramas, and it’s not Adam-12 riding around helping people with minor problems. It’s much more of a Dirty Harry atmosphere, in which the world is full of subhuman violent predators being battled by furiously heroic cops, and there’s even a whole program devoted to subhuman violent sexual predators because sex sells.
Thing is, if you keep telling people that the world is full of scary, violent people, they will believe you. And if you tell them that the police are the only barrier between them and that scary, violent world, it’s not surprising that they are willing to believe the magical crime-solving abilities attributed to crime labs, and to put their trust in Dirty Harry cops who are often a little lax about procedure.
It’s called Mean World Syndrome and it’s a real thing. As Madge would say, “You’re soaking in it.”
Juxtaposition of the Game Shows
Heh. See how I snuck in some more politics?
Off The Mark is funny ’cause it’s true, though the gang at the dog park also know who carries and who doesn’t, and there’s a rush when one of the cookie-bearers arrives. But they’re very good at using those three-parts-per-trillion noses to discover who else is holding.
The segue to Sutton and Herbert being that it would be nice if more people had that kind of nose for figuring out who’s selling out and how to tell threats from jokes.
Sutton is less apocalyptic, calling out gutless losers, while Herbert notes some genuinely distressing developments, though, of course, when we go into the voting booth, there’s no difference between a gutless loser and a dedicated fascist if they’re filling in the same spots on the ballot.
I long for the days when you could annoy rude drivers without being afraid that they’d whip out a gun. As it is, I’m content that the dog realizes that I’m not yelling at her even though she’s the only other person in the car.
Also it’s nice that it’s winter, because you need to tone it down a little when the weather changes and you’ve got the windows down.
Frazz brought a smile with this one, because I remember being six years old when we moved from southeastern Pennsylvania to the northern tip of New York. The first snowfall hit and there was plenty of it, but it was powder and, as she notes, wouldn’t stick together to make snowmen or snowballs.
I wrote with some despair to an aunt that I’d landed in a place with cold weather and useless snow, though I learned fairly soon that we got plenty of genuinely good snow, and that, while that little Michigander says it melts away too soon, ours sure didn’t.
Years later, I got married in Denver on March 20 with sunshine, grass and crocuses in bloom. My older brother got married back home on May 1 and the pictures all show six-foot snowbanks in the background.
Joe Martin sparks a more recent memory, this one going back to a period between the time airlines served actual lunches and the time they went to peanuts and cookies.
They began handing out little assemble-your-own-sandwich kits, with Lilliputian-sized cold cuts and cheese and bread, plus mustard and mayo packets.
I suppose the argument was that, if they handed out completed sandwiches, the bread would get soggy, but I wasn’t born yesterday. The point was to keep the monkeys occupied for a little while so the flight attendants could get a break.
First Dog outlines a threat that has nothing to do with CSI or DEI or GOP but is actually real and dangerous and scary and unlikely to happen, but a whole lot likelier than you hitting the lottery.
The first asteroid is due in 2032 and if Trump is still our Fearless Leader, I’ll be out there with a pair of flashlights guiding it in.
However, as First Dog notes, it isn’t like to hit and if it does hit, it won’t wipe us out, but also there’s an excellent chance we’ll dither instead of taking action, which is how we’ll also handle the Big One, which will hit when I’m 232 years old and, according to Elon, still collecting Social Security.
At which point this will be our national anthem:
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