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CSotD: Friday Funnies

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Mike Peterson August 23, 2019 1 minute 2 comments

We still haven’t actually seen Eugene the Jeep in this week’s 1936 Thimble Theater, but there’s already a villain seeking to kidnap — jeepnap? — the little fellow.

Wikipedia (mostly) disputes the story that Eugene inspired WWII GIs to refer to their small, go-anywhere vehicles as “Jeeps” but doesn’t explain why, or provide examples of how, according to them, the term had earlier been applied to raw recruits.

To which I echo what Olive said to the Admiral.

Switching from Ancient to Modern, kudos to Will Henry for not hitting the reset button on Wallace the Brave‘s broken arm. We’re apparently going to have some fun with the concept for awhile, and so far so good.

Wallace-in-a-cast, paired with Spud, is a wonderful character swap, since Spud would probably love to have such a solid excuse to keep from doing all the scary things Wallace is itching — no pun intended — to do.

Though, of course, Spud would never dare to do anything that would result in his having his arm in a cast, so there ya go.

But I do admire his “farmer’s tan.”

I got a laff out of this Lockhorns, even though the terms aren’t the same, in that a bouncing check would have let them scoot from the restaurant undetected.

But cards do fail to go through from time to time, sometimes for lack of funds, which I would assume is the case for the always-on-the-edge-of-ruin Lockhorns.

However, they’ll also be declined if there’s some invisible schmutz on your card, and those chips that were going to improve things so much seem just as slow as swipe-cards and perhaps even more prone to random rejection.

It does seems silly that we have these sophisticated, hi-tech, semi-magical 21st Century ways of transferring money and, when it fails, the solution is to wipe the card on your shirt and try again.

Irrelevant but interesting: A regional convenience store chain offers 10 cents off a gallon if you use a card they issue that takes the money directly from your account instead of routing through VISA or Mastercard.

This saves them the handling charges, but a friend who owns a rival chain tells me 10 cents is too generous and they’re cutting their gas profits by about three cents per gallon, but counting on you to come inside and buy coffee, donuts, whatever.

Which I used to do, back in the days before pay-at-the-pump. Another regional chain resisted pay-at-the-pump for just that reason, until they realized they were losing gas sales entirely.

Gotta keep on your toes these days if you want to stay in business.

Now where the hell were we?

My initial reaction to this Dogs of C Kennel was to laugh and wonder if the Dutch ever complained about what windmills did to their skylines?

Then I realized they wouldn’t, because it was their local grain going to that specific mill for their particular use.

It’s a different thing when you’ve got those behemoths whirling on your local hills, generating power for faceless strangers 500 miles away.

Says the guy whose friends and neighbors just killed a giant power project that would have started in Canada and delivered power to folks south of us and wouldn’t have done a damn thing for anyone here.

I don’t think there’s a way to make the grid work on a purely local basis, but this here corporate gigantism business is getting out of hand.

Pooey to them from us.

And pooey to me from me, as Carpe Diem recreates a scene from my early days as a youth soccer coach.

No, it wasn’t healthy, but, fortunately, our kids’ rec league instituted mandatory coach training just about the time I was beginning to figure things out for myself, and the result was a lot less Napoleonic sideline nonsense.

We were taught to — ordered to — prepare the kids with skills training and then, at game time, shut up and let them play.

Apparently it stuck: I was impressed at my grandkids’ games to see how mellow things have become, even though referees still don’t call every trip or off-sides play.

The kids are still kids, but the adults appear to have grown up.

(If the sidelines at your kids’ games aren’t like that, you need to talk to somebody.)

Coaching my boys in soccer was the second-best thing I ever did. Putting them to bed every night was the best.

But as Jeff Stahler notes in this Moderately Confused, the ritual did get out of hand.

There were songs and comedy bits and storytelling and each one had to be done just so, though the Bert and Ernie puppets were permitted not only to ad lib the story of the Three Little Pigs each night but were even allowed to sometimes substitute the Tinder Box.

The rest was locked in and god help you if you departed from the script.

I’m not sure the amount of giggling that ensued was helpful in the goal of inducing sleep, but the final section was reading and that pretty much did the job.

(Helpful Hint: The best book ever for nighttime reading is “Through the Looking Glass,” because the characters change with each chapter, and, if you cheat by watching the 1933 classic movie, it’s easy to remember their voices when you get to the banquet at the end — Cary Grant is the Mock Turtle, WC Fields is Humpty Dumpty and so forth.)

Though if you plan to reach back into your childhood for reading material, you’d better check it out first.

Sheldon may have an affectionate, if cynically realistic, take on PL Travers, but the sugary Mary Poppins of that movie, as he notes, is far from the weird, strict, semi-abusive, openly racist woman in the books.

We also halted Dr. Doolittle after Prince Bumpo begged him to turn him white so he’d be good-looking. I don’t remember Eddie Murphy having that conversation with anyone.

Stick with Narnia. It jumps the shark about five books in, but the kids won’t notice.