CSotD: Sailing to meet the sun

And diamonds, Janis. Lots of diamonds.

Which, as noted here before, are pretty worthless except that people think they aren’t.

And the sort of person who thinks “chocolate diamonds” are a thing is the type who will be impressed when she gets one as a gift from a guy who won’t turn off the TV on weekends.

I’m not sure which is more annoying: The guy who watches every possible sports program as an alternative to spending time with the family, or the woman who complains without making the effort to distinguish between games that matter and games that don’t.

Meanwhile, as people complain about how partisan our politics have become, our home life has begun to divide us into man caves and she sheds.

I’d never heard of a “She Shed” until one of them caught fire in a State Farm commercial.

But I got a shock of recognition when I saw a Buffalo Wild Wings commercial that said “Your ‘Man Cave’ is a lie. It’s not a masculine refuge. It’s a basement in your wife’s house.”

I know they’re just trying to sell beer and wings, but it’s okay to use truth as a selling point.

And, anyway, it’s more honest than exchanging industrial-grade diamonds for the right to remain disconnected.

It’s pointless to try to analyze mating rituals. The male frigate bird has a red pouch which he inflates to attract females, and, strange and inerotic as it appears to us, it obviously works for them.

Remember that the next time you see a couple and can’t understand how they got together or why they stay married, isolated in their she sheds and man caves.

Don’t try to analyze them.

Just shrug and say “Frigate.”

 

Speaking of things I don’t get

I try to keep up with politics and I think I do a decent job of it, but I don’t feel qualified to talk much about Brexit and Boris Johnson.

Which means I also don’t know which American commentary to pass along, but I suspect that Seamus Jennings, working for the London-based Independent, has a viewpoint to be respected.

Closing down Parliament in order to stifle debate seems kind of transparently not such a good thing. As far as I can tell from this distance.

And even if Jennings and I are both wrong, it brings us to this

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Paul Fell)

(Tim Eagan)

If you’ve never read the 2017 Irish Times interview with Dan “Tom Tomorrow” Perkins, there’s no time like the present. In it, he set the now-common metaphor that Trump offers too much and that, for cartoonists, it’s like trying to drink from a fire hose.

It’s a worthwhile read. Paul Fell illustrates the issue, but Tim Eagan admits he’s simply had enough and has signed off with this essay and a reprint of a 2009 cartoon which expresses his feelings.

It’s one of those situations where I’m sorry to see him put down his pen, but, on the other hand, I can hardly blame him.

Maybe he and Andrew Luck should go down to Buffalo Wild Wings, have a couple of beers and watch other people destroy themselves.

 

More assigned reading

Christopher Weyant offers this cartoon. For more on the topic of the hilarious standup genius of Donald Trump, here’s Dana Milbank (apologies if you run into a paywall).

Short version: T’ain’t funny, McGee.

But here’s an amusing thought, as Hurricane Dorian closes in on Florida.

Okay, two amusing thoughts, counting Jimmy Margulies’s joke about the eternal snakeoil salesman who has no capacity for empathy but never misses a chance to line his pockets.

I have friends and relatives in Florida and empathy for what is likely to happen there in the next few days. And, by the way, the slower the hurricane moves, the more power it’s building up.

Still, if it could hit Mar-A-Lago and somehow skip over the rest of the state, that would be fine with me.

I just want to see how Pat Robertson and the rest of that blasphemous crew spin the theology of a direct hit on Dear Leader’s bunker.

 

Update #1

No, she isn’t.

 

Update #2

Here he is.

 

Fishy Business

Meanwhile, Edison Lee picks up on something both annoying and depressing.

I’m so old (cue audience response) … I’m so old that I remember when a Fishwich was a pretty good sandwich because there was a pretty good slice of fish in a thin, crispy coating.

And fish sticks were also largely composed of fish, rather than being fried breadcrumbs with fish flavoring.

 

I lived next door to a Howard Johnson’s, back when there were such places, and they had all-you-can-eat fish fries on Wednesdays, which made me marvel that there could be that many fish in the ocean.

Apparently, there weren’t, but I don’t think that’s why companies have eliminated about 60% of the fish from their products, and I might feel better about depleting the fisheries if we weren’t being cheated at our end as well.

Okay, no, I wouldn’t.

I saw someone post a shot of the swordfish steak they were having for dinner the other day, and I wondered how deep underground they lived that they thought eating swordfish was something you told other people you were doing.

“Hey! Check out all the plastic bags I got!”

There is such a thing as sustainable swordfish, but, even then, they are getting smaller because it’s a fish that matures slowly and we’ve eaten the big ones.

And, as that chart notes, even the smaller ones should be caught on handlines, not scooped up by factory ships.

Fishermen are like farmers: The ones you think of, the hard-working people whose families have been doing it for generations, are a disappearing breed, being pushed out by factory farms and factory fishing ships that know neither the land nor the water and are there purely to profit.

I’ve been reluctant to post music here since YouTube became so relentless in attaching overlong, unskippable ads to everything.

But check out this Maritime heartbreaker from Lennie Gallant before you order that next fish-flavored breadcrumb sandwich: