CSotD: Nutty times and random stuff

According to Michael Ramirez (Creators), the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene lost her committee assignments means that declaring an anti-semitic belief in space lasers, thinking that mass murders of school children were staged and advocating the assassination of legislators is “nutty.”

And equally as “nutty” as believing that people who work two jobs should be able to pay the rent, that police officers should be held to certain basic standards and that people in a wealthy nation should have health care.

I would disagree, but plenty of people wouldn’t.

 

So pardon me if I follow the logic in Pearls Before Swine (AMS) and just go back to bed.

Though as Pig admits, there is the issue of food and there are other reasons you can’t simply stay in bed all the time.

Besides, who can sleep with all that whining from people who advocate the right of bakers to refuse service to gay people but insist that publishers are absolutely required to give space to people who spread nutty lies?

It would be so much easier to handle if we could truly believe that people who hold “nutty ideas” were uneducated, unemployed morons, but they aren’t.

Nor are they a small, isolated group of nutty people.

They’re educated, successful fellow citizens and we need to engage with them.

 

However, there are other issues we could also be dealing with, such as T-shirts with pockets, as seen in Mr. Boffo.

I’ll grant you, this is an issue that could wait, given that it’s winter and most of us are wearing sweatshirts or sweaters over our T-shirts, which is capitalized not because the word is a proper noun but because the shirt is shaped like a capital T.

Back when we all smoked, the pocket was a more dignified place to safely carry your cigarettes than rolling them up in one sleeve like a hoodlum. So you might think that, as smoking becomes less prominent, the pocket could go.

Except that now we all carry phones everywhere, and some people put them away once in a while, for which a T-shirt pocket comes in handy.

 

Cigarettes were apt to give you cancer, but smartphones are far more likely to make you stupid, as Carmen notes in Prickly City (AMS).

I know my own phone number, but I don’t know anybody else’s anymore, including family members. If I lost my phone, I could get a new one, but I wouldn’t be able to call anybody.

Which doesn’t bother me nearly so much as my suspicion that GPS apps are going to make us unable to find our way around unassisted.

I don’t mean for long trips to unknown places, but, after you’ve lived somewhere for a time, you build a mental picture of how it’s laid out and where places are relative to each other.

Or, you should.

I’m not sure you’ll ever know where anything is, if you use your app instead of your brain and your memory.

 

As long as I’m grousing about phones, I’ll address Lemont’s issues with watching movies on TV, as seen in today’s Candorville (WPWG), in part because, after my streaming service started buffering during last night’s Super Bowl, I switched to CBS’s app on my phone.

And, yes, as bad as the game was, it was even worse when everybody was an inch-and-a-half tall.

I have to be neutral about watching movies in the theater, because my ADD means that, when other people whisper or move around, I can’t help noticing, and so I’m suddenly no longer in the story but back in my seat.

I’d rather watch most movies at home so I can suspend disbelief without interruption.

But I appreciate that Lemont is talking about “Godzilla vs Kong,” because when someone says “You really have to see it in the theater,” they usually mean that it’s visually a lot of fun but that, without the special effects, the fact that the movie itself is stupid becomes obvious.

Which reminds me that, when “Battlestar Galactica” came out, they included Sensurround, which made the seats shake when something blew up, which was cool, even though things blowing up in space probably wouldn’t make you shake.

But Lemont is right: The bigger the screen, the better the viewing.

I’ll bet even last night’s halftime show would have seemed less ridiculous if you’d been watching it in Cinerama in a theatre.

In North Korea.

 

Shifting to another topic but not shifting from my general mood of disgruntlement, the Lockhorns (KFS) touch on a sustained grievance, which is my suspicion that people who call themselves “wealth managers” are seeking a way to manage to get their hands on yours.

I walk past a place regularly with a sign out front that says “Wealth Conservatory” and it makes me think “Professor Plum destroyed your portfolio in the wealth conservatory with a candlestick.”

 

I don’t have any wealth for them to manage anyway, and I don’t even have as much junk to leave my kids as the guy in this Bob Eckstein cartoon.

I’ve lived in eight places since I was empty-nested in the mid-90s, and each move has required a re-assessment of stuff, mostly because trying to Tetris it into a U-Haul means learning to pack not simply by size and shape but by priority.

In the process, I’ve gone from a three-bedroom house to a three-room apartment, shedding junk as I go.

My kids won’t have to sort through a lot of furniture, but they’ll still have the issue of whether they ought to keep the magazine with Dad’s 1973 review of a book nobody else read.

They’ll have to keep the box of random wires and unlabeled chargers and remotes, of course, because you never know.

I have a friend who, when we were both on the cusp of 50, suddenly said to hell with it and threw everything that fit into the trunk of her car, pitched the rest and moved to the West Coast.

I truly envied her mobility, but I was still far too much in love with my stuff.