CSotD: Friday Funnies on a Saturday

The conversations in Reply All nearly always demonstrate the comic potential for combining reality with a wink, and, while Lizzie simply can’t help revealing her true feelings, she seems such a real person that it works.

A character who is a particular “type” generally becomes tedious, and there are any number of strips with a grumpy central animal character proving how predictable and unfunny and backed-into-a-corner that can become.

Lizzie is self-centered, but she’s also insightful and, while that is often indirect and unintentional, it’s also occasionally front-and-center as it is today: She proposes a childish, clichéd solution, then admits that she isn’t even fooling herself.

 

Wiley is more outwardly directed with his cynicism, but this Non Sequitur really strikes blood at the moment, particularly if you watch any daytime TV.

A lot of mainstream advertising has pulled back at least until they could put together their “We’re All In This Together!” ads.

Some of those seem genuine, like Liberty Mutual’s pledging to refund some premium money to customers, since they can’t get their cars out of the garage to wreck them anyway. And Rocket Mortgage is encouraging its borrowers to get in touch if they’re having problems with cash flow.

Others seem more self-interested, like auto companies offering deferred payment plans or Dominos encouraging you to order on-line, pay up front and have the pizza left on your porch.

Their boast that, from the time their pizzas come out of the oven they are never hand-touched hardly impresses me: I’ve worked pizza and we didn’t just reach into the oven and pull out the pizzas by hand, even back in the Dark Ages.

The drop in legitimate advertising has really brought forward the ambulance chasers, drug dealers and — more or less as depicted in Wiley’s cartoon — the people eager to help you get back on your feet by absconding with your structured settlement, which you were given because you would have pissed away a lump sum.

Their entire marketing plan being your gullibility.

BTW, I not only haven’t seen a lot of cruise line ads lately, but “A Place For Mom” seems to be keeping their heads down, too.

Anyway, maybe it’s only my experience as a business writer, but about two-thirds of the ads make my Spidey senses tingle and the other third is filled by Sarah McLachlan’s despicable ASPCA charity porn.

(Which would be much more welcome if she’d take a hint from St. Jude and show the happy results of charitable support instead of exploiting the ghastly pictures of need.)

So here’s my New Reality: As I retire from my day job, I’ve got time to watch daytime TV, but I haven’t got the stomach for it.

Shoot me if that changes.

 

Also this

I went to the hospital yesterday for my annual “Your Cancer Is Still Gone” checkup, which, BTW, it is. One more next year and I can close that chapter, five years being the ticket.

Everyone there was masked, which didn’t surprise me in the least, since I’ve got health-care workers in the family. And nobody there was panicked, which also didn’t surprise me, for the same reason.

But, yeah, I’ve seen the guy in this Candorville, though mostly I haven’t, since they’re hiding under their beds.

Which is better than the equally foolish nitwits at the other end of the imbecilic scale who refuse to take any precautions at all.

Both ends are supremely proud of themselves, but at least the paranoids will still be alive when things settle down, and won’t have killed their grandparents.

I saw some guy in the park the other evening. There was a light breeze down the river and no humans but the two of us within a quarter mile, but — 50 yards from me — he was wearing his mask.

Then on the way home, I stopped at the grocery store and saw two unrelated people heading down a one-way aisle the wrong direction, but it was okay because they were both pushing their carts handle-end first, as if it were the direction of the cart which was the qualifying factor in all this.

If nothing else, this pandemic is revealing our national IQ.

Which reminds me …

 

I think Dave Whamond would have done better to make this Reality Check a history exam and have him ask her for some semi-obscure date.

IIRC, even on our NYS Regents exams, all the sines and cosines were in charts in the back of the exam book. It was after you looked them up that all the cipherin’ and the gozintas began.

Mind you, I’m not your best resource on math: I had to repeat it in college and still ended up getting a D from a professor nicknamed “99 Klein.”

 

Though I’d rather be an eedjit in math than be led down the yellow brick road seen in this Bliss.

Back in my college days, we used to joke that our kids were going to get haircuts, major in business and take up conservative doctrine, just to piss us off.

And then Michael J. Fox turned our joke into a popular TV show.

And then the little bastards did it for real.

A case of farce being repeated as tragedy.

 

Graphic History Lessons

Mike Lynch offers a collection of excellent cartoons from Puck Magazine, but this isn’t one of them.

This is a JS Pughe double-truck also from Puck, which I pulled a couple of years ago but didn’t use in a kids’ series about the 1903 trip Roosevelt and John Burroughs took to Yellowstone, which set the stage for the conservation movement.

This particular piece was two years later, but TR was still sorting out his love of hunting with his newfound understanding of balance of nature.

You can go look at Mike’s collection and probably still get a few things done this weekend, but for god’s sake don’t click on what I found when I was looking for information about Pughe.

 

And, finally

Yes, Betty and Bub, we’re all ready for something new, even if we still like the old.