Comic Strip of the Day: Friday Funnies
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Wiley Miller is in the midst of an impressive run of news/deadline synchronicity, with this Non Sequitur appearing just as Laura Ingraham announces on national television that she is not the unwitting victim of some subconscious prejudice but is, in fact, a fully intentional white supremacist who wishes to have our government enact blatantly racist policies to save us from the mud people.
However, these are the apolitical Friday Funnies, so let’s just pretend we’re laughing at the overall humor of the piece and not at the dark commentary about our spiraling-into-the-ground nation and the impending death of the American dream.
Next slide, please.
This Pros and Cons is better, because you have to really be following the news closely to make some connection between it and the judge in the Manafort trial, who admitted the other day that he had improperly accused the government of shenanigans.
Ellis even acknowledged that one of his prior remarks was out of line, telling the jury early Thursday that he “may well have been wrong” the day before when he slammed the Mueller team for allowing an expert witness from the IRS to remain in the courtroom while other witnesses were testifying.
The problem being that it’s hard — nearly impossible — for the prosecution to move for a new trial if the judge engages in shenanigans that lead to an improper “not guilty” verdict, and, even if they could, it would push the whole process forward beyond the midterm elections.
“This robe doesn’t make me anything other than human,” Ellis told the court on Thursday morning after instructing the jury to forget what he had said to the Mueller team about the IRS witness. “You’ve got to put that aside.”
Well, there. The bell has been officially unrung.
Again, however, that’s politics and we don’t do politics on Friday.
The readers will ignore the previous cartoon.
However, as long as I’m giving instructions, I will advise you to go outside and look up tonight and throughout the weekend, since the Perseids are predicted to be the best in several years.
Arlo is correct that those planets are bright and visible and, in fact, I’m kind of surprised that we haven’t seen a lot of nonsense on Facebook about the proximity of Mars to the Earth, since every time it happens we get told it has never happened before and won’t again for ever so long, usually in terms of how it coincides with some Chinese lucky numbers or suchlike.
Dagnabbit, back in the days of the Harmonica Virgins, we had to spread misinformation mostly in analog form.
Which we did quite well, thank you.
And speaking of the Good Old Days, Sunday’s Tank McNamara reminded me of them, and specifically of the days when we had wooden rackets that you had to keep in a press so they wouldn’t warp.
They weren’t all masterpieces on the level of a Stradivarius (and they were never actually strung with the intestines of cats), but I remember when metal rackets came along and it was similar to when metal baseball bats began replacing ash and hickory.
We felt there was something not okay about abandoning the old form, and we groused about the reportedly faster action of the metal rackets.
Perhaps if they’d made a “plink” instead of the nearly-identical “pock” we’d still be arguing over them, but, in any case, while there were a lot of Sears Roebuck wooden rackets in the hands of little kids at summer camp — it was cheaper to replace them than to restring them — our tennis counselor had a much more artisanal weapon, given that he was on the tennis team at a private college.
The relevant memory here being that he also had a mercurial temper and, in his bouts against other counselors, a way of registering anger by throwing his racket against the chain link fence, which was loose enough to absorb the impact and give a satisfying “ching!” noise.
Until the day he missed a shot, hurled his Stradivarius and it happened to hit the fence at a spot where there was a metal pole.
Even the counselors occasionally learned lessons at Camp Lord o’ the Flies.
Juxtaposition of the Day
(Bizarro)
I was struck by the matter-of-fact way Baby Blues used the half-shaved hairdo to indicate a young person.
There’s probably a term for the style, but I don’t know what it is and I don’t have a problem with it, though it does strike me as a little odd that Jell-O dye jobs have gone from middle school up to relatively adult women.
Chaque un a son gout, and my grandkids don’t seem to have problems with old pictures of me in bell bottom jeans sporting a whole lot more hair than I have now.
But I thought it was interesting that Rick Kirkman simply used her hairstyle as a neutral indicator that high school girls work at the pool.
Wayno, by contrast, makes extremity the point of his panel, and, first of all, I thought it took some cojones to include the handlebar mustache, considering his boss/partner in the comic is famous for one.
And I might have swapped the bubblepipe for a vaping pen, but, then again, it wouldn’t be as obvious that he was vaping and therefore was, how you say …
Thing is, a lot of us go through a period in life when we want to stand out, and I’ll admit to a prejudice in my belief that an adolescent may prefer “They’re staring at my bright pink hair!” over “They glanced at me! Omigod, I’m a weird person nobody will every accept!”
But Jell-O dye jobs fade and hair grows out (or, in my case, falls out) and it’s not hard to go back to normal when you become an adult.
Unless you’ve covered yourself in ink and stretched your earlobes to extreme dimensions.
However, I suppose that’s simply what old folks will look like one day.
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