CSotD: Monday Monday

There are several editorial cartoons about the US women’s World Cup win; I like Mo because it’s joyful and then comes back to The Point.

It’s important to point out that the women, for the most part at least, recognize that they can’t get the same number of dollars as the men because they don’t yet create the same revenues.

But that’s not really what “equal pay” means and they certainly deserve an equal level of pay, which would be based on the interest, ticket sales, TV revenues, jersey sales, etc.

I love watching World Cup, but FIFA remains something of a sewer, so there’s a level of guilt involved.

OTOH, they did drag Sepp Blatter from the top post and ban him for six years, which shows some awareness. They also moved the 2022 games in Qatar from summer to winter in order to avoid heat stroke, which was apparently a compromise because giving back the bribes was problematic.

By comparison, I can’t watch the Olympics at all anymore because of all the behind-the-scenes hijinx, but examining FIFA and the Olympics to see which one is less despicable is like smelling the things you pull out of the back of the refrigerator.

Glad the girls won. Hope they get a better cut in the future.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day #1

(Retail)

(Joy of Tech)

The notion of objective criticism takes a double hit today, and I’m hoping the Retail strip is the start of a series, while I won’t spoil Joy of Tech by reprinting the whole thing — go have a look at the rest because you’ll get a bonus contextual laff at the end.

They brought in the self-criticism aspect of annual performances at one of my jobs and the temptation to be a wiseass was ever present, in large part because it was a one-size-fits-all questionnaire in a business with an enormous diversity of jobs.

One of the questions was what I had done to improve workplace safety, and, although I had a desk job, I still had to have an answer or they would bounce the form back. One year we had moved a carton of paperwork closer to the wall to avoid a tripping hazard, but the next year I had nothing. I put down that I always checked to be sure my shoelaces were tied.

My boss signed off on it and I got my 3% raise and the world somehow continued to turn on its axis.

Joy of Tech brings up a different, but familiar, point, because for several years I wrote for a real estate magazine that needed to maintain credibility with Realtors but was also dependent on the support of the builders we wrote about, so I really did use the code words necessary in writing previews of the various developments around town.

“Cozy” meant you couldn’t fit a full-sized couch in the livingroom and “unique” meant that you’d better come have a look at this place before you show up with buyers in tow, etc etc.

If I’d been writing for the general public, I’d have felt guilty about it, but the Realtors understood the code and we all got along.

 

Different kind of joy of tech

I laughed at today’s Pickles because, while I know she’s got it wrong, I’m completely puzzled by waving and poking at all that stuff.

I guess the main thing is that, if I were all that social in the first place, I’d be out on the street waving at people and poking them and whatever, instead of sitting at my computer, which is pretty anti-social.

I ran one of those high school quiz bowl leagues for about six years, and no school can possibly win without out least one and preferably a couple of Aspergers kids, so I do know how to socialize with people who cannot socialize, but, even then, the sample is spoiled by the fact that they’ve joined the team.

As one of them told me later (after he’d led his team to the nationals, BTW), it would be nice to have a kind of club for Aspies where they could get together, except that they wouldn’t.

However, since most of these kids were on their teams for three or four years, I got to watch them gradually gain more and more social skills, until, by senior year, most of them were at least comfortable if not entirely adept.

Social media having the opposite effect, since after three or four years on-line, you run into an election and any improvements in social skills go right out the window.

 

Pet Department

You can thank Mark Parisi for a joke that’s gonna follow you around for awhile. I can’t even imagine wearing contact lenses, so perhaps you can imagine the horror this image gives me.

Though it’s not like I’m comfortable with having my cornea carved up with a laser to begin with.

Sure, toss in a cat. What the hell, make it a party.

 

Meanwhile, Lola offers this, but I’m pretty sure my dog would find a laser interesting, and I know that my son’s dog is as nuts over them as any cat, the difference being that he’s a bull mastiff and tilts the scales (and everything else) at about 130 pounds.

Making his pursuit of the little red dot funny for about eight seconds. Perhaps four, depending on where you were standing when it started.

 

Bizarro brings up a conundrum for the middle-aged, which is that, if you’re going to get a parrot, you need to think of it while you’re still young, because, as Polly says here, she’s apt to live about 80 to 100 years.

Which is how people end up with second-hand parrots that used to belong to pirates or other hard-cussin’ folks.

Speaking of which, here’s why you don’t want an African Gray: They are so adept at mimicry that not only will they pick up on oft-repeated profanity, but they’ll repeat it in the voice of whoever they learned it from.

At least Bebe didn’t mimic Gunther’s voice: