Posting early because I’ve got a 6 am flight at an airport 90 minutes away and that may be the funniest thing you see all day, but if you have a more sensible way to get to Columbus this weekend, please join me at AAEC/CXC.
Onward, summing up a week where Homer was nodding all over the place.
F’rinstance, I suppose Allspice could be conceited, but the fellow in this Reality Check has got no reason to be. People think allspice is a blend of your basic pumpkin spice stuff — cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg — but it’s actually just a single spice that, pre-grinding, looks like peppercorns.
The joke still works, because he’s sort of a superstar in his being able to combine all that flavor, but the “spice girls” are really a bunch of herbs and that joke would work a lot better in countries where the “h” is pronounced, and among people with good memories for outdated slang.
But I have no idea how the comedy firm of Weingarten, Weingarten & Clark, LLC, got the idea that maple syrup is an autumn thing.
They’d have been okay with just pancakes and syrup, because as the weather gets nippy, that’s a good breakfast, but they’re about seven months late for “fresh” syrup, because you can tap the trees when the sap is rising but I don’t think you can grab it on the way back down.
Getting fresh with Scarlett Johansson being perhaps an equally practical goal.
Real Life Adventures, however, brought me up short, made me do a little Googling and a little math, and, by yompin’ yiminy, they’re right: If that little girl is seven, and her mom was seven when “Rambo: First Blood” came out, then Mom is currently 44, a little long in the tooth for the role, but a lot of people put childbirth off longer these days than we did.
I like cartoons that make you pause like that, and the fact that they’re right is a bonus because it suggests to me that they did a little figgering themselves — you don’t just throw Grandma and Rambo out in the same sentence without thinking it through.
BTW, I’ve noticed that advertisers seem to have figured out that “just like Grandma used to make” doesn’t fly anymore, though if Grandma was a child of the Sixties, she may be a better cook than her own mother, who lived in that post-war era when everything that wasn’t frozen came out of a can.
And not just Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, but exotic, ethnic dishes as well. And don’t miss that list of other fine canned foods in the Derby line. I think they were trying to kill us.
At least the peanut butter didn’t stick to the roof of your mouth, which mystifies me because I’m pretty sure we ate Peter Pan and I’m pretty sure it did.
Also pretty sure those tamales were probably not just the way Abuela used to make them.
But while we’re talking generations here, it’s been awhile since I’ve heard anyone talk about goiters, and I was kind of surprised to see Lola troubled by one.
In fact, the only other case of a goiter I’d heard about was my grandfather, who had one, and, when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War, the doctor asked him if he was from the Upper Peninsula, which he was.
The doctor said he saw goiters in recruits from up there because they didn’t have sufficient iodine in their diets.
The cause was a lack of fresh greens, the preventive, apparently, was iodized salt. In fact, this Wikipedia piece not only specifies Michigan but says that, once people started using it, their IQs increased markedly.
Too late for my grandfather, who already had a degree in metallurgical engineering, but at least he didn’t have to worry about post-war goiters.
Meanwhile, I don’t know just how old the Lockhorns are supposed to be, but — having both interviewed and met her socially — I could make a pretty good guess about Bunny Hoest’s age and she is one very hip old lady.
Relevant to this comic, I’ve noticed that, while Loretta still bangs the car into the garage door regularly and I think I’ve seen them fussing over checkbooks, gags like this come up with what I will call startling frequency, because each time one of them appears, I do a similar “wait a minute” as to the Grambo joke, except without all the math.
I simply sit there wondering how on earth Loretta and Leroy became so with-it, given that the couples in most comparable strips think it’s some great social breakthrough for the wife to get a job.
And I think you could program Alexa to do that, though you’d have to really be determined, which I think Loretta just might be.
Then there’s Frazz, which frequently stops me in my tracks, but I’ve learned that it’s pointless to fact-check either him or the kids because they’re invariably right.
But then I looked the guy up anyway and the best part is that he lived to be 92, which is pretty amazing because, if those canned tamales didn’t kill you, Tang and Pop Rocks probably would.
Though I suppose if you know what’s in that stuff, it might make you less eager to put it in your own body.
Anyway, Frazz is always fun, but it has also always been highly educational.
Come see about me (See about me, baby!)
If you are anywhere around Columbus this weekend, there will be a passle of editorial cartoonists hanging around, as well as a lot of young cartoonists at the CXC gathering and some other random folks.
Specifically, if you’re at the Library on Saturday at 3:30, you can watch me moderate a panel on editorial cartooning in the age of Trump, with
Nick Anderson
Patrick Chappatte, and
Nancy Ohanian
My mother was a Yooper also, and had goiter surgery as an adult, Another area with iodine deficiency is Southeastern Bavaria. I knew one old lady (old to me then, but probably just in her 60s) with a goiter the size of an orange. In fact, before iodized salt goiter was so prevalent there that it had become a beauty mark. At the same time there were women who wished to hide the swelling with jewelry.
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O139850/necklace-unknown/
Geezer Alert : The “bitter herbs” are Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme – which some of us who remember Simon and Garfunkel may recognize as part of one of their songs.
A doctor explained to me that the areas around the Great Lakes are particularly short of iodine in the soil – glaciation, I think.
My Mom actually served tamales from a jar for supper one night. The cornhusk wrappings were real corn husks , as I recall. And none of us died. (Well, not THEN)
The Limelighters had a song about “Vicki Dugan ” that included the word callypigian. If Caulfield puts that on his form, he better hope Mrs. Olsen wasn’t a Limelighters fan when she was in college.
People were so homogenized back in that era that they wanted “real American tamales”?
My introduction to real Mexican food was gradual, starting with deep-fried frozen burritos (which are actually chimichangas) at Air Force base snack bars, and then living in New Mexico and California.
Happily, today you can get pretty decent Mexican food almost anywhere in the U.S. (except where I am currently living).
Derby tamales were wrapped, as the ad says, in “pure vegetable parchment.” Or, as we might say, in “paper.”
The cornmeal did give it more texture than canned ravioli, but I’m not sure how distinguishable they were beyond that.