CSotD: Free Space

Easter Monday is a bit slack, but that gives me a free space in which to indulge in picking up some things yesterday’s Georgia rant distracted me from, like Sunday’s Non Sequitur (AMS).

And I’ll disagree with Wiley’s take, but only because our situations seem reversed: If my pup gets out without her cable attached, she dances around and dares me to catch her, but then is readily lured inside with the promise of a cookie, which is scored a win for me.

If I had a fenced yard, I’d leave her out there until she surrendered, but that’s not to say she doesn’t own me on several other matters. Perhaps most.

 

And Dan Piraro turned in a masterful Bizarro (KFS) yesterday. It’s good he gave away the key, because it would be easy to shrug and not get it and move on. Even with the instructions, it was a battle to say the names of the letters rather than use their sounds.

Nothing wrong with making readers work for the gag, except for the short time you have to grab them.

And, besides, it reminds me of

FUNEM
OSVFM
FUNEX
OSVFX
OKMNX

 

Silly has its place, and Mike Baldwin tickled me with this Cornered (AMS), in small part because it had been a few decades since I’d heard that prayer, but mostly because I’m sick of hearing Amazing Grace played on the warpipes.

I respect the hymn and I love the pipes, but the blend is problematic, starting with the fact that the hymn is neither Irish or Scottish nor Welsh nor Breton.

Nor are pipes called for at every funeral, though if somebody wants a panda on a unicycle at their funeral, that’s okay with me, and if you want him playing the pipes, it’ll likely have to be Amazing Grace, as I’ll explain.

Pipers traditionally play at police and fire department funerals because so many of those deceased were Irish back in the 19th Century.

The dominance of micks started with the street-level politics of the Good Old Days, in which ward heelers gained votes by handing out jobs, and then it grew because insiders could pull in their relatives as they got off the boat.

The bond is long and well established by now, and if some Italian firefighter or Jewish cop dies and wants a piper at his funeral, hey, you’re part of the family.

Howsoever, there are all sorts of good Irish and Scottish dirges with which to pipe someone to the grave, and the appeal of Amazing Grace is that warpipes have a very limited range and an even more limited ability to play sharps and flats, and that particular song is easy to play.

Which is to say that Amazing Grace is to the warpipes what Chopsticks is to the piano.

I guess you could also say that Amazing Grace is to good piping what “Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub” is to thoughtful prayer.

 

Candorville (WPWG), meanwhile, highlighted something a great deal more important, and this strip should be downloaded and mailed to every elected official in the country.

The pandemic has made it a little harder to schedule appointments, but lack of universal health care is a much greater villain in the inequity of care, a blight that hits the poor harder, including the working poor and the lower middle class, which, in turn, hits minority communities.

Personal example: Once I was on Obamacare, I could afford to go visit my doctor for minor things without worrying about the cost. That’s why I was in his office for something that turned out to be insignificant and happened to add, “Oh, and I had a little blood in my urine …”

Which is how I wound up going to see a urologist and then an oncologist, who told me that, if I did nothing, I’d be dead in six months.

So I did something and here I am, five years later.

Conservatives like to point out that the emergency room will give you care even if you can’t pay, but that’s too often too late, and, even when it isn’t, it’s more expensive than catching a problem when it can be solved with a prescription instead of an admission.

Smarten up, America.

 

And smarten up about this, too: It’s possible to care about two things at once, and Clay Jones nails that fact.

I grew up with community policing in a very Mayberry-like setting, and I’ve known some good cops, then and since.

But I’ve also known some bullies and racists and bad, bad people, and I would think the system would be self-correcting, but obviously it isn’t.

And part of the problem is because the unions that once helped cousin Paddy get a job when he came to America have morphed into a system that shelters bad cops and intimidates the good ones from coming forward. “Serpico” may not have been a documentary, but it was based on fact.

Which has made the testimony at the Derek Chauvin trial fascinating and infuriating. The good cops know how their job is supposed to be done.

There is some ambiguity in the fact that the people who defend bad cops have adopted as their symbol an American flag with a thin blue line across it, the “thin blue line” being slang both for the need to defend society against evil and for the way bad cops cover for each other.

In any case, it’s as wrong to hate all cops as it is to hate all minorities, but it’s okay to hate hypocrisy and corruption.

It just takes a little more investigation and a little more thought.

 

Finally, speaking of putting things into their proper perspective, here’s a bit of Easter by Andy Marlette (Creators), which brought back a memory of a column I wrote when Abbie Hoffman died.