CSotD: Last Sunday of the Year

Speed Bump (Creators) speaks for me.

A year can’t be evil, and I refuse to sit around feeling sorry for myself, but I’m certainly willing to call the past year nuts and illogical and silly and, as the little lad about to take over suggests, simply puzzling.

I don’t much care if they catch him just so long as he’s gone.

I also don’t know why people think everything will change in five days when we swap calendars. I’m focused more on hoping for change on the 20th, but I suspect that that crazy naked guy will also still be running around.

The end of this presidency reminds me of the news story that inspired Randy Newman’s song, “Naked Man.”

It seems the police got a call that a naked man had grabbed this woman’s purse and run off. Sure enough, they found a naked man standing on the street holding that very purse.

He explained that he had been in bed with his lover when her husband came home, so he leapt out the window without his clothes and, while he was standing there wondering what to do, a second naked man ran up and handed him a purse and then ran away.

Nobody believed him, but apparently we have become more gullible in the years since.

Well, never mind. Let’s drop politics and read some Sunday funnies instead.

 

I don’t know if this Lockhorns (KFS) qualifies as seasonal humor or not. It really could run anytime, though there is a lot of complaining at Thanksgiving and Christmas about women doing dishes while men watch football.

Since I’m something of a “Stay the hell out of my kitchen” type, I’d just as soon the amateurs weren’t crowding an already small room putting things away where they don’t belong, but there’s more to it than that.

One of the things I missed most when my nest became empty was cooking for others, and a holiday feast was nearly orgasmic in both the amount of pleasure you were able to give your family and in the way it tested your ability to get everything to come out right at the same moment.

To me, complaining about cooking Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner would be like a professional football player saying, “Dammit, now we’ve got to play in the Super Bowl!” or an actor bitching about having to go into the city to open on Broadway.

The dishes? Most days, they’re an unwelcome chore and it’s nice to have someone else take them over.

To which I would add that having the person who didn’t cook be the one who does the dishes is a gracious concept, but imposing it as an actual rule and then arguing over it is the sign of a relationship with far larger issues.

But they’re a bonding event at holidays, a sort of culminating act in preparing and serving the meal, and, if you weren’t part of the cooking, maybe you should just go watch some football and do your bonding in there.

That’s twice a year; three if you count Easter. The rest of the time, like Leroy, I consider putting them in the sink enough.

They aren’t going anywhere.

 

Wumo (AMS) has Scandinavian roots, but it has lately seemed more American in its humor and settings, and today’s is an example of that, since I don’t think European doctors are as distant from their patients.

For one thing, cost is less of a factor in seeking medical help, and, for another, doctors in other countries make a nice living, but more on the level of a civil engineer. There’s a reason they move to the USA.

I had one doctor whose wife was a good photographer and decorated his offices with pictures of the fabulous places they’d pissed away the money we gave him.

And when we were expecting our second and wondering how the hell we’d pay for it, the doctor who came to address our Lamaze class wore a camel-hair blazer that would have covered the charges and left some change.

Med School should include a rotation in the real world.

 

Some serious criticism: As noted here before, Sunday Mark Trails (KFS) were a highpoint in my young life, particularly since they often taught me about things I could find in the roughly 5,000 square miles of forest that made up my backyard.

So I’ve watched Jules Rivera’s takeover of the strip for awhile, giving her time to get into the flow.

She’s not the only artist who has “re-imagined” a strip lately, and it’s not a bad move either by King Features or (disclaimer) Andrews-McMeel, for whom I work, to modify a dwindling strip that still has a reasonable subscriber base.

I’ve liked some, I’ve disliked others and my reaction does not always line up with general feedback. That’s to be expected.

I haven’t liked the re-casting of the dailies so that Mark is a dope and his family is utterly dysfunctional, but, since the original dailies were already ridiculous, it hardly matters.

However, the Sundays lack the sense of being one-with-nature that were the hallmark of the strip in years past. That’s a genuine problem.

Sundays have seemed superficial, but today’s is actually inaccurate.

 

Bobcats are sometimes called “red lynxes,” but the lynx itself is a separate species — three of them, in fact — and, while the comic strip is set in Florida, bobcats live nearly everywhere in the United States and Mexico.

I don’t know how well better research can substitute for an organic connection to the wild, but — whatever she wants to do with crazy Mark and his insane family on weekdays — Rivera needs to step up her work on the Sundays.

 

And now for something completely different

Jeremy Banx riffs on the impact of the pandemic on “Santa’s Grotto,” a Yuletide fixture in British department stores.

Which I know from its brief, wonderful appearance in the BBC holiday special, “Bernard and the Genie,” which you can and should stream from Amazon, Youtube and some other sources.

Alan Cummings, Lenny Henry and Rowan Atkinson — How can you go wrong?