CSotD: A Brief Humor Break
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Cartoonists have spoken about the fire hose issue, that the crises are coming at us faster than they can be drawn, and I’m not sure why the woman in Joe Heller‘s cartoon isn’t wearing gloves and carrying two rakes, but I’m certainly willing to step away and focus on fall for a bit.
It’s becoming very beautiful here and, on Saturday, I have to drive north for a luncheon in Potsdam, so I’m hoping the leaves will hold on for another week.
Like this fellow Roz Chast has memorialized, I’m a man for two seasons, though the climate is relatively moderate here in New Hampshire, assuming you don’t mind winter being winter.
What I do mind is that summers lately have been as oppressive as I remember them from my time in Northern Indiana, which is a major reason I chose to live in New England and not the Midwest.
In any case, having weathered (heh) the Kavanaugh hearings, a day of humor is called for, and we can ease into it with today’s Arctic Circle which is about some funny penguins and a polar bear who admits to being in the wrong hemisphere, only today’s is about somebody who never admits to anything.
Well, I said “ease in.”
I was listening to coverage of the new report on climate change and they said something about the millions of people who currently live within range of the rising oceans.
It occurred to me that, while there are people in Bangladesh already living in homes in which the water is routinely ankle deep, we’ll likely find the money to build some sea walls here in the US.
Without taxing the people who have the money, of course. We’ll just borrow it, as Brian Duffy suggests we did to help the farmers.
Barney & Clyde notes that we’ve stopped picking on the unfortunate minority who previously had to pretend to be honest and who now only have to pretend not to notice that the deficit is ballooning up faster than the sea level, which also isn’t.
So I was thinking that the people who don’t believe in climate change and are also opposed to admitting refugees are going to have to stop deluding themselves on at least one of those things fairly soon, because the ankle-deep Bangladeshis are, so far, an anomaly that their own government is working on, but they’ll be much more common fairly soon.
Meanwhile, Vietnam is trying to reconcile the fact that the Mekong Delta is becoming too brackish for growing rice with the fact that the rice harvest is one of the largest pieces of their economy, so it’s not just about whether the homes are underwater but whether national economies are.
And here’s a big part of the issue: Steve Breen does a very nice political cartoon depicting the problem, but, since his likely audience wouldn’t recognize the globe if it didn’t show North America front-and-center, it kind of looks as if we can blame Australia and New Zealand.
While they’ll sure get a lot of the global-warming refugees, they’re hardly the biggest contributors to the problem.
And Elon Musk has donated money to put filtered drinking fountains in Flint, Michigan, schools, which is a good thing that I don’t want to disparage, but, then again, it won’t help the kids when they go home and get a drink there, and Flint is hardly the only place with lousy drinking water and if the Elon Musks of this country were paying their fair share of taxes, we could fix that problem and some others, too.
And I like The Barn but it would also be nice if kids knew where their water comes from in the first place.
However, several generations of illustrators have drawn Jack & Jill by a well instead of drawing their water from a spring, as they would, and climbing a hill to where the spring emerges, as they also would, rather than capturing the water after it’s flowed down through god-knows-what to the bottom of the hill.
So I’m blaming children’s artists, not government/corporate shills, for spreading that bit of environmental ignorance.
Though they’re not the only ones to blame. I also read as a youngster that free-flowing, clear water was clean, a fact that assumes beavers are incapable of building dams upstream.
This is being an error the truth of which you learn much faster than you would about lead content or climate change.
In fact, it occurs to me that all these folks who talk about “draining the swamp” might work a little faster on the project if they were drinking from the swamp like the rest of us.
That’s your free daily metaphor, offered in a semi-serious apology for my not getting away from politics after all.
And speaking of people who have generally avoided politics, Mark Streeter notes fellow-Tennessean Taylor Swift’s recent anti-endorsement of Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn, who has an eight-point lead at the moment.
There are several notable points here, but let’s start with what Swift actually said, since the rightwingers are already lying about that, as well as about the age of her fan base, which may indeed have started out as 10-year-olds but that was 14 years ago, so, come on, man, do the math.
And she has 112,000,000 followers on Instagram, which is where the young folks gather these days, and where she also posted her endorsement.
Also, BTW, if you hadn’t noticed, young people are registering to vote.
Swift had previously remained apolitical, and had learned that speaking up — even about an assault that happened on-camera in front of a crowd and was immediately reported — would get her mocked and dismissed simply because she’s a tiny blonde pop singer/songwriter. (Though she by-Gawd won!)
Her habitual, intentional silence — coupled with that fair-skinned blondeness — resulted in her being unwillingly adopted as an icon by young white-supremacist incels who surely must be rethinking their fantasies now.
And just when they were getting over the revelation that Willie Nelson isn’t a rightwinger either.
Poor little laddies.
(Tim Eagan)
Those oldies but goodies remind me of you …
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