CSotD: Friday Funnies, laughing in the rain

Friday Funnies come just in time this week, because the firehose of serious stuff is making a mockery of that saying, “Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.”

The long-form graphic commentators, plus the every-other-Wednesday part-time cartoonists, are just catching up on the college admissions scandal while the daily reactors are showing Trump doing nasty things to a tombstone or else celebrating a gun-control reform which New Zealand has announced but not yet actually imposed and now it looks like Mueller might file his report which, by the way, is not the same as letting us see it.

All of which makes it an excellent time to stop the political commentary momentarily and hope maybe things sort themselves out over the weekend, which even in normal times they don’t quite, but why abandon hope?

This Zits got a good laff because, no, I don’t remember birthdays.

We used to have a good system to help me out: My older son and his mother shared one birthday and younger son and I shared another, which made it easier to remember and, I think understandably, damned hard to miss younger son’s.

But then the kids began wedding and procreating and the numbers just overwhelmed me.

Ironically, the one date I do remember each year is our anniversary, which was two days ago, or would have been if we hadn’t split in 1984, which puts it right up there with remembering my high school locker combination and my nine-digit student ID number from college.

Which I guess is tied into the fact that I kick butt at Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy but got lousy grades in school: I only remember things that don’t matter.

Though it could be worse, because I can see dog poop. In today’s Non Sequitur, Wiley Miller takes on the people who can’t.

At least the fellow has his dog on a for-real six-foot leash instead of one of those dog-casting reels that lets them wander up into the flower bed while the owner feigns ignorance.

Last I knew, Wiley had a fleet of Jack Russells, which are so small that finding their poops in your yard is like noticing what you think (hope) at first are caraway seeds on the kitchen counter, while my ridgeback lays down things that are a bit larger than Wiley’s dogs theirownselves.

The strip is particularly well timed because the snow is just beginning to fade away up here and so at the park we’ve finding the evidence of how many people think poop-scooping is a summer sport.

It is indeed just-spring when the world is mud-luscious and as much as I love Labrador retrievers, this Dog Eat Doug falsely focuses on paws when, in fact, Sophie would have been out wallowing up to her neck in all that puddle-wonderfulness.

By contrast, Mud Season is a great time to have a ridgeback, because they don’t like getting wet and so here is 95-pounds of bold lion-hunter delicately picking his way across a muddy, puddly driveway looking for high points in order to keep his little paddies dry.

No kidding: When we get home, he will leap 6 feet from the car to the porch to avoid the muddy driveway.

Hey, there’s no mud on the savanna. I’ve known ridgebacks to go more than 24 hours without a potty break because it was raining.

Now, in the interest of equal time for other pets, here’s a classic Arlo & Janis from 2002.

Carpe Diem raises an issue that is funny in a comic but actually has been seriously discussed by theologians, who concluded that, when you get to heaven, you get your appendix back, plus any other parts you may have lost in the course of life, as well as any which they had failed to issue upon birth.

I’ve never heard, however, that these Church Fathers worked out when you get the stuff back, which is to say, do you have to clear customs first or is everything back in place when you show up at the Port of Entry?

And they should be back in place. It would suck if they just handed you a plastic bag and expected you to do the re-assembly on your own.

They’d have to have those metal benches you see just past the scanners at the airport where people put their belts and shoes back on, only we’d all be turning our gall bladders and spleens around in our hands trying to figure out what goes where.

After which it’s onto the Rainbow Bridge, where your late doggy awaits a joyful reunion with you.

Which for me means that, when I get to heaven, I’ll find Buttons and Taylor and Szabo and Ziggy and Josh and O’Malley and Nellie and Ziwa and Destry and Vaska waiting for me, and I loved them all, but, to be honest, if there aren’t some cherubim to do all that scooping, I think I’d rather go to hell.

With or without my spare parts.

Spleens, appendices and dog poop may not be the only things you’d just as soon leave behind when you get to your Just Reward, and last Sunday’s Reply All is a reminder that there’s a reason we don’t have so many capers after 30.

Speaking of having the ability to ignore piles of poop.

You do, or at least you should, reach a point where you look back at those madcap capers and say, “We sure had fun!” followed by “What the hell were we thinking?”

Or, as one of my ex-girlfriends observed 20 years later, “We could have died,” though I think one should have grown enough in perspective that the physical danger part would be secondary to the selfish-asshole part.

But, yes, okay: I’m glad such things didn’t occur to me then, and I kind of miss being so thoughtless and irresponsible.