CSotD: While you were out winning a Nobel instead
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The Lockhorns sounds a predictable note this morning, but I chuckled.
The strip has been quite hip in recent months about technology and similar things, which I wouldn’t have expected from an old-school Bickersons sort of strip, but that makes me surprised Loretta doesn’t realize Leroy can click-click-click until he gets to the NFL Network and then sit back and wallow in pigskin trivia until it’s time for the Draft (April 25, 9 pm).
But, yes, the Super Bowl is over and those of us who believe in “all things in moderation” need to find something else to do during the remaining 60% of the year.
Juxtaposition of the Half Century or So
(Tank McNamara, mid-70s)
It did not go unnoticed by comics fans that one of the most memorable commercials last night was shall-we-say-an-homage to Tank McNamara, as a dinner for retired football players turned into chaos over a perceived fumble.
I don’t know the exact date of that strip, but Tank began in 1974 and the strip is in the first few pages of the 1978 collection.
Tank reverting to his NFL days over any dropped object was a running gag in the early years of the strip, a time when a good number of the Old Timers in the NFL commercial weren’t born yet, or were too young to read the funnies.
Still, a tip of the helmet to Bill Hinds and his late cartooning partner Jeff Millar, for creating a gag that still works more than 40 years later.
As for the game itself, a lot of people were disappointed because there was so little scoring. Because only the offense counts.
Calais Campbell, watching at home, summed up the reaction of a defensive end, and, for that matter, mine, too: There was some excellent football being played, just not a lot of scoring.
However, in 53 Super Bowls, only nine defensive players have been named MVP. Even if you like scoring, that’s not logical.
But it’s how things are.
And now I’m seeing people complain about the quality of the halftime show, too.
Geez, I hope the nachos were good.
And social media was full of people bragging about not being sports fans, bless their hearts.
This meme particularly amused me because I never understood all the hoo-ha over Downton Abbey.
I watched an episode or two, but I couldn’t get into it. Similarly, I’ve seen an episode or two of Game of Thrones and that’s not my thing, either.
But it’s a point of preference, not one of pride. And people talk about those shows, so of course I have some knowledge of them.
Pretending to be more ignorant than you really are seems like an odd point of pride, doesn’t it? A relatively intelligent person soaks up all sorts of things.
I don’t like modern dance, for instance, but I recognize the names Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp.
So someone pointed out that two-thirds of Americans did not watch the Super Bowl.
Well, how could they?
Between volunteering at the soup kitchen, translating Epictetus and attending Shakespeare performances, who has time?
Elsewhere in Comicsland
Nancy doesn’t seem like the mens sana in corpore sano type, but that doesn’t mean she’s not competitive, and the past couple of weeks have shown her in the midst of a robotics tournament.
Most people are competitive in one venue or another, and these robotics clubs are wildly popular in middle schools.
However, Nancy may be more competitive than average, and her caution about saying you tried your best reminds me of my grandfather, who was wonderfully mild in person but had a strong dislike of that phrase.
As he put it in a letter to his grandchildren:
Never admit to anyone, especially yourself, that ‘you did the best you could.’ In the first place it probably isn’t true, and secondly you are saying that your best is not good enough, you are admitting defeat. Many people feel that such a remark justifies them before the world. I claim that it merely proclaims incompetence.
Part of the appeal of Nancy is that she is one tough bird. That’s always been true, but Olivia Jaimes brings it out on a much more overt, and interesting, level.
Nancy is hardly the type to admit that her best isn’t just as good, and a bit better, than anyone else’s.
The battle of Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but the next war is being won in robotics club.
Meanwhile, I’ll be happy enough when Nancy and her robotics club comrades grow old enough to stop the madness Ted Rall depicts.
It’s been some time since competent security people admitted that there’s little advantage in fancy passwords with this many letters and that many numbers and that many punctuation marks, but it appears that the news has not trickled down to the people who design websites.
Or else they’re control freaks, which is likely.
If nothing else, I wish they’d program their security to recognize the regulars and quit logging us out and forcing us to remember the complicated, nonsensical passwords we were forced to come up with.
And the best schadenfreude treat I’ve had in weeks came in a news story with this self-explanatory lede:
Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX says it cannot repay most of $190 million in client holdings after its 30-year-old founder Gerald Cotten, the only person who knew the passwords to its “cold storage,” unexpectedly died in India in December 2018.
And it just gets better and better: The company was already having some assets frozen by regulators — and here you thought the benefit of pretend money was that it didn’t have regulators — when the owner went to India to open an orphanage (as one does) and died of complications of Crohn’s disease, which isn’t funny if it happened but it may not have, and “the government confirmed a Canadian had died in India, but could not offer more details due to privacy laws.”
There ya go. Privacy. It’ll get you every time.
Yes, I’ve shown this before. And now I’m showing it again.
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