CSotD: If it’s Friday, it’s Meet the Funnies
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This week’s story arc in Betty has them contemplating the collection of snow globes they’ve accumulated in their travels, with the central question being “Why on earth did we accumulate all these snow globes?”
Apparently, they weren’t being ironic, though snow globes from tacky gift shops might be an interesting thing to collect. And by “interesting” I mean they wouldn’t take up much room and they’d certainly start some conversations, though mostly the one going on in the strip this week.
Gift shops are so full of ridiculously tacky crap that it’s hard to believe they aren’t doing it on purpose, having found that gag gifts sell really well. I bought a coffee mug at Graceland on the basis that I could use it in the office with no danger of it wandering off.
But I suppose what they’ve found is that, to put it politely, you can’t anticipate public taste and as long as you buy cheap things, you can lay out quite a variety.
Or, to put it less charitably, that tacky crap sells really well, and not just as gag gifts.
Which seems to be the basis of our economy. I just bought a bowl for the puppy and had a hell of a time finding one that didn’t say something like “Yum!” on the bottom.
First of all, I have never had a dog who needed additional motivation to eat.
Second, I’ve never had one for whom uncovering a clever message in the bottom of the bowl would be an incentive.
While I’m still in rant mode, here’s this past Sunday’s Edison Lee, which gave me flashbacks to when I was polite (It was a long time ago. You probably weren’t here.) and allowed a pollster to ask me questions.
And thereby got signed up for the 12-calls-a-week plan, which makes me question the random nature of these things, though I guess if you find anyone who’s willing to be polled, you need to hang on to them.
Which brings up a related issue.
Charlie Sykes was talking to PJ O’Rourke on the Bulwark podcast recently and they were laughing about a reporter who had interviewed a typical local woman.
While she sat outside a bar having a drink.
At 8:30 in the morning.
I’m not sure “people who are willing to be polled” is a much more reliable indicator of across-the-board public opinion than that.
A poll came out the other day that said most Millennials and Gen-Z’s don’t know about the Holocaust, which got a lot of shocked coverage and which I think shows that somebody doesn’t know how to conduct a poll.
Or else knows how to conduct one that turns out right.
Most states have had the Holocaust on their curricula for a couple of decades, and schools often devote a whole week to the topic, including having survivors come address classes. And the Pew Research Center also has a poll that shows some gaps in knowledge, but nothing as shocking as the purported ignorance revealed in that poll.
I’m not asserting any motivation for those shocking results. But I don’t believe them.
Speaking of schools and learning and suchlike, there are all sorts of Zoom-class jokes running around and they’re mostly kind of the same and not all that funny, but Maria Scrivan cracked me up with this Half Full.
I was going to remark that young Master Potato Head’s trick would have been easier when he was made of Styrofoam rather than hard plastic, but couldn’t find a reference for when that happened.
However, the Wikipedia article does note that he was originally a real potato, which would certainly make it work.
It also notes that
On April 30, 1952, Mr. Potato Head became the first toy advertised on television. The campaign was also the first to be aimed directly at children; before this, commercials were only targeted at adults, so toy advertisements had always been pitched to parents.
There is a soupcan of illogic in that: If it was first, there weren’t any previous ones pitched at anybody.
But, whatever the tangles of the claim, it brings to mind that, in Quebec, you’re not allowed to advertise to children on TV, and you don’t have to say “Hey, kids!” to get in trouble. A TV commercial got yanked up there because it showed cookies jumping off a diving board into a glass of milk, which regulators determined appealed to children, not adults.
No wonder Canadians grow up to be so civilized.
Wedding Bell Blues
Dethany and Guy have run into a pandemic problem over at Fastrack, though, like his dad, my disappointment would be muted.
I don’t much like weddings, though our wedding was really cool.
We put it together ourselves, we only had about 40 people there and we hired a legendary Boulder band.
We were going to have it on Mount Evans but rethought things in light of the 14,000 foot elevation, the challenging road and the number of grandparents involved, so instead we borrowed an Episcopal church in Denver from her brother’s college roommate’s father, the rector, who also signed the certificate, since the ceremony was performed by an ex-priest who’d lost, or renounced, his collar after arguing with his conservative superiors over the Farm Workers’ Strike in the San Luis Valley.
The only weddings better than that are second weddings. By then, all the Barbie-and-Ken fantasies have been worked out of the system.
Everybody should skip the first wedding and the first marriage and go straight to the sequel.
But to give Fastrack a second shot today, I’ve got a niece getting first-time married who basically just told everyone it would be a quiet wedding and a good party, so they could show up or not and it would be cool either way, and then the pandemic made showing up even more problematic, which means it probably will be an even cooler wedding for those who make it.
I like their attitude so much I (almost) wish I were going myself.
And speaking of attitude …
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