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CSotD: City/Country, Young/Old

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Mike Peterson May 14, 2020 1 minute 5 comments

I didn’t understand GrubHub before the lockdown, since so many pizzerias and Chinese places deliver anyway and because I couldn’t see the advantage of paying some gig worker to do what it would take you so little effort to do yourself, which is get off your lazy ass and go get the food.

It didn’t help that Dominos is careful to tell you that, while there is an extra charge for delivery, none of it goes to the driver, so you should add a tip, which ratchets the price of a less-than-mediocre pizza up to the cost of a much better meal.

However, Joy of Tech is much more young, hip and urban-oriented than I am, and, besides, I’m more tolerant now, given that people in cities are genuinely locked down, while out here in the sticks, we just avoid unnecessary contact.

In fact, New Hampshire is opening up to outdoor seating for restaurants, and the distancing regulations are such that the city is blocking off part of a street as well as a parking lot so that two restaurants on the pedestrian mall can spread out, which I think is pretty cool.

It’s not the only way we work together: Our (Republican) governor holds regular news conferences in which he answers questions politely and thoroughly and introduces specialists to pick up on the science he knows is beyond him.

In case you’d forgotten that was possible.

I suppose if I were paying $2,700 a month for an apartment in Manhattan, I wouldn’t begrudge tipping $20 for a $14 pizza, but, more than that, if I lived in Manhattan, I wouldn’t be ordering pizza from Dominos.

Here’s a related …

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Alex)

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

I should probably be a lot more tolerant, as well, of parents who are locked up in apartments with their children while out here we can take the little ones to the woods to run around.

And we’ve only got little Anne’s memories of what it was like in the Secret Annex, while I’m guessing her folks and the Van Pels could have expanded on the inner tensions, but, still, they lasted a good deal longer than all the people today who are bitching and moaning about their children.

I’m trying to be sympathetic, in part because, as said, we’re not nearly so locked down as they are in major cities, and also because, when my kids were little, I was home with them except for brief post-maternity months when their mother was.

Not every career choice offers the option of simultaneously playing with your kids and working.

But I also come from a time when falling in love and having kids wasn’t so goddam intentional as it seems in these two cartoons.

Part of it is the economy, certainly: We could afford to have one person home, while daycare costs would have gobbled up any advantage of both of us working. (Which they still often do.)

But there’s also the issue of being vulnerable and allowing yourself to, literally, fall in love rather than negotiate your way in.

Well, whatever. Maybe I’m being too harsh and judgmental, but here’s a judgment I won’t back off from: Bitching about your children is tres uncool.

We’ve heard a lot of talk and seen a lot of cartoons about how the lockdown will bring about domestic violence, but I kind of wonder how Joan Crawford and the kids would be doing about now.

If you’re really having trouble coping, get help.

If you’re not, don’t disgrace yourself by publicly trashing your children.

Little pitchers have big ears and decent people aren’t impressed.

And while I’m up here in the pulpit

As noted before, there is “spin” and there are “goddam lies,” and Mike Luckovich puts his spin on Moscow Mitch’s goddam lie that Obama didn’t leave advice about dealing with pandemics.

By the way, Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, seven months before the elections that year, which means that, if anything happens to RBG, McConnell will block the president from appointing a new justice until after the elections six months from now.

Just kidding.

He’s not even pretending to be honest anymore, and it would be amusing if there were not an army of Deplorables out there eating up every word as if it were Holy Writ.

And, in case you thought Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus or McConnell’s blatant lack of respect for the Constitution were changing anything, the GOP just won two Congressional seats in special elections.

It’s all in how you look at it

(Lisa Benson)

(Tom Toles)

I was going to run some of the cartoons from before the pandemic, the ones in which fiscal conservatives attacked Trump’s massive tax cuts and his huge additions to the national debt, but I seem to have misplaced them.

I gather that, theoretically, massive tax cuts are good for business while putting spending money directly in the hands of individuals is bad.

Although, in practice, the only thing trickling down on the middle class is plutocratic urine.

But, since Deplorables insist on thinking of national budgets like family budgets, it’s worth observing once again that when you can’t afford to feed your children or take them to the doctor, you get a second job, i.e., increase your revenues.

You don’t just stop feeding your kids or deprive them of medical treatment.

The America that was once so “great” had substantial taxes on the wealthy and much less distance between the earnings of the workers and the accumulations of the oligarchs.

That’s not socialism. It’s history.

Plus this

(Gary Varvel)

(Bill Bramhall)

Okay, the Obama era may not have quite been as celestial as Bramhall puts it, but that’s spin.

Promoting “Obamagate,” however, without explaining what it is supposed to be, simply backing up Dear Leader’s “Oh, you know what it is!” blank insistence, or his nonsensical, counterfactual accusations, with no explanations or examples, is not simply “spin.”

And if you make your living by commentary, you have a moral obligation to be able to tell the one thing from the other.