CSotD: Friday Funnies … Recalculating …

I will confess to feeling much like the fellow in Brewster Rockit, and I say “confess” because I feel kind of guilty over being in a state that ranks 42nd in per capita Covid cases, with most of those seeming to be in the southeast corner, or, as one might call it, “suburban Boston.”

And, while I do more than sit and watch TV all day, I live alone and have worked at home for the past decade. I’m pretty safe.

I have been getting a bit more exercise, mostly in the form of getting halfway to a store and then walking back to my car for the damn mask.

Person. Man. Woman. Camera. TV.

However, I’m not taking it all lightly, since I have a son working as an ER nurse in a part of the state with a lot of summer homes that filled up with fleeing New Yorkers.

He doesn’t share a lot — he respects HIPAA and has his own ethics — but he’s been defensive about those who criticized New Yorkers for coming up here, and I do know he’s seen more than enough Covid cases as well as post-Covid re-admissions, since that stuff messes up the rest of your body real good.

And I know that not everyone he’s dealt with has walked out of the building. I’ve learned over the years to let him talk about what he wants to and let him stow away the things he needs to.

 

Which made me particularly annoyed by a Nib piece headlined “What it’s like to be a nurse during Covid-19” which turned out to be “What it’s like to be a nurse during Covid-19 if you don’t end up actually working with any Covid-19 patients.”

Between folks on my block and people at the dog park, I know a lot of nurses who don’t actually work with Covid-19 patients, and, like soldiers who spent the Vietnam War in Germany, they are deeply respectful of their colleagues whose experience is more direct and immediate.

My inner Lou Grant would like to call a quick staff meeting to discuss the topic of “relevant sources,” but it ain’t my staff.

However, it’s Friday and there are a great many frivolous things we could be giggling over.

For example, for the geeks in the group and those who have to live with them, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal offers a gag of which I read the first three panels because I felt I probably ought to, and then fell out of my chair at the fourth.

Apple did a brilliant move decades ago in making their computers readily available and affordable for schools and thereby creating a rising wave of loyalists.

I’ve worked on Macs at work while having Windows at home and most of what I’ve come away with is the annoyance of trying to make a move on one using the keyboard strokes of another.

But then I also don’t understand why people who drive Ford trucks get such pleasure out of decals of Calvin pissing on a Chevy logo and vice-versa.

(Note to grammar nazis: I do not mean a Chevy logo pissing on Calvin.)

And Inkyrickshaw offers more geek humor with this spin on the Turing Test which also made me burst into laughter at the punchline.

Which, after all, is the point of a multi-panel cartoon: Set’em up and knock’em over.

 

Elsewhere in the Intertubes

This Tweet got some attention the other day, and I immediately went to their YouTube channel and found that, indeed, people were calling Archie a simp.

So when I saw that BoingBoing had an article on the topic, I clicked on it to see what they had unearthed, which turned out to be a vague, unsourced theory that perhaps the Archie people were trying to get people to click on their YouTube channel, even if only to post “Archie is a simp.”

Yes, my inner Lou Grant has been having a rough week. We should move on.

But, Archie gang, you shouldn’t mess with one of our local heroes. He’s only a simp in your vapid re-imagining of him. The boy’s a proud Granite Stater at heart.

 

And if you’re going to try to play mindgames, go take some lessons from Dave Coverly. Speed Bump offers, for your consideration, three panels of Twilight Zone-style humor.

Speaking of which, click here.

 

While Betty offers some more down-to-earth humor.

I really appreciate that Betty can be “down to earth” without being unpleasant and coarse. Cutting through the bullshit does not have to include handing out portions of your own, or even using the word at all.

And Bub can be a little thoughtless at times, perhaps a bit casual about folding the laundry and so forth, but he’s a rock-solid guy, as he demonstrates here.

 

Another domestic strip, Ben, is taking the focus off the main characters to deal with the grandchildren and their paternal grands, who live out in Vancouver.

I’ve got a niece and nephew who grew up speaking English and Spanish interchangeably, which could be kind of funny at an age where they interchanged them in the same sentence but which provides a world link that is invaluable.

Those linguistic doors begin closing soon, and, if you aren’t raised in a bilingual world, you’re not likely to be nearly as good at acquiring a second language later. Ben’s son-in-law may be able to give his kids an appreciation of their culture, and should, but he can’t give them the experience he had.

 

And Pros and Cons offers this thoughtful argument at a moment when people have once again started talking about the Moon Landing (51 years ago? Nobody celebrates 51st anniversaries!) and whether it really happened, with the main argument in its favor being the thousands of people who would have to have kept quiet all these 51 years.

A whole lot more people than went to see that movie.

I prefer the Nashville version.

 

https://youtu.be/ryTH3KROIqM

(Vince Gill, John Sebastian, Steve Cropper, Paul Franklin, Billy Thomas, Glen Worf)