CSotD: A Break in the Doom
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This K Chronicles brought me back to my (second) senior year in college, when my wife and I canceled our Chicago paper because it was such a downer. We still got the South Bend Tribune, whose editorial page was also depressing but which at least was not a compendium of murders.
Ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away. But dwelling on them doesn’t solve them, and, while voting helps and demonstrations can push bureaucrats to act, you need to also tend your own garden and keep your head healthy.
And, as Deflocked (AMS) points out, watching television doesn’t seem to help. Between cop shows featuring perverted murderers and reality shows that consist of people screaming at each other, TV decidedly adds to the overall sense of horror.
Yes, the cops magically catch the perverted murderers, but there’ll be another one next week. We’re surrounded!
I miss Adam-12 where most of their calls were for cat-up-a-tree sorts of mundane things.
Anyway, we’re taking a break today and saluting silliness:
Non Sequitur (AMS) brings back a different memory entirely, and an embarrassing one.
When I moved to Maine to edit a small community paper, I expected those dour Yankees to be cold to someone “from away,” but I was welcomed warmly.
Particularly since I started my tenure by giving them all a hearty laugh when one of the local teams won a series and moved on to the tourney in the state capital.
Only I headlined it that they were headed for Georgia.
Our sportswriter called as soon as the paper hit the streets, and he should have been angry, but he was laughing too hard.
Thank god my face wasn’t well known yet, because most of the laughter was mercifully behind my back.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Naming an apple “Delicious” won’t change its taste to match, and when I went to find out how long ago the apple was developed, I discovered that even the growers don’t like them.
Apparently, the original apple was an oddity that did, indeed, taste pretty good. But it was striped and people wanted red apples, and as the article explains:
“The strive for a better retail presentation led orchardists and nurserymen to try to design and crossbreed that Red Delicious to get that perfect dark red color and those perfect five little bumps on the bottom,” says Paul Vander Heide, owner of Vander Mill Cider. “And in the process, they forgot that things have got to taste good.”
I spent nearly 20 years in the Champlain Valley, which is apple country, and I still live where I can go to an orchard three miles from my home and pick my own or buy them fresh off the tree, which makes a huge difference in the taste though it also makes me far less likely to buy apples post-autumn.
A fresh Macintosh is crisp, firm and tart, but a Mac out of storage is dull tasting and mealy in texture. Honey Crisps are the big thing now mostly, I think, because they arrive from Chile in the off-season tasting like their name says.
And, as Roz Chast puts it, naming things is big business, and what I particularly like is that this humorless overpaid cog in the machine has wadded up papers around him, because combining marketing buzzwords is hard work.
So is producing/inventing new foods that actually taste good, but that’s hardly the priority.
This Rhymes with Orange (KFS) reminded me of a friend whose grandparents’ old farmhouse in Iowa was fully plumbed at some point in the middle of the 20th Century but still had an outhouse.
His grandfather appreciated having fresh water for showers and cooking and such, but adamantly insisted “You don’t s*** in the house.”
At least, he didn’t.
To which I would add that an outhouse for one family is a lot different than a Port-O-San used by a crowd, particularly if you use a little lime from time to time and stock it with toilet paper instead of back copies of the Sears catalog or corncobs.
And that last item brings up a personal issue which also may not resonate with city folks but which also goes back to the matter of naming things:
First of all, horseshoes is a better game and far more portable. But irregardless and notwithstanding, how on earth did anybody get that name past their mothers without getting smacked upside the head and a mouthful of soap?
It is a puzzlement.
Wallace the Brave (AMS) once more demonstrates the interplay between Wallace and Amelia, and the challenge it presents to their poor teacher.
As for stupid questions, both Lucy Van Pelt and Calvin came up with foolish theories of how things worked, but they innocently believed them. Wallace seems more like Caulfield in Frazz, purposely ferreting out oddities in order to challenge grown-ups to refute them.
Only Caulfield’s odd questions invariably lead to some truth, and, while we don’t know what Wallace truly believes, his question isn’t going to lead anywhere except to Amelia popping up to call his BS.
Mrs. Olson rarely gets the better of Caulfield, while Frazz either agrees or counters with a different logical nugget.
Amelia, bless her heart, simply cuts to the chase.
Brewster Rockit (Tribune) is not the only strip I’ve seen this week referencing income taxes, which suggests that either some cartoonists have long lead times or they don’t realize that the IRS gave us one more month to get them in.
Which is kind of counterintuitive, since being stuck at home gives us little else to do anyway, though I suppose it’s more complex for people who have been dabbling in the gig economy.
I’ve been freelancing long enough that I’ve forgotten the steep learning curve when I no longer just reported what was on my W-2 and how many kids I had.
We now return you to your normal state of despair. Click here to read all the bad news from First Dog on the Moon.
wotthehell there’s a dance in the old girl yet
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